A Colder War by Charles Cumming

Three British assets that were being run out of the Istanbul office have been killed. All within a few weeks of each other. An opposition journalist, also friendly to the Istanbul office, has been put in prison without due process.

The cover for the well-seasoned agent running them, Paul Wallinger, is that he is a career diplomat. His wife and two adult children live in England. While the son was Paul’s favored child, his daughter was mostly estranged because of his job and lifestyle. Paul had planned a weekend on a Grecian island with his current paramour, a former Hungarian agent now restauranteur in Croatia. After the weekend, Paul climbed into the pilot seat of a rented Cessna headed home to Istanbul, but for unexplained reasons, this experienced pilot crashes.

At Paul’s funeral, his SIS boss, Amelia, enlists the help of Tom Kell, a recently ‘retired’ agent. A couple years ago (and one book earlier), Kell was involved with a rendition that went south. The CIA operative was at fault, but somehow, Tom ended up taking the fall.

Amelia wants Tom to investigate Paul’s death, setting him up as an insurance investigator. He heads off for Istanbul, the Greek Island, the coastal Croatian town, and back to Istanbul trying to get a feel for what happened. But also to see if there is a mole behind it all.

The mechanic who serviced the plane inexplicably commits suicide. The Hungarian woman is killed in her apartment. Either the mole or the Russian handler is trying to tie off loose ends.

Amelia thinks the mole could be any one of 5 or 6 people and Tom is assigned to look into Ryan, a ‘Cousin’ in Istanbul (Cousin = CIA). While the Brits and the Yanks are on the same side, they are still adversaries in a dangerous game.

Kell and his team of watchers keep very tight surveillance on Ryan, but when the Russian handler digs into Kell and his relationship with Rachel, Wallinger’s daughter, he makes a couple guesses and concludes that Ryan is blown. Now the real chase begins as Kell and team try to keep up with Ryan’s extraction plan.

Tom is a disgraced agent given the gift of opportunity to get back into a game he has sorely missed. While most readers will assume that Kell will catch his man, what you wont’ expect are the consequences of the capture which Cumming skillfully uses to set up the 3^rd in the Tom Kell series.Cumming has a brief but very successful writing career with one trilogy done and two books into this Tom Kell series, with both current titles achieving NYT best seller status. A talented writer with a creative imagination that keeps the well-trod mole hunt theme current and engaging. A little slow to get going, but once Tom gets the scent, the pace picks up considerably..

ECD

The Trinity Six

This the third book reviewed by Charles Cumming in the blog. The Trinity Six is a classic and updated WWII spy novel. Given that it’s a current day novel with many of the characters of interest having already died, the covert techniques described by Cummings covered both old time field craft and modern spy techniques.

There really was a “Cambridge Five,” the title for five men who were undergraduates at Cambridge in the 1930s who became an effective group of spies for Russia during WWII. (Trinity College is one of the colleges at Cambridge.) This book takes off from that reality with the notion that there was a sixth spy who had never been revealed even though many scholars had looked for evidence of such and suspected many men of being the sixth man. In this book, the protagonist is Dr. Sam Gaddis, a Russian History professor at Trinity College. The current Russian president is Sergie Platov, a very Putlin-like tsar-like figure, and Gaddis had just finished an academic tome called Tsars which was nothing less than a blistering attack on the Platov regime. Platov was a most important figure in trying to cover up any such research – but why would he do that? Shouldn’t the success of a Russian spy network look good for the Kremlin?

Because of his book, Gaddis was approached by a young woman, Holly Levette, who said she had been given some secret papers from her mother, Katya Levette. Katya had been working on a book about the alleged sixth Trinity Spy when she suffered a premature death, probably from alcoholism. Holly thought Gaddis might be interested in her mother’s research, and then as he began to delve into the material and talk with others about it, people started to die. Most notably murdered was his ex-girlfriend, a colleague who he consulted about the project. Then there were others.

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I need not lead you through the plot which was clever. There were significant twists and turns, but it was not too complex to follow (as I’ve found with some other intricate spy novels). Cummings did a good job with the supporting characters. More than with many authors, I could really picture his many locations that Cummings artfully portrayed. I thoroughly enjoyed this story and am very impressed with Cummings story telling skills. I’ll be reading more of his books.

A Divided Spy

If you’re a fan of espionage stories, then you must have wondered what it would really like to be a spy, not in terms of the actual spying parts of the job, but the personal parts – what happens to relationships over time, and more important, what happens to one’s own sense of self as the result of spending years living a dangerous deception. Charles Cumming in The Divided Spy has captured the essence of the impact of spying on the character of a man who has some residual degree of humanity, a theme Cumming has fleshed out in both the protagonist, English Thomas Kell and his principal foe, the Russian Alexander Minasian, the man who was responsible for the murder of Kell’s love, Rachel Wallinger.

While there were excellent ancillary characters that Cumming used to tell his story, the primary action was between Kell and Minasian. Their dialogue is riveting. The story starts in a casino (not at a baccarat table), but at a roulette while as a British passport office employee, a gambling addict, predictably got in debt from which he could only extract himself by agreeing to provide real British passports to some terrorists. The main terrorist has the intent to do a mass murder in England is an English-born Muslim. After spending time fighting as a Syrian rebel, he has returned to England to carry the jihad there. He has adopted an alias, Shahid Khan. The Khan plan becomes central to the Kell-Minasian conflict, and you’ll have to read this great thriller to get those details.

A Divided Spy is Cumming’s eighth novel, but it’s my first. ECD has already favorably reviewed another Thomas Kell novel, A Foreign Country. I’m so impressed with his story telling that I’m going to hunt for another one of his novels to read in the very near future. St. Martin’s Press has a winner on its hands. I’m lucky to have gotten an advanced copy, and it is due to hit the shelves on 2/14/17.

A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming

Spying is about waiting.

Jean-Marc Daumal is a well off Tunisian businessman in a dead end marriage. His wife tolerates his transgressions, but their current au pere, a 20yo girl from the UK is different. Jean-Marc and Amelia Wheldon’s affair has gone well beyond an occasional dalliance to genuine affection. One morning, Amelia is just gone leaving a note with her American benefactors, a rich couple who live on a boat and sail the Med. She just wanted to stretch her wings.

Fast forward 30 years. A retired French couple are vacationing near Luxor, Egypt. While strolling on a Nile beach, they are mugged and beaten to death. The next week, an ordinary young accountant of no real note is kidnapped of the streets of Paris.

Amelia Levene's (nee Wheldon) post Tunisian life led her to the British SIS (aka MI6) where she has risen to the point where she leapfrogs a senior level admin-type and accepts the call to be the MI6 chief. But in the weeks prior to her taking over, she suddenly vanishes. She has gone to Paris then to Nice where local assets find her taking a painting class, then she ups and disappears.

Sounds fishy. One of the service’s clandestine heads is worried; off the grid this close to taking over? Can’t ask a current agent to look for her so he contacts an agent who has recently been fired after an incident surrounding the joint UK/US interrogation of a jihadist in Afghanistan.

Tom Kell has been killing time eating take-out food and watching black and white movies on TCM. At times he imagined life outside of the service, but knows he really can’t live any other life. He’s asked to track down Amelia, so he follows her trail through Paris to Nice then to Tunis.

MI6 thinks she must have some fling on the side, but is concerned that maybe she is tying up loose ends with another foreign agency – SIS’s job is to look at all kinds of possibilities.

But the truth that Kell finds is not quite what London was expecting. Kell has to confront Amelia about what he’s learned about her absence and what he thinks is lurking beyond what she has experienced. Indeed, the French DGSE has set up an operation intended to curry influence within MI6 using a secret long buried by Amelia.

I read a back cover blub about another author’s comparison with modern espionage writers like Olen Steinhauer (in my power rotation) and UK's Charles Cumming. I hadn’t heard that name before so I checked out his titles and settled on this 2012 book (it was available at the library). This was espionage at its roots – watching, waiting, surveillance, persuasive interrogation, more surveillance, supposition, more waiting, more watching. None of the high octane shoot-em-up of some stories. Cummings skillfully exposes the highs and lows of the spy life offering characters of depth that the reader can both care about and on some level, identify with.

Yes, I’m glad I read that cover blurb. Also glad that the county library has a number of books by Cumming on the shelf. For me, not on the same level as Steinhauer . . . yet. But this guy is very, very good and worthy of digging deeper into his works.

East Coast Don