Aiken Trilogy

"Charlie March is dead. On a day that promised perfection to the hero of the CIA, an eighteen-minute countdown was all he got to enjoy it once he turned the ignition key and sent an electric spark to his sailboat's engine..." With Muir's Gambit, Michael Frost Beckner returns to the world of Nathan Muir and Tom Bishop he created in the motion picture Spy Game. A prequel to the film, Muir's Gambit opens forty-eight hours before the events of the Robert Redford/Brad Pitt film with the assassination of retired CIA hero Charlie March and spymaster Nathan Muir's life and career are about to implode. Deputy Director Harker is exploiting March's assassination to rid the Agency of Muir-the "Cold War dinosaur" and life-long devotee of March whose brash style of espionage Harker despises. For Nathan Muir, Charlie March was where everything started: March recruited him, trained him, forged him into a master spy. But "Nathan Muir" were Charlie March's dying words, and Langley careerists find his murder the perfect opportunity to flush both Muir and their worst Cold War secrets down the CIA memory hole. Told by the brilliant but hapless, manic but relentless Russell Aiken, this former Muir protégé is consigned to a dead-end career in Langley's legal department. That is, until he's tasked with assassinating Muir himself. Aiken approaches his "spy game" with both jaded sarcasm and secret yearning. On the run from a crime of passion, Aiken sprints along the edges of madness through a world full of maddening corners. As the two spies play a dangerous cat-and-mouse game over the dark underbelly of forty years of CIA conspiracies, Muir's Gambit sweeps from the Chosin Reservoir to Cyprus terror bombings, Congo coup d'état's, Anglolan proxy wars, and in the final hours of the Berlin Wall. And for two men untethered from morality, all those lies leave just one final night for redemption.

A hole in the jungle. A house on stilts over a riverbank... Bishop aimed his gun at the young woman facing the mirror. "So here's the life-or-death question: who are you and where's van Eyck?" "I'm nobody." "You sent the message. You serviced his drop. You showed at the meet." "I don't know him-I don't know anything!" "You're lying." Bishop thumbed back the hammer. Dead inside, he wanted to kill. Something, someone, anyone... This one. Ten years have passed since Nathan Muir rescued Tom Bishop from a Suzhou Prison and escaped the Agency for good. Now, all his former agents have suddenly vanished leaving the CIA blinded around the globe. Then a coded message comes in from Malaysia with astonishing news: a lone spy has survived the mysterious purge. Long forgotten in Kuala Lumpur, he claims to know the secrets behind Muir's networks and a new cataclysmic danger threatening the world. There's just one catch. He'll only come in to the one man Langley trusts less and despises more than Nathan Muir: Tom Bishop. With Muir's Gambit, Michael Frost Beckner cleverly disguised a character-study of CIA moral dissolution and the struggle for redemption as an unrestrained spy thriller. In the process, he added a new, unconventional narrator to the great characters of espionage fiction: the best-intentioned, remarkably hapless, never-offended but ever-aggrieved Agency lawyer, Russell Aiken. Even as Aiken hides a fatal diagnosis, he hopes to trade his law books for one shot at the cloak and dagger-and redemption-of the field. Bishop's Endgame, sequel to Beckner's hit film Spy Game, opens with clandestine operative Tom Bishop AWOL in the killing fields of Kosovo, and spymaster Nathan Muir retired to Princeton University, where he's up to his old tricks working recruitment on brilliant student Amy Kim. Set at the crucial time of the Malaysian summit where al-Qaeda plans the September 11 attacks, the CIA is rendered powerless as all Muir's former spy networks, all around the globe, suddenly vanish. Bishop is soon off the grid in Malaysia, joining forces with Lara van Eyck-the enigmatic Eurasian daughter of Muir's last and long-forgotten spy. But when Amy Kim discovers evidence implicating Bishop in Muir's betrayal, Aiken's wish for field work turns into a curse, and he's sent to Malaysia to terminate Bishop with extreme prejudice. Bishop and Muir will have their final face-off along a border between two countries, two centuries, two world orders; between life and death and two versions of themselves: who they want to be and who the Spy Game makes them.

In 1959, Castro took the vital step to nationalize the bat guano caves...and ban Santa Claus. "The Cuban DI has always beaten us, Russell. To save the love of your life, you'll be required to sacrifice your country." "Nina is my country now." "Then go, but if you don't bring your best game, you will have sacrificed both your lives, and they'll rape and torture Nina out of spite before they put a bullet in her skull." The Hotel Florida, Havana. Christmas Eve. Hapless but ever-striving CIA lawyer Russell Aiken defects to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Unlucky in love as he is at treason, Aiken is in the unenviable position of having to betray his country to save the life of Nina Estrada, his one true love. Nina: met, loved, and lost on an LSD-fueled one-night stand in 1978. Years later, revealed as Nathan Muir's asset hidden from Aiken over two decades, the pair reunite at the old spymaster's wake. But their chance at a "happily ever after" is dashed when Nina is abducted by Cuban agents, and Aiken must infiltrate Havana to trade his life for hers. As Aiken's love-letter confession divulges secrets past, present, and yet to come, the untested Amy Kim works inside the Office of Technical Service to create a device to neutralize Aiken's usefulness to Cuba. But with Aiken's treason exposing the CIA's top spy in Castro's inner circle, deadly events in Cuba and Venezuela are discovered to share a hidden connection to Bishop and Muir, and the final truth behind Bishop's capture Spy Game draws Muir's deadliest enemy from the shadows. The one Langley spymaster Muir was unable to beat in his lifetime, the man who engineered the destruction of Bishop and Muir's relationship, Silas Kingston is part of a CIA within the CIA and inside Russia's former KGB known as KALEIDOSCOPE. With Aiken in Check, Beckner brings full circle the existential toll the spy game takes on its players. From the deadly costs of lives lived as lies in Muir's Gambit, to the impact lifelong deceit has on the perception of identity portrayed in Bishop's Endgame, this final novel in the Aiken Trilogy exposes how those two conditions, fraudulence and false identity, deconstruct a spy's primary objective: the exchange of information...which just so happens to be the basic building block of reality. In a world where deception piles upon deception, will Aiken lose all he loves and honors, or will he assume Muir's mantle to become grandmaster of the Spy Game?