Families of Spies , livre ebook

RedDoor Press - Brian Landers

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

144 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Julia Dylan's aunt, Eveline Sadeghi, vanishes while sailing from Kefalonia to Syracuse in Sicily.Julia and her new husband Thomas abandon their honeymoon and join the search. In Syracuse they encounter a suspiciously well-informed detective who is investigating the murder of an Iranian journalist. Thomas is convinced that Eveline's disappearance is somehow connected.Julia's uncle, the Director General of Defence Intelligence, asks MI6 to investigate but MI6 has higher priorities. The CIA have uncovered a Russian spy at a NATO airbase north of Syracuse.Could it all be connected? And could the connection go all the way back to an infamous Mafia massacre in 1947?To unravel the mystery of Eveline Sadeghi's death, Julia and Thomas Dylan must not just understand history but must understand families, especially their own.John le Carre meets Agatha Christie in the second gripping novel in the Dylan series

Informations

Publié par	RedDoor Press
Date de parution	30 juillet 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839780622
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Praise for Awakening of Spies
‘A richly detailed, and deeply engrossing espionage thriller. Brian Landers is the real deal’
Andrew Raymond, author of the Novak and Mitchell thrillers
‘This book is authentic and gripping. It is written with great authenticity and terrific sense of pace. It is the first in what I believe will be an unmissable series of novels’
Peter Oborne
‘Very impressive… I look forward to the next’
James Hamilton-Paterson
Also by Brian Landers
Empires Apart: The Story of the American and Russian Empires
The Dylan Series:
Awakening of Spies
Coincidence of Spies
Exodus of Spies
FAMILIES OF SPIES
BRIAN LANDERS
Published by RedDoor
www.reddoorpress.co.uk
© 2020 Brian Landers
The right of Brian Landers to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design: Rawshock Design
Typesetting: Tutis Innovative E-Solutions Pte Ltd
Joseph, Alexandra and Catherine
PROLOGUE
7 July 1 977
Eveline ‘Bunny’ Sadeghi was smiling happily as she sailed to her death.
The sun had been rising behind them as they left the harbour at Sami yesterday. Now a glorious sunset was welcoming them to Syracuse, only an hour away. The winds had held steady and they had the sea to themselves. As they sailed westwards across the Ionian Sea there seemed to be more planes going their way than ships. Her brother-in-law’s yacht, Mahsheed , was not as sturdy as her own beloved Bunny Hopper , which she had left safely moored at home on the Solent, but it was a lot more comfortable. As they approached their destination, her husband Davoud was down below fixing a welcome gin and tonic.
Bunny had enjoyed their few days in Kefalonia although Davoud’s brother, Behzad, was not an easy man. His villa, some miles inland from Sami, enjoyed spectacular views but she was never able to completely relax there. The isolation was total. Despite the heat of the sun the villa always seemed cold, the accommodation, while spacious, was rough and masculine.
Behzad seemed to have no need for female company, he shared the villa only with his driver, and Shahryar, whose role never seemed clear. Two women from the village came in to cook and clean but Bunny had never seen Behzad talk to them, hardly surprising as he seemed to have made no effort to learn Greek and they could certainly not speak Farsi.
On Sundays, which the two women had off, Shahryar would disappear somewhere and return with a parcel of books and letters and a mountain of kebabs and rice he had presumably picked up in the village taverna. Behzad certainly read voraciously and Bunny enjoyed their conversations about opera or Russian literature, but sooner or later Behzad always turned to politics and her heart would sink. It was not a subject that gripped her at the best of times and it brought out the worst in her brother-in-law. Behzad’s paranoia would be comical if it were not so overpowering. Everyone was out to get him. Usually it was the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK. He insisted that when he was at home in Paris they kept him under constant surveillance. Here on the island SAVAK apparently had paid informants everywhere. And if it wasn’t SAVAK it was the Israelis, and if not them the American CIA or even, heaven forbid, the British.
She had asked her brother, who was now something high up in Intelligence, whether there could be any truth in any of it. It had been just ten days ago at their niece’s wedding. Gordon had just laughed and said that he could imagine all sorts of conspiracies in the feuding world of Iranian exiles but one thing he could guarantee was that the Shah did not maintain a nest of spies on an inconsequential Greek island in the Ionian Sea.
Bunny’s thought drifted in a different direction. It had been a lovely wedding. Julia was her favourite niece and the last to marry. Her new husband was not at all what Bunny would have expected, a minor civil servant of undistinguished pedigree.
‘Thomas has a First from Durham and is fluent in four languages,’ Julia had indignantly proclaimed after deciding that Bunny was insufficiently welcoming.
Certainly his wedding speech had been surprisingly impressive and genuinely amusing. Whether he took after his pugnaciously argumentative father or rather dreary West Country mother time would tell.
Julia had looked enchanted and enchanting. Bunny smiled broadly at the memory, tightening the mainsail as the wind had dropped.
Right ahead she spotted a small fishing boat seemingly becalmed. As she drew closer Bunny could see two men standing by the tiny wheelhouse, looking in her direction, and another man inside. She waved but there was no cheery response. As the boats came closer, perhaps eight or ten yards apart, the fishing boat’s engine sprang into life. Bunny was startled and instinctively steered away. She looked up to see one of the men point his hand at her, but it was not just his hand. She saw the gun just as it fired and registered the thought ‘Pirates’ in the instant before the bullet struck her thigh.
The force of the bullet knocked her back against the tiller and the yacht slewed around directly towards the other boat. Davoud, emerging with two gin and tonics, was thrown on to his side. His first thought was that they had crashed into something. Then someone seemed to have thrown a cricket ball at him. He didn’t have time to register that it was not a cricket ball: the grenade exploded with such force that yacht, crew and very nearly their attackers disappeared in a storm of splintered wood, metal and shredded sail.
I
Trying to look back over my life in the secret, and sometimes not-so-secret, world of British Intelligence I find that many of my oldest memories are starting to fade.
I joined what was then called the Defence Intelligence Staff in 1974 as a civilian analyst, a civil servant hired to sit behind a desk in Whitehall and write reports, but I have no idea now what most of the reports were about. In any case they were only ever read by a handful of people in the Ministry of Defence before being locked away in the enormous array of filing cabinets we referred to as our library. It was a very different world in those days and not just in terms of technology. The thinking was different. The Intelligence community was slowly emerging from an age that had already disappeared everywhere else. I remember one old-timer questioning me about military developments in ‘Bantu Africa’. Was there anywhere else in British society where such a term would even be understood?
‘Our bosses are obsessed with colonies and Communists,’ one of my younger colleagues told me. ‘They still feel betrayed by the politicians who gave our empire to the natives and by so many of their university chums who gave our secrets to Stalin.’
By the summer of 1977 I had decided that I needed to take time out to think seriously about my future. I was not convinced that Whitehall was my natural habitat. Fortunately, I would not be pondering the future on my own. I had met Julia in Chicago, fallen in love with her in Brazil and eventually shared an apartment in Hammersmith.
Just a few months after I was recruited I had unexpectedly found myself working with Julia in Brazil. When that operation moved to its successful, but violent, conclusion in Tobago I discovered that I had found a soulmate. It had taken Julia much longer to reach the same conclusion.
That operation changed both our lives and not only because it had brought us together. For me seeing violent death at first hand had been a profound shock. Producing endless reports, which is all I did when the operation was over, seemed so inconsequential in comparison. Now, three years later, Julia and I were to marry and we were both determined that, with the wedding ceremonials out of the way, there would be plenty of unhurried time on our honeymoon to sort out just how we wanted to spend the rest of our lives; quite possibly new careers for both of us.
I don’t remember having had much to do with the wedding plans but I do remember endless discussions about the honeymoon. It was to be two weeks of pure joy without a cloud in the sky or a spy in sight. How wrong we were.
I had wanted to return to the Caribbean for our honeymoon but Julia insisted that trying to recapture the past was never a good idea. After much debate she conceded that sometimes it made sense to travel back in time and we would start our new life with a dose of antiquity, a week in Rome followed by a week in Athens. As always Julia was right, just as she had been about the wedding.
I would have been happy to settle for a civil ceremony, certainly that is what my militantly atheist father would have wanted now that he had flung off the non-conformist traditions still clung to by my mother. But Julia would have none of that. Her family’s traditions were very different and nothing less than Worcester Cathedral, morning suits, elaborate hats and a glittering reception in a marquee would be enough for a grandchild of the first Lord Grimspound.
When I first introduced Julia to my parents my father had rushed off to the local library and came back gleefully to report that Julia’s grandfather had been a Birmingham industrialist who had bought his peerage from Lloyd George. The Grimspounds were no more aristocratic than we