Mirage

The unlikely hero of Passman's second thriller (after The Visionary) is a ponytailed couch potato named John Berger, a computer cryptographer with a Stanford Ph.D. On his way to work at EXC Labs in Los Angeles on a Monday morning, Berger is stopped by a guard who informs him that EXC was blown up over the weekend. As the week wears on, things only get stranger. Interrogated by the FBI, Berger discovers that the bomb was planted in his own desk. And his alibi--he attended what he thought was a chess tournament--is blown out of the water when the FBI discovers there was no real tournament that weekend. Confused and distressed, Berger tries to piece together what might have happened and prove his innocence, with the assistance of Florida FBI agent Jill Landis, who spots a pattern after a similar bombing brings down a building in Orlando. It soon becomes clear that Berger was hypnotized the weekend of the bombing, but under whose direction? The key to the mystery lies in a secret project called Mirage, once funded by the U.S. government and shut down three years before. The project's director, Kenneth Combs, frustrated and bitter, is now in cahoots with a ring of international terrorists, and he is desperate to silence Berger, who was supposed to die in the EXC explosion. To make matters worse, Berger is hearing strange voices in his head that he must muffle if he is to save himself and the thousands of other people Combs's associates plan to eliminate. Berger is no James Bond--lacking in muscle tone, he's also a ""lousy liar, and not a particularly good actor"" but Landis somehow falls in love with him anyway. Short on elaborate plotting and high-level suspense, Passman's latest does possess a quirky charm. (Oct.)