The Seventh Floor, by David McCloskey.
Typically, I have chanced upon #3 in
David McCloskey’s series of Spy novels involving various colourful and driven
members of the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency – why can’t I ever seem to
start at #1! He writes from experience,
having worked for the CIA in another life – he knows how everything functions,
especially the hierarchy on the seventh floor, Olympian home of Finn Armitage
and Deborah Sweet, brand new leaders eager to make their mark on the organisation,
which includes Artemis Proctor, a fearless – and tactless – leader of a
subsection. The failure of an exercise against a Russian Source and the
disappearance of handler Sam Joseph, captured and held by the Russians for
three months until they swapped him for someone they needed more, provided
Armitage and Sweet with the ammunition they need to boot her out of the only
job she has ever really loved: without
her CIA job she is nothing: ‘all your
life you’re CIA. Then you’re not.’
Working as an alligator wrangler at her cousin’s Florida
theme park is no substitute, and the gators take exception to being rode twice
a day; they bite and will never be her pets. Is this what her life will be like from now
on?
Until Sam Joseph miraculously turns up bringing whiskey – and
salvation in the form of explosive secret news that he hasn’t shared with
anyone, including the various Psychologists and Medics he has seen since being
released: one of their number on the seventh
floor has sold out and is providing the CIA’s most secret knowledge to the
Russians. A mole has been planted and
that little critter is flourishing, absolutely bursting with information, and
excellent at covering his tracks, having had so much training at doing just
that at the CIA.
And how can a disgraced ex- section boss and an ex- undercover spy prisoner have any credibility with a leadership that wanted them gone anyway –
no: they will have to try to unravel and
expose the traitor by themselves, the hard
way, the dangerous, ‘they could kill-your-ass way. Which is the only way.
David McCloskey’s superb prose takes no prisoners; his character—building is second to none and,
despite the demise of one of his main protagonists there are still enough great
identities for the series to keep going, and going – and going! Do you hear me, Mr McCloskey?! SIX STARS.
