TOP HOOK

Third in the Alan Craik naval intelligence series by a pseudonymous father/son team of retired naval intelligence officers, picking up where Peacemaker (2001) left off.

In that installment, Lt. Commander Rose Siciliano (Craik’s wife) was assigned to work with “Peacemaker,” a communications satellite the Russians and Chinese believed was an instrument to guide weapons of mass destruction. Here, we learn that “Top Hook” George Shreed, a CIA case officer whose wife is dying of cancer, has been passing Peacemaker data to Red China. Shreed finds himself about to be exposed by “Anna,” a blackmailer whose dead lover left her some computer disks listing him as a double-agent. She wants $2,000,000 for her silence. To divert suspicion from himself, Shreed frames Siciliano as the Chinese leak. The mother of two, finally headed toward Houston and her dream job in astronaut training, is suddenly and damningly reassigned to a Word-Processing Center. Craik, also smeared as a security risk, finds himself yanked out of advanced CIA training and sent to a project testing a new imaging system in Trieste. There are no le Carré subtleties of spycraft here—when Craik interrupts an assassination attempt on Anna, he takes out two Serbs—and many incidents strain belief, as when the fleeing Anna dives into a Venetian canal and comes up for air in a sunken chapel, or when her stewardess roommate is murdered in her place. Shreed confesses all to his dying wife, but his devious underling Suter has bugged her hospital bed and hears everything. He’s especially interested to learn that Shreed has planted a virus that will soon empty China’s war coffers. Can Suter get his hands on those billions? Shreed’s doings lead us to the brink of war with China and an air battle over Pakistan.

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