Artemis Procter returns in former CIA analyst, David McCloskey’s electrifying new spy thriller, where London had devolved into a covert battleground between Britain’s MI6 and America’s CIA intelligence services.
What if the CIA and MI6 began spying each other? This is the question at the heart of David McCloskey’s thrilling fifth novel. The new thrust behind the question, which adds edge to this contemporary story, is the threat that the US and UK themselves might have come to distrust each other at the highest levels, while having still to counter other enemies on every side.
Indeed there must be a suspicion that it has been written with that in mind, with scenes labelled by location as they switch back and forth from the wooded , curving roads of Langley (home of CIA) to the space-age angels of MI6’s headquarters in Vauxhall, with detours to Tehran for an injection of fear, to the Maldives for beauty, and modishly, to Diego Garcia.
A new administration has taken office, installing a brash and unconventional CIA Director determined to disrupt the Agency and sceptical of its close relationship with their cousins across the Atlantic. Case officers, including newly installed London Chief of Station, Artemis Procter, must now navigate a tense environment as old friends become adversaries and no one knows who to trust. When agents run by both services begin dying, Procter and her team at London Station must decide whether loyalty to the Mission and their friends means disobeying the Agency they serve.
David McCloskey’s thriller depicts the nuts and bolts mechanics of how CIA and MI6 collaborate and explores what could happen when politics threaten to destroy the “special Relationship” between America and Britain. McCloskey, from Dallas, Texas, who worked at Langley and in field stations across the Middle East, weaves bits of tradecraft into the text: the difficulty of positioning facial recognition cameras to catch detail, how to throw off someone tailing you or how to push someone downstairs so that it kills them. His description of the five-minute tense struggle to get a satellite phone signal in Tehran conveys viscerally the claustrophobia of threatening places when that slender line of blips steaming up to a satellite is the only means of communication with those who are on your side to survive. Who is on your side and who should be but isn’t makes up the heft of his latest spy story. Procter his protagonist, loses parts of her glued-on facial disguise, sections of putty falling off into the street, but we’re told little about what lies beneath the disguise. Womemn come off particularly badly: they are prostitutes, a “frosty bitch” ( the head of MI6) or in conveniently for their lovers are on their periods. Characters swear as much as they breathe, jokes are clichéd; steak is ordered. National caricature abounds: Brits get uptight if Americans forget the hyphens in their double-barrelled names, as well as feeding themselves on bad meat pies.
Amid international tension of our times, “London Station” recounts a falling out between spy agencies, not their masters, even an attempted escape from Iran.
London Station by David McCloskey, Swift Press £20/ WW Norton & Company $29.99, 432 pages.
