Traitor's Kiss » (Bargain)

Once a reporter for Independent Television News, Gerald Seymour has lived in the West Country for several years. His bestselling novels include, among others, Harry’s Game, The Glory Boys, Red Fox, Field of Blood, The Heart of Danger, Killing Ground, The Waiting Time, A Line in the Sand, Holding the Zero and, most recently, The Untouchable.

Their biggest mistake was to think the Cold War is over.

An English trawler strays into Russian waters. When it returns, the captain has a package to deliver to British intelligence. For the next four years a high-ranked Russian naval officer, Viktor Archenko, passes valuable information to M16. Suddenly the flow of information stops. His contacts in London know nothing about him -- but they know that he’s under suspicion. The time has come to get him out.

But the new breed now playing the spy game have no interest in irrelevant Cold War sparring or the risk of a scandal. There are deals to be done, alliances to be made. They would rather leave Archenko to fend for himself. Only one veteran agent realizes that there is much more at stake than one man’s life. Only he dares ask the question: if the war is over, who will fight the peace?

Kirkus Reviews

A gang of disgraced British commandos infiltrates Russian territory to bring out a Navy turncoat in a tale to match the best of the mid-century spy thrillers. The always reliable Seymour (The Unknown Soldier, 2005, etc.) has taken a reading of the temperature in Comrade Putin's Russia, deduced the return of deep, murderous winter and risked a return to classic British form. Good call. Assembling his adventure from such road-tested parts as the return of an out-to-pasture spymaster, the brilliant but modest analyst in love with her Russian asset, a relentless state security interrogator and four disgraced commandos looking for atonement, Seymour sets his machinery in motion in Kaliningrad, that last decadent bit of the Evil Empire on the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania. There, where the remnants of Soviet naval ambitions lie rotting at the piers for lack of fuel and provisions, Captain Victor Archenko, trusted aide to an upwardly mobile admiral, has begun to sense that he is being watched. The double game he began four years earlier when he walked onto an English trawler with a package of military information addressed to London has come to an end. A corrupt local enforcer from the KGB's successor agency chanced into evidence of Viktor's unauthorized travels, and enforcers are closing in. Now Viktor is asking for redemption of Britain's promise to extract. Unfortunately, his handler has retired, and the attention of British Intelligence has shifted from the remnants of the Soviet Union to the new war on terrorism. To the rescue comes Alice North, whose passionate attachment to the asset in Kaliningrad exceeds her loyalty to the empty suits who have replaced her old boss RupertMowbray, whom she alerts to the present danger. The still clever Mowbray works up a rescue plan that recalls to action four exiled and disgraced commandos with nothing to lose except, possibly, the cynical careerist reluctantly along for the ride. Nearly unbearable tension. Splendid spy stuff.