The Night Hawk

The assassin; traditionally a puppet of the revolutionaries, of the
conspirators, of the twilight powers that make history. Qualifications
necessary: two hands and a weapon. But the past fifty years have produced
a new phenomen—hee scholar-assassin, the intellectual thug,
the self-justified professional.
With THE NIGHT HAWK, the paradox of the killers from Oxford
takes a new twist; for here we have Nico de la Hoya, the aristocrat
from Andalusia, Research Fellow in Greek, and his half-brother
Juanito, a highbrow playwright from Madrid... On the face of it,
the unlikeliest combination for destruction since the days of Bonnie
and Clyde. Yet they form a unique team, a two-man deterrent —
“We don’t run to hydrogen bombs, that’s the point. People like you
and Juanito are the only kind of deterrent we can afford.”
“Balance of terror, yes. I know the theory. The thing about deterrents
is that they should work.”
“The thing about deterrents is that because of them nothing happens.
So you can’t always tell whether they work or whether they don’t.”
‘*Palmones got shot, didn’t he? . . . Things happen.”
Things certainly happen: because Nico and Juanito bring to the
business of political murder an objectivity, a scholastic unconcern,
that makes their partnership unusually successful. But Palmones was
the man who killed their father; a fect which makes their sixth assignment
a little different to any of the others. And from the confusion of
unexpected incidents and emotions that is born with the first breath of
the operation an inevitable pattern emerges—a pattern as clear as
the sudden light in their victim’s eyes as he died, and as irresistible
as the bullet that took him in the chest and spun Nico into the violent
logic of death and counter-death.
A real cat’s-cradle of a thriller, this; one for true connoisseurs of the
countdown...