Brahms Four wants out. This alarming signal - it means that one of Britain’s most reliable, most valuable agents behind the Iron Curtain is urgently demanding safe passage to the West - sends a ripple of panic through the highest levels of the British secret service. And - appropriately - it has fallen to Bernard Samson, himself once active in the field (his territory, Eastern Europe), but now anchored behind a London desk, to undertake the crucial rescue. After all, it was Brahms Four who once, nearly twenty years ago, rescued him.
But even before Samson sets out on his mission, he is confronted with inescapable evidence that there is a traitor among his colleagues - a traitor planted by Moscow Center. Clearly, it is someone close to the top, close to Samson himself. It could be Dicky Cruyer, his immediate supervisor - the Department Wunderkind - whom Samson despises. It could be the American Bret Rensselaer, who has built his entire career around the work of Brahms Four - and who is spending an inordinate amount of time with Samson’s wife, Fiona (she too is an agent). It could be Frank Harrington, the man in charge (for the moment) of the agency’s office in Berlin. It could be Giles Trent - except that his connection to the KGB seems almost too obvious. It could be any member of the senior staff at London Central... even the Director-General himself....
Through brilliantly etched scenes of suspense - as we follow Samson into the center of a web of treachery and deceit, as he sifts through the layers of lies, time- honored assumptions, and intramural mtiigues that mask the traitor’s identity - the novel moves between London and Berlin (Berlin East as well as West) until, at last, the mists of secrecy that have cloaked both past and present are dissolved... and hero and traitor collide.
In its unfaltering excitement, in its creation of atmosphere and character, Berlin Game is superb - one of the strongest and most compelling thrillers we have yet had from the acclaimed author of such international best sellers as SS-GB, XPD, and Goodbye, Mickey Mouse.