People often ask why I like to write about politics, power, and Washington, D.C. in particular. My answer: It's the only city in the country that can declare war and raise taxes. It also has the most total disregard for the truth of any place on earth, at least in my humble opinion. It's not the capital of spin as so many have anointed it; it's the manufacturer of truth, which, in reality, contains more fiction than my novels. Truth is unpredictable and thus dangerous. It therefore needs to be controlled. I created the Camel Club series to take this issue on squarely. What is the real truth and how do you discover it? After three books in the series, I'm sad to report I've yet to find it.
In the latest Camel Club book, Stone Cold, I have multiple plots going on, all of which will collide at the end. Oliver Stone, the head of the intrepid band of conspiracy theorists called the Camel Club, spent his early years as a CIA assassin. Those years are coming back to haunt him as a members of his old killing squad are being murdered one-by-one and he soon finds himself on that list.
Behind the killings is a secret from decades-go that the CIA and others in power can never allow to come out. You'd be amazed how many of these things are actually lying around in our history. The closing scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark is not so far-fetched. So the motivation for the CIA is to not let the secret come out for the public good. Keeping the public ignorant is often seen by those in power as being a worthy goal.
Do the ends justify the means? That's a question that continues to bedevil us. How far is too far? How low to stoop is too low if the other side keeps dropping the bar?
And right in the middle of all this is Oliver Stone and the Camel Club. Oliver Stone is a man who deeply regrets what he used to do for a living and has spent much of three decades trying to atone for those past deeds. Yet the question left for the reader to this about is: Does he deserve to die for what he did? Do people deserve second chances? And can we continue to label people so easily as good and evil or is the issue far more complex?
And that, in a nutshell, is why I write the books I do. Encapsulated in the microcosm of Washington is life, albeit on steroids. I can explore every facet of humanity, its strengths and weaknesses, its resiliency, its incommunicable spirit, its depravity and its sometimes fatal conundrums, with stakes that could not be higher. For unlike when a man bludgeons his mate in anger causing a loss of one life, when things go awry in Washington, nationals fall and so, sometimes, does the very sky.