There are three main characters in Spy Line. Bernard Samson is a well-built, quiet man about forty years of age. He is of respectable middleclass origin — his father was a Secret Service agent as was his Uncle Silas Gaunt — who grew up in Berlin and speaks fluent German as well as English and Russian. An English citizen, he has a small home in a London suburb.

He was a field agent — one of the best — for a number of years before being made a senior staff member of the German Station; although he is a noncollege man, he has educated himself to a respectable degree.

He is married to Fiona, the daughter of an industrialist whose callous greed makes him a latter-day Bounderby of Coketown. She is Oxford-trained, a hardcore, independent woman who is also a Secret Service agent. They have two children. As...