The Camel Club

I bought this book at an airport because it was six hundred pages long and I had a four-hour flight, and a six-hundred-page thriller is a particular kind of purchase: you are not buying art, you are buying a guarantee that the next several hours will pass. What surprised me is that the guarantee held. Baldacci is not a stylist, and I will get to that, but he knows how to make a page turn, and he knows how to make a deadline feel like a physical object sitting in the room.

The premise is a good one. Four men meet regularly in Washington, DC to talk about conspiracies. They are not operatives or geniuses in the usual thriller sense. They are a retired guy who lives under a false name and keeps a protest tent in Lafayette Park, a former Army officer turned war protester, a rare books librarian who dresses like the nineteenth century, and a man with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder who once worked for a federal health institute. They call themselves the Camel Club, and their meetings are half detective work and half social club for people who do not fit anywhere else.

Oliver Stone is the leader. The name is not his. He was born John Carr, served in Army Special Forces, and spent part of his career as an assassin for a CIA unit called Triple Six. He is a legend in certain rooms and a nobody in most others, which is exactly how he wants it. Reuben Rhodes went to West Point, served in Vietnam, worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then became a war protester. Caleb Shaw works in the rare book wing of the Library of Congress and has the manner of a man who would prefer the 1850s. Milton Farb was a child prodigy, worked at the National Health Institute, and lives with compulsions and paranoia that make him both the most vulnerable and the most useful member of the group.

The murder on Roosevelt Island

The inciting incident is almost casual. The club rows over to Theodore Roosevelt Island for a meeting, and while they are there two men arrive by boat with a captive. The men are Tyler Reinke and Warren Peters. They force the victim's hand around a revolver and shoot him, staging a suicide. Then they plant a note and a plastic baggie to suggest the man swam to the island on his own.

The victim is Patrick Johnson. After the killers leave, Stone finds a Secret Service lapel pin on the body. Milton, being Milton, touches the note, which is the kind of detail that later matters because the killers come back. They come back because Johnson's shoes are clean, which contradicts the swimming story, and because the note has been disturbed. They spot the club, chase them by boat, and wound Stone and Reuben before a police boat drives them off.

That sequence tells you what kind of book this is. It is not a procedural that lingers on evidence bags. It is a book where the heroes are in the water and someone is shooting at them within thirty pages, and the plot moves because people make fast decisions under pressure. Baldacci is very good at this. The chase is legible, the geography is clear, and the violence has consequences.

A suicide that is not a suicide

Secret Service agent Alex Ford catches the Johnson case. He is paired with a rookie named Jackie Simpson, a former homicide detective from Alabama, and the pairing is one of the better things in the novel. Alex is competent and tired and inclined to follow the evidence where it goes. Jackie is new to the Service but not new to death, and she has a detective's instinct for the thing that does not fit.

The official story is suicide. Alex does not buy it, and the book gives him reasons rather than intuition. The pin, the shoes, the note, the fact that Johnson worked at the National Intelligence Center. Meanwhile the club is investigating on its own, partly because they do not trust the government and partly because they are afraid of being framed for a murder they witnessed.

There is a bar in this section, and a woman named Kate Adams, a Justice Department lawyer who tends bar at night. Alex knows her. Through her he meets Tom Hemingway, a senior operative at the NIC. The scene is doing a lot of quiet work: it puts the intelligence apparatus in the same room as the people investigating it, and it gives the reader a character to be suspicious of before there is any proof. Baldacci is not subtle about this. He is efficient, which is different.

Caleb turns up the fact that Johnson worked at the NIC, and that is the hinge. The club's paranoia stops being a hobby. They are now investigating the agency that employs the man who was murdered, and the agency is not going to be helpful.

The hometown dedication

The middle of the book moves to Brennan, Pennsylvania, a town recently renamed after the President, James H. Brennan, who is coming home for a dedication. This is where Baldacci does his best structural work. He cuts between the town, the plotters, and Washington, and the reader knows more than most of the characters, which generates the particular dread of watching a trap close.

The plot is elaborate. A terrorist group led by an American mercenary called Captain Jack is preparing an operation. The supposedly dead Adnan al-Rimi is part of the team, working as a security guard at Mercy Hospital. There are local people involved, a network of them, and one of them is a nanny whose role I did not see coming. Hemingway is in the middle of it, either betraying the group or being betrayed by it, and the book keeps that ambiguity running longer than I expected.

At the dedication, a former National Guardsman with a prosthetic hand shakes the President's hand and administers a fast-acting drug. Terrorists in the crowd fire tranquilizer darts at the security detail. Others self-immolate to disable vehicles, including the ambulance. It is a horrifying set piece, and it works because Baldacci keeps it procedural: each element has a purpose, and the purpose is to strip away the President's protection one layer at a time.

The President appears to have a heart attack. Alex gets him into the limousine and drives to Mercy Hospital while snipers fire on them. At the hospital a security guard helps him, and the guard is al-Rimi, playing his part. Alex provides covering fire while the guard carries the President inside, and then the trap closes. Brennan is put in an ambulance, moved to a hidden compartment in a van, and driven away.

I want to be fair to how well this is staged. The abduction is not a magic trick. It is a sequence of small, plausible corruptions of a security plan, and the reader can trace each one. That is harder to do than it looks, and it is the reason the middle of the book does not sag despite its length.

Eight hours

The kidnappers announce that Brennan is being held in Medina, Saudi Arabia. They demand a policy change and promise to release him in a week. Captain Jack then betrays Hemingway and frames the Sharia Group, which implies Syria is behind the kidnapping. The acting president, Ben Hamilton, responds with a threat: if Brennan is not returned within eight hours, the United States will strike Damascus with a nuclear weapon.

That is the engine of the last third. Eight hours is a beautiful device for a thriller because it converts everything into logistics. Briefings, launch protocols, chain of command, the question of who can order what and who can countermand it. Baldacci makes the nuclear deadline feel procedural rather than abstract, and that is the book's biggest technical achievement. You are not watching a mushroom cloud in the imagination. You are watching a checklist.

It is also, of course, insane as policy, and the book knows it. Hamilton is not a cartoon. He is a man in an impossible position, surrounded by advisers who are managing him, and the escalation has its own momentum. Decker, one of those advisers, eventually argues for moving the launch earlier rather than later, which is the moment the novel's clock stops being a metaphor and becomes a character.

Meanwhile the Camel Club, Kate, and Jackie gather at Alex's house and watch Milton's surveillance footage. Alex identifies Reinke and Peters. He recognizes the masked man's hand as Hemingway's. Stone puts the pieces together and realizes where the President is being held: Murder Mountain, a former CIA training facility in Virginia, a place he knows from his own past.

Murder Mountain

Stone, Alex, Reuben, and Jackie go to Murder Mountain. What they find is Hemingway, Captain Jack, and a team of North Korean mercenaries. A firefight follows, and Stone reverts to the thing he used to be. He kills several of the mercenaries, and the book does not pretend this is heroic in any simple way. It is a man doing the only thing he was ever trained to do, and the prose gets colder around him.

Captain Jack takes Jackie hostage. Stone distracts him by revealing his identity as John Carr, which lands with the force of a gunshot in a conversation. Then Carter Gray arrives with six armed men. Gray runs the National Intelligence Center, and his plan is the real conspiracy: he wants Brennan dead and the strike on Damascus to proceed. His wife and daughter died on 9/11, and he has convinced himself that the country needs a permanent war. It is a broad motive, and Baldacci does not do much to complicate it. Gray is a villain with a thesis, and the thesis is stated plainly.

Captain Jack fires at Brennan. Jackie dives in front of the President and is killed. Stone holds her and sees a crescent scar on her palm, and the book reveals what it has been holding back: Jackie was his daughter Beth, a child he lost long ago. It is a coincidence of the generous sort, the kind that makes a thriller work emotionally and makes a careful reader wince. Both reactions are correct.

Stone forces Gray to cooperate by offering him the thing he wants: credit. The plan is to release Brennan from Medina, Ohio, a nearby town, not Saudi Arabia, and let Gray be the hero who found him. Hemingway escapes into the woods. With fifty-two minutes left, Decker convinces Hamilton to move the launch ahead. The secure phone rings. Brennan has been recovered. Hamilton orders the launch aborted, and atmospheric interference disrupts communications. Contact is reestablished and the launch is aborted with one second to spare.

One second. Baldacci earns that second, mostly. After three hundred pages of procedure, the margin is the point: the system nearly destroyed a country by accident, and the thing that stopped it was a phone call getting through.

What the book is good at

Brennan is recovered in Medina, Ohio. Gray is publicly hailed as a hero. Jackie's death is ruled a carjacking, which is the kind of bureaucratic obscenity the book is genuinely angry about. Brennan returns with an 86 percent approval rating, learns that Syria was not involved, and rebukes his advisers before turning to Secretary of State Mayes, signaling a foreign policy shift. It is a tidy resolution to an untidy event, and the novel seems to know it.

At Jackie's funeral Stone watches from hiding, then kneels by the coffin for twenty minutes, leaves a daisy, and says goodbye to Beth. It is the best scene in the book. No speech, no explanation, just an old man at a coffin. Baldacci is not usually a writer of restraint, but he is here.

The club inducts Alex and Kate as new members. Alex stays behind and reveals that he knows Jackie was Stone's daughter, having pieced it together from a whisper, a discrepancy in her file about her Atlanta birthplace, and her physical dissimilarity to the parents who raised her. Stone meets Gray at John Carr's grave in Arlington and demands his resignation. Gray scoffs. Stone plays a recording of Gray's treasonous confession from Murder Mountain, and Gray accepts. The next day the resignation is major news. Alex, on perimeter duty, looks toward Lafayette Park and thinks the country will be all right as long as Stone is there. Stone sits on a bench with a companion, watching the White House.

The prose is functional. That is the fair criticism and it is not a small one. Baldacci writes sentences that do their job and no more, and after six hundred pages the flatness becomes a texture of its own. The villains are broad, the coincidences are generous, and the book is long. Some of the middle chapters could be cut without losing much. If you want a thriller with style, this is not it.

What it has instead is momentum and a likable ensemble. The Camel Club works because the members are not superhuman. Milton's compulsions make him hard to be around and also make him the person who notices the thing everyone else missed. Caleb is fussy and brave in ways that surprise him. Reuben is a walking argument with his own past. Stone is the myth at the center, and the book is smart enough to let the others be ordinary around him.

I finished it on the plane and then sat with the ending for a while. The nuclear deadline is the part that stayed. Not because it was exciting, but because the book makes clear how much of the process is people deciding, under pressure, what a country is willing to do. One second is not a lot of margin. Baldacci seems to think we should notice that, and for a six-hundred-page airport novel, noticing is worth something.