Gayle Lynds:
Come Spy With Me
I’m often asked why I write spy novels. And my answer is always the same — how could I not? As J. Edgar Hoover said, “There’s something about a secret that’s addicting.” Secrets are powerful, and once something becomes secret, it becomes important to someone somewhere. The spies who keep the secrets and seek out other secrets are fascinating. You might remember Robert Gates. A few years before becoming Secretary of Defense, he was the director of Central Intelligence. In other words, the head of the CIA. He explained it this way: “When a spy smells flowers, he looks around for a coffin.”
The world of spies can be a source of danger and of exciting adventures, while at the same time we readers can indulge ourselves in great stories of power, geopolitics, and history. Writing a spy thriller involves weaving webs of deception and shameless lying. But then, there’s a reason espionage is called the second oldest profession. Where does a writer begin?
My most recent spy novel is The Assassins. It began with an image in my mind: A lone man trudging through the snow, tired from a long overseas flight back home to Washington, D.C. I knew his name was Judd Ryder, and that it was early morning, and he was cold. His hands were jammed into his jacket pockets. Thick snow blanketed trees and rooftops. Icicles hung from telephone lines. The snow plows hadn’t reached his street on Capitol Hill yet. Then.... A door closed, an unnaturally loud sound in the snowy hush. The noise had come from ahead where a man was stepping outside and was hunched over, locking his front door. What the hell! That was Judd’s row house.
Remaining across the street, Judd saw the man turn away from the door, head bowed as he buttoned his trench coat. A gust of wind flipped open the coat. The lining was black-and-green tartan — a sub-zero lining in the same tartan fabric sewed into Judd’s trench coat. He focused on the man’s boots. They were L.L Bean’s. Above the tops showed tan shearling linings. Those were his damn boots. His damn trench coat. The man was a burglar. What else had he stolen? The intruder raised his head to scan around. For the first time, his face showed. It was if Judd were looking into a mirror — gray eyes, arched nose, square face. The man was about six-feet-one. Judd’s height. He had wavy chestnut-brown hair. So did Judd. The bastard even had a good tan, and of course Judd was tanned from his month in Iraq. This was no ordinary burglar. Judd had been professionally doubled....
(Yes, doubling happens, and our intelligence agencies are very good at it. For details, read the books of Antonio Menendez, retired CIA master of disguise.)
Judd’s scene continues with the imposter slogging across the snowy intersection. The roar of a powerful engine sounds, and a big Arctic Cat snowmobile careens around the corner, the driver’s face hidden by a helmet and goggles. As the double tries to escape, the snowmobile deliberately rams him, sending him high in a backward arch that leaves him dead.
Judd runs to the body, searches it, and discovers a District driver’s license with his name on it. Now Judd has more than the cold air to chill him.... This was the time he usually walked over to the little market on Seventh to buy groceries. He always crossed this intersection. Either the double had been targeted for murder — or Judd had been.
How do you beat an unbeatable villain?
My simple idea of a man trudging home through the snow had developed into an introduction of my hero that I hoped would intrigue readers. But now I needed a villain ... someone worthy ... someone who had the power and connections to have doubled Judd. And someone slippery enough that it would take Judd a large part of the book to identify.
For years I’d kept a clipping from a 2002 Time magazine about a notorious independent assassin: “He almost never emerged from the turbid underworld of international crime, and he had no consistent belief system. He switched allegiances with ease. Governments actually paid him just to leave their people alone. Even so, beginning in 1974, he was responsible for 900 murders in 20 nations....”
Perhaps you recall this master terrorist of the Cold War — Abu Nidal of the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). Highly organized and vicious, he died in 2002 either by suicide or murder, depending on which story you believe, after decades of grisly success. And he was not alone in his infamy. Other horrific assassins from the era included Carlos the Jackal, Sasha the Macedonian, and Mehmet Ali Agca.
I realized although I’d studied international assassins, I’d never focused on them. The more I thought about them, the more it seemed to me that we tended to consider them monolithic, virtually identical, all sociopaths or psychopaths. But that’s not true — among them there’s a spectrum from psychoses to neuroses. (In fact, if you’re breathing you’ve likely got a few neuroses, too. It goes with the territory of being alive. But that doesn’t mean you’re destined to be a contract killer.)
Thus began my journey to into the fascinating lives of the six international assassins who gave title to The Assassins. There’s a high death rate among assassins, which tells you how good these six had been at their work — they’d not only survived the Cold War but had gone on to work independently, without the help or protection of sponsoring governments or terrorist organizations.
And then as I wrote the book, I set them against each other in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. Who was the best? And who was the ultimate villain?
There has to be a story
For there to be a story, the assassins needed a purpose. They had to want something so much that they’d risk their lives. And that brings me to a seventh assassin — Saddam Hussein. When he rose to power in the late 1970s, it was as the Ba’ath Party’s top enforcer. He made Iraq his personal piggy bank, taking bribes and kickbacks from governments, private companies, and individuals. At the same time, he grew increasingly paranoid that too many people knew where his fortune was hidden.
This is where my fiction begins: I imagined that Saddam secretly brought in six financial advisers to hide his money around the world in secret accounts. Then Saddam hired my six assassins to eliminate the financial advisers. When the book opens, the assassins are furious because Saddam has stiffed them for the second half of the money he owed them for the wet work. In real life, Saddam was notorious for not paying his bills.
Here’s another interesting fact, and one of the bits of information that inspired me to write The Assassins: When the United States captured Saddam in December 2003, his wealth was estimated to be between $40 and $70 billion. The U.S. government had expected to find his fortune and use it to pay for the war and to rebuild Iraq. But we were ultimately able to track down only a few billion, and we’re still searching. Other governments, organizations, and individuals are, too. The search for Saddam’s billions has turned into the biggest — and quietest — treasure hunt the world has ever seen. And in my book, one of the six assassins knows where it is, but he hasn’t been able to get his hands on it yet. His obsession with the fortune and the political cover it will buy him are what drive the plot.
What The Americans TV series has done in exploring the secret lives of undercover spies is what I’ve been doing in my books for twenty years. People who work in intelligence tend to marry each other. It makes life easier. They understand when the other can’t talk about something “at work,” or when he or she needs to leave unexpectedly.
At the same time, their children often go into intelligence work, too. Just as there are families of plumbers and lawyers and drug dealers, there are families of spies. For instance, one of the CIA’s most destructive traitors, Aldrich Ames, was himself the son of a CIA man.
So in The Assassins I created a growing relationship between Judd Ryder and Eva Blake. Judd is an ex-military intelligence officer and is burned out. He wants nothing more to do with the life. But Eva, a former museum curator who’s just joined the CIA and is in training at the Farm, wants into the life, and has been excelling there.
Despite the fact that they’re heading in different directions, they work well together. And they’re drawn to each other. Their story weaves through the book as they confront each of the six assassins. By following Judd and Eva, we uncover a political powder keg and eventually find Saddam’s hidden billions — I couldn’t resist. Someone had to figure out where all that loot was!
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Gayle Lynds is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of ten international spy thrillers. Library Journal calls her “the reigning queen of espionage fiction.” Publishers Weekly named her novel Masquerade one of the top 10 spy thrillers of all time. She’s a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and with David Morrell cofounded International Thriller Writers. Visit her at GayleLynds.com
