espionage
Mandrake
Grace Flint is a top flight undercover cop, the best in the business, brave, stubborn, ruthless, clever, troubled. In an earlier novel her face had been ‘pulped’ by a grinding boot and reconstructed so cleverly that there is not only no evidence of surgery, but she is stunningly perfectly beautiful. But it’s a mask, a mask she has used to excellent effect in adopting different personnae; overlaying it with changes of characteristics and voice patterns and body language and gait and feelings as she becomes anything she wants to be. Making her the ideal candidate to be sent into the most dangerous of situations.
When we meet her in Mandrake, (Paul Eddy‘s second novel with her as its central figure), she is deputy director of the Financial Strike Force, watching in horror as one of her special agents walks into a trap during an elaborate sting. An operation designed by Flint to trap Karl Gröber, a former East German spy turned ruthless financial manipulator in a big money-laundering scheme through US banks. Code name Operation Pentecost.
The federal agent, Ruth Apple, is killed right in front of Grace, a gun in her mouth, before being hurled out of a helicopter. The criminals have vanished, and Flint’s own conduct is now under question, because the supposed water-tight new identity the agent had adopted had been cracked open like cheap glass by Gröber and his men.
There is only one explanation for this: someone has leaked vital information. Someone close to Grace. Close enough to anticipate her every move. Uniquely placed to betray her. MI6 have given this traitor the codename Mandrake. Who exactly is he? There is only one person who fits the profile: Grace’s own husband, Ben Gates. One by one all the ‘facts’ Grace knew about her gentle bird-obsessed husband disintegrate. She has no idea who he really is or where he is.
For Ben Gates never did actually exist except in the mind of his wife.
His entire backstory was an elaborate fiction.
But someone in Gröber’s team certainly knows who she is and where she is. Just when she thinks they are on the tail of the middle men, their plans are thwarted. And she acquires information about Gröber which chills her to the bone. He has from an early age been a cold and unscrupulous fanatic prepared to betray and use even his own family. She will not rest until she hunts him down, and he leads her to her former husband. Not even when she hears of both their reported deaths in an explosion followed by the downing of two helicopters.
Such is the nature of spying and the work of agents in any country, that they are rarely what they seem or what they purport to be. And Eddy has created a cast of master-manipulators calculated to engender confusion and distrust. I found myself suspicious of everyone and struggling to sort out their real affiliations. But there was no neat tidying up of ends to slot everyone into place; instead he has cleverly left several plot endings hanging to pave the way for future volumes featuring Grace Flint.