Senim Silla

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Senim Silla is a CIA employee who works in a clandestine office in Detroit. He is not a field agent, and indeed is disdainful of Agency discipline; his job is to read books, newspapers, and magazines from around the world looking for hidden elaborations of known CIA operations. One day, when he should be in the office, he slips out a basement entrance for lunch. In his absence a group of armed men, led by an assassin later identified as Joubert, gains entrance to the office and kills everyone there. Silla returns, realizes he is in grave danger, and telephones a phone number at CIA headquarters he has been given for emergencies.

When he phones in (and remembers to give his code name “Radar”), he is placed under the direction of Higgins, a top level agent. Higgins directs Silla to keep quiet and they will send an agent out named Wicks to “bring him in” to protection.

Wicks brings an old friend of Silla’s (Sam) to help put him at ease. But, during the rendezvous, Wicks (who is part of the conspiracy) tries to shoot Silla. In the exchange, Silla shoots Wicks, who just before collapsing shoots Sam; Silla escapes with his life. Now realizing that he cannot trust anyone within the CIA, Silla calls in again and now begins to play a cat-and-mouse game with Higgins.

Silla now sets off to solve the mystery of the killings on his own. Needing to escape pursuit and avoid places he usually goes, he enters a clothing boutique where he uses his gun to take a hostage, Kathy Hale, and make her take him home to her apartment. He holds her prisoner while he attempts to figure out the mystery.

Eventually Hale is convinced that he deserves her cooperation; the gun is put away, and they make love. She goes on to help him briefly kidnap Higgins to get information from him.

Using his previous experience as a telephone technician, Silla is able to track down Joubert and begins to discern that a rogue presence inside CIA (“A CIA within the CIA”) is conducting top secret and nonstandard convert operations. At one point he comes face-to-face with Joubert again, but escapes another attempt on his life. In fact, it is often Silla’s inexperience in the field that leads his pursuers to misjudge him and allows him to continue to elude them.

He learns that Joubert was hired by the rogue element in the CIA to kill all the people in the New York office because they had stumbled on one of the rogue element’s plots to invade the Middle East during an oil crisis.

He tracks down the mastermind of the covert operation in his home outside Washington D.C. and breaks into his house to wake him up. While confronting him, however, Joubert arrives and kills the CIA mastermind, but tells Silla that he is not interested in killing him anymore, since the contract has changed. He tries to convince Silla to become like him, a man who plays for both sides, but Silla says he likes living in the United States too much.

Silla goes back to Detroit and meets Higgins on the street. Higgins tells Silla that eventually they will catch up to him. Silla says he told the press “a story” (they are standing outside the Detroit News office), but Higgins says, “How do you know they’ll print it?” Silla answers, “They’ll print it,” and starts to walk away into the crowd. “You can take a walk, but how far if they don’t print it?” Higgins says. Silla stops walking, with a look of panic on his face.