When a KGB Agent Isn’t a KGB Agent

“Ends justify means,” says the KGB agent code-named Parsifal who turns out, improbably, to be one of the good guys in Robert Littell’s latest thriller, “Walking Back the Cat.” “If you don’t believe that . . . you will be incapable of moving the ball forward” in the great game of Cold War espionage.

But the Cold War is over, and Russia would seem to have no more use for Parsifal’s expertise in “wetwork,” i.e., assassination. His pose as a rare-gun dealer in New Mexico has become a permanent reality. Then he and the others in his spy network get surprising news: The KGB has secretly revived itself; orders to kill are once more being transmitted from Moscow.

This time, though, the ends-means equation is so obscure that even Parsifal, rarely one to question his superiors, grows uneasy. His ultimate target is the president of the United States--that’s alarming enough. And why is he also told to kill seemingly unconnected little people--a Russian defector hiding in a Dallas apartment, as well as several Apaches from a New Mexico reservation?

Meanwhile, a bummed-out Gulf War veteran known simply as Finn, fleeing the law after a scrape in Seattle, goes aloft in a hot-air balloon and lets the winds take him where they will. He lands in Watershed Station, N.M., nearly a ghost town where the Apaches eke out a living by farming, selling used pickup trucks and running a newly established casino.

To an elderly mystic, Eskeltsetle, Finn’s appearance out of the sky means he is a “messenger . . . sent to us by the Great Spirit.” Eskeltsetle’s son, Doubting Thomas, and his young wife, Shenandoah, a dealer in the casino, warm to the stranger, whose wide knowledge and lethal skills belie his claim that he’s an ordinary drifter.

Finn discovers that somebody--the Mafia?--is shaking down the casino. His investigation leads him to what may be a group of renegade CIA agents holed up in an abandoned Spanish fortress in the New Mexico mountains. Unexpectedly, it also brings him face to face--or eyeball to gun muzzle--with Parsifal.

Each has what the other wants: answers. The KGB man’s orders, they conclude, have been coming not from Moscow but from the CIA renegades, who have learned from the defector how to impersonate Parsifal’s masters. Finn wants to save his Apache friends; Parsifal wants to learn how and why he was betrayed. So they join forces to “walk back the cat”--espionage lingo for tracing a botched operation back to the point when things went wrong.

Littell (“An Agent in Place,” “The Amateur,” “The Defection of A.J. Lewinter”) is clearly a master of the genre. This novel is crammed with detail about guns, spy procedure, New Mexico history and geography, and the European backgrounds of some characters, yet it moves quickly. A pattern of recurring phrases helps us keep track of the plot. For example, $20 bills from the casino, each “folded lengthwise down the spine as if someone had started to turn it into a paper glider,” show up, described in the exact same words, in various other places.

It’s an intricate plot, of course, a formal puzzle whose unraveling gives us pleasure even as Littell denies us any hope that justice will prevail over Realpolitik. Usually, the trouble with thrillers is that their plots crush the life out of their characters--and the characters, for whom means have become their own ends, are half-lobotomized anyway. Littell’s virtue is that he manages to allow traces of humanity to seep through the formula.

The Apaches, trying their best to live in an inhospitable century, are a big help here. So, eventually, is Finn, haunted by atrocities he has seen even in that most “surgical” of U.S. wars. Parsifal, as his code name suggests, retains a bit of Marxist idealism; ironically, it’s his American counterparts in the spy game who prove to be the real cynics.