Empire State

by Henry Porter

Published 4 September 2003
The head of the US National Security Agency is assassinated in a spectactular set-piece killing at Heathrow. A Pakistani employee at the airport and his family are found murdered in their council house in Uxbridge. In New York, a fashionable Upper East Side osteopath, who's treating Robert Harland, receives two postcards of the Empire State Building from someone called Karim Khan, one posted in Turkey, the other Iran. A group of migrant workers, including Khan, en route from Afghanistan to the EU, is brutally gunned down in Macedonia. Khan escapes death, but is captured to endure worse - terrible torture. The quest to find the link between these apparently random events is pursued by Harland, with the help of Isis Hernick, a young female officer of MI6, in a remarkable thriller that explores our frightening post 9/11 world. It is a world that inspires paranoia on a grand scale, where international agencies give no quarter and show no scruple in hunting down supposed terrorists, and where torture is used by democratic societies who cite defence as the justification for their acts.

Brandenburg

by Henry Porter

Published 16 June 2005

November 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall. One man is caught between East and West...

The Stasi was among the most sophisticated intelligence organisations in the world, but by the end of the 1980s the Orwellian state of East Germany was collapsing around it. The special squads of armed officers, the torture chambers in the Stasi jail, the hundreds of thousands of informers could do nothing to prevent the rebellion that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is in the context of these last few paranoid weeks of the Communist world, when a population that had been oppressed for nearly sixty years found the will to rise up, that this outstanding thriller is set. Its hero is Dr Rudolf Rosenharte, an academic from Dresden and agent for MI6; his controller is Robert Harland, from A SPY'S LIFE and EMPIRE STATE.

When Rosenharte's security is compromised he is faced with a stark choice: to defect to the West, leaving his beloved family to the mercies of the Stasi, or return to East Germany to carry out a dangerous assignment under the Stasi's suspicious eye...


A Spy's Life

by Henry Porter

Published 5 July 2001

An ex British spy finds himself dragged back into the world of espionage after a mysterious plane crash...

Robert Cope Harland ended his career as a British spy in an Austrian hospital, after being tortured and beaten by Czech security agents in the last days of the communist regime. He was young enough then to find a new life with the Red Cross and then with the UN.

Twelve years later his UN plane crashes in mysterious circumstances at La Guardia airport, New York and Harland is the only survivor. Was it sabotage, and if so, was Harland the target?

It is soon clear to Harland that the answers are to be found in his past, a past which, along with its secrets and tradecraft, he has desperately tried to forget. And now the crash has thrown him back into a world of relentless intrigue and mistrust, to his youth, and a life-changing love affair...