Peter D Wilson

Exit, pursued by a bear (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Tony Anderson, an academic attending a conference in Prague during the Cold War era, is mistaken by security chief Alexander Placek for an expected western emissary to illicit dissident groups. In order to undermine such activities he sends Anna Jirak to worm her way into Tony's household as a spy. This she does by posing as a political refugee needing a form of marriage to the now-widowed Tony in order to escape deportation.
In time the marriage becomes genuine, so when Placek turns up demanding that Anna should wreck Tony's standing by accusing him of multiple adultery with supposed refugee women, she refuses. Placek's unwelcome duty then requires him, in the course of offering Tony a session chairmanship in a forthcoming conference in Kiev, to denounce Anna as a traitor to her own family and friends. Unwilling though Tony is to believe the story, it has enough verisimilitude to create a doubt that she cannot dispel, and in despair she takes an overdose of medicine.
Determined to avenge her fate, but knowing that he must work with Placek at the Kiev conference, Tony consults his cousin Eric in the UK security service. Eric advises an indirect approach by joining an actual dissident support group. This proves to be badly run and Tony is persuaded to take charge of it.
In Kiev, Placek confides in his devoted assistant Elena about his distress at the news of Anna, whom he had regarded almost as a surrogate daughter. He instructs Elena to accompany Tony on the city tour when he expects contraband to be somehow handed over, but the plan is thwarted by local police who turn out to have been Tony's contacts.
Back home, some time later, Tony is visited by Eric together with Placek who, disgusted by new instructions from his masters, wishes to defect but needs the help of Tony's group for Elena to escape. Tony is reluctant but urged by Eric, for his own reasons, to comply. Anna, who is now revealed to have survived the suicide attempt at the cost of a partial breakdown, praises Placek's character and adds her own plea that convinces Tony to agree, and insists that the two couples should thenceforward be friends.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Peter D Wilson
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. Oktober 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781465904539
• Artikelnr.: 48660580

Autorenporträt

Peter Wilson was born in Nottingham, England, in 1936. After education at Nottingham High School, where he changed course from classics to science because he couldn't get on with Greek, he gained an open scholarship to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, to be taken up after National Service (1955-57) in which he was a radio mechanic at the SHAPE military headquarters near Paris. At Oxford he gained first-class honours in chemistry, then took a PhD at Leeds University.

In 1964 Dr Wilson was appointed to a research position at the nuclear reprocessing site at Sellafield in Cumberland (the north-western corner of England), then operated by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Agency (UKAEA) of which the relevant division became British Nuclear Fuels plc (BNFL) in 1971. He remained there until retirement in 2001, mostly working on process chemistry development. For the last dozen years he was chiefly concerned with certain aspects of long-term waste management and related strategic issues, helping to form the company technical policy thereon and presenting its rationale in international discussions. He was also the technical member of a team representing the UK in gaining acceptance of an extension to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to cover a possible loophole. His book "The Nuclear Fuel Cycle" (Oxford University Press, 1996) became the standard text on the subject. Following his retirement, BNFL set up and financed a "Peter Wilson Medal and Prize" for research and communication, to be awarded annually for ten years at Leeds University.

Dr Wilson lived in Seascale, a coastal village near to the Sellafield site. His interest in amateur dramatics dated back to the 1960s and for many years he was an active member of the society based in Gosforth, the next village inland. His collection of stories, plays and film scripts along with some factual material may be found on his website.