The Retreat

Threatened with suspension from the Metropolitan Police, Detective Inspector Mackie Divine is approached by an agent of the special intelligence services who asks her to undertake surveillance work at a ch teau in Brittany. As a disaffected police officer, she would make an ideal guest at The Retreat, a community of social misfits, led by Peter Roman, a charismatic philosopher and therapist. There is also a conference centre at the property, attended by regular delegations from all over Europe. Impressed by Mackie, Roman invites her to attend one of the funders' meetings and introduces her to members of Babel, a group of extreme right wing economists and bankers. Their short term aim is to destabilise European society by disrupting relations between ethnic groups. Their ultimate aim is to install a ruling oligarchy that will use martial law to separate the population into ghettos corresponding to their ethnicity and skills sets. Interaction between these groups will be strictly forbidden and treated as a capital crime. Mackie fails to take these ideas seriously, though she regularly reports back to her controller, Rudyard, using the bug-proof SmartPhone he gave her. When a Vietnamese restaurant is burnt down, and the family forced to flee, she is frustrated by the local police investigation, led by a nonchalant examining magistrate, and risks compromising her adopted loyalty to the community, which seems to be taking on an increasingly sinister purpose. She discovers that one of the guests at the ch teau, Lorenz Schmidt, is working for German and US intelligence services as a double agent, gathering information on the policy of the EU - a pain in the ass for US trade and corporate business. His view of Europe is a continent of small states that all speak different languages and cannot agree with one another. This creates the vacuum that Babel and similar groups are aching to fill...