The Contract by Gerald Seymour

First published in 1980

Gerald Seymour is one of the spy thriller genre’s best practitioners. The Contract is among his best efforts. The setup is crafted in meticulous detail. The action that follows builds relentless tension. The ending might be shocking to readers who are unfamiliar with Seymour’s tendency to avoid the sentimental or predictable.

A young man named Willi Guttman becomes sexually involved with a young English woman. The woman is in Geneva, working for the WHO. Willi lives in Moscow, but he meets the woman while working as an interpreter for the Soviet delegation to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament. When the woman tells Willi that she is pregnant and needs his support, he agrees to defect so he can be with her.

After Willi fakes his death, the British SIS smuggles him out of Geneva and takes him to a safe house in England. They promise to reunite him with his girlfriend after he divulges all the secrets he knows. Unfortunately, he knows very little of value. His father, however, is Otto Gutttman, a prominent scientist who the Russians appropriated from Germany after the war. Otto now develops classified anti-tank technology for the Soviet Union. The British would love to get their hands on Otto. They see Willi as the means of inducing Otto’s defection.

The SIS learns from Willi that Otto takes an annual summer vacation in Magdeburg, his home town in East Germany. Henry Carter and his boss, Charles Mawby, devise a scheme to contact Otto in Magdeburg, alert him to Willi’s status as a defector, and convince him to join Willi in the west. To accomplish those goals, they hire a contractor. Johnny Donoghue is a former military intelligence officer who was separated from his employment in disgrace after mistaking a young girl in Northern Ireland for a terrorist and killing her. Johnny is fluent in German and, given his intelligence background, is seen as an ideal off-the-books operative.

The plan is to bring Otto and Willi’s sister to Berlin, where they will use forged identity papers and travel permits to enter West Germany, posing as West German citizens. In Seymour novels, plans hatched by SIS bureaucrats never go as planned. Johnny is eventually left with nothing but his wits and courage as he tries to bring Otto and Otto’s daughter out of East Germany. Fear of a bad outcome is palpable, heightened by the concern that Seymour nurtures for the welfare of the elderly Otto and his devoted daughter.

Excitement and dread build in equal measures as Seymour makes rapid shifts from scene to scene. He puts the reader into the heads of Johnny, Willi, bureaucrats on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and even the British Prime Minister, a man who isn’t happy to learn that the SIS, not for the first time, is keeping him in the dark about operations that could have a catastrophic impact on diplomacy if they go sideways.

Seymour’s attention to characterization and his intricate plotting place him on the top shelf of spy novelists. He doesn’t have the style of John Le Carré — few writers do — but his prose is crisp. The Contract is one of the best novels to explore the balance between the desire for freedom on the repressive side of the Iron Curtain and the desire to collect intelligence at any cost on the western side.

RECOMMENDED

The Unknown Soldier by Gerald Seymour

First published in Great Britain in 2004; published by Overlook Trade Paperback on March 28, 2006

Gerald Seymour is one of my favorite writers of espionage fiction. Toiling in the shadow of John Le Carré, Seymour's work is largely overlooked by the American audience. Seymour doesn't have quite the stylistic grace of Le Carré, but he is -- at his best -- nearly Le Carré's equal as a storyteller. While The Unknown Soldier isn't Seymour's best work (Home Run remains my favorite), the novel features some of Seymour's most intriguing characters.

Seymour structures the plot as a series of interlocking storylines, each following a set of characters that, for most of the novel, lack any connection to the others. The key character, known both as Caleb and Abu Khaleb, has managed to talk his way out of Guantanamo by adopting the identity of an innocent cab driver. For reasons that don't become apparent until the final chapters, Caleb is making his way across the Earth's largest sand desert, the Empty Quarter in the Arabian Peninsula. Sparsely populated by camels and itinerant Bedouin tribesmen, the Empty Quarter serves as a hiding place for Caleb's al Qaeda masters. A good part of the novel describes the arduous journey Caleb makes across the forbidding terrain and the conflicts that arise between the untrusting terrorists who accompany him.

Other characters include Beth Jenkins, a lonely geologist working at the Shaybah oil extraction plant; Samuel "Bart" Bartholomew, a disgraced physician who works in Riyadh, where his income depends upon the information about his patients that he provides to British intelligence officer Eddie Wroughton; Juan Gonsalves, Wroughton's American counterpart; Jed Dietrich, a Guantanamo interrogator working for the DIA;, and Marty and Lizzy-Jo, the pilot and sensor operator of a Predator that prowls the windy skies above the Empty Quarter. Each character comes fully alive. Their individual stories are more interesting than the slowly unfolding explanation for Caleb's trek across the desert.

As is characteristic of Seymour's novels, The Unknown Soldier is solidly plotted. Dramatic tension builds as the characters, carrying out their own missions and agendas, end up working at cross-purposes. Thriller fans looking for fast action, gunplay, and heroes who save the world from evil fanatics might be bored by The Unknown Soldier, as well as Seymour's other novels. This is a novel of intrigue and intellect rather than daring exploits.

Readers who want a clear, unambiguous ending in which the good guys defeat the bad guys should probably never read a Seymour novel, particularly not this one. I didn't mind the unresolved nature of the story's conclusion but I don't think it had quite the punch that Seymour intended. Perhaps there have been so many novels about terrorism in recent years that I've become jaded, but the open-ended, supposedly ominous ending didn't resonate with me. For that reason, I thought The Unknown Soldier was worth reading for its characters, less so for its story.

RECOMMENDED

Traitor's Kiss by Gerald Seymour

First published in 2003

A British fishing trawler, assisting a distress call, puts into a Russian port. A Russian naval officer gives the captain an envelope and asks that it be delivered to British intelligence. The envelope contains classified information and an offer to provide more. The Russian officer, Viktor Archenko, is assigned codename Ferret.

Four years later, Rupert Mowbray learns that Archenko is in trouble. Mowbray, recently retired from the SIS and Ferret's former handler, is one of the few who recalls Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall with fondness. They symbolize "a world of certainties, and a place of brave men"; they are a reminder of a time when Mowbray's work was unquestionably relevant. Now Mowbray is a relic, viewed by young operatives as a cold warrior stuck in the past. Yet Mowbray engineers a return to action when a confidante tells him that Archenko needs to be pulled out of Kaliningrad and that the SIS decision-makers would prefer to let Ferret rot rather than risk an extraction. Because of his former status and his stirring reminder that disloyalty to its assets will cripple the ability of SIS to recruit new ones, Mowbray convinces the powers to allow him to select and direct an extraction team -- a team of expendables whose relationship to the British government can be denied if the operation doesn't succeed.

Traitor's Kiss is not a novel for those who want nonstop action involving larger than life heroes battling cartoonishly evil bad guys (when they aren't busy seducing beautiful women). Seymour writes stories that are more realistic than escapist, featuring dedicated, multidimensional servants of government who (unlike their politically minded, job-protecting superiors) try to make sound decisions in a morally ambiguous world. Seymour's novels are not for those who crave instant action, high tech weaponry, and perfectly happy endings. Nonetheless, they are far from dull. Although Traitor's Kiss gets off to a slower start than some of Seymour's novels, suspense builds steadily after he sets the scene. As the crisis looms, tension becomes palpable. The rescue attempt, when it finally comes, is exciting enough for the most jaded action junkie -- and a reward for those whose attention spans allow them to progress deeply into this carefully constructed novel. The ending is immensely powerful and poignant, really quite brilliant.

Seymour brings life to the characters in Traitor's Kiss, investing even second string players with detailed backgrounds. Some readers find that boring because it slows the pace; I think the emphasis on character makes the novel more interesting than the predictable action stories manufactured by less talented writers of spy fiction. As Mowbray matches wits against a Russian interrogator, the minor characters become pawns in the manipulative games played by their masters. An unexpected love story lurks in the background (the product of Mowbray's manipulation), contributing to the tension by giving the reader even more reason to care about the main characters.

This isn't Seymour's best work -- it lacks the complexity and moral dilemmas that make Home Run so engrossing -- but it is a fine, nuanced piece of writing. The more I think about this novel, the more I like it.

RECOMMENDED 

Home Run by Gerald Seymour

Published by The Harvill Press on May 30, 1989; published in the US in 1991 under the title The Running Target

Writers of espionage novels are inevitably compared to John Le Carré, particularly if the writer is British. Gerald Seymour's writing style isn't as polished, and the characters in Home Run lack the multi-layered depth of Le Carré's best characters, but the plot and pace of Home Run are worthy of the master.

Home Run begins with the 1982 execution of a teenage girl in Iran. The rest of the novel takes place several years later. Point of view shifts frequently as two storylines unfold. One concerns a drug investigation that follows the death of a 19 year old heroin addict who overdosed. Her father, an important public official, pressures the police to make the heroin importer's arrest their top priority. The cops diligently pursue the task, grumbling all the way. The other story focuses on Matthew ("Mattie") Furniss, Head of the Iran desk at the SIS, who is being pressured by the new Director General to increase the quality of intelligence coming out of Iran. Fortunately, Furniss has cultivated a new Iranian spy, a family friend who happens to be the brother of the girl who was executed.

Home Run gets off to a conventional start, particularly with the drug investigation, where Seymour employs off-the-shelf drug cops who give the usual tiresome speeches about the evils of illicit substances. The main cop character is filled with anger and moral outrage -- traits that turn out to be necessary to the plot -- but he has the standard fictional cop's "driven by duty" personality. Seymour provided him with the familiar neglected wife who is no longer tolerant of his "job first" priorities and is making her displeasure known.

Mattie Furniss is a stronger and more interesting character; thankfully his story is at the heart of the novel. At the Director General's insistence, Furniss travels to Turkey to give a pep talk to his agents. Things do not go well for him. Back at home, bureaucrats and politicians are busily abusing their power or wielding it unwisely. There's a fascinating turf war between the self-righteous drug agents, who view the "faceless wonders" of the SIS as impeding their all-important drug investigation, and the smug SIS officers who view the drug agents as "glorified traffic wardens."

Both storylines are filled with action and tension. The pace picks up considerably by the novel's midpoint, moving with furious speed as the characters encounter realistic threats in dangerous places. Torture scenes are vivid without going too far.

Seymour uses too many comma splices, leading to awkward sentences, but that's a minor gripe. For the most part, the writing is adequate to its purpose, even if the prose doesn't soar. Stylistic lapses quickly become secondary to storylines that captivate the reader's attention.

I would enthusiastically recommend Home Run to most fans of espionage fiction, but it isn't for everyone. If you like novels in which the good guys are pure and the bad guys personify evil, this is not the book for you. There are plenty of evil bad guys, but the three main characters -- Furniss, his Iranian spy, and the drug cop -- each make questionable moral decisions. Seymour's construction of the characters and plot makes it easy to understand why they act as they do. Seymour doesn't judge them; the reader is left to decide whether each character's actions were right or wrong under the circumstances. The answers aren't necessarily clear -- I liked that, but some readers won't appreciate the moral ambiguity. As the novel's end approached, I was drawn into each character's world, fascinated by the choices they made, understanding and sympathizing with them even when I disagreed with their decisions. For all these reasons, I regard Home Run as one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking spy novels I've encountered.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED