The Little Drummer Girl

Set against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of the early 1980s, the novel opens with a bomb explosion in Bad Godesberg, a diplomatic quarter near Bonn, West Germany. The bomb was delivered in a suitcase by a blonde girl posing as a friend of the family's au pair, and the blast kills five people, including the young son of the Israeli Labour Attaché, and critically injures the Attaché's wife. A German investigator named Dr. Alexis is assigned the case, but the real momentum comes from an Israeli intelligence team led by a relentless operative whose operational name is Kurtz. He arrives with his gaunt deputy, Shimon Litvak. Kurtz identifies the bomber's signature, surplus wire and a crude booby trap, and connects the attack to a series of anti-Israeli bombings across Europe. Over a private lunch with Alexis, Kurtz reveals his quarry: a Palestinian commander from a village near Hebron whose two brothers were killed by Israeli forces, and who has assembled a network of young European radicals to carry out attacks against Israeli targets.

Kurtz, a Holocaust survivor and veteran intelligence operative, works under the grudging authority of his chief, Misha Gavron. His strategy centers on capturing the commander's younger brother, code-named Yanuka (an Aramaic term for a young suckling), and using him as bait to reach the elder brother, known as Khalil. Kurtz assembles safe houses across Europe, a surveillance team in Munich, and a "Literacy Committee" of forgers and writers to produce fabricated correspondence. He also recruits Gadi Becker, a legendary Israeli fighter who has retired to Berlin, choosing him partly for his physical resemblance to Yanuka. At the Greek-Turkish border, Litvak's team kidnaps Yanuka using a decoy girl to lure him from his red Mercedes, which is spirited away while his absence goes unnoticed.

The operation's centerpiece is Charlie (full name Charmian), a red-haired British actress in her mid-twenties. Politically radical in an unfocused way and prone to self-reinvention, Charlie is on holiday in Mykonos with her acting troupe when a solitary, scarred stranger appears on the beach. The troupe nicknames him Joseph. Charlie recognizes him as the man who watched her perform Saint Joan from the front row on multiple nights. Joseph is in fact Becker. He maintains a calculated distance before engineering the departure of Charlie's volatile boyfriend, Alastair, through a fictitious film opportunity, then draws Charlie into private conversations and proposes a tour of the Greek mainland. Meanwhile, Kurtz and Litvak, posing as American television producers, visit Charlie's London agent, Ned Quilley, extracting personal information and stealing years of her handwritten letters for the Literacy Committee to use in forging correspondence.

In Athens, Joseph takes Charlie to the Parthenon by night, then drives her in the red Mercedes to a villa outside the city, where Kurtz's operatives seize her. In a grueling interrogation, Kurtz dismantles Charlie's fabricated personal mythology, exposing lies about her background, and offers her the role of a lifetime: an undercover mission to infiltrate a Palestinian terrorist network and save innocent lives. Emotionally stripped bare and hungry for purpose, Charlie agrees.

Joseph constructs an elaborate fiction in which Charlie is the secret lover of a Palestinian named Michel, based on the captured Yanuka. Driving through Greece, Joseph narrates their invented romance, inhabiting Michel's character while remaining himself: He wears Michel's clothes, teaches Charlie to shoot Michel's pistol, and recounts Michel's family history of displacement and resistance. The boundary between fiction and reality blurs until Charlie can no longer fully distinguish them. In Thessalonika, Joseph presents her first mission: She must drive the explosive-laden Mercedes alone through Yugoslavia into Austria. After anguished deliberation, she agrees.

In Munich, Kurtz's team interrogates Yanuka through an elaborate deception, extracting intelligence that allows the Literacy Committee to produce two sets of forged letters, Michel's to Charlie and hers to him, imitating her handwriting and voice so precisely that she can barely distinguish them from originals. Charlie is shown the captive Yanuka, a drugged young man supported between guards, and given the correspondence to absorb. She seals the envelopes with her own saliva and fingerprints to authenticate them.

Charlie drives the Mercedes into Austria and deposits it at a prearranged location. Litvak's team watches as Rossino, an Italian operative working for the Palestinians, arrives on a motorcycle with a blonde companion who retrieves the car and drives north toward Munich. On the autobahn, the Mercedes explodes, killing the sedated Yanuka, who has been placed inside, and the young woman driving. The blast is staged to appear as an accidental detonation of the terrorists' own explosives.

Charlie returns to London to await contact from the Palestinian network. Her flat has been altered to contain planted evidence of her radicalization, while Kurtz arranges for British intelligence to investigate her openly, harassing her associates to push her toward the Palestinians. Contact comes in Cornwall, where orchids arrive at Charlie's theatre, followed by a Swiss lawyer named Mesterbein and a forceful German radical named Helga, who inform Charlie that Michel is dead. Charlie's grief is devastating and genuine, and she maintains her cover under pressure.

Charlie is taken to Beirut, where she lives among Palestinian fighters and meets Captain Tayeh, a wounded commander who interrogates her about Michel and Khalil. Tayeh takes her to meet Fatmeh, Michel's sister, in a refugee shelter in Sidon, where Charlie's detailed knowledge of Michel's family convinces Fatmeh of her authenticity. Charlie lives in a refugee camp near the Israeli border, witnesses an air raid, and develops a genuine connection to the Palestinian cause. At a desert training camp, she excels at weapons training and, after a final interrogation, is told a mission awaits.

Kurtz's analysts decode communications revealing a plan to assassinate Professor Minkel, a liberal Israeli academic, at the University of Freiburg. Charlie is smuggled into Germany and joins Helga and Rossino. Using a rehearsed ruse, Charlie distracts Minkel while Rossino steals his briefcase. Khalil arrives and constructs a bomb inside it, with Charlie assisting. She delivers the briefcase to the lecture hall, where Kurtz's team switches the live bomb for a decoy and detonates a controlled explosion.

Charlie is taken to a lakeside bungalow by Khalil, a tall man with a damaged right hand and a burn-scarred face. He tells her Minkel is dead. Consumed by guilt and desperate need, Charlie sleeps with him. In the early hours, Khalil grows suspicious: The countryside is too quiet, and he discovers that a clock radio, secretly replaced by Joseph with a homing device, contains batteries Charlie could not have installed. Charlie confesses everything. Joseph bursts through the door and shoots Khalil dead. Litvak delivers a final shot. Charlie is extracted in a state of complete emotional collapse.

Charlie is taken to Israel for psychiatric recovery. The operation's loose ends are resolved violently: Mesterbein, Rossino, Helga, Tayeh, and Fatmeh are all killed, and the refugee camp where Charlie lived is destroyed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Becker returns to Berlin, haunted and restless. Charlie returns to the English touring theatre circuit but is emotionally hollowed out. During a performance, she freezes on stage and walks into the auditorium, where Joseph sits watching. She descends to him, screams in fury and despair, then collapses against him. He catches her, and they walk together down the empty street, two damaged people bound in an embrace that is both a rescue and an uncertain beginning.