- Thor, Brad.
Spymaster.
New York: Atria Books, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-4767-8941-5.
-
This is the eighteenth novel in the author's
Scot
Harvath series, which began with
The Lions of Lucerne (October 2010).
Scot Harvath, an operative for the shadowy Carlton
Group, which undertakes tasks civil
service commandos can't do or their bosses need to
deny, is on the trail of a Norwegian cell of a
mysterious group calling itself the “People's
Revolutionary Front” (PRF), which has been
perpetrating attacks against key NATO personnel across Western
Europe, each followed by a propaganda blast, echoed across
the Internet, denouncing NATO as an imperialist force
backed by globalist corporations bent on war and the profits
which flow from it. An operation intended to gather
intelligence on the PRF and track it back to its
masters goes horribly wrong, and Harvath and his
colleague, a NATO intelligence officer from Poland named
Monika Jasinski, come away with nothing but the bodies of
their team.
Meanwhile, back in Jasinski's home country, more trouble is
brewing for NATO. A U.S. military shipment is stolen by thieves
at a truck stop outside Warsaw and spirited off to parts
unknown. The cargo is so sensitive its disclosure would be
another body blow to NATO, threatening to destabilise its
relationship to member countries in Europe and drive a wedge
between the U.S. and its NATO allies. Harvath, Jasinski, and
his Carlton Group team, including the diminutive Nicholas, once
a datavore super-villain called the Troll but now working for
the good guys, start to follow leads to trace the stolen
material and unmask whoever is pulling the strings of the PRF.
There is little hard information, but Harvath has,
based on previous exploits, a very strong hunch about what is
unfolding. Russia, having successfully detached the
Crimea from the Ukraine and annexed it, has now set its
sights on the Baltic states: Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania,
which were part of the Soviet Union until its break-up in
1991. NATO, and its explicit guarantee of mutual defence
for any member attacked, is the major obstacle to such a
conquest, and the PRF's terror and propaganda campaigns look
like the perfect instruments to subvert support for NATO among
member governments and their populations without an obvious
connection to Moscow.
Further evidence suggests that the Russians may be taking
direct, albeit covert, moves to prepare the battlefield for
seizure of the Baltics. Harvath must follow the lead to an
isolated location of surpassing strategic importance. Meanwhile
back in Washington, Harvath's boss, Lydia Ryan, who took over
when Reed Carlton was felled by Alzheimer's disease, is playing
a high stakes game with a Polish intelligence asset to try to
recover the stolen shipment and protect its secrets, a matter of
great concern to the occupant of the Oval Office.
As the threads are followed back to their source, the only
way to avert an unacceptable risk is an outrageously
provocative mission into the belly of the beast.
Scot Harvath, once the consummate loose cannon, “better
to ask for forgiveness than permission” guy, must now
face the reality that he's getting too old and patched-up
for this “stuff”, that running a team of people
like his younger self can be as challenging as breaking
things and killing people on his own, and that the importance
of following orders to the letter looks a lot different
when you're sitting on the other side of the desk and
World War III is among the possible outcomes if things
go pear shaped.
This novel successfully mixes the genres of thriller and
high-stakes international espionage and intrigue. Nothing is
ever quite what you think it is, and you're never sure what you
may discover on the next page, especially in the final
chapter.
September 2018 