A novel

The Cold Halloo

A spy who defected to her enemies forty years ago is dragged back into the field at seventy-three to identify the one mole she trained — because she is the only person alive who knows the tell she taught them, and the tell is now showing in a sitting head of state.

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She taught four people a single small gesture. Forty years later, one of them is running a country — and she can no longer remember which.

Margit Hess defected East to West in 1981, West to East in 1989, and then to no one at all. At seventy-three she runs a forgotten translation bureau on a quiet Vienna street, her memory going out under her like ice in a thaw. Then a young analyst arrives with four seconds of video: the Prime Minister of Austria, mid-speech, brings two fingers to his left cuff as if checking a watch he is not wearing — the exact tell Margit invented and taught to exactly four agents in a Pankow flat in 1984.

Three of the four are dead. So either the Prime Minister is the fourth, surfaced after a lifetime — or someone has resurrected her tradecraft to frame him. To find out, Margit must reconstruct the four people she made: a man she loved, a woman she betrayed, a man she invented, and a boy whose face she can no longer summon — before the people who want the answer buried retire her for good, and before her own failing mind takes the truth with it.

For readers of

John le Carré Smiley’s People
Mick Herron Slow Horses
Kate Atkinson Transcription

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