I didn’t want to return to Russia until I had a really fresh angle on it.

After I finished my Big Pharma novel about the opiate epidemic, I was looking around for a new subject, and I was drawn to the hostilities between Russia and Ukraine that had been going on since 2014. After all, I was trained as a Kremlinologist. It wasn’t just seething diplomatic hostilities, it was the exchange of artillery fire, the annexation of Crimea. And the diplomatic hostilities began to come to a boil.

At the same time, there was this outsized presence of Russian oligarchs in the West — you’d walk into a museum, and it would bear the name of someone who’d earned his wealth in mysterious ways in Russia.

I like the idea of novels that engage with the world in imaginative ways, that have a verisimilitude, that are about something that’s already in the real world that people grapple with. Part of the thrill of writing thrillers, to me, is to interpolate myself into the real world. So, what might happen if we take reality and adjust a few toggle switches? My novels are character-driven, but the world-building is the evocation of the world we live in. They’ve always been reportorial. I was inspired by the novels of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene and le Carré and Frederick Forsyth — novels that occupied the negative space of reality — the things we hear about but don’t know, the zone of the “what if” — things that could happen.

The tradition of the thriller, from its birth at the end of the 19^th century, was to be tethered to this reality and ask a lot of what-if questions. To find a human perspective into some of the most vexing conflicts of the era. The thriller was born in England during a time of paranoia about Germany, what Germany was up to, in the years leading up to the First World War. It makes sense that a lot of thriller writers were journalists first, from Graham Greene to Michael Connelly.

I spent a lot of time at meetings of the AFIO, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, listening to stories told by the old guys. They have great stories — some of them may never be confirmed. But you can explore them in fiction. You can ask the what-if questions. So, I write character-driven plots that are ways of exploring the world we live in, the possibilities of this world.

Hugely. I actually started working on this novel before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some six years ago, in 2019. I was fascinated by this world where these Russian oligarchs were merchant princes, buying up the fanciest real estate, acquiring the biggest yachts, the biggest private jets, endowing museum wings and hospital pavilions in the West. And then the war in Ukraine broke out, and overnight these oligarchs were persona non grata. I thought I’d have to scrap the book! But then, as I thought about it, I realized it could add a great dimension to my story — with different timelines set during these different periods, before and during the war, dramatizing this incredible reversal of fortune. And what at first seemed like a death blow to my idea of this novel was going to make the novel so much better and richer.

I was recruited by the CIA in college — which is not surprising: I was a Russian studies major at Yale, which was a traditional feeder for the CIA. But then I learned that it would involve mostly sitting in a cubicle and digesting Russian journals about the wheat harvest in Uzbekistan. I was actually hoping for the Glock and the martini shaker and the fake passports. So, I decided to create my own fictional version.

In Korea, there was never an official peace. There was a ceasefire, and it stuck. There was never an official cessation of hostilities. We may be craving an easy resolution — you know, in 24 hours! — when the reality is probably a nonsolution solution, where no one officially agrees to anything. It’s easier to make concessions when you don’t officially acknowledge you’ve made them. 

I think we want to see Russia humiliated as a penalty. We want the malefactor to be humiliated — it’s a very human desire. But history is not so encouraging about that. Germany was humiliated at the end of World War I, and that’s one of the reasons they gave us World War II. 

I tracked down a captain of superyachts who specialized in piloting yachts for oligarchs and was willing to talk without naming names. I got so many great stories and details that way. The best sources, I’ve found, love to tell stories, and this guy was a treasure trove of details and anecdotes. He told me about yachts that had custom-made submarines nestled inside. 

I didn't sit down with anyone who would have self-identified as an oligarch. That’s a term we can sling around too easily. I talked to people who were, let’s say, “oligarch adjacent.”

“Oligarch” — that's such an ambiguous term it can mean whatever you want it to. It doesn’t even mean what people think it means. Oligarchs in Russia aren’t rulers — far from it. They stay out of politics because that’s the deal they’ve made with Putin.

They continue to make deals through shell companies that have no connection to their real names.  

Then there was this remarkable shift from the oligarch as merchant prince to the oligarch on the lam, as almost a fugitive presence. That was to me a fascinating transition. First you’re on top of the world, the new Medicis, the ultimate patrons, and then you’re practically on the lam! These are people you’re throwing galas for, people you want on the board of your hospital or museum, and then five minutes later you pretend you don’t know them. They’ve become non-persons — persona non grata, rightly or wrongly. They became toxic. They were ousted from boards, their names taken off hospital wings. That reversal was so humanly compelling to me as a novelist.

In the gilded age that Henry James wrote about, there was never a point when J.P. Morgan became toxic. The American moneybags were never driven out. But the West just turned on the oligarchs.

Of course, within the intelligence community things look a little different. You may mistrust an oligarch because he’s close to Putin, but to the IC that represents an opportunity. It gives you a periscope into the Kremlin.

These were well-connected bureaucrats, mostly, who took over major industries in Russia — iron and steel, phone companies, aluminum companies, natural gas, banks . . . and in the west, they owned sports teams, huge yachts, mansions and major real estate. They’d use their private jets to fly their corgis around the world. They became such a compelling presence in our world. You know, in a Henry James novel set in England, it was the Americans who had the money.  Now it was the Russians who were the moneybags.

And there was this strange paradox. At the same time, Putin was becoming increasingly adversarial toward the U.S. He was outraged when Obama referred to Russia as a “regional power”, horrified at what happened to Qaddafi. He increasingly defined himself as a Russian nationalist. It was this ancient tension in Russia between westernizing and Slavophilia that was coming out.

We were seeing these princes of commerce, these patrons of the arts in the U.S., while Putin was becoming hostile — and that drew me to the idea of this situation. But how to make it immediately personal? I took this implicit marriage between Russia and the West and made it a literal one. You had this big oligarch who’s both lovable and sinister and he’s your father-in-law! It made the story feel all the more urgent.

I’m interested in money because I’m interested in power. And there the display of wealth can be a point of entry — look at President Trump. It announces you’re someone to be reckoned with. In Henry James, writing in the Gilded Age, new money is American, and old English and European families might need to marry it. In our new Gilded Age, we got the big-tech fortunes, of course, and I’ve written about this. But the big industrial fortunes were Russian. You could acquire the assets of Russian aluminum and oil companies, and then buy an old-line music company, or a bank; you could buy a sports media company, buy a West End theatre, finance Hollywood movies, join the board of universities, have famous museums and hospitals name buildings after you, all that. Yet the thing about these fortunes is: you never fully understand where they came from. Russian business dealings are, even for Russians, always wonderfully opaque. So, there’s an aura of mystery. Something that thriller writers always spark to.