Incomplete Angler

By R.Z. Sheppard

SPY HOOK

by Len Deighton

Knopf; 305 pages; $18.95

British agent Bernard Samson proved himself a good candidate for early retirement in Len Deighton's trilogy Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match. Samson's career was not advanced by his wife Fiona's defection to the Soviet Union or by the unreliability of the KGB operative Samson had enticed to the West. And, to top it off, field-wise Bernard found himself ill-suited to maneuvering inside the bureaucracy at London headquarters.

Instead of a pension, however, Samson now gets a whole new Deighton trilogy, beginning with Spy Hook. Line and Sinker are the titles of the projected other novels, suggesting an activity more passive and a lot murkier than tennis. In this new work, Deighton's temptingly baited plot lines run dark and deep. The first half offers more nibbles than bites as Samson discovers just how little his bosses want him to know about their intelligence operations.

If Samson seems slow to catch on to the freeze-out, it is partly because he has been distracted by Fiona's replacement. Lovely Gloria also works at Secret Service (London Central), and is more than 20 years younger than Deighton's middle-aged hero. As in previous Deighton thrillers, the pace quickens once the cool atmospheres and the cast of characters are established. Curious Bernie learns he is being used, but the stronger his suspicions, the more forceful are his bosses' warnings to lay off. At one point, he is ordered across the Atlantic and the American continent for a brief, foreboding chat with an ex-colleague he believed had been killed in Europe.

Surfacing in fragments is a willfully inconclusive story of vanished Secret Service funds, estimated at (pounds)4 million, that are thought to have been used by Fiona to set up an intelligence network in East Germany. But one can never be sure. Deighton dangles quite a few possibilities that should lure readers on to future Samson adventures. In addition to dead men who do not stay dead, there may be a defector who may not be defective: a small hint is dropped that Fiona could be working for our side after all. When last seen, Bernie is on the run from his own people. Obviously he still has miles to go before he sleeps. The question is, With whom?