There’s a catch phrase people occasionally use when they are trying to keep a secret: If I tell you, I might have to kill you. If Stella Rimington ever utters this, it won’t be an idle threat. As the former director general of MI5, an agency that provides domestic security for the United Kingdom, Rimington is privy to matters of international importance. She’s certainly not giving away anything of importance in her first novel, “At Risk.” “I really didn’t want to or find it necessary to write about anything that would give away secrets,” she says. What she did aspire to was writing a thriller with a woman as a lead character. “I wanted to describe how things are actually done,” Rimington says during a phone interview, “to get away from the James Bond idea that things are done by one person, and that’s a man. I wanted to, if I could while remaining readable, explain that things are done by lots of people.” Easier said than done. While managing the security of a country is a Herculean task, writing a book — let alone a readable book — is another skill entirely. But Rimington had aces other law enforcement peers-turned-writers might lack. Instead of going home at night after a long day at MI5 and picking up a romance or fantasy novel to relax with, Rimington entered the worlds of writers such as John Le Carre and Dorothy Sayers. Osmosis must have worked: “At Risk” is a taut, intelligent thriller, filled with finely drawn characters — including the protagonist, Liz Carlyle, a 30-ish woman based partly on Rimington herself, albeit younger — and a timely plot involving terrorism. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve been a reader of novels,” she says. “I studied English literature at university, but I’ve also been a reader of thrillers. Even before I joined MI5, and all the way through, strangely, as you might think for somebody in my former profession, I read thrillers for relaxation. And I’ve always wanted to write a novel.” But try as she might during three decades with MI5, the timing was never right to start penning a novel. After retiring as director general in 1996, she first wrote her autobiography before turning to fiction. Rimington certainly had personal experience concerning the plot of “At Risk” after years of dealing with Irish Republican Army bombings and other terror-related threats. MI5 is alerted of the possibility of an invisible — a terrorist who is a native of the target country and can cross borders undetected — plotting an attack. Rimington’s plot also pivots around a rivalry between MI5 and its international counterpart, MI6. That might be her only fabrication in “At Risk”; the agencies now put aside egos and accept working together as a necessity to thwart terrorists. “It does not come easily, and it doesn’t when you have different kinds of organizations,” she says. “I think now there is a realization that it’s essential intelligence is shared, and there is cooperation and collaboration. We set, during the ’80s, a firm machinery whereby the lead agency on terrorism, particularly terrorism being carried out in Britain, was MI5 for the primary assessment and the action. I think that proved very important.” Rimington understands that the agencies in the U.S. have not yet come together, that “there’s this muddle about who’s doing what.” Nor is she comfortable with calling the campaign against terror a “war.” “I think the reaction is somewhat exaggerated,” she says. “I think the phrase ‘war on terror’ is something we find quite difficult to cope with (in the United Kingdom) really, because I think we’ve come to understand that terrorism, unfortunately, is a permanent state. Because if you solve terrorism from one source, almost inevitably, it seems to me it’s going to rise its head from another source because it’s clearly so effective at drawing causes to the world’s attention. My sense is you’ve got to attack terrorism through intelligence, and if necessary, through the military. You’ve also got to go about politically trying to solve the issues that cause terrorism.” Nor is it wise to assume that terrorists are easy targets. On the contrary, she says they are quite sophisticated and intelligent. But so are the good guys, even if it appears nothing is happening. Actually, something is always going on. “The majority of the public rightly doesn’t know when there have been successes, and the only publicity you get is when intelligence has not gone together perfectly,” Rimington says. “I used to be sure that the people in the government knew when there had been successes, and had them come over and congratulate everybody. They felt their work was being appreciated.” Rimington at first missed being at the hub of so much activity, having reports of national import cross her desk every day. But now she rather enjoys the less hectic life of a writer. And she does so knowing that Britain is still in good hands. “I can actually sleep in my bed knowing I’m not responsible for these things,” she says, “and have great fun writing about them.” Sources of inspiration Stella Rimington learned to write her first novel in part by reading thrillers. Here are some of her favorite books by influential authors. = “Busman’s Honeymoon” by Dorothy Sayers. “Strange things happen in apparently quite ordinary places,” Rimington says about the Sayers novel featuring the characters Lord Peter and his new wife, Harriet. “The great thing about Dorothy Sayers, and particularly ‘Busman’s Honeymoon,’ is they go off to this nice lovely Elizabethan manor he’s bought for their honeymoon, and it all looks perfect. They open the door and, lo and behold, there’s a body in the cellar and a very complicated account of how it got there.” = “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” by John Le Carre. “The opening scene on the bridge as the double agent comes across is a wonderful evocation of the Cold War, the sort of grimness of the point where East met West. I remember going to West Berlin and looking over the wall at the East and thinking how grim it all looked.” = Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander series, set in Sweden. “He creates this sense of a remote part of Sweden wonderfully, this great sense of atmosphere in which is books are set.” Capsule review Rimington, the former director general of Britain’s MI5, pens an intelligent, thoughtful thriller about a terrorist threat in her debut. Particularly notable is the lead character, Liz Carlyle, who is an anti-super agent, who gets by with wiles, hard work and no small amount of intelligence. Additional Information:

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‘At Risk’ Author: Stella Rimington Publisher: Knopf, $24, 367 pages

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