The Charm School

traffic, or they’d gone off on special assignments to the
    surrounding bars and restaurants. With any luck, I’d be joining them shortly. But first I had to see Tom Walsh, who is in charge of the New York Anti-Terrorist Task Force. And what did Mr. Walsh want to see me about?
    His e-mail had said: JOHN, KATE, MY OFFICE, 5:15. PRIVATE. SUBJECT YEMEN.
    Yemen? Typo, maybe. Yemex? A new kind of explosive? Maybe he meant, “Yes men.” Too many yes men in the organization.
    Walsh doesn’t usually state the subject of a private meeting–he likes to surprise you. But when he does state a subject, he wants you to think about it–he wants it to eat at your guts.
    If I thought this out, I could conclude that Tom Walsh wanted to assign Kate and me to the Yemen desk. Do we have a Yemen desk here? Maybe he just wanted us to help him find Yemen on the map.
    Another possibility… no, he was not going to ask us to go to Yemen. No, no. I’d been there for a month to investigate the USS Cole bombing. That’s how I found out it was an anal cavity.
    I stood, put on my jacket, straightened my tie and brushed the chips off my shoulders–a well-balanced detective has a chip on both shoulders–then made my way toward Walsh’s office.

Books by Nelson DeMille
    By the Rivers of Babylon
    Cathedral
    The Talbot Odyssey
    Word of Honor
    The Charm School
    The Gold Coast
    The General’s Daughter
    Spencerville
    Plum Island
    The Lion’s Game
    With Thomas Block
    Mayday

Spectacular Praise for
    THE C HARM
S CHOOL

    “HIGHEST MARKS GO TO
THE CHARM SCHOOL,
WHICH JUST MIGHT BE THE THRILLER OF THE YEAR. It is relentlessly suspenseful, generating excitement on every page and presenting an honest, unflinching portrait of the Soviet Union and its people.
The Charm School
makes the grade.”
    —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
    “A HARROWING JOURNEY TO THE HEART OF TOTALITARIAN DARKNESS… a surreal mix of heartland illusion and heartless reality… . The result is a chilling, compelling, disquieting and ultimately devastating tale of police state savagery and superpower treachery.”
    —Washington Post Book World
    “AN EXCITING, WELL-WRITTEN STORY WITH A LOT MORE ACTION THAN SPY-NOVEL FANS ARE ACCUSTOMED TO… a classic good guys-vs.-bad guys confrontation, a slam-bang ending… . This story gets high marks in suspense, action, and overall readability.”
    —San Diego Tribune
    “A ROUSING ESPIONAGE ADVENTURE.”
    —Dallas Morning News
    “SO RIVETING THAT HOLLYWOOD PRODUCERS WILL BE BRAWLING FOR THE MOVIE RIGHTS. No one will stop reading or even pause for the last 100 pages.”
    —Boston Herald
    “
THE CHARM SCHOOL
GRABS HOLD OF YOU, DRAGS YOU OFF TO THE SCARIEST RUSSIA IMAGINABLE… and doesn’t let you out until the last page.”
    —James Kirkwood, author of
Good Times/Bad Times
and
Some Kind of Hero
    “A FIRST-CLASS THRILLER… mixes the wham-bam action of the
Firefox
novels with
Gorky Park’
s gritty insight into Soviet life.”
    —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
    “A TOP-RATE THRILLER WITH A WHITE-KNUCKLE ENDING. A must read for anyone interested in the Soviet mind-set.”
    —Dow Jones News/Retrieval
    “HIGHLY ENGAGING SUPER-SUSPENSE.”
    —Kirkus Reviews
    “STUNNING… FASCINATING… DeMille has written a story that engages both the mind and the emotions, and done so with a style that makes it a pleasure to read.”
    —West Coast Review of Books
    “AN ABSORBING NOVEL, ONE THAT NO READER WILL SOON FORGET. It looks deeply into East-West relations, and, in the end, what it teaches us about ourselves and Soviet citizens is disquieting and surprising.”
    —DeLand Sun News
(FL)

Copyright
    THE CHARM SCHOOL. Copyright © 2012 by Nelson DeMille.
    Excerpt from
The Panther
copyright © 2012 by Nelson DeMille
    All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
    Grand Central Publishing
    Hachette Book Group
    237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
    hachettebookgroup.com
    twitter.com/grandcentralpub
    First e-book edition: April 2001
    The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are