Charles Cumming: JUDAS 62

My last review was a book I thoroughly disliked. Now here’s one for a book I hugely admire. Judas 62 is a sequel to Box 88 and reintroduces us to Lachlan Kite and Box 88, an ultra-secret espionage agency based in London and operating in parallel to both MI6 and the CIA.

It’s a story in two distinct halves. In 1993 while still at university, Kite accepted a mission to ‘exfiltrate’ a Russian biological weapons scientist who wanted to defect. In 2020 he finds that the FSB, the former Soviet KGB, have put him at Number 62 on their ‘Judas’ list of targeted enemies, a list that included Alexander Litvinenko, who was successfully eliminated (2006), and Sergei Skripal, who with his daughter narrowly survived poisoning in Salisbury (2018).

Kite mounts a ‘sting’ operation in Dubai using the scientist he brought out in 1993 as bait for FSB revenge. This mission, like the defection, requires intricate planning and timing down to the minutest detail. A beautiful double agent plays a key role.

Once again Charles Cumming gives us a spy world somewhere between the different Whitehalls of John Le Carré and Ian Fleming. Lachlan Kite is more George Smiley than James Bond, and the writing feels much closer to the real war between rival intelligence services than the fantasy global threat of Blofeld’s SPECTRE.

Judas 62 is up there in the ‘pantheon’ of spy fiction, an engrossing and thrilling read. There’s a third instalment which I can’t wait to delve into.