MI6
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.
MI5 – keeping our country safe
Thames House is the headquarters of MI5, an imposing eight storey high edifice a few hundred yards from the Palace of Westminster.
Stella Rimington joined MI5 in 1965 and during her career worked in counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism, directing all three branches in turn. She was appointed Director-General of the whole of MI5 in 1992, the first woman ever to hold the post, and was awarded the prestigious Dame Commander of the Order of Bath in the 1996 New Year Honours.
In 2004 she published her debut novel with the principal character based on herself: At Risk.
Liz Carlyle is an agent-runner in the counter-terrorism group based at Thames House, ten years into her term of service, anxiety her constant companion; to be effective she must herself be placed at risk. Her life is dominated by her work; unpredictable, stressful and shrouded in secrecy. By nature and inclination she is totally suited to the task.
… her quiet sage-green gaze masked an unflinching determination. A hunger for the fierce, close-focused engagement of the chase.
She dresses in nondescript clothes calculated to be non-memorable in any environment, always low profile even in success. It’s a lonely path, work-intensive, below the radar, the lives and security of all her agents and contacts in her hands, national security her daily preoccupation.
As soon as relationships become demanding or complex, she must end them.
She had found herself unable to compromise her independence in order to accommodate the emotional needs of a lover.
That this cycle led to her denying her own emotional needs she was well aware. Each parting was an excision, a scalpel’s downstroke, for which the only cure was immersion in work.
And now she has ‘an invisible’ on her patch; the ultimate intelligence nightmare – a terrorist who, because he or she is an ethnic native of the target country, can cross its borderds unchecked, move around that country unquestioned, and infiltrate its institutions with ease. As soon as we know that, each new character becomes an instant suspect.
Painstakingly Liz and her colleagues piece together a picture of two people who have traumatic experiences in their past that have precipitated them into fanaticism and vengeance. Both have had training in weapons and killing. Both have managed to travel to the UK and close to their ultimate target. But along the way they have killed innocent people, and the combined skill and weight of all the relevant services responsible for counter-terrorism and law and order is being amassed. It’s a race against time to outwit this deadly pair; time marked by a fast-approaching sinister anniversary. Curiosity, tension and dread keep the pages turning, and I for one didn’t anticipate the twist at the end which challenged me to consider how I would react in these circumstances, just how robust my own moral code would be.
It’s chilling to absorb the cold dispassion of trained suicide bombers and assasins; sobering to feel the weight of responsibility MI5 and MI6 and the police force carry to keep us safe; awe-inspiring to see how they sift and search and second guess and deduce to stay a step ahead of the most devious and devilish minds and prevent the most heinous massacres; scary to see how personal agendas and self-interest can pervert even the most disciplined. Stella Rimington has done us all a service by giving us insights into this secret world in such a rivetting and accessible form.
Jackdaws
Having enjoyed Ken Follett’s novel Whiteout way more than expected, I raked another one from the back of my shelves: Jackdaws. A hefty 450 page hardback so not for the faint-hearted. It was well worth the effort.
The story is set in the dangerous final days of the Second World War. D-day is approaching and for one of Britain’s most effective operatives in northern France, senior agent Major Felicity (Flick) Clairet, the stakes have never been higher. She’s responsible for sabotage behind enemy lines and is no stranger to fear and danger, but she’s ruthless, clear-thinking, and paranoid about security; one of the survivors.
The centre of the proposed action is a large telephone exchange sited in a beautiful chateau near Reims which the Germans have enlarged to provide connections between the French and German communication systems, and a base for the Gestapo regional headquarters. It’s of enormously significant strategic importance; if it were destroyed, German communications would be crippled.
But when Flick and her husband, Michel – a Resistance leader – try a direct head-on assault, things go horribly wrong. On this occasion the intelligence supplied by MI6, had been inaccurate. Her team is destroyed, lives are lost, her husband is missing, confidence is temporarily shaken. But she remains resolute in her determination not to let the sacrifices be in vain.
Time is not on her side. She assembles a small group of women: a flirt, a murderess, a safe-breaker, a female impersonator, two aristocrats, one awkward, the other entitled – all unprofessional, but each with certain skills Flick needs. Code-named Jackdaws, these six women will attempt a daring infiltration under the very noses of the Germans, impersonating cleaning staff. An agents’ course normally takes three months; Flick has just two days to teach this motley band of women basic security rules: how to parachute, how to use weapons, and how to kill people without making a noise. Then they will be parachuted into France to blow up the telephone exchange.
Terrific tension is created by parallel accounts of the British team preparing to take out the telephone exchange and the German Major Deiter Franck infiltrating the French Resistance, as the countdown days are ticked off one by one. The descriptions of torture techniques, and the brutality of war, are both vivid and sickening, but the enormous courage of those who worked in enemy territory is breathtaking. It’s a shockingly mesmerising and totally gripping tale, bringing with it a fearful awareness of the price that was paid for the peace we take for granted.
Exactly 50 women were sent into France as secret agents during WWII; of these 36 survived. The other 14 gave their lives in service. This book is dedicated to them.