Bishop's Endgame

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.