Desmond Okewood of the Secret Service goes into occupied Belgium after a code, and the German counter-intelligence is waiting. Williams was a Reuters correspondent who was wounded on the Somme and went into military intelligence himself; he wrote these while it was still going on, and the tradecraft — false papers, safe houses, the man who talks — is from his own desk. Fifty-nine plates of moonlit streets, wet docks and quiet interiors by painters including John Atkinson Grimshaw and Isaac Israëls carry the same half-lit, watched world the story moves through.
