More about my novel

…

Willoughby.

Son of a Russian spy.

It seems ironic that he would end up becoming a spy himself, if that’s the right word for it.  He thinks of himself as one of those people who help to keep the general population safe in their beds at night.

It’s an interesting generalisation for a job that requires the person to do things that others wouldn’t do if they had a choice.

We like to think that those who are on that last line of defence, or the front line, or even on the thin blue line, will do what is necessary when the occasion demands it.

Policemen deal with criminals
Military policemen deal with military criminals
Federal or national police deal with country-wide problems
State police are for internal state matters.

Problems of an international scale that affect our country are dealt with by a different type of police.  In England, the differentiation is that MI5 is internal, and MI6 is external. In the USA, the FBI is internal, and the CIA is external.

I’m sure countries all over the world have their own organisations.

Writers like to invent their own, and I’m no exception.  I like the idea that we have organisations like that in Australia. I believe that the external force is called ASIO, but it’s rather shadowy, and they don’t advertise.

We also like to hide their offices in plain sight, much like the way Ian Fleming hid the 00s behind a company called Universal Exports or something similar.

The thing is, it’s more fun to create that organisation that lives in the shadows, run by some man who is about a hundred years old, with a very posh accent and no sense of humour, or by a woman who has a thorough no nonsense attitude, who would pass for the local busybody that runs the post office in a small English village.

As for the spies, sorry employees, they need to have military training, preferably seen action in some hellhole like Afghanistan, Iraq, or better still as a mercenary in Africa.  The more jaded the better.  Having no steady relationship with any woman, the last being with a high school sweetheart, who married the safe guy and had two point four children.

Thus, coming into the mid forties, the next bullet quite possibly having his name on it, the job is beginning to look a little passe.  Of course, and there is one other small problem: the people you’ve been hunting down and killing want retribution, and won’t stop until you are dead.

And worse still, one of your own people is trying to kill you, not because of what you did, but just because of who you work for.

Nothing personal.

Don’t you just love it when someone says that?

Well, that’s where the story starts…