The Pleasures of Conspiracy
You do not have to be paranoid to enjoy a good conspiracy. There are enough good, real conspiracies in the world to feed and inspire many good stories, which can be lots of fun to write and read.
While area 51 can feed the imagination of many paranoiacs, several conspiracies to murder Charles De Gaul when he was the President of France have inspired a suspense masterpiece, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth.
Very often, reading the news, the question arises: Is it a conspiracy? And even when you find out that it is not, you ask yourself: What if it were a conspiracy?
When you just hear of some sex scandal, such as the Profumoaffair in the UK, President Clinton’s Monica affair or New York Governor Spitzer’s prostitution affair, the first thought is “It cannot be true. He cannot be so stupid”, it must be a fabrication. However, when the culprits admit to the stupidity, the thought sometimes starts considering the possibility of some conspiracy that took advantage of a weakness of the victim. Intelligence services are known to have used such techniques, known as “Honey Traps.”
President Clinton’s affair, started my thought process, which culminated in Mission to Fail. In this thought process, I discarded the “Honey Trap” method, and went instead for a common political practice of researching a politicians past to find facts and indiscretions which can be used against him/her. This thought process was based on manufacturing a scandal, and how to do it so that the victim cannot recover from it, like President Clinton did.
Mission to Fail is the result of this mind journey, in which in which the scandal was just one factor. Other parts of the conspiracy included the motive, the means and the goal, all of which had to be imagined. For all this I tried to create a credible conspiracy with believable people.
This novel is an accountant's dream--if that dream turns into nightmare. The current POTUS is accused of a gay encounter years ago in his home state of Ohio. The accuser is not media-savvy and can barely string together a sentence; but the deposits into his bank account suggest payoffs. A White House staff member summons Steve Pinter of New York City, an unusual banker with.much integrity, often shunned for refusing to take the low road or the easy.way out. He is about to discover that as he turns over financial "rocks" in his quest for the truth, there are "monsters" hiding under those rocks who will kill to protect their schemes.
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