Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Spies & Politics

The life-and-death hunt for a notorious Nazi criminal unfolds against a background of international arms deals. As the story leads to its final dramatic confrontation on a bleak winter's hill-top, the question every reader asked at the end of The Day of the Jackal will inevitably be asked again: Can this be fiction?

When the entire Soviet Union wheat crop is destroyed by a devastating string of failures, the population faces starvation. The USA is quick to offer assistance. They devise a plan to trade vital food resources with the Russians in exchange for sensitive political information. But the Politburo has other ideas: the invasion of Western Europe to commandeer the food for them... As the paths of communication breakdown the president of the United States and leaders from around the world face an appalling choice: Should they allow the loss of thousands to save the lives of many more?

It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West's spy war with the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumour in Whitehall – unconfirmed and a little scandalous – that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found.

A Russian defector is found brutally murdered in a London hotel. Only four people knew he had turned - the four most important and powerful figures in Whitehall. There's only one conclusion - a mole has infiltrated the highest levels of the nation's security. Operating in secret from within Westminster's darkest corners, former spy Solomon Vine must uncover the traitor. Because Britain's future hangs in the balance. And with it the fate of the whole world.

Taken from a children's home as a young boy, Evan Smoak was a trained to become a government operative known as Orphan X. But then he broke with the programme. Now living out of sight and out of reach of his former employers, Evan chances upon a young woman in a coffee shop in Northern California who needs his help. Brutalised and under the control of a very powerful, dangerous man, she knows her life is at risk if she doesn't escape. And Evan knows that only a man with his particular set of skills has any chance of setting her free. His next move was never in doubt.

After a freezing mission in the North Sea which nearly costs lives - including his own - US Campus agent Jack Ryan Jr is taken off black ops. Ordered onto routine surveillance, he is sent to Singapore to check out a company with US interests. Soon enough, however, he finds the task anything but routine. It's clear there's a mole who must be uncovered - and quickly. As the mole attempts to cover their tracks, Jack finds himself dodging a team of highly trained killers as a tropical storm rolls in. What are the assassins trying to hide? And can Jack survive long enough to stop them?

Once a government assassin codenamed Orphan X, Evan Smoak works as a vigilante for the desperate. Now he's ready to retire. Then he gets a call. Max Merriweather's cousin has been murdered, and the woman he needs to find is missing. On the run and stalked by an assassin, Max calls the one person who could save him: Evan Smoak. But the forces ranged against Evan and Max are as lethal as Evan has ever faced. Keeping Max alive will be hard. Staying alive himself might be impossible....

As the world shakes from seemingly disparate outbursts of terrorism, Jack Ryan prepares for a crucial negotiation with President Zhou's increasingly hostile China. But when a routine traffic stop on an isolated road in rural Texas leads to the discovery of a stolen USB stick, it becomes clear there is a dark connection between the attacks. With tensions rising, a US spy ship in the South China Sea gets caught up in a violent storm - a storm which threatens to push it into the path of the Chinese navy, with potentially disastrous consequences.

To some he was Orphan X. Others knew him as the Nowhere Man. But to veteran spymaster Jack Johns, he was a boy named Evan Smoak. Taken from an orphanage, Evan was raised inside a top secret programme designed to turn him into a deadly weapon. Jack became his instructor, mentor, teacher and guardian. Because for all the dangerous skills he instilled in his young charge, he also cared for Evan like a son. And now Jack needs Evan’s help....

On a remote island off the coast of Argentina, a team of elite counter-terror commandos prepare to assault a newly discovered Hezbollah hideout. What they don't expect is to be brutally ambushed themselves - slaughtered with no survivors. What they don't realise is that, on screens around the world, the enemies of the West are watching. Back in Washington, DC, the growing obstruction in the Senate has reached crippling levels, as a crucial treaty to strength NATO in Eastern Europe is inexplicably blocked.

Summer 1914. A world on the brink of catastrophe. In London, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley – aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless – is having a love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state. As Asquith reluctantly leads the country into war with Germany, a young intelligence officer is assigned to investigate a leak of top secret documents – and suddenly what was a sexual intrigue becomes a matter of national security that will alter the course of political history.

As a boy, Evan Smoak was taken from the orphanage he called home and inducted into a top secret Cold War programme. Trained as a lethal weapon, he and his fellow recruits were sent round the world to do the government's dirty work. But the programme was rotten to the core. And now the man responsible needs things to be nice and clean. All evidence must be destroyed. That includes Evan. To survive, Evan's going to have to take the fight to his nemesis. There's just one problem with that. Jonathan Bennett is President of the United States, and Evan isn't his only victim.

Evan Smoak is a man with many identities and a challenging past. As Orphan X, he was a government assassin for the off-the-books Orphan Program. After he broke with the program, he adopted a new name and a new mission - the Nowhere Man, helping the most desperate in their times of trouble. Having just survived an attack on his life, and the complete devastation of his base of operations, as well as his complicated (and deepening) relationship with his neighbour, Mia Hall, Evan isn't interested in taking on a new mission. But one finds him anyway.

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, is living out his old age on the family farmstead in Brittany when a letter summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself are to be scrutinised under disturbing criteria by a generation with no memory of the Cold War.

M laid down his pipe and stared at it tetchily. 'We have no choice. We're just going to bring forward this other chap you've been preparing. But you didn't tell me his name.' 'It's Bond, sir,' the Chief of Staff replied. 'James Bond.' One body. Three bullets. 007 floats in the waters of Marseille, killed by an unknown hand. It's time for a new agent to step up. Time for a new weapon in the war against organised crime. It's time for James Bond to earn his licence to kill.

They lied to protect their country. He told the truth to save it. A gripping historical thriller from the bestselling author of Fatherland. January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, Georges Picquart, witnesses a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of twenty thousand spectators baying ‘Death to the Jew!’ The officer is rewarded with promotion: Picquart is made the French army’s youngest colonel and put in command of ‘the Statistical Section’ - the shadowy intelligence unit that tracked down Dreyfus.

'Evan. It's your mother. I heard you help people....' Evan Smoak used to be known as Orphan X: a figure as elusive as a rumour, until he came to the rescue of those who most desperately needed his help. The kind of help no one else could provide. The kind that caused concern in the corridors of power. As a boy he'd been plucked from a foster home and trained as an off-the-books assassin inside a top secret US government programme. Which is why, even forced into early retirement, he dare not trust the phone call.

Sadie Smith – a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists led by the charismatic svengali Bruno Lacombe.

Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, a world in the grip of the corrupt 'Papa Doc' and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Brown the hotelier, Smith the innocent American, and Jones the confidence man - these are the 'comedians' of Graham Greene's title. Hiding behind their actors' masks, they hesitate on the edge of life. And, to begin with, they are men afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself.

US President Keegan Barrett swept into office on his success as director of the CIA. Six months into his first term, he devises a clandestine power grab with a deadly motive: revenge. President Barrett personally orders Special Agents Liam Grey and Noa Himel to execute his plan, but their loyalties are divided. As CIA agents, they've sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all threats, both foreign and domestic. When the threat comes directly from the Oval Office, that's where the blowback begins.