AHMM, December 2009 (11 page)

Red to Black
features a British covert agent, Finn, stationed in Russia with the cover title of Second Secretary of Trade and Investment. Anna, a colonel in the FSB, is assigned to seduce Finn and to monitor his activities. The two embrace their roles, and each other, in a wary relationship that ripens despite an undercurrent of distrust over more than a decade.

The cat-and-mouse game is not only between Finn and Anna, but also involves the spies and their handlers. Finn, sometimes aided by Anna, becomes a rogue agent seeking to document the FSB's nefarious plans to gain economic domination of Europe. As Finn works his network of contacts throughout Europe struggling to piece together enough evidence to thwart their plan, he reveals the massive and deadly reach of the FSB.

Readers will not find pyrotechnics or Bond-style gadgetry here, but they will find compelling reasons to beware of the strength of Putin's Russia and the role the FSB now plays in enforcing its power.

Brent Ghelfi's the venona cable (Holt, $25) reaches back to WWII for the catalyst that sends a Russian spy to the United States to answer puzzling questions about his own father and the complex network of American and Russian spies that fought a shadow war. Ghelfi's Alexei Volkovoy, Russian criminal and spy, better known as Volk, makes his third appearance (following
Volk's Game
and
Volk's Shadow
). The titular Venona cable is a decrypted Soviet cable sent from New York to Moscow in 1943. It helped the Americans and British to identify many Soviet spies—Julius Rosenberg, Kim Philby, and Alger Hiss among them. But one agent, simply labeled Source 19, remained unidentified.

When aged American filmmaker Everett Walker comes to Moscow, searching for Volk and carrying a copy of the Venona cable, he ends up murdered in a warehouse belonging to Volk. Volk is arrested and becomes an unwilling pawn in a game being played by powerful Russian interests. What importance could the cable, long since decrypted, still hold?

Volk is soon sent on a mission to the United States to determine whether his father, Stepan, who defected to America in 1974, was patriot or traitor. Was he on a mission for his country—an agent of the Russian military intelligence (GRU), or not? And if he was, did he remain true or not? The U.S. ONCIX (Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive) agrees to help Volk, and understanding that unusual decision becomes another part of Volk's mission.

It doesn't take Volk long to realize that official cooperation in the U.S. doesn't mean that someone isn't anxious to see his mission fail, even if it means killing him. The Venona cable's last secret still may hold the answer to which spies were loyal and which were double agents. Soon Volk is on his own and on the run in America, desperately trying to survive long enough to learn the answers and earn the right and means to return home. Ghelfi provides plenty of action, and his deadly hero, despite being from the opposition, should earn plenty of American fans.

LONDONGRAD (Walker, $25) by Reggie Nadelson takes a New York City detective on a perilous journey from his home turf to a dangerous London and on to a violent Moscow. As with the previous two novels, Londongrad illuminates the classic spy dilemma of who can be trusted, even among those supposedly on your side.

Nadelson's Artie Cohen, a Moscow-born NYC cop, has appeared in seven previous novels, but in this latest adventure, Artie is not merely off the books; despite his resistance, he is also being recruited as a spy.

While on vacation, Artie discovers the body of a young woman murdered, wrapped in duct tape, and tied to a children's swing on a broken-down playground. Worse is to come as he learns that the victim was not the intended target; the real target was someone much closer to him, the daughter of his good friend, flamboyant entrepreneur Tolya Sverdloff.

Tolya, owner of nightclubs in New York, London, and Moscow, is both wealthy and reckless, convinced that his wealth provides immunity for his careless tongue. His daughter, Valentina, is a beautiful photographer and an activist with a foundation looking after girls abandoned or abused in Russia, unafraid to challenge an authority unused to being challenged.

Artie goes to London as a favor to Tolya and finds himself enmeshed in the coils of the Russian underworld while searching for the killer. The search eventually takes him to Moscow, plunging him into a whole new world of trouble.

Nadelson, a journalist and documentary filmmaker, paints vibrant pictures of the Russian community in New York and of the burgeoning Russian community in London, where rich Russians brought their wealth and crime. He evokes a Moscow transformed into a modern European city, but one where the old KGB has been replaced by the similarly ruthless new FSB.

Artemy Maximovich Cohen, better known simply as Artie, is at home as a New York City cop and as a member of NYC's large Russian community, but here he entertainingly demonstrates just how effective he can be on his own in foreign lands.

ALL POINTS BULLETIN: Holiday mysteries offer creepy cheer this winter; in Carolyn Hart's merry, merry ghost (HarperLuxe, $24.99), Bailey Ruth, a kindly spirit, offers help to a needy boy at Christmas. * IT'S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE MURDER (Five Star, $25.95) is the third in Jeff Markowitz's Cassie O'Malley sleuth series set in New Jersey. * A pair of siblings endure a tragic, suspicious car accident on winter vacation in Canada in Vicki Delany's WINTER OF SECRETS (Poisoned Pen, $24.95) * Anne Perry charts a young girl's quest to discover the truth of her uncle's mysterious death in A CHRISTMAS PROMISE (Ballantine, $18).

Copyright © 2009 Robert C. Hahn

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I had loved Josette ever since she first showed me how to pick a fat merchant's pocket on the busy streets of Paris. And no doubt she would have loved me in return, had it not been for that damned Chevalier, the one we called Remy. He was a thief, a trickster, and a well dressed popinjay, who had no right to deprive me of her affections. No matter that she was nineteen at the time, and I a mere several years younger. Someday, I swore, I would make an end to Remy for having robbed me of my dreams. I would find a way to turn the tables on this fallen son of nobility and see how he liked it. Then my sleep would be much more at ease. Or at least without his constant interruptions.

"Boy, you're wanted."

Ah, that voice again. The very devil himself calls me from my slumbers. No doubt he has new torments to inflict upon my young life. I thought to pretend sleep longer, but that never seemed to work. Better to answer and get it over with.

"Leave me alone. It's barely morning."

"Morning? The sun's past midday. Get up."

I soon felt the toe of Remy's leather boot prodding through a ragged hole in my shirt, nudging several of my bare ribs as he continued with his tirade.

"King Jules requests your presence."

King Jules,
he says, as if this second devil in my life were the anointed ruler of France and all its holdings. Even the least of us knew this so-called king was nothing more than a base-born tyrant who had seen fit to crown himself with a lofty title. At most, he ruled our motley underworld of thieves, beggars, counterfeiters, and trollops, and did it through fear of his personal wrath. That, and his grim bodyguard of muggers and dark-faced assassins used to enforce his every dictate. All souls within his grasp paid tithes out of their hard earned coins that each managed, by one means or another, to separate from the unwary citizens of Paris. It seemed the compass of Jules's fiefdom stretched from the old Roman ruins atop the Buttes Chaumont down to the River Seine, on across the bridges and deep into the shadowed backstreets of Paris. Even so, Jules was no king of royal blood like our young Louis the XIV, our
Roi Soleil,
our true Sun King.

To avoid another nudge in the ribs, I opened one eye and glared at Remy, but my tormentor was not one to be put off that easily.

"What, I wonder,” he mused aloud, “could Jules possibly want with an orphan pickpocket? Especially one who is so..."

"I pay my share at tithing time,” I quickly interrupted, “just like all the rest."

"...so incompetent,” he finished. “One who barely graduated from Mother Margaux's School for Orphan Pickpockets. I suspect that Mother threw you out rather than suffer further embarrassment from your lack of talent."

"I can pick a pocket as well as any other."

The Chevalier rubbed his chin. “The fact that you believe so troubles me."

He shook his head slowly, then stepped out through the open doorway of our hovel, a simple structure consisting of nothing more than three remnant walls of a small storeroom in one of the villa's outbuildings. A scrap of oiled canvas stretched overhead served to keep out rain and some of the wind. Just beyond the rubble doorway, the Chevalier paused long enough to give parting words.

"Tarry at your own peril, boy. Jules does not brook delays of his grandiose schemes, and it seems you are to have some involvement in his latest one.” Then he turned and started off.

"I'm not afraid of Jules,” I retorted as I threw a rock at the Chevalier's back, but that meddling popinjay was already beyond my range. He had no idea how lucky he was. Bah, enough of him.

Now that I was fully awake, with no chance of returning to sleep, hunger pains gnawed at my belly. Pushing myself up into a sitting position, I scrounged through a leather pouch kept tied at my waist. Tucked somewhere in this bag, among all the other small objects of value to me, was a wrapped length of blood sausage recently liberated from a common laborer who had obviously intended it as part of yesterday's noon meal. Had the man been more vigilant of his possessions, no doubt it would still be his. Of course, in thinking back on the incident, the lingering scent on the man's lunch basket should have warned me that my victim spent his days toiling in the endless sewers of Paris. I had been better served to have found a victim with a less fragrant job and a more decent lunch.

Preparing now to break my morning fast, I almost bit deeply into this meat delicacy when its slightly off aroma tickled my nostrils. I held the sausage closer to my nose and sniffed. That one quick whiff warned I had waited too long in this autumn heat. The meat was slowly turning. Still, I was hungry and my next meal could be a ways off. I sniffed again. No, not good at all. My appetite fled. Wrapping the blood sausage back in its scrap of cloth, I returned the package to my leather pouch. If nothing else, I'd find a way to slip the tainted sausage into the Chevalier's evening soup and let him be sick for a couple of days. It would serve him right for all the trouble he dealt me.

Still scheming on ways to even the score against Remy, I made my way to the enclosed yard where Jules usually held his private court. And there his majesty lounged upon his throne, a high-backed wooden chair that had seen grander times. Its cushioned seat of once-rich fabric was now threadbare and faded. Stuffing poked awkwardly out of rents in the cloth. Yet, Jules sat with his left leg resting over one arm of this declining chair as if the whole world were his. A wine goblet dangled from the fingers of his right hand.