It’s a Mystery: “The past lies in wait to ambush the present”
/
Harvey Gillot trafficked small arms and ammunition, machine-guns, mortars, artillery pieces and the many types of man-portable missiles that could be used against buildings, armoured vehicles or low-flying fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters. He bought and sold secure and encrypted communications equipment, main battle tanks, the lighter reconnaissance types and personnel carriers. He was a broker of weapons and the materiel of war. Not too many people knew of his trade. His profile was low and he practiced anonymity as an art form.… There was little to point out Harvey Gillot as a man of wealth, of business acumen, of anything remarkable…. Traveling with a Spartan load was compatible with his occupation and did not obstruct his ability to initiate a deal that would cost the purchaser in excess of three million American dollars.‘Trust rules,’ was his motto, handed down to him by his mentor. ‘Lose the trust of those you do business with, young man … you’ll be dead in the water.’ …Trust was Harvey Gillot’s lifeblood.
Of necessity, Gillot lives in fairly isolated circumstances on the Isle of Portland on the South Coast of England. He has a wife, Josie, and a daughter, Fiona, and a large detached house with a garden. Fiona is now fifteen and away at school and Josie, bored out of her mind in isolation, is jeopardizing their security by playing Lady Chatterley with the gardener. Gillot’s also got a dog, perhaps the only member of his family he can count on. He has almost forgotten the breach perpetrated by him in that ironclad rule of trust lo those many years ago in Vukovar. Or has he? One thing is certain, with a contract out on his life he’ll never be a loner again.The paid assassin, Robbie Cairns, isn’t the only one interested in Gillot. There is Det. Sgt. Mark Roscoe with London’s Serious Crimes Directorate, a.k.a. The Flying Squad. Their mission is to “intercept contract killers moving towards a hit”. As Roscoe puts it, “The major work of his squad was protection of men he despised.”Also there’s Megs Behan, a driven young woman who tracks the international arms trade for an NGO. It’s called Planet Protection and is funded by a Swiss billionaire. She is proud of the fact that Special Branch backsides and spooks have graced her couch because she often knows more than they do. She has a list of the ten primary weapons brokers in the United Kingdom. Her mantra: “These men are evil and should be hounded out of existence.”But of all those in Gillot’s orbit, one of the most interesting is Benjamin Cumberland Arbuthnot.Benji is seventy and a retired spook:
He might have been arrested, banged up in a cell without his tie, belt and shoelaces, if Special Branch had done a search and found the caches of classified papers – tea chests of them – he had accumulated during his time as an officer of the Secret Intelligence Service.
What makes him really fascinating is that he mysteriously shows up in places where the action is. He excels at stealth and is tracking the triggerman and the target playing high stakes cat and mouse. He’s like the face in an old spy movie that you keep spotting in the crowd. You know he’s important, you just don’t know why. And Seymour tells us just enough to keep our curiosity piqued. Even better, Benji’s pivotal moment is so subtly handled you almost miss it. This just makes the finale more of a double whammy.Seymour is incredibly skillful at taking us inside the minds and lives of his impressive cast of characters. He serves up detail brilliantly. We know what makes everyone tick, from the lowliest villager to the hit man, to the forensic scientist who has been unearthing Croatian victims for 20 years. The Dealer and the Dead lays bare the human and moral dilemma of war with wit, passion, and persuasive know-how.
Finding leaks and weaknesses. Finding the unfaithful, the untrue. Finding those whose loyalty had lapsed, or was never there to begin with. His job was to distrust his colleagues and so they distrusted him in return. There was only one man Henry had been allowed to trust, whom he had trusted for almost fifteen years, and that man had turned out to be the most faithless of them all.
That man is Weir. He’s defected to the Soviets. He’s been working for them all along. Henry, in Weir’s abandoned apartment, can’t wrap his head around this monstrous betrayal:
Everything they had worked on, everything they had discussed, it had all been sent east into the mouth of the enemy. He wanted to set fire to the room, to the house…. He pictured Weir loose in the world, a new man now, or something other than a man, intangible, flying east, his old clothes discarded, his name, his old face shed. A ghost in the night.
The Agency sends him to San Francisco,
to keep him away from the agency’s vital organs…. He had seen this happen before to others. He had been the man to send others away. He knew the danger in keeping a damaged individual so close to the company’s heart.
It is 1956 and he is living in Oakland with his wife Ginnie, teenage daughter Hannah and autistic son Thomas. By night, he is Henry March; by day, he is Henry Gladwell, tasked with running an illicit, drug-fueled brainwashing operation out of a seedy apartment on Telegraph Hill. It’s set up as a kind of brothel. Prostitutes he hires to slip hallucinogenic drugs and other psychotropic compounds into the johns’ drinks. The johns’ are hapless men lured into his facility and held captive, interrogated and sometimes tortured. Then they are ruthlessly discarded, often dumped in alleys or worse. His coworkers in all of this are a corrupt ex-SFPD cop, Jimmy Dorn, and a sadistic psychiatrist sent from Washington, Dr. Cameron Clarke: “You can call me Chip.” They do the hands-on stuff; Henry is there to document it all.As he records what he observes, Henry starts to unravel. He wants out. Instead he gets Grigori Valerov, high in Soviet counterintelligence, a would-be defector who claims intimate knowledge of Arthur Weir. At the end of a particularly brutal LSD torture session with Valerov, Henry can no longer fight the horror of himself and what it is doing to is family. He simply disappears, taking all his documentation with him.Cut to 1972. Dickie Ashby, a young, drug-addled CIA agent is sent to Los Angeles to infiltrate a group of bank-robbing radicals who claim to have been abused in a government brainwashing program years earlier. While the members of the group can’t trust their memories, they know that a key to unlocking their past is Henry March. They have found the bridge to Henry in his daughter Hannah, who owns a photography gallery in the city. Dickie gets to her first, and resolves to find Henry, an odyssey they take together. Their journey is harrowing and filled with surprises. Henry is that ghost in the night that he once dubbed Weir. By the time it all comes together, you have the eerie feeling that nothing around you is real.Half World is a stunningly evocative, emotionally harrowing read, beautifully rendered in spare prose without a superfluous note. It is an astute and sensitive portrayal of the intelligence community’s deceit and manipulation of history and of government paranoia during the Cold War and Vietnam War eras.Reading this novel produces a knot in the pit of your stomach and a disorienting sense of dread because it is all true. Half World, we are told in the beginning, is based on MKULTRA the secret CIA program begun in 1953 and continued through 1964, in which the Technical Services Division pursued the possibilities of mind control through experimentation with drugs (including LSD), electroshock, sensory deprivation hypnosis, and other methods. In numerous cases, such treatments were administered to completely unwitting subjects, including mental patients, GIs, students, prison inmates, drug addicts and people picked off the streets. Although officially “terminated” in 1964, it continued under the name MKSEARCH until 1972. The full extent of the ULTRA project and its continuations will probably never be known. DCI Richard Helms ordered most of the MKULTRA files destroyed in 1973. In the course of extensive research, O’Connor found that “You can go down a rabbit hole very quickly with MKULTRA.” He wound up using fiction to fill in some of the speculative gaps in the history.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.
