Five years ago, a commercial flight landed in Vienna, but upon touchdown, four terrorists on board stopped the plane far from the terminal and, with over 120 hostages, demanded release of comrades in arms. It did not end well.
Today, Henry Pelham has been tasked with following up on a lead that has just surfaced. By dumb luck, an informant for the US was on board and, using his burner phone, was texting out what was happening up until the kidnappers discovered his presence, dragged him to the doorway, executed him and tossed him to the tarmac.
Henry was part of the CIA’s Vienna station that day and, like everyone in the office, was running around like mad trying to find a way to resolve this peacefully. With this new information, his boss has him interviewing former co-workers in an attempt to determine if the leak came from within their own ranks. He’s interviewed most everyone and hit dead ends. One more to interview. Celia Favreau, nee Harrison at the time. Henry’s flame when both were posted in Vienna.
Celia and Henry were set to move in together when the plane was commandeered. But she broke it off when the siege ended and shortly afterward, took up with a General Motors exec, got married, quit the service and moved to Carmel, CA to raise a family. Harry has made an appointment to have dinner with Celia in Carmel so they can go over details from that awful day five years previous.
The small restaurant is empty except for a lone diner; late dinners midweek in Carmel tend to be pretty private affairs. Henry and Celia, because of or in spite of their previous relationship do a bit of a tap dance with each other to see what each remembers from that day, much of which revolves around a single phone call from a section chief’s phone that day. No one seems to know who made the call or who was actually on the other end of the call. The only thing known is the call was from a CIA line to Amman, Jordan. Shortly afterwards, the unfortunate asset was unceremoniously tossed to the tarmac. After action reports had no mention of the phone call.
Steinhauer catapulted into my power rotation with The Tourist back in 2009 and his followups, An American Spy, and The Nearest Exit were also top drawer espionage thrillers in the mold of the greats like LeCarre and Greene. Read all his earlier efforts, too, that were mostly based in an unnamed Eastern European country. Steinhauer is an exceptionally skilled writer of traditional espionage novels set in current circumstances.
Steinhauer's latest, All The Old Knives, takes a different slant on the theme. Despite my comments above, this book takes place almost entirely over dinner and supplemented with the occasional flashback to the awful day. The delicate and cagy exchanges between Celia and Henry are what this book is all about and Steinhauer pulls it off in style with periodic reveals and unsuspected twists in a conversation between two spooks, both skilled in manipulation and deception.
The acknowledgements page (you do read those, don’t you? You should) says that Steinhauer was fascinated by a Masterpiece presentation of a story called The Song of Lunch, where the entire show took place during a meal. It got him wondering if he could do the same in his genre. The result is a short book, longer than a novella, but certainly shorter than his other titles - easily read on a morning of any weekend. I’d say he was successful.
East Coast Don
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