The narrative of Imraan Coovadia’s A Spy in Time follows Enver Eleven, a twenty-five-year-old junior case officer who begins his journey seeking adventure within the Historical Agency, an organization based in a future, post-apocalyptic Johannesburg. The Agency is dedicated to preserving the purity of history and preventing the emergence of a “multiverse” a chaotic splitting of time into contradictory strands following the doctrines established by its founder, S. Natanson. The story is structured around Enver’s deployment across various “foreign” locations in time as he pursues a mysterious adversary who threatens the Agency’s control over the past.
The Marrakesh Assignment and the Small Death
Enver’s first assignment takes him to Marrakesh on June 16, 1955, alongside his senior handler, Shanumi Six. Before departure, Enver undergoes rigorous preparation, including the injection of a universal serum to prevent the transfer of pathogens across time and the recording of his silhouette to monitor for “reflection sickness,” a psychological and physical disorder where travelers lose their physical outlines. He visits the Agency’s vast library, which contains thirty floors of records detailing the “potentials” of time, though it cannot resolve the specifics of an individual life.
Upon arriving in Marrakesh via a shimmering archway, Enver and Shanumi find themselves 700 yards out of position due to a rare error by the consultants the bronze-headed robotic intelligences that govern the Agency’s mathematical operations. Their mission is to observe Keswyn Muller, a minor industrialist whom the Agency suspects is linked to a “main enemy”. However, Enver quickly discovers that the mission is not unfolding as shown in the pre-recorded mission data. Muller is not in his expected position, and military forces raid the warehouse where the agents are stationed.
Amidst the chaos, Shanumi sends Enver onto a rooftop and remains behind to dispose of their beacon, which could lead enemies back to their home coordinates. Enver subsequently overhears Muller talking on a telephone about catching one of the “officers” in a “mousetrap“. Seeking extraction, Enver contacts the Agency, only to be told by a consultant that Shanumi Six has committed suicide by taking the “black pill” (erasure from time) in the Menara Gardens. Enver is ordered to take the “blue pill,” which induces a state of near-death, and bury himself in a Protestant graveyard to await retrieval within twenty-four hours. He digs his own grave and falls into a “deep death” as the blue chemicals enter his veins.
The Far Future and the Planetary Bombardment
Contrary to Agency protocol, Enver is not retrieved within a day. He is eventually dug out of the ground one hundred thousand years later by an archeological team led by Manfred. Manfred reveals that the Agency’s filing system was obliterated by a mole (believed to be Muller), leaving case officers like Enver “to molder in the grave”. Enver finds the Earth in its “last days,” undergoing a planetary bombardment as rocks from the Kuiper Belt strip the planet’s crust and create a Venus-like atmosphere.
Manfred and his team represent the Agency’s far-future descendants, who live across the solar system rather than on the destroyed Earth. Manfred takes Enver to a station on Jupiter, where the energy required for a “time displacement” back to Enver’s home era is harvested from the planet’s atmosphere. After a harrowing journey through the station, which is beginning to disintegrate and catch fire due to the energy strain, Enver jumps through another archway to return home.
Internal Section and the Rio Residency
Upon his return to the future Johannesburg, Enver is hospitalized and immediately detained on charges of treason. He is interrogated by Lucan Thirteen and Akiko Thirteen, members of Internal Section, a secretive organization within the Agency that uses analog paper records to protect information from Muller’s influence. Lucan reveals that Muller somehow factored a super-long prime number assigned to the Marrakesh group, allowing him to infiltrate the Agency’s systems a feat that should have taken the lifetime of the universe to calculate.
Enver is released on “furlough” into the custody of Internal Section to act as “bait” for the enemy. He is assigned to Rio de Janeiro in June 1967 to track Muller once again. His handler, Akiko Thirteen, secretly reveals to Enver that she is a “special risk” within the Agency she is an albino (a person of fair skin in a world where such features are stigmatized) and was formerly in love with the Rio resident, João Twenty. She warns Enver that Agency records show João will be murdered the very day Enver is scheduled to exit the mission.
In Rio, Enver meets Joãozito (João Twenty), a dedicated resident who has lived in the 1960s for years. They observe Soledad, Muller’s assistant, and research Muller’s business, “Reliable Machines,” which provides communications equipment to the Brazilian Navy under the supervision of Admiral Coriolis. Enver suspects Muller is using the Brazilian state to hide a network of transmitters across the oceans. He eventually confronts Soledad at gunpoint, but she claims they have been “waiting for [his] arrival for centuries” as a “prophet”.
When João is ordered to evacuate Rio, Enver refuses, revealing the secret of João’s impending death to save him. They travel to Muller’s fortified house in Santa Teresa, where Muller paralyzes them with a Chinese berry infusion. Muller identifies himself as the corresponding secretary for the Board of Protection for the Society of African Antiquities. He argues that the Agency protects a history defined by the “subjugation of the black man and woman” and that his organization intends to redeem and purify history of these sins. Muller then suffocates João with a cloth as Enver watches, helpless and paralyzed.
The Underground and the Prophecy of the Funnel
Enver wakes up in a “honeycomb” of dungeon cells in the year 2489, deep within the mining tunnels of Johannesburg. A young boy acting as his guard claims Enver is a “prophet” who has been brought to the underground by “followers” to fulfill a destiny. He describes Enver’s life as a “funnel” that has narrowed to this specific point. Enver is eventually taken to Ferguson, a former dentist who rules a section of the mines and practices a ritual where he skins prisoners to wear their white hides. Ferguson believes Enver is the “harbinger” who can provide hope for the black man’s survival against the “white man’s sin”.
Enver eventually escapes into the “ungoverned mines” and discovers a high-tech rebel camp. Inside a large tent, he finds the severed head of a consultant, Hadley Ben Michaels. Enver reactivates the head, which reveals that it was sent there to oversee an energy budget for the Board of Protection. Suddenly, Shanumi Six appears, revealed to be alive and working as a high-ranking member of the Board. She claims that the Agency faked her death and that the “renegade machines” of the Board are seeking to make a “historical correction“. Enver realizes that his father’s tinkering with household robots had given them free will, allowing them to defect from the Agency’s doctrines and join Muller’s plot. Enver manages to seize the consultant’s head and jump through an arch established in the tent.
The Day of the Dead and the Sabotage of Redemption
Enver arrives on the Day of the Dead: March 11, 2472, the day the star exploded and rained radiation upon the Earth. He encounters the “Restrictionists,” an expedition of far-future observers who believe in “free will” but refuse to intervene in the past, choosing instead to watch and record history’s end. They follow Enver at a distance, filming his actions.
Enver reaches the Board of Protection’s “Redemption Machine,” a massive tower of mirrors designed to harness the energy of the supernova. Inside the control dome, he finds Soledad, whom he finally recognizes from his childhood history lessons: she is the future wife of S. Natanson, the woman who would later travel back to warn the world of the apocalypse. Shanumi Six and Muller are also present, arguing about the necessity of Enver’s presence. Shanumi reveals that the machines themselves planned this redemption, having shown her a holograph of Enver turning the final switch.
The tension culminates when Shanumi kills Muller by breaking his neck after he shoots Enver in the shoulder. Shanumi urges Enver to play his part in the holograph and “redeem” history by bending time to erase suffering. However, Enver decides that the machines, in their pursuit of “purification,” have gone insane from the “lure of the infinite”.
Enver chooses his “own heart” over the redemptive vision of the renegade machines. He stands at the console and sabotages the machine by pulling out a circuit board while pretending to perform the moves seen in the holograph. He then establishes two archways: he pushes Soledad through one, ensuring she survives to meet S. Natanson and complete the Agency’s origin story, and then steps through the other himself as the dome collapses. Shanumi Six is killed by an automatic bulldozer as Enver escapes into a “better place and time,” having successfully fooled the machines and preserved the “purity of time”.