Author: David Baldacci
Publisher: MacMillan
ISBN: 9781447225294
Year Published: 2014
In The Target, David Baldacci picks up where he's left off, featuring CIA assassins Will Robie and Jessica Reel in this no-holds-barred tale of perfidy and murder sanctioned at the highest level.
The president, the director of the CIA and the president’s national security adviser meet in secret to hatch a plot to kill the dangerous and unpredictable leader of North Korea. If anything goes wrong, the North Korean retaliation will certainly lead to an apocalypse and the president can't let that happen. Also, he will be impeached for his actions, if the mission is exposed. All he needs now is a team of impeccable agents who can do the job.
In this respect, the talents of Robie and Reel as assassins are unmatched. But there are some in power who don’t trust the pair. They doubt their willingness to follow orders. And they will do anything to see that the two assassins succeed in their mission, but that they do not survive.
One of them is Evan Tucker, the slimy CIA head, who decides to use Robie and Reel, whose last mission ended in the deaths of other agency personnel, something that Evan wants payback. But first, he sends the two agents to the Burner Box, a training facility in rural North Carolina, where they’re subjected to everything from near-fatal waterboarding to food and sleep deprivation, a form of punishment carried out as a refresher course for their mission.
But Robie and Reel survive the gruelling tests and are set for the assignments of their lives Unfortunately, the mission is blown apart when a North Korean operative discovers its motives. The duo is then dispatched to North Korea to salvage what they can and clean up the mess.
Meanwhile, Julie, a young girl known to both agents from a previous mission that’s never fully explained here, is captured by a group of Nazi sympathisers intent on getting to Reel and soon Robie discovers he has even more incendiary situations on his hands.
And all the while, Robie and Reel are stalked by a new adversary - an unknown and unlikely assassin, a woman who has trained her entire life to kill, and has her own list of targets - a list that includes both agents.
Baldacci writes with a sense of urgency, and both spies, although psychologically affected, are still at the tops of their games. But this novel’s construction proves both puzzling and distracting - Baldacci spins a compelling tale, revolving around the failed strike at North Korea, and taking up about a third of the book. The second third veers into Reel’s neo-Nazi past and takes the story so far afield that they seem like different novels. The final third returns to the Korean storyline, with the results being oddly fragmented. Cha Chunga, a North Korean version of Robie and Reel, is on a deadly mission. She is a survivor of the notorious labour camp of North Korea and a ruthless killing machine.
Some scenes set in a Korean concentration camp prove to be the most compelling by far, especially with their heartbreaking descriptions of lives that are almost too terrible to contemplate. But Robie and Reel fans will thrill to see their favourite spies back in action, no matter what the setting.
As ever, Baldacci keeps things moving at express-train speed and the nonstop adrenaline pumping action holds the reader's attention till the last page. The novel is gripping, excellent-paced and well-researched. Highly recommended.