The Contract by Gerald Seymour

First published in 1980

Gerald Seymour is one of the spy thriller genre’s best practitioners. The Contract is among his best efforts. The setup is crafted in meticulous detail. The action that follows builds relentless tension. The ending might be shocking to readers who are unfamiliar with Seymour’s tendency to avoid the sentimental or predictable.

A young man named Willi Guttman becomes sexually involved with a young English woman. The woman is in Geneva, working for the WHO. Willi lives in Moscow, but he meets the woman while working as an interpreter for the Soviet delegation to the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament. When the woman tells Willi that she is pregnant and needs his support, he agrees to defect so he can be with her.

After Willi fakes his death, the British SIS smuggles him out of Geneva and takes him to a safe house in England. They promise to reunite him with his girlfriend after he divulges all the secrets he knows. Unfortunately, he knows very little of value. His father, however, is Otto Gutttman, a prominent scientist who the Russians appropriated from Germany after the war. Otto now develops classified anti-tank technology for the Soviet Union. The British would love to get their hands on Otto. They see Willi as the means of inducing Otto’s defection.

The SIS learns from Willi that Otto takes an annual summer vacation in Magdeburg, his home town in East Germany. Henry Carter and his boss, Charles Mawby, devise a scheme to contact Otto in Magdeburg, alert him to Willi’s status as a defector, and convince him to join Willi in the west. To accomplish those goals, they hire a contractor. Johnny Donoghue is a former military intelligence officer who was separated from his employment in disgrace after mistaking a young girl in Northern Ireland for a terrorist and killing her. Johnny is fluent in German and, given his intelligence background, is seen as an ideal off-the-books operative.

The plan is to bring Otto and Willi’s sister to Berlin, where they will use forged identity papers and travel permits to enter West Germany, posing as West German citizens. In Seymour novels, plans hatched by SIS bureaucrats never go as planned. Johnny is eventually left with nothing but his wits and courage as he tries to bring Otto and Otto’s daughter out of East Germany. Fear of a bad outcome is palpable, heightened by the concern that Seymour nurtures for the welfare of the elderly Otto and his devoted daughter.

Excitement and dread build in equal measures as Seymour makes rapid shifts from scene to scene. He puts the reader into the heads of Johnny, Willi, bureaucrats on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and even the British Prime Minister, a man who isn’t happy to learn that the SIS, not for the first time, is keeping him in the dark about operations that could have a catastrophic impact on diplomacy if they go sideways.

Seymour’s attention to characterization and his intricate plotting place him on the top shelf of spy novelists. He doesn’t have the style of John Le Carré — few writers do — but his prose is crisp. The Contract is one of the best novels to explore the balance between the desire for freedom on the repressive side of the Iron Curtain and the desire to collect intelligence at any cost on the western side.

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