Book
Xpd
First published 1981
A cache of wartime documents threatens to expose a secret meeting involving Britain and Nazi Germany in 1940. Decades later, intelligence officers, politicians and private operators race to control the papers before they can damage reputations and alliances built since the war. The code XPD—expedient demise—signals how far some participants may go to keep the past buried.
The thriller moves between Second World War memory and Cold War manoeuvring. Deighton makes archival evidence as dangerous as weapons, showing how governments depend on agreed versions of history and how quickly those agreements become vulnerable when documents acquire a new political value.
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