1) "The Bourne Identity: Jason Bourne #1" by Robert Ludlum
His memory is a blank. His bullet-ridden body was fished from the Mediterranean Sea. His face has been altered by plastic surgery. A frame of microfilm has been surgically implanted in his hip. Even his name is a mystery. Marked for death, he is racing for survival through a bizarre world of murderous conspirators—led by Carlos, the world’s most dangerous assassin. Who is Jason Bourne? The answer may kill him.
2) "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" by John le Carre
In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse—a desk job—Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge. Assuming the guise of an embittered and dissolute ex-agent, Leamas is set up to trap Mundt, the deputy director of the East German Intelligence Service—with himself as the bait. In the background is George Smiley, ready to make the game play out just as Control wants.
Setting a standard that has never been surpassed, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a devastating tale of duplicity and espionage.
3) "The Day of the Jackal" by Frederick Forsyth
He is known only as “The Jackal”—a cold, calculating assassin without emotion, or loyalty, or equal. He’s just received a contract from an enigmatic employer to eliminate one of the most heavily guarded men in the world—Charles De Gaulle, president of France.
It is only a twist of fate that allows the authorities to discover the plot. They know next to nothing—only that the assassin is on the move. To track him, they dispatch their finest detective, Claude Lebel, on a manhunt that will push him to his limit, in a race to stop an assassin’s bullet from reaching its target.
4) "The Ninth Orphan" by James Morcan
How do you catch a man who is never the same man twice?
That is the question posed in The Ninth Orphan, a top-rated international thriller novel and the first book in The Orphan Trilogy.
An orphan grows up to become an assassin for a highly secretive organization. When he tries to break free and live a normal life, he is hunted by his mentor and father figure, and by a female orphan he spent his childhood with. On the run, the mysterious man's life becomes entwined with his beautiful French-African hostage and a shocking past riddled with the darkest of conspiracies is revealed.
But can the ninth-born orphan ever get off the grid? To find out you'll need to go on a tumultuous journey around the globe to such far-flung locations as China, France, the Philippines, Andorra, America, England, Germany and French Polynesia. The frenetic cat-and-mouse chase moves from airports to train stations and hidden torture prisons, taking the reader on a shocking, nail-biting ride into the world's closet of skeletons that goes beyond conspiracy theories to painful reality.
Fast-paced, totally fresh and original, filled with deep and complex characters, The Ninth Orphan is a controversial, high-octane thriller with an edge. Merging fact with fiction, it illuminates shadow organizations rumored to actually exist in our world. The novel explores a plethora of conspiracies involving real organizations like the CIA, MI6, and the UN, and public figures such as President Obama as well as the Clinton, Marcos and Bush families.
Tackling genetic selection, mind control and secret societies, The Ninth Orphanexposes a global agenda designed to keep the power in the hands of a select few. The novel's antagonists are members of a shadow government acting above and beyond the likes of the White House, the FBI, the Pentagon and the NSA. Could something like this ever take place? Or, is it already taking place right now?
This unique and unpredictable thriller also has a poignant, romantic sub-plot. The story contains the kind of intimate character portraits usually associated with psychological novels. Buckle up for a wild trip full of death-defying action, cloak and dagger intrigue, unexpected role reversals and surprise endings.
5) "Nonofficial Asset" by William Sewell
Peyton Stone never quit his day job. But it's his other profession that might just get him killed.
Islamabad. Baghdad. Shanghai. Kazakhstan, Kabul. Langley. For Peyton Stone, that's a work commute. But his is no normal job. On the surface he's a world-renowned security expert. But his real occupation is serving as a "nonofficial asset," a contractor working for the CIA when the government needs complete deniability. While advancing American interests globally, Stone discovers that those interests can exact a steep personal price. And when his business partner is murdered in a Shanghai hotel, ominous ghosts from his past return and he's drawn deeper into the covert maze, on the hunt for a stolen nuclear weapon and the rogue Iranian admiral hell-bent on using it. In Nonofficial Asset his skills, training, tactics, mettle, and allegiance to family and country are all pushed to the limit as he races to prevent nuclear catastrophe.
A captivating international espionage cliffhanger, William Sewell's new spy thriller is not some fake fantasy conjured by an uninformed novice writer working from his safe, local Starbucks. This is an adroitly told tale of very real and likely scenarios by someone who has been in some, if not most, of these dark bunkers--and lived to tell about it. A 30-year veteran of the clandestine services, William Sewell is a communications security expert by day. But like Peyton Stone, he has another profession. Exploiting his behind-enemy-lines intelligence experience, Sewell infuses Nonofficial Asset with an authenticity that can only be gained from real-world experience in the trenches.
6) "American Assassin" by Vince Flynn
Before he was considered a CIA superagent, before he was thought of as a terrorist’s worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by the politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a gifted college athlete without a care in the world . . . and then tragedy struck.
Two decades of cutthroat, partisan politics has left the CIA and the country in an increasingly vulnerable position. Cold War veteran and CIA Operations Director Thomas Stansfield knows he must prepare his people for the next war. The rise of Islamic terrorism is coming, and it needs to be met abroad before it reaches America’s shores. Stansfield directs his protégée, Irene Kennedy, and his old Cold War colleague, Stan Hurley, to form a new group of clandestine operatives who will work outside the normal chain of command—men who do not exist.
What type of man is willing to kill for his country without putting on a uniform? Kennedy finds him in the wake of the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack. Two-hundred and seventy souls perished that cold December night, and thousands of family and friends were left searching for comfort. Mitch Rapp was one of them, but he was not interested in comfort. He wanted retribution.
Six months of intense training has prepared him to bring the war to the enemy’s doorstep, and he does so with brutal efficiency. Rapp starts in Istanbul, where he assassinates the Turkish arms dealer who sold the explosives used in the Pan Am attack. Rapp then moves onto Hamburg with his team and across Europe, leaving a trail of bodies. All roads lead to Beirut, though, and what Rapp doesn’t know is that the enemy is aware of his existence and has prepared a trap. The hunter is about to become the hunted, and Rapp will need every ounce of skill and cunning if he is to survive the war-ravaged city and its various terrorist factions.
7) "Agency Rules-Never an Easy Day at the Office" by Khalid Muhammad
Celebrated as a ragtag force that defeated and broke the Soviet Union, no one predicted the Mujahideen would bring with them a plague that would spread like wildfire through Pakistan in the years to follow. When the battle-worn fighters returned with no enemy or war to fight, they turned their sights on the country that had been their creator and benefactor.
From the same battlegrounds that birthed the Mujahideen, a young Kamal Khan emerges as a different breed of warrior. Discarding his wealthy family comforts, Kamal becomes a precision sniper, an invincible commando and a clandestine operative bringing intimidation, dominance and death with him to the battlefield. Ending the plague is his prime directive.
Shrouded in political expediency, hampered by internal power struggles, international espionage and doublespeak that makes Washington's spin doctors proud, Kamal's mission is a nightmare of rampant militant fundamentalism that threatens to choke and take Pakistan hostage. For him, the fight is not just for freedom, but the survival of a nation.
8) "Our Man in Havanna" by Graham Greene
MI6’s man in Havana is Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true…
First published in 1959 against the backdrop of the Cold War, Our Man in Havana remains one of Graham Greene’s most widely read novels. It is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire of government intelligence that still resonates today. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Christopher Hitchens.
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