A spy in from the cold, sort of

A contract on his head

He recalls particularly the time the head of security for a high-profile Russian banker took exception to the way Abdullayev portrayed his boss.

"He decided that I had to be punished, that I had to be exterminated," says Abdullayev, who calls the contract on his head a "misunderstanding." The hit was called off only after an Azeri executive within the bank intervened on Abdullayev's behalf, he says.

Abdullayev has also managed to upset Rus-sian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who bristled at his portrayal as an inept young KGB agent. Mr. Primakov sent an emissary to the Azeri ambassador in Moscow to relay his displeasure, Abdullayev says.

And while Abdullayev usually draws on his own experience for his books, he sometimes forecasts the future.

In "Three Colors of Blood," Abdullayev wrote of an assassination attempt on Azerbaijan's President Heidar Aliev. Two weeks after the book was published, assassins tried and failed to kill the president, leading some to question just how much Abdullayev had known of the plot. Abdullayev says it was merely coincidence, and counts Mr. Aliev among his loyal readers.

Portly and balding, Abdullayev would have trouble fitting into James Bond's dinner jacket. But his charm could disarm diplomats at state dinners and enemy agents in dark alleys. While maintaining a fierce nationalism about Azerbaijan, Abdullayev has published only about a half-dozen books here. Publishing in this oil-rich, poverty-stricken country is difficult, where book shops are few. Most books are simply hawked from street stalls.

"That's a big tragedy here. There's no market. How do you sell a book in Azerbaijan? We have 1 million refugees who have no buying power," says Abdullayev, referring to the 1 out of every 7 Azeri citizens displaced by a decade-long conflict with Armenia.

Armenia currently occupies 20 percent of Azerbaijan. While the countries have agreed to an official cease-fire, cross-border shootings are a near daily occurrence. Abdullayev refuses to earn any money from speeches or lectures in Azerbaijan, preferring instead to donate any money he could earn here to refugees who can't go home because of the unofficial war.

The vast majority of his books are published in Moscow by Exmo, one of Russia's largest printing houses. His books in the United States are published by Simon and Simon. Even though his cloak-and-dagger days are long gone, Abdullayev maintains contacts in the underworld of post-cold-war espionage. It's all good fodder for the next novel.

When communism fell in 1991 "the whole Soviet Union became one big detective story," he says.

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