Michael Idov’s firecracker espionage thriller starts with an unforgettable scene. A commercial airliner flying from Istanbul to Riga, Latvia, is intercepted over Belarus by a Russian MiG-29, which dogs the plane just 50 yards portside. In case anyone doubted its intent, the MiG speeds forward, banks across the commercial plane’s path and comes back alongside. The jetliner pilot capitulates and makes an emergency landing in Minsk, capital of Moscow’s client state, Belarus.
In case you think it unlikely, something similar happened to a Ryan Air plane in 2021, so that a dissident could be arrested. In The Collaborators, passenger Anton Basmanny is quite sure he’s the cause of the aggressive MiG. The Russians want him.
Welcome to a strange bywater of the Information Age. Basmanny is not a spy. He hasn’t, like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, exposed government secrets. Instead, he’s a warrior in the field of open-source material, publicly available information collected, massaged and disseminated through popular internet sites. His latest YouTube video coup targeted Russia’s deputy minister of defence and his lavish Napoleon-inspired secret villa in Côte d’Azur. The video received 15 million views the first week, the deputy lost his job, but in the process Basmanny made himself a target.
Heʼd learned about the deputy’s vulnerability from CIA case officer Ari Falk, based in Riga, whose job is to destabilise the country by exposing corruption in the Russian kleptocracy. But his impact is nil. Basmanny’s methods might be bizarre, but they attract attention.
When the plane finally arrives in Riga after its detour, the crew disembarks, the passengers file off. No Basmanny. In the reception area, Falk’s phone alerts him to a just-posted YouTube video from Basmanny, in which he confesses to being an American agent. A promising information weapon blown.
Falk is surprised Basmanny is still alive and has been flown back to Istanbul, where Falk finds him. Although the official story is that all the Riga-bound passengers were released after questioning, he tells Ari about a couple in first class who were shot in cold blood outside his interrogation room in Minsk. Who were they? What happened to them?
Then, in a matter of hours, Basmanny is dead too, poisoned. Since the Russians could have killed him in Minsk just as easily, or in fact more easily, Falk concludes they wanted to send the CIA a message. So begins his guilt-fuelled quest to identify and learn the fate of the mysterious couple who may be the only clue to what’s behind a series of fatal attacks, Basmanny’s being only one.
A young Los Angeles woman, Maya Chou Obrandt, learns that her father – the wealthy Russian-born financier Paul Obrandt – has drowned in Portugal. Although his massive fortune and his clients’ investments seem to have evaporated, he’s left Maya a house there, which she visits in order to find out more about his last days. The more she investigates, the less well the explanations of his disappearance hang together. They’re falling apart at least as fast as his fortune. Maya starts to believe – or is it only wishful thinking? – that he’s not really dead. Did his high-level contacts in Russia’s financial world end up with his investors’ money?
In the way of political thrillers, the political and the personal become intertwined. Ari and Maya encounter each other and work together at least for a while, exchanging some entertaining banter, and they make an effective team. Though their goals are different, they’re parallel.
In addition to the characters mentioned – with Ari, Maya, and Basmanny especially engaging – I’d single out London-based internet whiz Alan Keegan, who also uses open-source intelligence to reconstruct events and puncture balloons inflated with lies. Keegan has a network of thousands of fans around the globe who eagerly aid him, scouring the internet for data, photos, whatever. It’s an activity described as ‘part journalism, part activism, part counterespionage, and part online gaming.’ Any time Keegan enters the story, something interesting and exciting is in store. Oh, and if you ever need a flash mob, he’s your guy.
Michael Idov is screenwriter as well as a novelist, so has a well-honed facility with plotting such a complex story and maintaining a blistering pace. Saying the plot is complicated is a serious understatement, but if you enjoy peeks behind the sometimes-bland news coverage of events – those ‘it’s not what it seems to be’ stories – you’ll find this an exciting read. In Idov’s hands, it all comes together expertly.
Also see John Fullerton’s How Not to Kill a Spy or Alex Gerlis’s Every Spy a Traitor.
Simon & Schuster
Print/Kindle/iBook
$14.49
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
