The Company of Strangers

by RobertWilson (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.31

  Karl, a young intelligence officer, arrives in Hitler's East Front HQ committed to the cause, but finds himself implicated in the assassination of a minister and presiding over the debacle of Stalingrad which decimates his family. Damaged and working as a double agent, he is transferred to Lisbon - his brief, to save his country from disaster. Andrea, an Oxford mathematics graduate, is drafted into the Secret Service in the summer of 1944, and her first assignment is Lisbon, where the traffic in industrial diamonds giving the Nazis the tools to maintain their rocket-launching programme in Britain. Lisbon in 1944 houses as many spies and informers as it does ordinary citizens. And in the torrid July heat the endgame to the Iberian intelligence operation begins. Three Secret Services manouevre around each other, and Karl and Andrea are thrown together in a night of violence and intrigue. Berlin 1965: Andrea is sent to this schizophrenic city from London, where the Secret Service is reeling from the Philby affair. The Stasi are mountjng a fearsome counter-intelligence operation and she suddenly finds those desperate days in Lisbon replayed in the viral cold of a Berlin January, but this time she's not sure whose side she's on.