The posthumous Ludlum franchise is in safe hands; The Altman Code is a slick, classy dash through the undergrowth of international politics with an intelligent, but fallible, hero and villains whose motives make at least a kind of sense. A Chinese freighter is on its way to Saddam Hussein's Iraq with a load of the makings for chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction; the US can neither afford to let it arrive nor engage in a direct confrontation with post-Communist China without clear evidence that it is justified in doing so. Covert agent and microbiologist Jon Smith finds himself caught up in a plot that involves skulduggery in both American and Chinese cabinets, the Uighur separatist movement, the US president's long-lost biological father and the mistress-of-disguise agent sister of his own dead lover. Lynds has learned from Ludlum how to make researched material sound like deep expertise and how to keep a lot of plot angles in the air at the same time.