Mole Hunters
Retired CIA officer David McCloskey has written another pager turner. In this novel he captures the bureaucratic back-stabbing culture of the CIA as only an insider can do. His protagonist is the gutsy curly headed five foot tall, Artemis Aphrodite Proctor. She is a veteran of tours in Afghanistan and Syria and was the architect of a botched operation in Singapore where CIA officer John Joseph is kidnapped by the Russians and his Russian asset is killed. This failure forces her out of the CIA.
Simultaneously two other operations go awry with a key CIA asset in Russia assassinated. She rightly believes that there is a mole in the house and when Joseph is released in a spy swap, they join forces to hunt down the mole. Joseph is also exiled from the CIA, so they are acting as private citizens, albeit highly skilled citizens in the dark arts of the CIA. I learned that the official mole hunters in the CIA are known as the dermatology department.
On the other side we see an aging SVR officer, Rem Zomov, working as hard as he can to protect is asset operating at the highest levels of the CIA. The title refers to the executive floor at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Zomov orders a hit on Proctor and Joseph using an illegal couple on Dallas to do the dirty work. In shades of the hit TV series “The Americans” we find them to be a mild-mannered suburban couple blending into the north Dallas milieu.
McCloskey takes his adventure from northern Virginia, to Orlando, where Proctor is now improbably working at her cousin’s alligator park, to Las Vegas and ultimately on to France. There is much more to the story, but I ended up troubled by the bureaucratic infighting and petty jealousies that plague an organization dedicated to protecting us.
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