London Match

London Match
Len Deighton

Long-awaited reissue of the final part of the classic spy trilogy, GAME, SET and MATCH, when the Berlin Wall divided not just a city but a world.The spy who’s in the clear doesn’t exist…Bernard Samson hoped they’d put Elvira Miller behind bars. She said she had been stupid, but it didn’t cut any ice with Bernard. She was a KGB-trained agent and stupidity was no excuse.There was one troubling thing about Mrs Miller’s confession – something about two codewords where there should have been one. The finger of suspicion pointed straight back to London.And that was where defector Erich Stinnes was locked up, refusing to say anything.Bernard had got him to London; now he had to get him to talk…

Cover designer’s note (#u86bf1dc7-af96-5a24-ac9e-e85bd184c6d3)

On reading a synopsis for one of Len Deighton’s trilogies I was immediately taken by the sentence, ‘And we are back in the mazes of Secret Service mystery and intrigue – mazes that now lead into Samson’s own tangled past.’ There I found my concept for the London Match cover! I would place him within the maze, trapped, with pathways leading to danger, in the form of the gun, and perhaps worse, the KGB, represented here by one of the agency’s badges – this Soviet-era icon features the hammer and sickle together with Cyrillic letters for ‘KGB’ and ‘USSR’.

Some years ago I was commissioned to design a calendar for a leading British sign company. I decided to use the many door numbers that I had photographed during my travels around the world, showing a different number for each day of the year. I contacted the Prime Minister’s press secretary, who kindly gave me permission to photograph the door of Number 10 Downing Street. This photograph has once again found a good use adorning the back cover of this book of intrigue in London’s Whitehall.

At the heart of every one of the nine books in this triple trilogy is Bernard Samson, so I wanted to come up with a neat way of visually linking them all. When the reader has collected all nine books and displays them together in sequential order, the books’ spines will spell out Samson’s name in the form of a blackmail note made up of airline baggage tags. The tags were drawn from my personal collection, and are colourful testimony to thousands of air miles spent travelling the world.

Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

LEN DEIGHTON

London Match

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd 1985

Copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 1985

Introduction copyright © Pluriform Publishing Company BV 2010

Cover designer’s note © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

Cover design and photography © Arnold Schwartzman 2010

Len Deighton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008125004

Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780007387205

Version: 2017-05-23

Contents

Cover (#u983afc60-45d7-5dc6-9071-3b08e3ea2ead)

Cover Designer’s Note (#u8b31242f-e538-5f84-a00e-a7966b1181ce)

Title Page (#u18b3be76-f459-5ac1-9d07-c79da49159a0)

Copyright (#u734e3f95-80cb-5d61-828e-c91971091c5c)

Introduction (#uc1fc7ff0-0fca-5440-b06c-c3d9e54f1c76)

Chapter 1 (#u8bab3e98-690e-53fc-ab40-d978a935770d)

Chapter 2 (#u40b9bd72-7f27-5ef0-8482-382e6341d7b2)

Chapter 3 (#u89a30654-55af-593b-9277-60bc2369cafa)

Chapter 4 (#ua8a59788-7840-5699-964a-81f0f7ed17c0)

Chapter 5 (#ude1af3aa-519d-550f-9fb6-a0fc6e58b6bd)

Chapter 6 (#u8e6e6695-96b3-5be0-837a-0082ec42cd5f)

Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)