The Defector // Betrayal — Evelyn Anthony

A woman and a man have arrived at an English country house to spend a quiet weekend in the depths of Wiltshire. Surrounded by magnificent formal gardens they relax with drinks before dinner .The woman is Davina Graham, one of British Intelligence's key operatives. The man is top KGB agent Ivan Sasanov. Between these two very different people a strange, emotion-charged relationship has developed. Sasanov, the defector, finds his new life in England alien and confining. The intense loneliness of anonymity, the betrayal of Russia, the absence of his family - he loathes it all. The only person with whom he feels any rapport is Davina, his debriefer and interrogator. Davina Graham, isolated from her own family by the secrecy of her job, is a professional to her fingertips. She falls in love with Sasanov knowing that the only way to persuade him to co-operate now is to bring his wife and daughter out of Russia for him. What she does not immediately realize is that in that almost impossible mission, ringed by treachery and counter-treachery, she will have to play the key role... But even if by some strange and miraculous twist of fate she succeeded as an agent, she would have lost the only thing she wanted as a woman.