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    Games Traitors Play
    Unavailable
    Games Traitors Play
    Unavailable
    Games Traitors Play
    Ebook406 pages7 hours

    Games Traitors Play

    By Jon Stock

    3/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    Re-inventing the spy story for the 21st Century.

    John Le Carre meets Jason Bourne!

    Salim Dhar is the world's most wanted terrorist. The CIA is under pressure to hunt him down, after he narrowly failed to kill the US president. The borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan are the target of relentless drone strikes. Echelon, the West's intelligence analysis network, is in meltdown, monitoring all channels for the faintest trace of Dhar. But no one can find him. Only Daniel Marchant, renegade MI6 officer, knows where he is.

    Marchant has been living in Marrakech, listening to the traditional Berber storytellers as they enthral tourists with tales from The Arabian Nights. Marchant believes that Dhar has shunned technology, retreating to old customs:coded messages for Dhar are being embedded in ancient narratives.

    When a man flees from the square, Marchant pursues him up into the Atlas Mountains, where he sees an unmarked military helicopter take off and head east. Is someone shielding Dhar to perpetrate an act of proxy terrorism on the West? Or is the CIA right when it claims to have killed him?

    To discover the truth, Marchant must be recruited by Moscow. But Marcus Fielding, erudite Chief of MI6, doubts that his young intelligence officer has the mental strength to be a double agent. It's a role that will require him to believe his late father was a traitor, an allegation that Marchant fought long and hard to dispel. Now he must rekindle those rumours and confront dark truths about his own loyalties. He must also work with Lakshmi Meena, the CIA's beautiful new liaison officer in London. Can he ever trust a woman-or an American-again after being betrayed by her predecessor?

    As Britain braces itself for an airborne terrorist attack, Marchant survives torture in Morocco and India in his bid to find and stop Dhar. Will family ties ultimately prove more binding than ideology? In an absorbing thriller that combines the nuances of Cold War Le Carre with the ejector-seat excitement of Top Gun, Marchant discovers that treachery is the greatest game of all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateMar 3, 2011
    ISBN9780007352357
    Unavailable
    Games Traitors Play
    Author

    Jon Stock

    Jon Stock is currently Weekend editor of the Daily Telegraph. He is the author of two novels, ‘The Riot Act’ and the ‘Cardamom Club’, and is also a columnist with The Week magazine in India. He lives in Wiltshire with his wife and three young children.

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    Reviews for Games Traitors Play

    3/5

    16 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The espionage novel updated to reflect today's never-ending state of alert and anxiety. The basic premise is a bit far-fetched: that a very capable MI-6 agent and a leading Islamic terrorist are half-brothers. The Americans, led by a vulgar, sadistic neo-con believes that the British agent is a traitor due to his family ties--so they have him waterboarded at a black CIA site. Later, the same CIA zealot condemns Daniel (the Brit) to torture by the Moroccan secret police; this tale makes the Americans look as evil and psychopathic as the KGB under Brezhnev. While everyone else plays with finesse--double-dealing and manipulation are rampant--the Americans rely on brute force, and are bumblers to boot. Daniel has been betrayed by his former lover, so he is paranoid personally and professionally. This is a book that does not serve as a recruiting poster for spies. They can trust no one, are completely isolated, and kill and maim at will. But the family element goes deeper, and Stock succeeds in providing the final surprise on the last page, a nifty bit of plotting and a fitting final betrayal.
    • 2/5
      An interesting idea, though I found the main protagonist, roving MI6 agent Daniel Marchant, extremely irritating and rather wished that the CIA would succeed in putting him out of everyone's misery quite early on in the book!
    • 4/5
      Phew! This is a good one.

      I would suggest (again) that John le Carré defined the British spy novel - and even the names and terms of the (real) world of espionage in many people's understanding of such things. More than James Bond - at least until recently. But, le Carré's classics, whilst still being classics, are a bit old-school, aren't they? He's good, but all a bit last century? But because the world le Carré created is quite probably the world that many readers think actually exists, it must be difficult to try to move into 'his territory' and write a 21st Century spy novel. Difficult to say things are/were different and sound convincing.

      Unless, it seems, you're Jon Stock. His 'Games Traitors Play' is the first of his novels I have read - but it will absolutely not be the last.

      'Games Traitors Play' plunges immediately headlong into a thoroughly believable and satisfyingly confusing, switch-back story of cross-, double-cross - and I wouldn't be at all surprised if I didn't miss a triple cross somewhere along the line. Talk about not being able to put it down, I couldn't. Didn't dare. It was glued to my hands. Didn't dare feel like I'd missed something, misinterpreted someone somewhere double crossing someone somewhere else. You can't take your eyes off this one for a moment. I love a book where you really need to pay attention.

      So, he seems to have effortlessly and immediately created a believable - background history and all - spy world. Gone of course, is the Cold War. But the tensions and aftershocks are still being felt. International terrorism is the 'new Russia', of course, but the old Russia is still alive and kicking. And part of the fall-out from the Cold War, is new tension based on old rivalries, between the UK and US spy and counter-spy cultures. No matter how satisfying it is, as a British reader, to see the Yank intelligence people get their comeuppance from time to time, you do have to remind yourself sometimes that we're supposed to be on the same side here! And who is on the other side? Who knows! A thoroughly confusing, shifting, shapeless world of terrorists cells, individuals and Jihadists, each using each other and their allegiances to each other and no one, to create an unidentifiable moving target for today's secret agents to try and aim at. In the good old days, you knew that everyone on this side of the Iron Curtain was on your side, everyone on the other side, wasn't, didn't you? Everyone on both sides, knew which rules to play by; they'd all been to the same English Public Schools after all! That's all changed. I don't envy today's spies, that's for sure.

      The book rushes round the espionage world at a satisfyingly controlled breakneck pace, taking in amongst other places, Morocco and the Atlas Mountains, Sardinia and deepest, darkest Russia. But it is mainly centred on Britain, British spies now and then and London and MI6's headquarters. No longer of course 'The Circus', but the much more modern 'Legoland' (if you've seen the latest James Bond 'Skyfall', you'll know why). Also and a first in my reading experience, the genteel town of Cheltenham and it's GCHQ 'doughnut' get some well-deserved recognition.

      In the end, 'Games Traitors Play' is a book all about relationships. Uneasy, troubled, but necessary relationships. Between MI5 and MI6, between the UK and the US and especially their respective ways of doing things. Between family, father and son, brothers and of course, the past and the present, between old-school and new-school spying.

      As i said, I couldn't put it down. Even when I'd finished. Kept hoping there was more. There are more, so Amazon will be getting an order as soon as my pocket money arrives in the new year.

      "Little does she know that I know that she knows that I know she's two-timing me...."

      Remember that song?

      Suppose you need to be of a certain age.