The House of Special Purpose (2004)

Christopher Hyde's thriller, published as an Onyx paperback in 2004, opens in November 1941, when Wild Bill Donovan recruits the freelance news photographer Jane Todd and the Scotland Yard detective inspector Morris Black to trace a relic rumoured to survive from the Bolshevik Revolution, pursued by a Nazi assassin, a countess with a shady past and the head of NKVD operations in America. Its back cover promises a story filled with actual events and historical figures. (Open Library)

Watches

Longines watch: Riding the elevator down from his office in the Apex Building, Maurice Halperin, head of the Latin American division of the Coordinator of Information's research and analysis section and, in the novel, a secret Communist Party member run by Vassili Zarubin of the Soviet embassy under the code name Stowaway, reads the time off the Tiffany-Longines wristwatch his father gave him when he received his doctorate. He then drives to a mill on Rock Creek to meet Zarubin. The text calls it a Tiffany-Longines, naming the retailer with the maker; no model is given.

Source text: Riding the elevator down from his fifth-floor office in the Apex Building, Maurice Halperin pushed his bifocals up onto his nose and lifted his wrist, reading the time off the Tiffany-Longines wristwatch his father had given him when he received his Ph.D. and became Dr. Maurice Halperin, professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. (Christopher Hyde, The House of Special Purpose, scan cataloged as Onyx (New American Library), 2004, p. 52; the meeting with Zarubin follows on p. 53; Internet Archive scan OCR)