FORWARD TO “DEEP STRIKE”

Like most works of fiction, this is one that began with a “what if.”

What if, I wondered after the last presidential race, what if a small handful of CIA agents who investigated Russian hacking, were outraged by the blatant interference in America’s democratic process?

What if those agents were infuriated by the unwillingness of congressional leaders to react to their findings, and further inflamed by the refusal of the new president to acknowledge that the hacking had even taken place?

What if they were scandalized by the fact thatAmerica’s intelligence agencies and colossal military force would now be under the command of that same new feckless leader?

What if, pushed to the breaking point by the death of a colleague, three of those agents go rogue to take on the President and all his vast powers, and attempt to drive him from office?

To write this fiction, I made use of voluminous news reports about the U.S. and Russia, accounts of America’s vast intelligence apparatus that the president controls. I received valuable input from a plastic surgeon, from an expert on Moscow, from hackers and cyber professionals.

But the characters in this novel – their backgrounds, their thoughts and words and interactions – are all invented. The crimes and corruption my agents uncover, the climactic ending to their struggle, are all spun from my own imagination.

It’s all fiction. It never happened.

But could it?