Disordered Daggers : A Shadow Intelligence by Oliver Harris (2019)

[gervase_fen]

 

Impressively complicated spy thriller in which our hero, MI6 agent Elliot Kane, goes off the reservation to track down a fellow spy who has gone AWOL in Kazakhstan. Before she vanished Joanna Lake had e-mailed him a deepfake video clip showing a cryptic rendez-vous in a plush hotel room. How does Kane know it’s a fake?  Because it shows him, “in a room I’d never been in. It was my face, my physicality. I hit play, watched myself sit on the sofa, pick up cigarettes, change my mind and put them down. “

Oliver Harris has clearly done the research on current spy tech (fake office routers snatching key data, facial recognition apps to identify former adversaries) and the realpolitik is persuasive.   The convincing devil is in the detail – what a 21^st century brush pass now looks like (using wi-fi hotspots),  how the Daily Telegraph can build a spy’s legend, what to eat and drink in Astana, what it feels like to be in a stairwell of a building targeted by a terrorist bomber.  There are some clunky gear shifts as Kane remembers international contacts who pop up online or by phone to provide infodumps to propel the plot forward, and by chapter forty I had lost track of who was an ally and who wasn’t.  This doesn’t have the leavening humour of Mick Herron, but Harris’ blend of Lionel Davidson travelogue and Frederick Forsyth actuality kept me speed reading on to the end.