1. The Ipcress File
A British intelligence officer is transferred into a small security unit and given a case involving the disappearance of scientists. The investigation moves through London laboratories, government offices and clandestine meetings, where the apparent kidnapping operation begins to look like something more systematic. The narrator’s suspicion…
2. Horse Under Water
A British agent is drawn into a search for a German U-boat sunk off the Portuguese coast during the Second World War. Its cargo may connect wartime Nazi operations with a modern criminal and intelligence network, and the attempt to recover the wreck attracts divers, smugglers…
3. Funeral in Berlin
Berlin, 1963. A British intelligence officer is ordered to arrange the defection of a Soviet scientist from East Berlin. The plan depends on Colonel Stok, a formidable Soviet security officer, and on an elaborate route across the heavily controlled border. Every participant appears to be bargaining…
4. Billion-Dollar Brain
A routine assignment pulls a British agent into the organisation of General Midwinter, a wealthy American anti-communist who has built a private intelligence and propaganda machine. Midwinter believes technology, money and ideological certainty can destabilise the Soviet Union, and his plans draw the agent toward Finland…
5. An Expensive Place to Die
Paris in the 1960s is the setting for a web of surveillance, blackmail and intelligence rivalry. A British agent becomes involved with a discreet clinic whose wealthy clients make it an ideal source of compromising information. What begins as observation develops into a contest among British,…
6. Spy Story
After returning from a patrol aboard a nuclear submarine, Patrick Armstrong joins a London war-gaming centre that models Soviet and NATO strategy. The simulations are supposed to remain theoretical, but the data, personalities and institutional rivalries around them begin to echo events outside the computer room.…
7. Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy
A Soviet scientist with ambitions far beyond ordinary military research appears ready to defect to the West. A British agent and an American intelligence officer are assigned to handle the case, but the scientist’s value makes him the centre of competing plans involving the CIA, Soviet…