Mörderische Machenschaften
2013
In 1973, at the height of the Cold War, the British SIS and the American CIA mount a combined operation to look at some supposedly new military installations in Albania. The operation is disastrously compromised by American double agents and a number of good men die on the Albania Beach near Schenjin.
Seven years later David Gentry is saved from a sniper’s bullet at Bologna railway station when a terrorist bomb explodes killing eighty fine people and wounding more than two hundred.
Almost twenty five years later a young Romanian soprano is shot dead as she takes her curtain calls after a performance of La Traviata at La Fenice in Venice.
Two people are present at each of these occasions, Peter Smith, now attempting to follow a quiet life in Arles in the South of France, and Valery Grantkov an old Romanian assassin with a taste for using an equally old Russian rifle. When the assassin decides to make up for the fact that he missed killing Smith both in Albania and in Venice, the retired Welshman finds the tranquillity of his retirement disturbed again by his past resurfacing.
Smith and his girlfriend Martine Aubanet, the daughter of a wealthy Camargue farming family, travel to Pau for Smith to take on his old friend and colleague McDowell at a game of Real Tennis. After the game and a leisurely lunch they return home to hear the McDowell has disappeared. Smith returns and finds that in all probability been murdered on his way home and that there seem to be connections between the death and the original Albanian operation in which McDowell had also participated.
In spite of a marked and baffling reluctance on behalf of his old friend and one-time Control in SIS, David Gentry to offer any help on this occasion, Smith begins to investigate the series of coincidences.
Without the benefit of Gentry’s help, Smith is forced to rely on his friend and senior gangster, Alexei Girondou, who runs most of the organised crime in the South of France. The two have had dealings before and have struck up an unlikely friendship. So when Gentry is mysteriously kidnapped by someone purporting one of the original American conspirators, it is Girondou who comes to his aid. Smith discovers that it is not the Americans who are responsible but another colleague from the old days in SIS, Miles Ripley who has now risen to the brink of becoming the Director of the Service.
Smith realises that many things he has taken for granted over the years are no longer true, including the bases for some all-important and much-valued friendships. He wants a resolution to all this and if that means revenge then so be it.
