This latest thriller by Charles Cumming again features MI6 chief Amanda Levine and her friend Tom Kell, a hard-drinking middle-aged spy with a bad reputation he'd like to live down.
The plot is intricate, and the settings ground readers in Teheran, Istanbul and London. The evocative but pitiless language delivers the same hard message as A Foreign Country.
The world of the spy is a cold country. Working for "the firm" corrupts the employees, who become inured to the need to lie. The eternal ingrained habits of distrust and secret-keeping erode the personality to the point where it becomes all but impossible to have normal relationships.
Yet where there's life, there's hope. Thomas Kell, now in his forties, ousted from MI6 and divorced, is deeply affected by meeting Rachel, the daughter of a dead agent. For her, he is able to pry his heart open enough to hope for love and redemption.
But can he? Kell was..."back in the dreary routine of twenty-first-century flying: the long agitated queues; the liquids farcically bagged, the shoes and belts pointlessly removed." With these few words Cumming evokes the contemporary normalization of fear and suspicion at the same that he conveys Agent Kell's feelings of drab defeat, even as he undertakes a new assignment that offers him some promise of returning to the fold. When Kell confronts a CIA colleague whom he blames in part for his disgrace, (but of course there's always the guilt too), he is taken "into a tight bear-hug embrace with all the warmth and authenticity of a Judas kiss."
Masterfully, the author displays the disconnect between words and feelings. Tom Kell notices how "the relaxed, carefree way in which [Jim Chater] said: 'Oh, yeah?' betrayed a profound disquiet" to his observant enemy, an ally from the CIA. And even from a distance, Kell observes in Cecilia Sandor's upper lip "the absurd and unmistakable swell of collagen, her vast breasts out of all proportion to her reedy frame." In this story, what you see is rarely genuine.
Filtered through Tom's thoughts, Cumming describes good agents as "often bright, ambitious, emotionally needy," alongside the qualities needed to run them: "a mixture of flattery, kindness and empathy." Because secrecy breeds intimacy, he likens Vauxhall Cross to a bordello, where over nocturnal drinks, officers discuss their work with other officers, the only ones they can talk to, and then "one thing [leads] to another."
Yet even among agents, who are obliged to spy even on their colleagues when a mole is suspected, , there are still behaviours that are considered beyond the pale. People caught "running background checks on a new girlfriend, for example, or looking for personal information about a colleague-- would quickly be shown the door."
Chillingly, as they discuss the timing of whether to try to catch the mole first or to tell their CIA colleagues the bad news, C (Amelia) and Kell refer euphemistically to the potential consequences of holding out on Langley, the likelihood that a Red Cross convoy will be destroyed:
"Collateral damage?" Amelia said, as though she wanted Kell to take responsibility for it.
"Collateral damage," he replied.
This scene evokes the memory of the possible foreknowledge Britain had before the bombing of Coventry. If indeed they had it, the intelligence, gained at Bletchley Park, could not be used, lest the other side learn their code was broken. In wartime, there was no doubt that numerically speaking, this strategy saved lives. It also allowed individual deaths that could have been prevented.
Humans are not equipped to make such decisions; they shouldn't be required to do it. And the ones who willingly choose to work for organizations that expect them to are either sociopaths to begin with [like the villainous double agent in this story], or must sacrifice aspects of their humanity that most of us consider essential for normal functioning.
In war time, secret intelligence is understandably necessary. Yet society continues to create and populate such organizations, and individuals compete to staff them, even in times of supposed peace.
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