Three years ago,
former MI6 agent Paul Sampson was hired by his old employers to track
down a 13 year old Syrian refugee who might possess key data about
an ISIS attack on Europe. He met and fell in love with aid worker
Anastasia Christakos while tracking Naji Touma, and the three of them
were rescued by in Macedonia by billionaire Denis Hisami, who owed
Sampson a huge factor for finding his sister's fate.
Now, their affair
having burned out, Anastasia is married to Hisami, and she has been
kidnapped in Italy and disappeared. The motive does not appear to be
ransom, but something else that involves Hisami's money and
investments, and the operatives he hires to track her down bring
Sampson on board, though he would be impossible to keep from joining
the search anyway. And he needs to, because all of a sudden, Hisami's
American empire is under threat, and he's being accused of being a
Kurdish terrorist in his past life.
As with Firefly,
the novel that detailed the pursuit of Naji Touma, the core of Henry
Porter's new thriller is a chase with multiple pursuers who may be as
much in conflict with each other as with the kidnappers. Like the
previous book, White Hot Silence does pick up its pace as the
various agents near each other, while in the background the question
of who and why keeps the reader guessing. It's a complicated tale and
like its predecessor it does allow for a little deus ex machina from
characters who just happen to be in the right spot with the right
talents, and a certain randomness in exactly which mobile phones can
and can't be traced instantly, but everything is moving so fast that
hardly matters. What matters more is the resourcefulness of the
characters, not least the kidnapped Anastasia and the now more mature
Touma, who is a computer genius of the first order. And of course,
what will happen if Paul does find Anastasia. When it all comes
together in Estonia, the denoument contains a finish as suprising as
it is logical.
But beneath all this
action, Porter is making a very serious serious point, which ought to
resonate with readers in Brexit Britain at a time when, as I write
this, Tory leadership contender Boris Johnson's links to the American
nationalist strategist and former Trump campaign savant Steve Bannon
have been revealed and attracted virtually zero attention in the
mainstream media. What follows might be a bit of a spoiler...
Anastasia's
kidnapping has been arranged to prevent Hasami's revealing money
laundering taking place on behalf of right-wing, Russian-backed,
populist nationalist groups around Europe. It would be nice to have
had the operation explained more fully by one of the
characters nearer the top who needed to play Bond Villain, but the
task is left to one of the actual kidnapping thugs, Kirill, an ex FSB
interrogator who wants to discuss Huckleberry Finn with his captive.
As Kirill explains
to Anastasia: “now Americans have lost their ability to see good
or bad.They've turned on their country, their greatest enemies are
their fellow citizens—imagine that! They are fearful; they see
plots where there are none, their information is corrupted and no one
is able to form a sensible conclusion about best interests of people.
And now we watch them abandon principles of Constitution. It's like a
dream for us.
The people are
soft and idle and now they cannot tell difference between up and
down. It was not espionage that destabilised the US. It was the vanity
and weakness of its people. We played on their weaknesses and they
did the rest. Same in UK.”
It was nice Kirill
threw in those last three words, in case we missed his vodka-fuelled
point, and he doesn't need to throw in lots of details for us to be
able to connect the dots. Porter was making
similar serious points in his earlier novels, about terrorism in
Empire State (2003)
and the roots of the new Russia in Brandenburg (2005),
which was set at the fall of the Berlin Wall and featured a young KGB
colonel named Putin. Both those books featured Porter's previous spy
character, Robert Harland, and Harland makes his reappearance as the
story reaches its climax, as he has just happened to retire to
Tallinn, where he can provide some of the deus ex machina mentioned
earlier. In any event, it is nice to see him back.
Harland is another
link to MI6, and one of the most interesting of White Hot
Silence's subplots is the return of Sampson's MI6 nemeses, Peter
Nyman and Sonia Fell, agents who seem to have a different agenda, and
in this case seem to be working their own game. It's another good
thing Paul has his own extremely friendly MI6 source. Nyman and
Fell's game ought to be part of the sequel to this novel, because
there is much left unresolved, not least the futures of Paul,
Anastasia and Denis Hisami. One wonders how much current affairs
might impact that one.
White House
Silence by Henry Porter
Quercus, £16.99,
ISBN 9781787470804
note: this review
will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)
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