In the last few years, my crystal ball has been working overtime. Lethal Agent, a story about a weaponized coronavirus, was released shortly before the COVID-19 outbreak. A year later, Total Power’s dire warnings about the vulnerability of America’s power infrastructure were confirmed by the collapse of the Texas grid. Fans have been asking me what I’m writing about next so they can be prepared in case it blows up in the headlines again.
With Enemy at the Gates, my effort to predict the future got me into hot water. I’d planned for the next three Mitch Rapp novels to follow the destruction of America’s democracy from within. Power-hungry politicians, a co-opted military, and multiple foreign actors would work in concert to degrade our freedoms until there was nothing left. America would become a democracy in name only—something more like Russia or Iran than the country our founding fathers created.
The problem was that the claims of fraud in America’s 2020 presidential election and the subsequent Capitol riot made the book feel a little too close to reality. In the end, I decided to abandon the grand political arc and focus entirely on Mitch. For the first time in his life, he’s working for a president who doesn’t like or trust him. He’s watching internal threats become more dangerous than the external ones he’s spent his career fighting. And he’s starting to feel all those old wounds—both physical and psychological. The world is changing at a pace that’s never been seen before in human history. Is Mitch willing to change with it?