by Andy McNab (2002)
The brilliant new bestseller from the author of Bravo Two Zero.November 2001. A Zodiac inflatable slips away from a submarine off the North African coast. If he hadn't needed American citizenship so badly, Nick Stone wouldn't have agreed to do this one last job, but the CIA's offer of a new life in the United States, and the chance to share it with Carrie, the woman he's fallen in love with, is one he cannot refuse.The job seems simple enough for a man of his particular skills: infiltrate into the hostile and violent republic of Algeria, kill a money-laundering local businessman, and bring back his severed head to the West. Stone isn't told why the man has to die like this, and he doesn't want to know. He just guesses it's got something to do with the democratic world's fightback after the terrible events of 11 September.But as events unfold alarmingly fast, Stone realizes that by no means has he been told the full story - and that in reality the job has only just begun. Then comes the devastating news that Carrie, enraged by his broken promise never to work with the CIA again, has turned her back on him for ever.Operating in the dangerous underworld of the south of France, where al-Qaeda has embarked on a panicked round-up of funds using the ancient banking system of hawalla, Stone is in at the deep end of a very dirty war. In the most daunting mission he has ever undertaken, as one bloody twist leads to another, Stone ultimately finds himself confronted by the most desperate dilemma a man could ever face.
Andy McNab
Nick Stone is a deniable asset to British Intelligence. His refusal to assassinate an individual in the Houses of Parliament leads to a chilling ultimatum from his bosses. Either he finishes the job, or Kelly, the 11-year old girl in his guardianship, will surely die.
Harry Mathews
Through a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in Paris, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest friends had their suspicions, which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a connection. With growing frustration at his inability to make anyone believe him, Mathews decided to act the part.
Andy McNab
Indonesia, January 2005. Nick Stone is working undercover, to retrieve incriminating material from amongst the tsunami-ravaged chaos of a devastated landscape. His team is attacked and a man dies -- but not before he makes an agonising promise that will return one day to haunt him ... Moscow, March 2011. Semi-retired but restless, Stone finds himself at the centre of an extraordinary encounter which turns his world upside down. An oligarch's young son and heir has been snatched -- with his mother -- from aboard a luxury yacht in the Seychelles, and only one man has what it takes to track them down and bring them home. The fuse is lit, and Stone is hurtled into his most complex and compelling mission yet -- a mission that leads him from the Alpine enclaves of the super-rich to the savage underbelly of war-torn Somalia. And in a world where piracy, extortion and betrayal lurk in the twisted wreckage of imperial ambition, Stone's principal objective turns remorselessly from liberation to revenge ...
Francesca Kay
Set in London in the early eighties, award-winning novelist Francesca Kay's third novel tells the story of a spy who falls for the wrong woman. What happens to a man who has his ear pressed to the lives of others but not much life of his own? When Stephen Donaldson joins the Institute, he anticipates excitement, romance and new status. Instead he gets the tape-recorded conversations of ancient communists and ineffectual revolutionaries, until the day he is assigned a new case: the ultra-secret PHOENIX. Is PHOENIX really working for a foreign power? Stephen hardly cares; it is the voice of the target's wife that mesmerizes him. -- Publisher.