A spy thriller with nuances

Not so long ago, publishers thought women couldn’t write thrillers. Espionage novelist Gayle Lynds recalls that her first book, “Masquerade,” was turned down in 1994 by the president of one major New York house because “no woman could have written this book.”

These days, Miss Moneypenny has vaulted from the secretarial desk into the spotlight, leaving James Bond to fetch his own tea. Lynds found another publisher, hit the bestseller lists and never looked back. Her success helped pave the way for Francine Mathews, Raelynn Hillhouse, Jenny Siler and Leslie Silbert, all of whom have written well-received spy sagas.

Into this growing cadre now sidles Stella Rimington, who knows of what she speaks as a 30-year veteran of Britain’s famously secretive MI5 (akin to our FBI) and its first woman director general (1992-96).

Rimington, whose memoir, “Open Secret,” is available in Britain, confesses that she long dreamed of writing a novel. But creative writing and spy catching don’t necessarily go together. In fact, they probably use opposite lobes of the brain. Luckily, Rimington delivers the goods in a high-octane race-against-time debut thriller that still finds time for nuance and character. In “At Risk,” she introduces hard-driving MI5 British Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle, who arrives at her Thames House headquarters one Monday morning to hear alarming news.

The book’s alluring premise is that an Islamic terrorist group is about to deploy the ultimate intelligence nightmare inside Britain: an “invisible,” which is spook-speak for an agent who operates without suspicion because he’s an ethnic native with the right passport, clothes, accent and cultural touchstones. Imagine that instead of fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh had been ordered back to the United States on a terrorist mission with the logistical support to carry it off, and you get the idea.

“At Risk” starts slowly, but by Page 20, Rimington introduces a cipher-like young woman disembarking from a Paris Eurostar train at Waterloo Station, dressed in sunglasses, parka and cap pulled low to conceal her identity. Meanwhile, MI6 (Britain’s CIA equivalent) is tracking a Pakistani operative named Faraj Mansoor who has vanished from Peshawar. When a scruffy British ne’er-do-well and sometime smuggler is found dead from armor-piercing bullets at a truck stop toilet in soggy East Anglia, the novel is fully in play.

Rimington spins her web with precision, baiting her traps and letting events build to a crescendo. Liz must jockey among police, army and competing intelligence officers, especially the preening MI6 operative Bruno Mackay, an old Harrovian just in from Pakistan who speaks unaccented Arabic and plays a Pakistani qawwali singer on the car stereo while tooling through central London. There is also Charles Wetherby, Liz’s appealing “head of section” and Mark Callendar, her feckless married lover who announces he’s leaving his wife, to the horror of commitment-phobic Liz.

“At Risk” is most compelling in illustrating the cat-and-mouse game that terrorists and counterintelligence officers play. And Rimington has given Liz a fascinating foil: the young “invisible,” a Muslim convert who has taken the battle name Asimat, after the wife of Saladin, a 12th century Saracen prince who wrested Jerusalem from the Christian crusaders. Now, to prove worthiness to her adopted cause, she embraces violence. But we also sense Asimat’s humanity, or at least an awareness of all she has lost. After her first kill while helping Mansoor, the young zealot muses: “She had been reborn dead.... She had feared that she would feel too much; instead, infinitely worse, she felt nothing. Last night ... she and Faraj had been like reanimated corpses. Twitching in each other’s arms like electrified frogs in a school laboratory.”

The blank psyche of assassins and terrorists is deftly portrayed, as are the trade-craft details and lingo -- the primers on making C4 explosives from Silly Putty; the many sobriquets for MI5, the encrypted e-mails that Liz must decipher. And surely Rimington speaks from experience when she writes: “Every instinct that Liz possessed

“At Risk” also explores the psychological connections that develop as agents obsessively track terrorists and each tries to anticipate the other’s next move. “She’s right under our noses.... I can practically smell her,” Liz announces, wondering if Asimat can feel Liz’s “faint but insistent step” behind her. Indeed, from the hide-out of a wind-swept cottage, Asimat stares out at the winter rain and muses to Faraj: “They’re looking for us. I can feel it.”

The dreary wet cold of the English countryside, the tedium of intelligence gathering interspersed with the adrenaline rush of hot leads, the exigencies of human trafficking, the snotty upper classes with their own secrets are all served up with aplomb. Rimington’s tight plotting and short chapters keep the pages flying until the final showdown, which is a pleasant surprise, more subtle than one might expect of a hard-charging thriller, though sacrificing none of that medium’s power. *