A Foreign Country
Winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 2012 for Best Thriller of the Year. Selected by the Sunday Times and the Guardian as Best Thriller. Perfect for fans of John le Carré, a gripping and suspenseful spy thriller from ‘the master of the modern spy thriller’ (Mail on Sunday) WITH AN EXCLUSIVE AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR.Six weeks before she is due to become the first female head of MI6, Amelia Levene disappears without a trace.Disgraced ex-agent Thomas Kell is brought in from the cold with orders to find her – quickly and quietly. The mission offers Kell a way back into the secret world, the only life he’s ever known.Tracking her through France and North Africa, Kell embarks on a dangerous voyage, shadowed by foreign intelligence services. This far from home soil, the rules of the game are entirely different – and the consequences worse than anyone imagines…
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CHARLES CUMMING
A Foreign Country
Copyright
Harper
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First Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
Copyright © Charles Cumming 2012
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover photographs © Josephine Pugh/Arcangel Images (cityscape); Henry Steadman (foreground and figure, right); SuperStock (bench, seated man); Shutterstock.com (all other images)
A Colder War extract © Charles Cumming 2013
Charles Cumming asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Extract from The Spirit Level copyright © Seamus Heaney
Published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber 2001
Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber
Extract from The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley © 1953 Hamish Hamilton reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd
Extract from Ashenden by W. Somerset Maugham © 1928 William Heinemann reproduced by kind permission of A P Watt on behalf of the Royal Literary Fund
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 e-books.
Ebook Edition © March 2012 ISBN: 9780007346448
Version: 2016-05-03
Dedication
For Carolyn Hanbury
Epigraph
âThereâs just one thing I think you ought to know before you take on this job ⦠If you do well youâll get no thanks and if you get into trouble youâll get no help. Does that suit you?â
âPerfectly.â
âThen Iâll wish you good afternoon.â
W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden
âThe past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.â
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
1
Jean-Marc Daumal awoke to the din of the call to prayer and to the sound of his children weeping. It was just after seven oâclock on an airless Tunisian morning. For an instant, as he adjusted his eyes to the sunlight, Daumal was oblivious to the wretchedness of his situation; then the memory of it took him like a shortness of breath. He almost cried out in despair, staring up at the cracked, whitewashed ceiling, a married man of forty-one at the mercy of a broken heart.
Amelia Weldon had been gone for six days. Gone without warning, gone without reason, gone without leaving a note. One moment she had been caring for his children at the villa â preparing their supper, reading them a bedtime story â the next she had disappeared. At dawn on Saturday, Jean-Marcâs wife, Celine, had found the au pairâs bedroom stripped of its belongings, Ameliaâs suitcases taken from the cupboard, her photographs and posters removed from the walls. The family safe in the utility room was locked, but Ameliaâs passport, and a necklace that she had placed there for safekeeping, were both missing. There was no record at Port de la Goulette of a twenty-year-old British woman matching Ameliaâs description boarding a ferry for Europe, nor any airline out of Tunis with a passenger listing for âAmelia Weldonâ. No hotel or hostel in the city had a guest registered under her name and the few fresh-faced students and ex-pats with whom she had socialized in Tunis appeared to know nothing of her whereabouts. Presenting himself as a concerned employer, Jean-Marc had made enquiries at the British Embassy, telexed the agency in Paris that had arranged Ameliaâs employment and telephoned her brother in Oxford. Nobody, it seemed, could unravel the enigma of her disappearance. Jean-Marcâs only solace lay in the fact that her body had not been discovered in some back alley of Tunis or Carthage; that she had not been admitted to hospital suffering from an illness, which might have taken her from him for ever. He was otherwise utterly bereft. The woman who had brought upon him the exquisite torture of infatuation had vanished as completely as an echo in the night.
