Third in former CIA analyst David McCloskey’s riveting series of espionage thrillers, The Seventh Floor will grab your attention and hang onto it until the last page. Not only is the story a hair-raising exploration of international misdeeds, its underlying theme is how loyalty to friends, family and country is tested.

In the book’s opening pages, two of the CIA’s Russian sources are dead. One had a message which would have been vital to American CIA officer Sam Joseph – protagonist of McCloskey’s first book, Damascus Station – but now Sam’s gone missing.

Also reappearing in this story, this time as its protagonist, is Sam’s boss and mentor Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Hard-nosed, hard-drinking and profane, she heads the CIA unit Moscow X, a covert action programme targeting Putin and his cronies,

Her unusual name is full of classical references. Artemis (huntress), Aphrodite (love) and Procter (similar to Proctor, someone who oversees students). The best expression of her hunting and caring sides is the row of nine stars tattooed between her shoulder blades, each representing one of her agents whose murder she’s avenged. In real life, at CIA headquarters a star is carved into a memorial wall for each agency officer killed in the line of duty. There are 140 of these stars, and the officers’ names are listed in an accompanying book. The names of 34 of them remain secret.

This three-part calamity occurs just after the appointment of a new CIA Director, Finn Gosford. He and his new staff occupy the agency’s seventh floor, source of the book’s title. Unfortunately, Gosford and his number two, Deputy Director of Operations, Deborah Sweet, know Artemis and her best mates – Mac, Theo and Gus – all too well from their earliest days of training. The two groups have been at loggerheads ever since, with Artemis and her colleagues pegging Finn and Debs as true second-raters. And Finn and Debs hating them for it.

McCloskey deftly weaves in background information about the main characters, including their overseas exploits and a frightening experience they endured in Afghanistan, which cemented their friendship and their assessment of Finn.

An officer named Petra, in charge of the Special Investigations Unit – colloquially called the Dermatology Shop – is the agency’s chief mole-hunter, and she suspects this cluster of disasters may not be coincidental. “Too many problems all at once,” she says in a meeting with Finn, Debs, Artemis and her three friends. When Petra suggests the agency should investigate the possibility of information leaking to the Russians, Finn and Debs won’t hear of it.

After several months of brutal interrogation and psychological torture, Sam Joseph is swapped for a Russian agent. He comes home to a very different organisation. Petra and Artemis – in a spectacular showdown that Debs takes particular glee in – have been fired. And, in one of the most unexpected career turnarounds imaginable, Artemis now works for her cousin who owns an alligator-themed amusement park in Florida. While McCloskey is an expert at conjuring a toxic workplace atmosphere and a dank underground cell in Moscow, he also describes the alligator attraction and the unsavoury tasks Artemis must perform there. Omitting, thankfully, the smell.

Sam is given busywork to do while the psychologists assess his mental strength. Frustrated, he visits Artemis in Florida and tells her what no one else knows. There is indeed a mole in CIA, but Sam’s Russian contact was assassinated before he could give Sam the name.

With exquisite attention to tradecraft, Sam and Artemis develop a plan to identify the traitor. It’s of course risky to carry out in that setting, amongst people who by nature and training are highly suspicious and observant. Worse, given the assassination targets, it appears the mole may be one of Artemis’s three best friends.

While this action-packed story carries you along on a tidal wave of suspense, McCloskey makes his characters’ actions and choices seem quite realistic. You see how the characters try to protect themselves, as well as gain a sense of the personalities drawn to espionage and good at it. McCloskey’s characters seem like real people, displaying flaws and heroism, demonstrating loyalty and hiding betrayal.

Also see The Collaborators by Michael Idov or McCloskey’s earlier book Moscow X.

Swift Press
Print/Kindle/iBook
£8.79

CFL Rating: 5 Stars