A Colder War
From the winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2012 for Best Thriller of the Year comes a gripping and suspenseful new spy novel. Perfect for fans of John le Carré, Charles Cumming is ‘the master of the modern spy thriller’ (Mail on Sunday)Thomas Kell is a disgraced agent who longs to come in from the cold. When MI6’s top spy in Turkey is killed in a mysterious plane crash, his chance arrives… for Kell is the only man Service Chief Amelia Levene can trust to investigate the accident.In Istanbul, Kell soon discovers that there is a traitor inside Western Intelligence. Then he meets Rachel- the dead spy’s daughter- and the stakes grow higher still.From London to Greece and into Eastern Europe, Kell tracks the mole. But a betrayal close to home transforms the operation into something more personal. Soon Kell will stop at nothing to see it through.
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CHARLES CUMMING
A Colder War
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Charles Cumming 2014
Cover design layout © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Josephine Pugh/Arcangel Images (cityscape); Henry Steadman (foreground and figure, right); Superstock (bench, seated man); Shutterstock.com (all other images).
Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Extract from The Double-Cross System by Sir John Masterman. Published by Vintage. Reprinted by permission from The Random House Group Limited.
Extract taken from âPostscriptâ taken from The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney © Estate of Seamus Heaney and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007467501
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2014 ISBN: 9780007467495
Version: 2018-06-04
âThe spy thriller has been on the ascendant in the past few years, breeding a bunch of talented writers, Cumming among the very bestâ The Times
âAn espionage maestro ⦠The levels of psychological insight are married to genuine narrative acumen â but anyone who has read his earlier books will expect no lessâ Independent
âA cleverly plotted spy taleâ Sun
âCummingâs prose is always lean and effective, but I was struck by the many times he injected phrases and descriptions so nice that I stopped to savour themâ Washington Post
âA Colder War is more than an excellent thriller: it is also a novel that forces us to look behind the headlines and question some of our own comfortable assumptionsâ Spectator
For Christian Spurrier
âCertain persons ⦠have a natural predilection to live in that curious world of espionage and deceit, and attach themselves with equal facility to one side or the other, so long as their craving for adventure of a rather macabre type is satisfied.â
John Masterman, The Double-Cross System
â⦠You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.â
Seamus Heaney, âPostscriptâ
Contents
The American stepped away from the open window, passed Wallinger the binoculars and said: âIâm going for cigarettes.â
âTake your time,â Wallinger replied.
It was just before six oâclock on a quiet, dusty evening in March, no more than an hour until nightfall. Wallinger trained the binoculars on the mountains and brought the abandoned palace at Ä°shak PaÅa into focus. Squeezing the glasses together with a tiny adjustment of his hands, he found the mountain road and traced it west to the outskirts of DoÄubayazit. The road was deserted. The last of the tourist taxis had returned to town. There were no tanks patrolling the plain, no dolmus bearing passengers back from the mountains.
Wallinger heard the door clunk shut behind him and looked back into the room. Landau had left his sunglasses on the furthest of the three beds. Wallinger crossed to the chest of drawers and checked the screen on his BlackBerry. Still no word from Istanbul; still no word from London. Where the hell was HITCHCOCK? The Mercedes was supposed to have crossed into Turkey no later than two oâclock; the three of them should have been in Van by now. Wallinger went back to the window and squinted over the telegraph poles, the pylons and the crumbling apartment blocks of DoÄubayazit. High above the mountains, an aeroplane was moving west to east in a cloudless sky, a silent white star skimming towards Iran.
