Capturing spy-fiction

How do illegal arms and ammunition continue to feed the global industry of terror? They point to an international network of arms dealers, renegade secret agents, errant politicians, dubious money-spinners and an army of foot soldiers who might either be ideologically driven morons or those lured by windfall sums.

But to know how to bust them in a nerve-wracking trail, the most authentic accounts are sure to come from insiders. Here comes Close Call, the eighth book in the series by former head of the British Secret Service, Stella Rimington, featuring Liz Carlyle, Section Head of the Counter Terrorism Unit at MI5 in the “insider” spy fiction tradition of John le Carré, a former spy himself.

At a time when the air is rife with pro-revolutionary feelings during the Arab Spring uprising and its concomitant high-mindedness, a watching brief is given to Liz and her team amid fears that the rebel groups have been infiltrated by al-Qaeda-type jihadis who might have access to shady arms dealers.

And that the source of the arms deal is not in the West or Southeast Asia, but in Europe. It’s within the brief of Liz and her team to make sure that the illegal weapons provisioned by under-the-counter suppliers do not get into the hands of some lethal terrorists.

It’s this call to monitor a shipment of guns and bombs from Yemen making its way across Europe that takes her and her team to Paris, Berlin and Manchester. And, that also takes her from a past riddled with vestiges of her personal relationships to a present that confronts her with personal tragedies. The “close call” that she has to take, in the course of this journey, is punctuated by her professional responsibilities that admit of no recuperation from personal bereavement.

The novel throws interesting sidelights about the degree of international collaboration, as it starts in 2012 with the incident of an attack of the CIA agent Miles Brookhaven infiltrating rebel groups in the Middle East and extracting information from “Donation”, Yemeni Trade Minister Jamaal Baakrime, who, after his son is killed, goes haywire and vanishes into Dagestan — a republic of Russia, located in the North Caucasus region.

Andy Bokus, head of the CIA in London, alerts that the arms embargo to Yemen notwithstanding, someone his agency has code-named “Pigot” is smuggling arms through England to put the consignment in the jihadis’ hands. “Pigot” has been identified as Antoine Milraud, a disgraced French ex-intelligence officer, a middleman for arms sale linked to major transactions in a range of conflict-torn territories from Central Africa to Chechnya, whose knowledge of surveillance and international contacts make him potent.

This Milraud happens to be a close friend of Martin Seurat at the French intelligence agency, but now is Seurat’s sworn enemy. As France and Britain concert with the Americans in an attempt to stop the movement of illegal arms from Yemen to England, hearts get exchanged between Seurat and Liz, a present that is halted by the unnecessary death of Seurat, a serial character of Rimington’s Liz Carlyle novels.

What brings piquancy to the plot is that Liz would have to deal with her past that overlaps her present. By the call of her trade, Liz has to face Jimmy McManus again, once a policeman of devious moral principles, now deputy head of Special Branch in Manchester, who once has befriended and bedded Liz when she was seconded to the Merseyside Police.

Liz now meets a McManus embroiled with a shadowy club owner Lester Jackson, who’s ‘expanding’ his interests from drugs and prostitution to the arms trade. Jackson’s slave trade deports girls from Dagestan — Russia’s most heterogeneous yet non-descript republic, a scene of low-level Islamic insurgency and terrorism since the 1990s — that casts an invisible shadow over the turn of events in the novel.

McManus gets killed by Jackson in a chilling encounter when Liz and her team track the weapons to a warehouse outside Manchester, where terrorists appear to be planning a major attack at a soccer stadium. The reference to Dagestan and McManus might remotely remind one of Kim Philby, a classic case of the fox guarding the chicken coop as a section head, one among the many Soviet moles who are part of the MI6 lore. The plot gets foiled, but not without extracting a huge cost from Liz.

Though Stella is no Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, there’s no doubt that the novel is an authentic spy-fiction. Its scrupulous authenticity and high realism might explain its two-dimensionality and its stiff gait. The rigorous professionalism of not only the first female director of MI5 but also its first chief named in the media could make way for a little glasnost for poor Liz Carlyle.