Robert Ludlum writes spy thrillers the way the rest of us play Scrabble. Ludlum has 25 tiles, with words on each—words like World War II, secret documents, Nazi war treasure, CIA, Vatican, Rio/Buenos Aires, Geneva/Zurich, Berlin, MI-5, Maserati, beautiful blonde, Gestapo, double agent, international banker, false passport. Each year Ludlum chooses half the tiles, face down, and turns them over, arranging them this way and that until some reasonably plausible sequence appears. He then plays them on a board whose red and blue squares are marked violence (lots of them), sex (less), doublecross, disguise, assassination, fear of insanity, and so forth. Fill in the details and you have a Ludlum thriller. A CIA agent in a sexual encounter with a disguised beautiful blonde in Moscow? No problem. A chase through Geneva in a Maserati for Nazi war treasure? Voila. When the book is finished, Ludlum takes...