What Peter and Dmitri intend to do is befriend and compromise Jack, underwrite a political career for him, turn him into an agent of influence and then get him elected President. As Peter tells Dmitri, referring to Alger Hiss: ''The same people who beatified Alger will discover and love Jack -- the Jack we are going to design for them. They will invest every kopeck of their moral and political capital in him as soon as they hear him speak in parables. To them, Jack's weaknesses will be strengths, his lies truths, his crimes miracles.''

Exactly how this plan is carried out is far too byzantine to be summed up in this space. Nor is it fit for a family paper because it exploits Jack's outsized sexual drive through the use of ''Swallows, as girls and boys who provide operational sex were called by our organization,'' Dmitri explains.

Suffice it to say that the plot thickens as intriguingly as in any of Mr. McCarry's recent novels (''Shelley's Heart,'' ''Second Sight'' and ''The Bride of the Wilderness,'' among others), with Jack graduating from Harvard Law School, setting up a practice in Ohio, winning a highly publicized police-corruption case and beginning his clamber up the ladder of elected offices.

As usual, Mr. McCarry displays the inside scraps of knowledge he has picked up presumably from working in the C.I.A. and writing memoirs with the likes of the former Secretary of State Alexander Haig and the former Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan. How else could he come up with such fables and facts as a ''Lubyanka breakfast'' being a cigarette and a bullet? Or that at the battle of Kursk, between Germany and Russia, ''so many tanks were destroyed on both sides that Americans saw the rust spot from the moon 25 years later.'' Or that when the Russians made Janos Kadar the Premier of Hungary after the uprising of 1955, to make sure that his attraction to the ladies didn't distract him from his duties, ''the K.G.B. castrated him -- completely.'' Which, of course, they have to keep threatening to do to Jack.

And, as usual, Mr. McCarry exercises his disdain for the political left, heaping scorn on draft dodgers, Vietnam War protesters and ''that community of right-thinkers that Peter called the Unconscious Underground,'' whose members ''manned the junction boxes of influence and opinion of America.'' What makes his derision seem particularly vitriolic is that he identifies it with Peter's, whose ''contempt for those Americans who loved us was breathtaking,'' Dmitri reports, ''but that is the revolutionary's way.''