The Helsinki Pact by Alex Cugia
Requirements: ePUB MOBI Reader, 1.5 Mb
Overview: Berlin, 1989. The Soviet Empire is close to financial collapse. But secret meetings on the Russian-Finnish border may bring the hard currency Russia desperately needs – if it can deliver its side of the deal. In East Germany the Party and the feared secret service, the Stasi, struggle to keep control of a population protesting for change and freedom.
West Berlin economics student Thomas Wundart has been trapped into spying for the Stasi. His target is his oldest and best friend, Stephan, now important in West German finance as personal assistant to the head of Deutsche Bank and key to the information the Stasi wants.
Thomas’s Stasi manager is Bettina – beautiful, intelligent, strong-minded and feisty – and Thomas swings wildly between his growing attraction to her and his fury at her control. Bettina was herself coerced into becoming a Stasi agent but nevertheless retains a fierce loyalty to East Germany and dreads the societal changes that the looming unification will bring.
After the Berlin Wall opens Colonel Dieter, a high ranking Stasi officer recognised for his integrity and loyalty to socialism, sends Bettina and Thomas on a highly secret and very dangerous mission to Dresden. There they discover fraud and corruption in the Stasi offices, corruption which then KGB agent Vladimir Putin sets out to exploit for his own benefit. They learn also of a mysterious Frankfurt-based organisation with Stasi links, Phoenix Securities, which looks to benefit hugely from currency manipulation on unification.
At great risk they obtain hard evidence of Stasi corruption at the highest levels and are recalled to Berlin by Dieter. There tragedy greets them and realising the serious danger they’re in they hide away in a secret East Berlin flat. However, when Bettina is recognised by a now deeply implicated Stasi former lover they have to flee for their lives, desperately running to find safety in the West.
Because this is a taut, urgent, fast-paced thriller set in a totalitarian state in the very recent past and which cleverly mixes real events and real people with an imaginative telling of a gripping tale it may be hard to put down. The story involves greed, totalitarian brutality, murder and betrayal, integrity, Western arrogance, ignorance, and a fierce commitment to justice and to socialism. The characters are rounded and real and grow and develop complexity as the story develops. Does crime pay in the end? Do the bad guys escape? You’ll need to read the book to find out, now, won’t you?
Genre: Thriller
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