Aiken In Check: A Spy Game Novel

In 1959, Castro took the vital step to nationalize the bat guano caves...and ban Santa Claus.

"The Cuban DI has always beaten us, Russell. To save the love of your life, you'll be required to sacrifice your country."

"Nina is my country now."

"Then go, but if you don't bring your best game, you will have sacrificed both your lives, and they'll rape and torture Nina out of spite before they put a bullet in her skull."

The Hotel Florida, Havana. Christmas Eve.

Hapless but ever-striving CIA lawyer Russell Aiken defects to Fidel Castro's Cuba. Unlucky in love as he is at treason, Aiken is in the unenviable position of having to betray his country to save the life of Nina Estrada, his one true love.

Nina: met, loved, and lost on an LSD-fueled one-night stand in 1978. Years later, revealed as Nathan Muir's asset hidden from Aiken over two decades, the pair reunite at the old spymaster's wake. But their chance at a "happily ever after" is dashed when Nina is abducted by Cuban agents, and Aiken must infiltrate Havana to trade his life for hers.

As Aiken's love-letter confession divulges secrets past, present, and yet to come, the untested Amy Kim works inside the Office of Technical Service to create a device to neutralize Aiken's usefulness to Cuba. But with Aiken's treason exposing the CIA's top spy in Castro's inner circle, deadly events in Cuba and Venezuela are discovered to share a hidden connection to Bishop and Muir, and the final truth behind Bishop's capture Spy Game draws Muir's deadliest enemy from the shadows.

The one Langley spymaster Muir was unable to beat in his lifetime, the man who engineered the destruction of Bishop and Muir's relationship, Silas Kingston is part of a CIA within the CIA and inside Russia's former KGB known as KALEIDOSCOPE.

With Aiken in Check, Beckner brings full circle the existential toll the spy game takes on its players. From the deadly costs of lives lived as lies in Muir's Gambit, to the impact lifelong deceit has on the perception of identity portrayed in Bishop's Endgame, this final novel in the Aiken Trilogy exposes how those two conditions, fraudulence and false identity, deconstruct a spy's primary objective: the exchange of information...which just so happens to be the basic building block of reality.

In a world where deception piles upon deception, will Aiken lose all he loves and honors, or will he assume Muir's mantle to become grandmaster of the Spy Game?