The Parsifal Mosaic

Plot summary

Michael Havelock, (an anglicized version of Michal Havlíček), is an intelligence officer working for the US State Departments black operation division "Consular Ops". At the beginning of the novel he believes he has just witnessed the execution of his partner and the love of his life, Jenna Karas (anglicized version of Jana Karasova) along an isolated stretch of the Costa Brava. Jenna had been marked for execution because she had been proved to be a KGB double agent.

He immediately leaves the intelligence world, something he had been considering doing for some time and goes sightseeing in areas he had previously visited. In Athens, Pyotr Rostov, a senior director of the KGB forces a meeting with Havelock. Rostov denies that Karas is an agent of theirs. Later, in Rome, Havelock sees Jenna alive at a train station. She flees him, frightened, and he pursues her.

He makes contact with a former source at the US Consulate called Colonel Baylor, and begins his search for Jenna throughout several countries. Meanwhile, strategists for Consular Operations in the US government decide that he is a paranoid schizophrenic and must be terminated, lest he compromise entire networks across Europe. All the evidence available to them indicates that Karas was a double agent, and was successfully terminated on the Costa Brava. So one of them, "Red" Ogivile sets up an ambush on the Palatine Hill in Rome with the intention of taking Michael in. However, the two mercenaries he hired are taken out by Michael, the gas grenade he uses only affects him when Michael lashes out, and after being convinced of Havelock's innocence, he ends up taking an accidental bullet from Colonel Baylor who was sent to kill Havelock.

Back in the United States, however, the US government has a problem of its own: Anton Matthias, Secretary of State, acknowledged by the entire world as a genius and trusted with powers far beyond those his office allow him, has gone completely insane. Before anybody realized that he was insane, he negotiated treaties with parties he believed to be representing the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China, each agreeing to a nuclear strike against the third party, but in fact with a man who identified himself as Parsifal. Parsifal demands a huge ransom to keep the documents from being released, thereby triggering a nuclear war. Once the ransom is paid, however, he does not touch it, having confirmed how desperate Washington is. Havelock, who as a child had been one of the few survivors of the massacre at Lidice, has a special bond with Matthias, a fellow Czech who had advised him in graduate school. Somehow Matthias's insanity is linked to the order to terminate Jenna Karas.

For her part, Karas has been told that Michael is a Russian spy and that he is trying to kill her. Consequently, she is not especially eager to meet him. When Michael finally traces Jenna to an isolated farm in Pennsylvania, they realize that they were both deceived and that each had been told that the other was an enemy. They then work together with the President of the United States, Charles Berquist, and several trusted advisors to find Parsifal and stop him.

They are opposed by Arthur Pierce, a brilliant and murderous Soviet mole highly placed in the State Department. Pierce has ordered the murders of the strategists of Consular Operations ( two of them are crushed by a bulldozer in their car and driven off a cliff and another is shot), and then a string of successive killings - all in his own quest to gain evidence of Matthias's insanity. Pierce is working not for the regular KGB, but the VKR (Voennaya Kontra Razvedka), a fanatical branch of Russian intelligence identified as an offshoot of the OGPU. He is also, for that matter, a paminyatchik - an agent under deep cover, who has lived in the United States since infancy. For much of the novel, Pierce's true loyalties lie undiscovered. One of Havelock's allies, Undersecretary of State Emory Bradford, realizes that Pierce works for the VKR, but he is murdered by the ever-alert Pierce before he can warn anyone else. Pierce also solicits the murder of Rostov, who loathes the VKR and has tried to help Havelock.

When Michael finally finds Parsifal, a friend of Anton and a Paminyatchik who is less fanatical than Arthur Pierce, he finds out that the documents were not produced to provoke nuclear war, but rather to demonstrate that no one man could be trusted with vast amounts of power. Pierce, however, has had his operatives murder Michael's bodyguards and breaks into Parsifal's house just as he agrees to burn the documents. However hearing that Rostov has been murdered, Parsifal decides to sacrifice himself by using his body to block Pierce's gun allowing Michael and Jenna time to get out. Michael and Jenna then kill Pierce's operatives by stabbing them and Michael then flanks Pierce and guns him down. They conclude that the documentary evidence of Matthias's insanity is best destroyed. Havelock tells Berquist of this; he is informed, in turn, that Matthias has just died. Finally safe, he and Jenna move to New England, where Havelock accepts an academic position.

Characters in "The Parsifal Mosaic"

Major themes

Movie Rumors

Ron Howard has been attached by Universal to direct the film adaption of the Parsifal Mosaic, according to Variety.

In 2014, director Zhang Yimou (director of Hero, House of Flying Daggers, The Flowers of War) was in talks to direct the adaptation of the book