EMMA

EMMA is a tough, sly book about home-grown terrorism. Most thrillers are simplistic fantasies with little grounding in real world experience. They grab you by the lapels, but the characters rarely live up to the plot. There will some kind of game set up by the bad guy, which will end in godawful catastrophe if it succeeds. It fails because a good guy comes along, and events race along through a dream-world in which brave, red-blooded clear-minded conservative men come together to secure the situation in the nick of time while waving the flag.

This two-dimensional patriotism is rooted in a kind of island psychology created by our geographic isolation. But the really good spy novels are international, which is why the best ones in English have been written by Brits living cheek by jowl with the French, Germans et al. No American espionage writer can go the distance with real heavyweights like Graham Green, John Le Carre or Len Deighton. Michael Segedy isn’t there yet but he’s coming on, and EMMA is as promising as anything I’ve come across in this century. In his way he’s as international as John Burdett, the young expat Brit master. You don’t get the Bangkok chongos or Zen excursions, but the deadly cultural critique is there, along with action that periodically explodes out of nowhere. Segedy has lived much of his adult life abroad, and it’s in his books. He understands the dirty little secret of how big business hooks up with politics and war, and lays it out. It’s the real world, not some quasi-historic quasi-religious mumbo-jumbo.

At his best, Segedy works your forebrain and the primal section all at once, which he can do because he’s done the thinking we tend to avoid. He comes up with some rather shocking and intelligent stuff that keeps you reading, the funky reality of how things actually happen, and what happens when things go wrong. If you wanted to know what Iraq is like, and what it does to the people we send there, buckle your seat belt, because that’s the heart and guts of EMMA, Segedy’s acronym for Emergent Movement of Militant Anarchists. Emma Goldman was the leading anarchist of her time, a notoriously hard-nosed celeb who attempted to assassinate Henry Frick, a malefactor of great wealth. And lest we forget, Emma is a Jane Austen classic – Segedy’s assortment of academic degrees have not killed his sense of humor.

Brent Cossack is a stand-up American guy who puts off college and goes to Iraq because his folks don’t have the money to put him through school. He’s smart and talented, serves his hitch, returns, and then steps into another world, with a job most people can’t handle. He does it, but when he finds out what’s really going on, he has a problem, because he just isn’t a mercenary type. He’s been used, and it’s eating at him. Between his tech aptitude and an attractive woman, he becomes involved with Anonymous. From there he graduates to EMMA, which does not limit itself to internet attacks.

While Cossack is living that life, Rick Clark, a guy not unlike himself in many ways, is working for the FBI, trying to figure out some curious assassinations in which the killing has been done by weapons associated with the victims, corporate execs in the military industrial complex and arms trade. It’s a kind of hard-core poetic justice for people who profit from helping kill other people for money. Like Cossack, Clark is smart, and another a loner of sorts, his wife having left him because he’s too much into his job to be in a relationship. Like Cossack, he has an empty life until he becomes involved with and influenced by a woman with a mind of her own. Segedy’s sense of humor comes out again in the tech-expert partner that Clark has been saddled with, a twisted dick.

The surgical assassination of war-profiteers is hard to get very excited about in this century, given the scale of their crimes. But EMMA turns to politically motivated mass murders, lifting the story to a desperate urgency in which hunter and hunted both seek a vicious, elusive psychopath who has seized the reins at EMMA. His line of work and his depersonalized thinking rub our noses in the nastiness of tech-worship/addiction. Which is interesting, because Segedy is professionally knowledgeable about computer technology. ( )