British agent Bernard Samson is suffering the con-sequences of having meddled when he was instructed to steer clear. Far from being thanked for ferreting out what appeared to be evidence of an unprecedented breach of security in the Secret Service, he is on the run from an arrest warrant issued by the Service, naming him a traitor.

Now he is hiding in Berlin, hiding on a run-down, dangerous, dead-end street that crashes up against the Wall and harbors the destitute, the illegal, and the lost. Samson knows how to make himself fit in and disappear—he's had a lifetime of sanctioned practice—but he's worried that he's played into London's hands; "I've put myself in prison . . . And they don't even have the bother or the expense of it." As the weeks pass, Samson slowly realizes that the Service knows where he is; they've even continued to pay his salary. But they don't seem to care about him one way or the other.

So, when word finally comes that he can return to London—all charges dropped, no board to face, no tribunal—the invitation takes Samson by surprise, but he is much less surprised to learn that the strings attached to this promise of freedom could bind him for life. And when, back at London Central, he is off-handedly given an assignment in Vienna, Samson is reminded of something he once told a young Service recruit: the more casual the briefing, the more hazardous the operation. In fact, even before Samson lands in Vienna, he has taken the first, irreversible steps toward the center of a web of Secret Service mystery and subterfuge even more complex, and more perilous, than he feared.

Spy Line, the second in the three-part spy series Spy Hook, Spy Line, and Spy Sinker, is in its own right a superb thriller. It is Len Deighton at his most exciting and suspenseful.