Balance of Power

A fictional news dispatch from Hispania portrays Bernard “Barney” Daniels as a delusional escaped patient, while the story reveals he is a former CIA agent returned from a mission with memory loss and a CIA brand. Max Snodgrass brings him retirement papers and a pension; a bomb hidden in an envelope explodes when Snodgrass removes it from Barney’s mailbox while Barney is away. CURE director Harold W. Smith assigns Remo Williams and Chiun to kill Barney at the President’s insistence, then reverses the order when the envelope links the plot to Hispania. Barney meets Gloria X, an American sent to Hispania through a prison work program, who presents herself as a leader of the Afro-Muslim Brotherhood and hires him to kill civil-rights leader Calder Raisin.

The narrative reveals Gloria is working with General Robar Estomago to foment racial violence as cover for a foreign plot. Barney refuses to kill Raisin; other attackers kill Raisin and stab Barney with curare. Doc Jackson saves Barney, whose feverish memories recover his relationship with his wife Denise Saravena, his discovery of a concealed installation, and her murder while pregnant. In Hispania, President Cara De Culo detains and tortures Barney. A young recruit who had secretly aided him is killed while helping him escape; Barney returns to the city and publicly exposes the CIA’s presence, making the opening news account’s explanation misleading within the novel.

Smith connects Gloria, Estomago, an installation and Russian activity, but much remains conjectural. Remo later confronts Gloria at the fortified mosque site; after he makes her drink the substance she offered him, her intoxicated confession describes a bomb plot and installation, and she reveals the map’s concealed lines. She falls from an open window while acting intoxicated and shouting that she can fly; the scene does not state her condition afterward or clearly establish whether she intended to jump. Barney breaks into the Hispanian Embassy and takes Estomago to Central Park, where he kills him in a staged “ritual of the bat” duel.

The final report says an explosion destroys the installation, more than 200 women are found in a mass grave, and De Culo is dead; it cannot establish whether he died by suicide or homicide or whether nuclear weapons were present. Two men, one white and one Black, reportedly leave the palace, strongly implying Barney and Jackson without naming them.