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Secret information has been leaked to a US spy, revealing that a Chinese cargo ship is carrying tons of weapons-grade chemicals to the port of Basra. Saddam Hussein's Iraq has bought the chemicals to be used to create blister and nerve weapons. The leaders in the United Sates agree that the cargo can't be permitted to be delivered, but there is still international politics to be considered. Once before, in the early 1990s, the US boarded a Chinese ship with reports that it carried weapons, only to be embarrassed in front of the world when nothing was found. The current president of the United States, Sam Adams Castilla, needs proof that the ship is carrying the contraband cargo before he can confidently order the Navy to board the freighter. Complicating the whole situation is the fact that a long worked-for human rights treaty is in the final stages of negotiation, and there are hard line factions in both the American and Chinese governments that would like to destroy the hope that it will finally be signed. Fred Klein, the boss of Covert-One, a very top-secret government agency, calls upon one of his best agents, Lt. Colonel Jon Smith, who is a medical doctor, biomolecular scientist, virologist, as well as an army lieutenant. It is up to Smith to retrieve the Chinese ship's manifest and deliver the proof of its deadly cargo to the President. Only five days remain to complete his mission, because the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf is the last place the US Navy can board the freighter before it delivers its shipment. In this abridged compact disk version of THE ALTMAN CODE, Lt. Colonel Jon Smith, M.D., seems to be the only agent Klein has, because Smith is hopping from Beijing, to Shanghai, to Hong Kong and back again, with stops in between, all within these five days. Smith gets into one close scrape after another but each time is handily saved by CIA operative Randi Russell, Smith's dead lover's sister, and Asgar Maamoot, a member of a Chinese minority, who is working towards independence. These two people seem to dash around China as much as Smith does. There's also a secondary problem with a man who is claiming to be a prisoner of the Chinese since 1949. The elderly man also insists that heıs the real father of president Castilla. Rescuing him is also left to Smith to handle. The ultimate bad guy in THE ALTMAN CODE is a mega conglomerate called the Altman Group, named after the head of the companyıs father. Hence the title of the novel. This company is the ultimate backer of the delivery of the Chinese shipıs cargo. Actor Don Leslie reads the story for us and I found him to be marvelous! His portfolio of international accents is perfect in intonation, inflection, and nuance. Even in a room filled with characters speaking with the same Chinese accent, Mr. Leslie still manages to make each person unique and youıre easily able to tell them apart! Heıs done a magnificent job in narrating this work. Although the cover of the book pronounces that this by Robert Ludlum, itıs actually written by Gayle Lynds based on an outline Ludlum wrote before he passed away. The whole story seems reminiscent of the B spy movies of the seventies. The hero is brilliant, strong, and stoic and no matter how many time he's beaten up, by the next chapter heıs fine and still able to leap tall buildings. The action is punctuated by storms of bullets flying with the hero always out-running them; the bad guys arenıt just shot, they slam backwards onto plate glass windows and fall through in a rain of broken glass; and the hero, even if jumping blind from a window, still manages to land on a store awning, and when that breaks, he again lands on a venderıs umbrella, and when that collapses, he only fall a few feet to land unharmed on the ground. But like those 70s movies, the international settings are spectacular and is the thing that drags the story to a higher and more interesting level. Here Ms. Lynds has pushed the story to go by so quickly that it seems to be taken for granted that the readers wonıt notice the huge holes in the logic of the piece. This abridged five compact disk version is a pleasant enough mindless romp and it might make for a nice diversion while driving, but it wasnıt clever enough to catch much more of my interest. Maybe the book is better.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, July 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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