Brandenburg Gate

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the most important geopolitical event of the last fifty years, was as shocking and unexpected as it was revolutionary. During those turbulent, nail-biting days, no one could have predicted that the end of East Germany would come peacefully. With Brandenburg Gate, the 2005 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award winner and acclaimed journalist Henry Porter captures the tense final moments in a brilliant, multilayered espionage thriller "in the finest tradition of Le Carre" (The Herald [Glasgow]). September 1989. The Communist government in East Germany is on the brink of collapse, desperately clinging to power. But even the Stasi, one of the most formidable intelligence agencies the world has ever seen, with an informer for every seven residents, countless special jails, and nightmarish interrogation centers, can't stop the rebellion the ends in the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is in these last few frenzied weeks that Brandenburg Gate is set. Dr. Rudi Rosenharte, formerly a Stasi foreign agent, now an art scholar living in Dresden, is sent to Trieste to rendezvous with his old lover and agent, Annalise Schering. The problem: Rudi knows she's dead. He saw her lying in her own bloodied bathwater, and then kept her suicide a secret. The Stasi believe Annalise is returning to the fold with vital intelligence. To make sure Rosenharte plays the game while in Italy, they have imprisoned his family. But the Stasi is not the only intelligence agency using Rosenharte. Soon the British and Americans encircle him, forcing him to choose between abandoning his beloved brother to a torturous death and returning to East Germany as a double agent. As the political pressures fromdemonstrations against the East German government rise, Rudi faces his own series of crises. Can he rescue his ailing brother from the Stasi and safely sneak his family to the West? And who among those he trusts is an informer? Brandenburg Gate is an intelligent thriller by a skillful writer at the top of his game.