Derek Lambert - The Red Dove

He looked haggard and exhausted as though he had been through a terrible ordeal but, thought the barman serving him a Japanese whisky, there was an air of achievement about him.

Massey swallowed the whisky, ordered another and made a collect call from the telephone at the end of the bar to a number at Padre Island.

‘I should be home tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But be prepared for a big change.’

‘Change, Roberto?’ fear visiting the happiness in Rosa’s voice.

‘I’ve shaved off my moustache,’ and, as he heard her laughing and crying, he turned away from the barman so that he couldn’t see that he was doing the same.

After a while she said: ‘I don’t know why you had to go, Roberto. But…’ She hesitated. ‘…was it very bad?’

Very bad? Since his escape from Tyuratam he had jumped the Trans-Siberian Express and hidden from the KGB gunmen in a pine forest with – 30 degrees of cold biting through his clothing; he had been shot – another flesh wound – in a midnight chase through the streets of Nakhodka, the rail terminal and port before the sea crossing to Japan; he had survived a knife fight on the ship, although the Department V operative who had doubted his KGB credentials hadn’t been so lucky.

‘Not too bad,’ he said. ‘Not compared with what’s been achieved. You see,’ he explained, ‘we’re going to be together – and I’m going to return to space.’

The President of the United States swung his axe and said: ‘So, George, we did it. And if I’m not elected next fall then you and I will go into the movie business together.’

A breeze blowing across the President’s ranch from the Pacific ruffled Reynolds’ fine silver hair. ‘And make a film about lumberjacks?’

‘George, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, despite what everyone says you have got a sense of humour.’ The President leaned on his axe. ‘But we’ve achieved a lot, you and I. Before our spectacular the Russians were way ahead of us in the military application of space. Now, maybe, with world opinion turned against them we’ll have a chance to pull in front. Equality? It will never happen, George, it will never happen.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ Reynolds said. ‘Suppose Vogel quits his job at Vandenberg this year – hypochondriacs often will themselves into wheel chairs. And suppose an agent cultivated by the Soviets takes over. Then the Kremlin would make the connection for real.’

The President began to speak but Reynolds held up his hand. ‘Now suppose we managed to persuade someone in the Russian computer terminal to work for us. Yashin, for instance – I’m told he believes computers should be used for peace not war. Could he not arrange American penetration of the Soviet military programme?’ Reynolds smiled faintly. ‘Then, Mr President, we would have equality. And that’s what deterrence is all about, isn’t it?’

Derek Lambert’s classic spy novel exposes the truth about the life of the Western community in post Stalin Moscow, and their existence in which tensions and hostility of the Soviet Union sometimes prove intolerable.

An American working for the US embassy and the CIA, a young Englishman at the British Embassy gradually cracking under the strain of Moscow life, and a member of the Twilight Brigade. In an alien land their lives become inextricably joined in a vivid and tense story of diplomats, traitors, Soviet secret police and espionage.

The Red House follows a year in the life of Russian diplomat Vladimir Zhukov, the new Second Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Washington – a ‘good Communist’ in 1960s America.

Seeing what life in the West is really like, he discovers there is more to American than what Soviet propaganda has taught him. Increasingly intrigued by the Washington circuit, from outspoken confrontation between diplomats to the uninhibited sexual alliances arrange by their wives with other diplomats, the capitalist ‘poison’ begins to work on him and his wife.

As he struggles to remain loyal to his country and begins to question who is the real enemy, he has to decide to whom is first loyalty due: country or lover, party or conscience.

The Trans-Siberian Express has left Moscow carrying the most powerful, closely guarded man in the Soviet Union - and also the man who plans to kidnap him.

Tension aboard the train is at a maximum. The KGB has checked and double checked. But as Vasily Yermakov, the Soviet leader, tries to sleep on the first night in his cabin, he has an uneasy feeling that something is about to go wrong.

Moscow treated defectors from the West with kid-gloves. That is, until they had outlived their usefulness. But the American Robert Calder was different. He had defected to Russia with information so explosive that even the iron-clad regime of the Kremlin shook with fear. It had kept him alive. Until now.

For Calder is desperately keen to return to the West. So they place the ruthless and scheming Spandarian on his trail, a KGB chief with a mind as sharp as the cold steel of an ice pick. And as a back-up they unleash Tokarev, a professional assassin who kills for pleasure…

Each year a nucleus of the wealthiest and most influential members of the Western world meet to discuss the future of the world’s superpowers at a secret conference called Bilderberg.

A glamorous millionaires just sighting loneliness from the foothills of middle age… a French industrialist whose wealth matches his masochism and meanness… a whizz-kid of the seventies conducting a life-long affair with diamonds, these are just three of the Bilderbergers who have grown to confuse position with invulnerability. A mistake which could prove lethal when a crazed assassin is on the loose…

In neutral Lisbon, British Intelligence have concocted a ruthless doublecross to lure Russia and Germany into a hellish war of attrition on the Eastern Front and so buy Britain the most precious commodity of all: time.

That plot now hinges on one man: Josef Hoffman, a humble Red cross worker. But who is Hoffman? And where do his loyalties really lie?

Derek Lambert was born in 1929, and served in the RAF for two and a half years, before becoming a foreign correspondent, travelling the world to exotic locations that later inspired his novels. His travels gave him first-hand knowledge of his material and his authentic tales of espionage made him a household name and bestselling author. He spent the later years of his life in Spain, where he died in 2001 at the age of 71.