Former newsman and occasional MI6 agent Michael Vaux has survived an assassination attempt and plans on a long period of rehabilitation. But the spymasters at Vauxhall Cross, the London HQ of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, have learned of a military plot to overthrow the pro-West regime of Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Intelligence sources have warned Britain that a small clique of rebel officers plan to finalize their plans for a coup d’état aboard a pleasure craft heading up the Nile to Aswan. London and Washington have supported military strongman Field Marshal Abdel al-Sisi’s regime since he overthrew democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi in 2003. Britain decides to thwart the coup attempt by stealth rather than force and orders the SIS into action.

MI6’s Department B3 is ordered to do what it takes to sabotage the rebels’ aims. And the top brass decide that Michael Vaux, known for his long experience in the region, is the man for the job. Vaux, who is still recovering from the attempt on his life, is told that he is being sent on a ‘recuperative’ Nile cruise to his favorite part of the world. They calculate that his renowned interest in the Mideast will be stirred by the presence of a military contingent among his fellow passengers on the pleasure cruise.

Who would have thought one night with a beautiful woman could destroy everything?  Former journalist Michael Vaux covered global politics for major media outlets before early retirement. Then he was honey-trapped into serving queen and country by the Secret Intelligence Service.

Now top officials at UK spy agency MI6 suspect one of their senior operatives of betrayal–and Vaux is top of the list. In the wake of anonymous charges of Vaux’s disloyalty in top-secret operations, he’s put under scrutiny by the United Kingdom’s top spy catcher.

Evidence mounts against him. Who would frame him for treason? As a veteran spy, he must uncover the real mole before he ends up dishonored and dead.

Retired journalist-turned-MI6 agent is at loose ends after his long-time girlfriend, Anne, leaves to care for her ailing father. But after Vaux’s first night alone, an old colleague from Department B3– a maverick sub-group of MI6’s overworked Mideast and North Africa desk–shows up at his cottage door. Someone in Beirut is unmasking dozens of MI6 agents and assets in the Middle East, endangering their lives and blowing several key operations. Vaux is asked to come in the from the cold and hunt down the traitorous double agent.

As Vaux goes deep undercover in Lebanon, he learns that MI6’s station in Beirut is full of power players with their own personal agendas. In a once-glamorous city still reeling from civil war and the aftermath of heavy Israeli bombardments, Vaux finds his own agency at odds with itself. Vaux’s first task is to determine whom he can trust among the surviving cutouts and secret agents whose help he needs to uncover the mole in their midst.

Michael Vaux is out of the game. The ex-journalist and occasional MI6 agent is happy—house-sitting in Tangier for an ex-girl friend. But when the British Secret Service contacts him, he is persuaded to ‘come in from the cold’ one more time.A high-ranking operative of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb [AQIM] wishes to defect, promising to give information to MI6 that could prevent a series of terrorist bombings and kidnappings. But after their only contact with the would-be defector is assassinated on the Paris to Madrid Francisco de Goya night train, Vaux finds himself combing the winding, narrow streets of old Tangier while butting heads with an idealistic CIA officer.

Meanwhile, the young MI6 agent sent to aid Vaux in his search to locate the defector, is abducted outside a nightclub on Tangier’s hot and sultry Corniche. Vaux’s quest to find both his younger colleague and the senior Al-Qaeda operative pulls him beyond Tangier’s city limits to exotic Melilla, a small, Spanish enclave in North Africa, and on to storied Casablanca. Faced with an ever more complicated series of deadly events, Vaux finds himself inexorably lured into a convoluted labyrinth of deceit and betrayal, where double and triple agents pursue their own shadowy goals and the loyalty of even the most committed MI6 and CIA agents isn’t guaranteed.

Roger Croft’s ‘The Wayward Spy‘ was nominated by Shareranks.com as one of the top ten spy novelsever written. ‘Operation Saladin,’ its sequel, sees former MI6 agent Michael Vaux in Cairo working as bureau chief of a Damascus-based newspaper. But following the sudden death of Syria’s strongman, Hafez Assad, Vaux’s close friend, Ahmed Kadri, Syria’s chief armaments buyer, falls out of favor. He’s arrested by Syria’s intelligence agency [the GSD] who then demand that Vaux return to Damascus to face questions about his relationship with Kadri and his earlier suspected links to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.Warned by Elena Hussein, GSD’s chief of station in Cairo and Vaux’s lover, that he could face the same dubious fate as Kadri, Vaux fears for his safety and opts to quit Cairo.Enter MI6.

His former employers offer to forgive all past misdeeds in return for his accepting a special assignment: to be the principal player in Operation Saladin, an elaborate plot to help a dissident Syrian nuclear scientist to defect to the U.K. along with his top-secret dossier on Syria’s nuclear program and its stockpiles of nerve gas and other chemical weapons.But events don’t go according to plan: Dr. Nessim Said, the Syrian scientist, is shot dead in the quiet English village where he had been sent with Vaux for a few days of relaxation and surreptitious debriefings.Hope of locating the nuclear dossier evaporates with Said’s assassination. Who killed Said? Prime suspects include the Mossad, whose ‘targeted killings’ of nuclear scientists working for Arab regimes, has become a familiar pattern. But the Syrians, unaware of Said’s plan to defect, blame MI6 and in particular Vaux. An Al-saiqa [Syrian Special Forces] hit team is sent to hunt Vaux down…