Early on in ["The Hydra Head"] an elevator attendant looks, as if for the first time, at the design on a Mexican peso—the eagle strangling the serpent. Toward the end, the narrator fantasticates the image in the service of explaining what the secret agent's trade is all about. The serpent is a hydra, and the agent is but one head of the hydra. Cut off that head and a thousand will replace it. The eagle is two-headed. "One head is called the CIA and the other the KGB. Two heads, but only one body. Almost the Holy Trinity of our age…. In serving one head we serve the other and vice-versa. There's no escape. The Hydra of our passions is trapped in the talons of the bicephalous eagle."

Or, put it another way,… the secret agent is trapped in a Manichean system in which there is an...