Beware of Russians bearing gifts.
Defectors are not always welcome.
Is the information they bring worth the cost of protecting them for the rest of their lives? Is it even genuine? Might they be double agents?
These are some of the questions facing MI6 when a Russian agent hands himself in to them in Denmark.
As a team begins to assess his value, his former employers in the Kremlin develop a brutal plan to show that no defector will ever be safe.
And they know where to find him. Which means there must be a mole in MI6.
So it is that the cavaliers of Six find themselves being interrogated by nondescript Jonas Merrick of Five - the man called back from retirement and his beloved caravan, the man the young guns call the Eternal Flame because 'he never goes out.'
But while he may be grey, Jonas is also ruthless. As he quietly works through the suspects in London, and violent mayhem breaks out in Denmark, Jonas plans not just to unmask a traitor, but to hit back at the Russians with deadly force.
First encountered in The Crocodile Hunter, Jonas Merrick is set to become one of the great figures of modern spy fiction.
A thrilling story of the secret services, their enemies and the society they operate in, building with unrelenting suspense to a superb climax, The Crocodile Hunter is Gerald Seymour writing at the top of his powers.
In the office at MI5 where he works, they call Jonas Merrick 'the eternal flame'. It isn't a compliment. It's because he never goes out. He never goes undercover, never does surveillance, never goes with the teams that kick down the doors or seize the suspects off the street. He commutes into work and sits at his desk and then he goes home. But Jonas has qualities the hot-shots fail to notice: a steely concentration, a ruthless ability to focus and find the enemy hiding in plain sight. Hearing of a British Jihadi returning from Syria with murderous plans, Jonas sends out for a telling photograph: a crocodile, almost submerged, just its eyes above water as it waits for unsuspecting prey to drink at the riverbank. Coming ashore near Dover, Cameron Jilkes is a young man from a broken home and a failed education, trained in the harshest theatre of war, driven to rage by loss and pain. And this time, 'the eternal flame' must go out - to hunt the crocodile himself.
"The always classy Seymour expertly stacks up the elements of his story to create another intricate, absorbing thriller." THE OBSERVER on Beyond Recall.
'Seymour produces the most intelligent writing in the thriller genre' Financial Times
He had been to the limit. Then they sent him further.
Gary - 'Gaz' - Baldwin is a watcher, not a killer. Operating with a special forces unit deep in Syria, he is to sit in a hide, observe a village, report back and leave.
But the appalling atrocity he witnesses will change his life forever.
Before long, he is living as a handyman on the Orkney islands, far from Syria, far from the army, not far enough from the memories that have all but destroyed him.
'Knacker' is one of the last old-school operators at the modern MI6 fortress on the Thames. He presides over the Round Table, a little group who meet in a pub and yearn for simpler, less bureaucratic times.
When news reaches Knacker that the Russian officer responsible for the Syrian incident may be in Murmansk, northern Russia, he sets in motion a plan to kill him. It will involve a sleeper cell, a marksman and other resources - all unlikely to be sanctioned by the MI6 top brass, so it must be done off the books.
But first, he will need a sure identification. And for that, he needs a watcher...
Full of surprise, suspense and betrayal, Beyond Recall is a searching novel of moral complexity and a story of desperate survival.
The Kalashnikov AK47. A weapon with a unique image. A symbol of freedom fighters and terrorists across the globe. Undercover officer Andy Knight has infiltrated an extremist group intent on bringing the rifle to Britain - something MI5 have been struggling for years to prevent. He befriends Zeinab, the young Muslim student from Yorkshire who is at the centre of the plot. All Zeinab needs to do is travel to the impoverished high-rise estates of Marseilles and bring one rifle home on a test run. Then many more will follow - and with them would come killing on an horrendous scale. Zeinab is both passionate and attractive, and though Andy knows that the golden rule of undercover work is not to get emotionally attached to the target, sometimes rules are impossible to follow.
Edwin Coker, nicknamed 'Boot', is a case officer at MI6. When a hacker falls into his hands and reveals details of a secret meeting, Boot conceives a plan to strike back - with a bomb that will seriously damage the Russian operation. Boot turns to Merc, an ex-soldier fighting in Iraq and a gun-for-hire, to deliver the explosives into Russia and bring the hacker back. But things do not go to plan and his mission becomes near impossible. The scene is set for a classic story of pursuit, evasion and a battle for survival.
Jonas Merrick - mockingly nicknamed 'Eternal Flame' by his colleagues at MI6 because he was desk bound, and considered a long redundant encyclopedia of names and faces - was on the edge of retirement. Having escaped his own insincere retirement party and taken refuge on a bench within the grounds of Thames House he finds himself sitting next to Winston Gunn, a young man drawn into the Jihadi activist net while serving 18 months imprisonment. A young man packed tightly with explosives ready for detonation....
In a moment of suspense that will affect many thousands of lives, a handful of people will converge on a barren stretch of Yemeni desert. Corrie Rankin is already a legend at MI6 when he is sent to take down a high value player in the war against Al Qaeda. This is Jericho's War. The weapons it deploys and the brutal aims it pursues are state of the art. The fear it breeds and the raw bravery it demands are as timeless as the desert itself.
Jago is a kid from a rough part of London who has worked hard to get a job in a bank. Marcantonio is a member of the 'Ndrangheta crime families from Southern Italy. He is in Germany to learn how to channel their illicit millions towards legitimate businesses. When Jago witnesses Marcantonio commit a vicious assault, he is drawn into the middle of a delicate surveillance operation...
Officially, the Cold War is over, and the hand of friendship has been exchanged in public. In private, though, the intelligence war continues. A British trawler strays into Russian waters. On its return, the captain has a package for British Intelligence. For the next four years, a high-ranking Russian naval officer provides MI6 with priceless information. But suddenly he goes quiet. Clearly under suspicion, the decision is made to get him out. But his controllers in London know nothing about him .
MI5 officer Winnie Monks has never forgotten the death of a young agent on her team at the hands of a former Russian Army Major turned gangster. Now, 10 years later, she learns that the Major is travelling to a villa on the popular Spanish holiday destination Costa del Sol, and she asks permission to send in a surveillance unit. They find an empty property near the Major's. It's a perfect base for Winnie's darker, less official, plans. But it turns out the villa isn't deserted. The owners have invited a young British couple to house sit while they are away. Jonno and Posie, a new couple, think they are embarking on a romantic, carefree break in the sun. But when the Secret Service team arrives in paradise, everything changes.
Danny Curnow, known in the army family by his call sign, Vagabond, ran agents, informers. Now he lives in quiet isolation and works as a guide to tourists visiting the Normandy's D-Day beaches. But violence in Northern Ireland is on the rise again. The covert world was close to destroying Danny. Fifteen years later the stakes are higher, the risks greater, and Danny will have to prove that he is as hard and ruthless as before.
In a Croatian village near Vukovar, no one who survived will ever forget the night they waited for the weapons they needed to make a last-ditch fight against the advancing Serbs. The promised delivery never came, and the village was overrun. Eighteen years later, a body is unearthed from a field, and with it the identity of the arms dealer who betrayed them. Now the villagers can plot their revenge. In leafy England, arms dealer Harvey Gillott regards himself as a man of his word. There is only one blemish on his record, and that was long ago. But Gillott, his family, his friends and his enemies are about to be pitched into a sequence of events that will unfold across Europe with breath-taking drama and almost biblical power.
Starred review. "...a testament to (Seymour's) talent and skill." - Publishers Weekly
