The Vienna Channel

About this book

In Austria’s foreign ministry, Daria Heczko notices a staple a centimetre too high on a routine export invoice. The thread she pulls runs through a sanctions-evasion network nine years deep. A slow-burn diplomatic thriller in the tradition of John le Carré.

A staple sits a centimetre too high on a routine export invoice, and Daria Heczko notices.

In the quiet corridors of Austria’s foreign ministry, Daria has spent sixteen years reading paper the slow way her father taught her — trusting the small wrong detail. When a dual-use export clearance carries a tell only a forger leaves, she pulls the thread, and it runs through a sanctions-evasion network nine years deep, a dead Section Head’s forged signature, and a Russian handler she once refused in Geneva.

The two internal channels she files through close in her face. The mentor who warns her twice to be careful turns out to have his own reasons. To bring the network into the light she builds a fourth channel — a journalist, a Brussels investigator, an unauthorised foreign source, and a surveillance officer who decides, once, to look the other way — and publishes the truth as a private citizen, on a Friday, in the rain.

The cost arrives in instalments. A man goes off a tenth-floor balcony. A Director-General’s signature surfaces where it should not. A handler is recalled without a goodbye. And the institution she corrected from the inside takes from her exactly what institutions take.

A slow-burn diplomatic thriller in the tradition of John le Carré — about what a channel means, the price of working inside a system you still believe in, and the inheritance of a vocation. For readers of A Legacy of Spies, An Officer and a Spy, and Mick Herron’s Slough House.