Mr. le Carré's great strength is that he is a master plotter. His premise of intelligence agents running amok since the end of the cold war is totally plausible, and the way he links his major characters through their professional roles is ingenious. After taking forever to get there, the reader comes across some 40 pages that are as taut and thrilling as any adventure story I have ever read. They just happen to consist of continuous narrative -- with no tricky flashbacks, very little psychologizing and no political lectures -- and they provide a momentum that lifts almost the entire last third of the novel. If only the first 200 pages were like that, former readers of Hotspur and Triumph (including this one) would be enthralled.