Safe houses A novel

Review by New York Times Review

that the phrase "the fall," in the context of espionage fiction, usually refers to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall doesn't entirely rinse it of its theological connotations. The Cold War has long been a backdrop against which to explore human frailties; that's one of the reasons so many spy novels are backwardlooking. But, like any careful spook, the best of such novels look both ways at once. In what we have to assume is the twilight of his career, John le Carré opted to interrogate his own past in the recent "A Legacy of Spies," but took the opportunity to examine the present at the same time. If neither era showed human nature at its best, it was hard not to discern between the lines a certain amount of nostalgia for the world before the fall. Dan Fesperman's latest novel, "Safe Houses," similarly opts for a dual perspective. It begins in 1979, in a Berlin rife with shady bars and attic windows, but that's something of a red herring: Though peopled by spies of every shade, it's not a Cold War thriller as such. Instead, its narrative flashes back and forth between the backstabbing streets of a divided city, where the enemies might easily be on your own team, and a murder investigation set in the present; a murder with roots in long-ago events that is not the simple domestic tragedy it appears to be. This novel stumbles at the outset, it should be said: One fortuitously overheard conversation in a safe house is a fair device to trigger a thriller; two is stretching credulity. But that bump in the road having been negotiated, what follows is a smooth ride, a novel belying its historical origins with a #MeToo slant. In 1979, the C.I.A. officer Helen Abell discovers that a handler in the Berlin station has a history of sexual assault, and puts first her career and then her life at risk to expose wrongdoing the Company seems all too happy to accommodate. Thirty-five years later, in Maryland, Anna Shoat's parents are murdered by her brother, a young man with learning difficulties. Anna wonders if there's more to the crime. As she investigates, she is aided by Henry Mattick, a refugee from Washington politics. Many of his ground rules overlap with those of the world of espionage - for example, that information is shared and friendship offered "not out of any sense of love or loyalty.... You're just hoping to use me." As their probing reaches back to the 1970s and beyond, skeletons drop rattling from the cupboards. The narrative choreography demanded by Fesperman's split timelines is expertly handled, and the dilemma faced by Helen, in particular - whether to be a good employee or a good citizen - illustrates the kind of weight that the spy novel, in the right hands, is capable of bearing. Lea Carpenter's "Red, White, Blue" is an altogether different kettle of spooks, less an unfolding story than a series of set pieces, using - rehearsing might be a better word - some of the tropes of the spy thriller. There's nothing new about this: Many a selfconsciously literary novelist has dipped a toe in the genre in order to examine themes of identity, betrayal, duplicity and so on. Few, though, have skated quite so lightly over the surface of the world they're borrowing. While much of the pleasure of Fesperman's novel derives from its detail, and the acute handling of tradecraft - like the escape and evasion kit Helen prepares - Carpenter dabs instead on a larger, fuzzier canvas. An unnamed C.I.A. case officer delivers a series of bulletins about his career, and the spy trade in general, to Anna, a young woman whose late father also worked for the C.I.A. He has, it seems, something of moment to impart to her. Alternating with these sections are glimpses of Anna's own life: her memories of her father, her girlhood, her marriage, her gradual comprehension of who her father was and what he did. What the threads have in common is a kind of dreamlike, affectless prose that effectively nulls characterization - Anna's husband, we're asked to believe, is a mover and shaker in the music business, but nothing about his behavior adds credibility to this bare résumé. And the individual sections are, if anything, overcrafted, each straining for its own little epiphany. A ship's nautical compass, appearing in an opening paragraph, will inevitably have mutated into "a moral compass" by the section's closing line. Meanwhile, our nameless agent delivers a series of unanchored observations, supposedly laying bare operational truths. "Timing plus empathy equals a successful recruitment ... timing plus empathy can even, occasionally, avert an attack." This sounds worth exploring, but remains an abstract profundity. Narrative scaffolding, indeed, is conspicuous by its absence throughout, and while we're told at one point that "the order in which we receive facts matters," this isn't borne out by the text, many of whose sections could be rearranged without fracturing the story. And yet, it weaves a spell. Though mannered and elliptical throughout, it's more readable than those qualities usually herald, and in the end there's something hypnotic about its stately, confessional prose. I'd hesitate to classify it as a spy novel, because it pretty clearly doesn't want to get grubby. No: It's a novel in which some of the characters are identified as spies. But in its contemplation of different kinds of lost innocence, it's also pondering the fall. MICK HERRON'S latest novel, "London Rules," is out now.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 16, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In West Berlin in 1979, Helen Abell, a low-ranking CIA agent, has been relegated to what is virtually a maintenance job cleaning up at various safe houses, changing the tapes, restocking the cabinets, etc. When making an unscheduled visit to one of the houses, she comes upon a top-level agent, Robert, attempting to rape a source. Helen intercedes, knowing there will be blowback, but she has no idea how bad it will be, nor does she know that, in a matter of days, she will be on the run from her own superiors, aided only by two other female agents who have scores to settle with Robert. Flash forward to 2014. Helen and her husband have been murdered at their Iowa farmhouse, apparently by their mentally damaged son. Their daughter, Anna, doesn't buy it and enlists Henry Mattick, an investigator with some shady government ties, to help her poke around. With all the dexterity of Kate Atkinson juggling narrative time lines in Transcription (2018), Fesperman jumps between the Cold War and the near present, filling in the tantalizing blank spaces in Helen's, Anna's, Henry's, and Robert's lives, as a mother and daughter, across time, struggle to penetrate the cliques and factions and competing agendas, all of it beneath the big wonderful tent of the Company. The level of treachery and betrayal, personal and otherwise, depicted here is byzantine in its complexity and potential to spawn collateral damage. This is a masterfully constructed example of classic le Carré-style espionage fiction, the all-enveloping perfidy burrowing its way into inner lives and leaving the survivors only tentatively able to move forward.--Bill Ott Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This effective thriller from Fesperman (The Letter Writer) opens in 1979 West Berlin, where Helen Abell, a low-level CIA functionary, accidentally overhears and tape records a violent encounter between a much higher ranking officer, Kevin Gilley, and a German woman. Helen intervenes, incurring Gilley's wrath; when the woman turns up dead, Helen seeks to bring Gilley to justice. In general, the resourceful Helen does the best she can to deal with the era's sexism with the help of a sisterhood of CIA women determined to make a difference. Flash forward to 2014. Helen and her husband have been murdered on their Maryland farm, and the only suspect is their mentally ill son, Willard. Believing Willard incapable of murder, daughter Anna hires PI Henry Mattick to investigate. Anna is shocked to discover that her mom was once a spy; the reader won't be surprised to learn that Mattick isn't quite what he appears to be-or that there are deep, dark secrets within the CIA. Aficionados of quality spy fiction will be rewarded. Agent: Jane Chelius, Jane Chelius Literary Agency. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In 1979 West Berlin, Helen Abell works for the CIA managing safe houses. Her shrewd observation skills mark her as an agency employee who should be a field agent; in more gender-restricted 1979, she's relegated to glorified house-mothering. When Helen uncovers disturbing information about an agent, she acts, setting off a complex and dangerous chain of events with far-reaching consequences. In 2014 Maryland, a young man in between jobs lives quietly next door to a farmhouse where domestic violence suddenly strikes. Henry Mattick can't resist investigating the double homicide-a longtime farming couple murdered in their bed by their developmentally disabled son Willard. When Willard's sister Anna returns home to help Willard and try to grasp the situation, Henry agrees to assist. Their journey to the truth sends them down surprisingly dangerous paths, while Helen's narrative races toward them at a breakneck speed. VERDICT Fesperman (Lie in the Dark) delivers a breathtaking, intricate international spy novel unnervingly on point for the #MeToo moment. Recommended for enthusiasts of FX's The Americans looking for a fix as the show's final season draws to a close. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/18.]-Julie Kane, Washington & Lee Lib., Lexington, VA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

In 2014, 35 years after Berlin-based CIA worker Helen Abell went rogue to uncover a high-level agent as a serial rapist, she and her husband are murdered in their farmhouse on Maryland's Eastern Shoreboth shot in the face with a hunting rifle.Initially, it is assumed that the couple's mentally ill 24-year-old son, Willard, committed the crime. But his older sister, Anna, believing him incapable of such an act, hires Henry Mattick, an investigator, to help uncover the truth. She is amazed to discover that her secretive mom was once a spy in Europe and may have been targeted in connection with her activities there. The book continues with alternating sections following Anna in the present and Helen in the past. In Berlin, the innocent but strong-willed Helen, 23, has the job of tending to four safe houses for the Company. During a surreptitious middle-of-the-night visit to one of them, she witnesses a man assaulting a young woman and stops the attack. Warned by her superiors to forget the encounter and stay away from the assailant, an operative code-named Robert, she continues her pursuit on the sly via a network of female colleagues who are well-aware of the man's transgressions. Just as Anna will put her trust in Mattick, who once worked for the Department of Justice in Baltimore, Helen puts her trustfor a timein her lover, Clark Baucom, a veteran operative with the manner of Robert Mitchum and weariness written into his DNA. Fesperman (The Letter Writer, 2016, etc.) takes a risk in dividing the narratives so cleanly, but the strategy pays off when they converge, one story deepening the meaning and intensity of the other. Unlike some spy novels, this one never bogs down in gamesmanship, spy talk, or cheap reveals. It strives to be truthful.Prolific spy novelist Fesperman delivers another winner, this one as fiendishly clever as it is richly entertaining. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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1 Berlin, 1979 The older man sat down at the kitchen table in the back of the safe house and recited the words for a second time. His monotone made it sound like a lesson, or maybe an incantation--some spell he was trying to cast over his listener: "To swim the pond you must forsake the bay. You may touch the lake, but you must never submerge, and you must always return to the pond." The younger man, with his arms crossed, nodded. "And the zoo?" "Dry. To all of us, anyway. The pond is also dry, to the zookeeper." A pause, a wheezing intake of breath. "All of their people believe it to be long since drained, and its waters shall forever be invisible. Except of course to those of us with special eyewear. And that's what we're offering, if you're interested." "Eyewear?" "So to speak. A new way of seeing. And access, opportunity. More than you've ever dreamed of." The older man poured some whiskey. He swallowed and set down the glass sharply, like he was knocking for entry. "You don't understand a word of it, do you?" "Some of it. Not all." "We're inviting you in. But before that can happen we have to dry you off." "From my swim in the bay?" "Of course." The younger man frowned and shuffled his feet. But the tilt of his head, the narrowing of his eyes, betrayed heightened interest. He uncrossed his arms and spoke again. "First you have to tell me more." "No. First you have to tell me the route you took to get here." "Just like you said." "You were alone? No shadows, start to finish?" "You saw the finish. There was no one at the start, either." "Positive? Even on the S-Bahn?" "I took every precaution. The route was clean. I have done this before, you know." A long pause, followed by another gurgle of whiskey, a second knock of the glass. "Come here, then." The wheeze, yet again. "Sit down." The younger man took a step forward and then stopped, as if something else had just occurred to him. "What if it's no sale? This isn't one of those things where if you tell me then you have to kill me, is it?" The older man laughed, choppy notes from an old accordion. "Come. Have a drink." "Was that a yes or no?" "It wasn't a yes-no question. Sit down and I'll explain. People are dying out there, Lewis. They're drowning with no one in the whole damn bay to save them, and you can change that overnight. As that Polish girl of yours likes to say, time's a-wasting." "How do you know about her?" "Rule one, Lewis. Always assume we know more than you think." Upstairs, in the room with the equipment, Helen Abell took note of the name "Lewis" as she leaned forward on stocking feet, straining to listen through the headset. A cryptonym, no doubt, but something about it was familiar. He wasn't part of Berlin station--or, as the old-timers still called it, the Berlin Operations Base, or BOB--but maybe she had come across his name in a memo, or the cable traffic. For the next few seconds all she heard was the sound of the younger man's footsteps crossing the kitchen floor-- clop, clop, clop , as loud as a Clydesdale--and the scrape of a chair as he sat at the table. It made her recall his polished black shoes, clunky, like the ones the East Germans wore. The men had arrived a few minutes earlier. Helen had peeked out the window the moment she heard the rattle of a key in the lock, and she'd spotted them on the doorstep out front. Unexpected visitors, and neither looked familiar. But the mention of "Lewis" was a thread she could work with. The wheels of the tape recorder kept turning, twin planets in rotation, absorbing every word. She was afraid to move lest the floor creak, giving her away. Too late to announce her presence. Was she wrong to leave the recorder on? To be listening at all? Probably. Undoubtedly . The whole thing was almost certainly way above her clearance. But she'd never heard any conversation like it. From her brief observation she'd discerned that both men carried themselves with an air of competence and seniority--experienced hands in a special order, one which she aspired to join. It was like eavesdropping on a conversation of the gods. Nonetheless, she was off-limits and it was time to bow out. She should switch off the recorder, remove the headphones, and quietly wait for them to leave. With a sigh, she reached for the off switch. Then the needles flicked on the dials as the younger man spoke, and her hand stopped in midair. He'd lowered his voice, and Helen, unable to help herself, squinted in concentration to make out the words. "Do the effies know?" "Not a thing, or not since Jack kicked the bucket in '72." "Jack? You mean . . . ?" "Of course." "He was a friend?" "Of a sort. The enemy of my enemy, that whole business. Last of his kind. Here, drink up." A splash of whiskey, then silence. Helen was transfixed. What in the hell were they talking about? The effies. The zoo. The pond, the bay, and the lake. And now a reference to a former power figure named Jack--probably another cryptonym. Everything about the conversation was baffling, and not just because she didn't know the lingo. For starters, why speak in code? The whole point of a safe house was to make you feel secure enough to dispense with the mumbo jumbo. You kicked back, put your feet up, traded all the secrets you wanted in the plainest possible language. Safely, and with absolute confidence. That's how she'd rigged these houses, four of them in all across the zones and neighborhoods of West Berlin, available at any given moment for privileged access and secret consultation. Each house was clean, unobtrusive, and practically soundproofed against the curiosity of neighbors, due mostly to her own efforts during the past year. She was particularly proud of the job she'd done at this location, a crumbling brick townhouse a block south of Alt-Moabit. She had labored zealously to craft the most secure possible environment for the Company's case officers and their agents, or for whoever else among their friends might temporarily need shelter from the cold and lonely hazards of their profession. Why, then, this strange collection of buzzwords? Unless it wasn't so much a code as a special language--and, yes, there was a difference--an exclusive lexicon for some obscure fraternity of operatives. Perhaps for someone with a higher security clearance this would be no mystery at all. She also wondered how the men had gotten a key. Helen knew the identities of all six key holders for this house. Someone had given them a key without telling her. That in itself was a serious breach of security. In addition, the meeting was unscheduled. When people wanted to use one of her facilities--okay, one of the Agency 's facilities--the rules said they were supposed to provide at least six hours' notice, so she could ensure that no one else would barge in on them, and that conditions would be welcoming and ready. Before she took over, embarrassing run-ins and overlaps had been infrequent but not at all unheard of, a state of affairs that the chief of station had seemed to accept as an occupational hazard. Helen had taken pains to eliminate such snafus. It was all in the details--controllingthe leaseholders, managing traffic, making the places easy to use, clean, and functional. She had carefully vetted the current cover tenant for this house, a Pan Am stewardess with Agency connections whose work schedule meant she was home only on Wednesdays and Sundays, and even on those days could clear the premises at a moment's notice. There were contingencies for unannounced meetings, of course, and also for use by operatives and agents who weren't regular customers. Espionage emergencies were hardly uncommon in Berlin. But the meeting Helen was hearing downstairs had none of the snap or crackle of an urgent rendezvous. This chat was unrushed, collegial, and despite the age difference she suspected that these men were on roughly equal footing, meaning it probably wasn't a meeting between a case officer and his local agent. Their English was flawless, no trace of a foreign accent. They were either American or very practiced at pretending to be American. Of course, technically speaking, Helen wasn't supposed to be there, either. That was the rub, and the reason for her deathly silence. Unbeknownst to the Agency, she had begun making surprise weekly inspections of her four properties. It was the most efficient way to uncover shabby upkeep and lax practices. She kept the visits off the books or they wouldn't have worked. Yet another way in which she went the extra mile, a trait she'd become known for since her arrival in Berlin fourteen months earlier. The job certainly hadn't been her top choice. Not even close. She'd always suspected that the chief of station, a randy old mossback named Ladd Herrington, made the assignment to demean her, to put her in her place. "You're only twenty-three?" he'd said on that first day, peeping above the frames of reading glasses as he pawed through her file. His eyes wandered quickly from her face to her breasts, where he let them rest long enough to make her uncomfortable. "You do know you'd be happier as an analyst, don't you? In the long term, anyway. Much better prospects for advancement. For marriage, too, although perhaps that doesn't interest you. Here, on the other hand . . ." He flapped a hand dismissively, as if they were assessing her chances of discovering a new comet, or of recruiting Leonid Brezhnev as a double agent. Analyst. The default assignment for any Agency female, except the ones exiled to records, or to some other "special branch" of this or that department as long as it was well behind the scenes. Hardly any made it into the field. Nonetheless, there she'd been, arriving on Herrington's doorstep with only two years of experience for a posting to the city that had defined the Cold War, and he'd responded by slotting her in a position that until then had been largely clerical, staffed by someone two steps below her pay grade. To make it sound less offensive, or perhaps to heighten the joke, he'd come up with a new title: Chief of Administration for Logistics, Property and Personnel Branch, Berlin Station. Helen had sulked for a week before deciding to make the most of it. She explored and then exploited the job's opportunities, which turned out to be more expansive than anyone had realized. She revetted the tenants, rescouted the locations. Finding all of them lacking, she replaced them several months ahead of the usual rotation. She tightened hiring practices for support staff, upgraded the facilities at minimal cost, and instituted greater accountability among users. Overlaps and screwups disappeared, as did the mice and bedbugs. Complaints from field men dwindled. She made connections, widened her niche, found a lover, and settled in to Berlin's cold, grim majesty with a sardonic viewpoint worthy of a lifer. And now, here she was, caught in the middle of one of her surprise inspections, silent and still and, for the moment, trapped upstairs on a gray October Monday at mid-afternoon as she wondered what the hell she'd stumbled onto. She had arrived at the house shortly after 2 p.m., dressed in maid's clothing and carrying a mop and bucket to minimize curiosity from the neighbors, although she already knew enough about their work schedules to be confident that the block would be empty, apart from the usual scattering of Kinder und Hausfrauen . After entering, she proceeded by her customary routine. Locks and latches? Check. General cleanliness? Better than last time, at least. No more mouse droppings beneath the sink, which in this neighborhood was all you could hope for. Refrigerator? Well stocked, nothing gone sour or moldy. Liquor supply? Ample and safe in its usual hideaway, off-limitsto the cover tenant. Last on her checklist was the taping system. She always tested it by walking from front to back downstairs while reciting a favorite poem from Rilke. Sometimes she declaimed in German. Today, in English. She spoke the opening lines while standing in the parlor near the front door. How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things? Noting the cleanliness of the carpet and the furniture, she began stepping slowly toward the back of the house. Passing the stairwell into the dining room, she spotted a smudge on the wall to her left; above, a crack in the celling. But she never stopped speaking: I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects, in some dark and silent place that doesn't resonate when your depths resound. She entered the kitchen. Rilke had named the poem "Love Song," but for Helen the words never brought to mind any man, past or present. It instead made her reflect on this strange profession of hers, this realm where it was risky indeed to touch the souls of others or, sometimes, even to try and shelter them in some dark and silent place--like this house. Helen uttered the final lines while peering out the back window into the small garden with its bare plum tree. Yet everything that touches us, me and you, takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one voice out of two separate strings. Upon what instrument are we two spanned? And what musician holds us in his hand? Oh sweetest song. With the words still resonating in her head, she climbed the stairs. Her routine was to rewind the tape and play it back, listening carefully to make sure the microphones had picked up every syllable. If no tweaks or repairs were needed, she erased it and was on her way. Today she'd heard the key in the front door just as she was reaching for the stop button. Heart beating fast, she'd moved to the window. That's when she saw the older man, the key holder. Excerpted from Safe Houses by Dan Fesperman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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