The Secret Lovers — Charles McCarry

An American spy confronts personal and political intrigues when he obtains a Russian dissident's explosive manuscript in this Cold War spy thriller.

In West Berlin, CIA agent Paul Christopher receives a dissident Russian novelist's handwritten manuscript from a nervous courier. Minutes after the handoff, the courier's spine is nearly snapped by a passing black sedan. Meanwhile in Rome, Christopher's wife Cathy takes a famous film director as a lover to stir her husband out of his cool and unfeeling stoicism.

These two seemingly discrete events set in motion a spiral of operational and personal intrigue that leads Christopher from clandestine meetings in the cafes of old Europe to a rendezvous with an operative on the front lines of the Cold War in the Congo. All the while, he secretly arranges the publication of a novel that could bring the Soviet system to its knees, and races to identify the leak that compromised the messenger -- and possibly his entire mission.