End Game

By John Skow

SPY SINKER by Len Deighton

HarperCollins; 374 pages; $21.95

What spy novelist Len Deighton tries here must be nearly impossible: winding up a closely plotted six-volume thriller -- lugging all the bodies offstage and making sure that each one has a tag attached to a toe -- and still writing a creditable novel. He makes a good job of it with a clever change of focus.

All will remember, of course, that Bernard Samson, England's rough-cut intelligence agent in Berlin, was bamboozling communist Stasi operatives with great success until his beautiful and highborn wife Fiona defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less. This breach of marital etiquette caused Samson endless problems -- how to find a suitable nanny for the children, whether to marry his young mistress, how to prove that he himself was not a Soviet mole, and so on -- detailed moodily and lengthily in the two most recent novels of Deighton's double trilogy, Spy Hook and Spy Line.

This final entry gives Fiona's side of matters. As Bernard had pretty much figured out by the end of Spy Line -- and as the KGB was surely on the point of discovering -- Fiona had been a double agent all along, playing a delicate and deadly game for the cozy old establishmentarians who run Britain's spies. Deighton persuades the reader to take this shell-and-pea shuffling more or less seriously by giving real weight to Fiona's predicament. She is bright and tough, but the pressure of remembering her lines and her lies has worn away her resilience. She worries about going mad, about having already gone mad. Her sometime lover, probably also her KGB watcher, notices her distress and kindly, slyly, asks the reason. " 'I was thinking about my hair,' she said. 'About having it cut shorter.' Men were always ready to believe that women were thinking about their hair."

Not many writers, male or female, have invented a woman spy as well drawn as Fiona or a spy fiction as wry and sinewy as this one. But do Fiona and Bernard reunite and live happily ever after? Deighton, at the end of some 2,000 admirably umbrous pages, wisely fails to say. J.S.