The Agent Runner

From the winner of an Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award, a spy who came in from the cold for today’s wars.

British by birth, foreign by descent, and agnostic by conviction, Edward Henry Malik is an MI6 handler—an agent runner. For four years he has been running an agent codenamed Nightingale inside Pakistan’s notorious ISI, keeping watch on its links to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and its machinations in neighboring Afghanistan, but mostly monitoring for threats to the British homeland. Then, in the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Nightingale is exposed and Ed’s world falls apart.

Dismissed from MI6 and with his reputation in tatters, Ed returns to his roots in the immigrant enclave of Whitechapel in London’s East End. He takes a job at a freight forwarding office and unexpectedly falls in love with the proprietor’s daughter. It seems as if he has finally found respite from his demons. But you can’t escape your past. Ed knows too much, and he has come to the attention of Major General Javid Aslam Khan—Pakistan’s legendary spymaster, known as the Hidden Hand.

This lean, propulsive thriller tells a classic story of love, trust, and betrayal set against today’s Great Game, while in the background swirl rumors of a one-legged mullah and a shadowy militia with the means to detonate a dirty bomb.

Simon Conway is the author of A Loyal Spy and Rock Creek Park. Born in California in 1967, he studied English literature at the University of Edinburgh and served in a Highland regiment of the British army. Since leaving the military he has worked for the HALO Trust clearing land mines and explosive remnants of war around the world, most recently in Syria. As co-chair of the global Cluster Munition Coalition, he successfully campaigned for the 2008 international treaty that banned cluster bombs. He resides in Scotland with his wife.