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Stephen L. Carter - Jerichos Fall

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Amazon.com Review Book Description Stephen L. Carters brilliant debut, The Emperor of Ocean Park, spent eleven week son the New York Times best-seller list. Now, in Jerichos Fall, Carter turns his formidable talents to the shadowy world of spies, official secrecy, and financial fraud in a thriller that rivets the readers attention until the very last page. In an imposing house in the Colorado Rockies, Jericho Ainsley, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and a Wall Street titan, lies dying. He summons to his beside Beck DeForde, the younger woman for whom he threw away his career years ago, miring them both in scandal. Beck believes she is visiting to say farewell. Instead, she is drawn into a battle over an explosive secret that foreign governments and powerful corporations alike want to wrest from Jericho before he dies. An intricate and timely thriller that plumbs the emotional depths of a failed love affair and a family torn apart by mistrust, Jerichos Fall takes us on a fast-moving journey through the secretive world of intelligence operations and the meltdown of the financial markets. And it creates, in Beck DeForde, an unforgettable heroine for our turbulent age. A Q&A with Stephen L. Carter Question: Jerichos Fall is a departure from your previous novels. What made you decide to turn your attention to a spy thriller? Stephen L. Carter: I was ready for a change of pace. My other novels have been largeas the reviewers like to say, multi-layered. I wanted to try a short, straightforward page turner, a book to be read for the sheer pleasure of the story. Thrillers are fun to read, and, as I discovered, they are also lots of fun to write. If readers like Jerichos Fall, I expect I will write more of them. Question: In your Authors Note you write that the problem of mental illness among intelligence professionals is often said to be endemic. This link between intelligence work and madness is certainly born out in your character Jericho Ainsley. Why do you think this link exists and is this what drew you to Jerichos story? Stephen L. Carter: In researching my previous novel, Palace Council, I became fascinated by the problem of mental illness in the intelligence community, an issue much-commented on in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly because of James Jesus Angleton, whose paranoia when he ran counter-intelligence at the CIA nearly tore the place apart. I thought that structuring a story around an ex-spy who was losing his mind might provide a nice hook, and the rest just followed. Question: Jericho is former Director of the CIA, former Secretary of Defense, former White House National Security Advisor (former everything as you refer to him). You seem equally interested in how his career affected not only him but his family and in particular his ex-lover Rebecca DeForde (Beck). Why did you decide to make Beck the center of the story? Stephen L. Carter: My first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, dealt in part with what happens to the family of a man who is embittered after losing a tough confirmation battle for the Supreme Court. Here, I thought about the men in public life who have been brought down (or nearly brought down) by their relationships with women. We always find out what happened to the men, but rarely what happened to the women. In Beck DeForde, I wrote a character who was once the other woman to a famous man, and has had to rebuild her life after their tempestuous relationship ended. The idea of drawing her into the conspiratorial web surrounding her ex-lover was irresistible. Question: Have you always been fascinated with the idea of spies and secrets? Stephen L. Carter: It is not spying itself that interests me, it is the people who do it. I have done some reading about the toll that intelligence work takes on families, and here I have tried to imagine it fictionally. As to secrets, I teach a course at Yale Law School on secrets and the law. We build powerful walls to keep secrets, and most of them are probably not worth keeping. Those that are, sooner or later tend to leak through the wall. No doubt there are some secrets that should be kept, but classification and national security tempt those in power to keep in the darkness acts and words that should be dragged into the light. One rule of thumb I wish all officials would follow is this: Dont do anything youre not willing to defend in your memoirs. Question: What sort of research did this novel require? Did you have to investigate the history of the CIA? What its like to work in the intelligence community? Interrogation techniques? Did your research into the intelligence community unearth any surprises? Stephen L. Carter: I did a lot of research about the CIA, its history, its structure, its personalities, as well as about various mental illnesses. One thing that struck me was how much mental illness there has been, historically, near the top of the Agency. I mentioned Angleton. Frank Wisner, the father of the clandestine services, had a nervous breakdown while on the job. There are other, smaller stories, as well. Question:* After his retirement, Jericho went to work for a big financial firm where he may have been using his former ties and connections to perpetrate a massive financial fraud. While you are clear to point out that this is fiction it does seem that many government big wigs transition to the financial sector. Should we be troubled about this tendency? Have there been financial scandals involving former CIA agents? *Stephen L. Carter: The CIA has had its share of financial scandals, but the larger problem, I think, is the way that people parlay government service into multi-million dollar stints lobbying and litigating against the very agencies they used to run. Such conduct is not, nor should it be, illegal; but it does not look good either. Question:* Can people who dedicate their lives to keeping secrets and trading in conspiracies, ever really retire from that kind of work? *Stephen L. Carter: Of course one can retire, but this line of work has to have a lasting effect. If you live your life not talking about your work, it can be difficult to settle into a life where you can talk about everything. And people who have been on the inside often suffer when forced to sit on the outside instead. *Question: Jerichos Fall is set mainly in a small town in the Colorado Rockies. How and why did you choose this particular setting for the novel? * Stephen L. Carter: I have spent a lot of time in the Colorado Rockies over the past thirty years, and it is a region of the country I dearly love. There are, moreover, many places in the mountains where cell phone service is iffy or non-existence. Being cut off from the outside world is of course red meat to the thriller writer... Question: Jerichos house, Stone Heights, is itself a character in this novel, one with its own secrets and surprises. It harks back to such stories as Wuthering Heights or Rebecca or an Agatha Christie mystery where the physical setting is as much a character as the people. Did you have any of those stories in mind as you wrote this? Stephen L. Carter: Oh, yes. I remember reading Thomas Hardy as a teenager, and being fascinated by the way that the house or the pond or the moor was always brooding over the action. Here, I had in effect two physical characters, the house itself, and the mountains that surround both Stone Heights and the town of Bethel. By the way, the town of Bethel is fictitious, but of course bears a biblical relation to Jericho. Question: In your previous books characters from earlier novels have gone on to appear in future novels. Will we see more of any of the characters from this novel? Stephen L. Carter: If I keep writing short thrillers like this one, we will certainly see some of these characters again. By the way, one of the minor characters in Jerichos Fall, a law professor named Tish Kirschbaum, was also a minor character in The Emperor of Ocean Park. So I have kept the connections going. (Photo Elena Seibert) From Publishers Weekly Bestseller Carter, who expertly blended social commentary and devious plots in his previous novels (The Emperor of Ocean Park; New England White; Palace Council), delivers a modest spy thriller, his first work of fiction not to focus on characters from what he has termed the darker nation. The sententious opening sentence (On the Sunday before the terror began, Rebecca DeForde pointed the rental car into the sullen darkness of her distant past) sets the tone for this minor effort. Rebecca has traveled to the Colorado Rockies to visit former CIA director Jericho Ainsley, whos dying of cancer. Jerichos decades of power and influence came to an end when he began an affair with her 15 years earlier. On arrival, Rebecca learns that shadowy forces fear that Jericho will reveal damaging Company secrets, and that his life is threatened by more than illness. Fans will miss the fully realized characters and mysterious puzzles of Carters more complex, less predictable earlier work. Author tour. (July) Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Stephen L. Carter: author's other books


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ALSO BY STEPHEN L CARTER FICTION Palace Council New England White - photo 1
ALSO BY STEPHEN L. CARTER

FICTION

Palace Council

New England White

The Emperor of Ocean Park

NONFICTION

Gods Name in Vain:
The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics

The Dissent of the Governed: A Meditation on Law, Religion, and Loyalty

Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy

Integrity

The Confirmation Mess:
Cleaning Up the Federal Appointments Process

The Culture of Disbelief:
How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion

Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby

Once again with love for Enola And it came to pass when Joshua was by - photo 2

Once again, with love, for Enola

And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and said unto him, Art thoufor us, or for our adversaries?

Joshua 5:13

PROLOGUE
The Return

On the Sunday before the terror began, Rebecca DeForde pointed the rental car into the sullen darkness of her distant past. The Interstate was behind her. So was the chilly rain that had slowed her progress. The county road wound through thick Colorado forest, now snuggling along mountain peaks, now twisting among glowering trees. Here and there a distant flicker marked a farmhouse, then was gone. Fog enclosed her like sudden blankness. There was no moon. There were no stars. Street lamps had overlooked this corner of America, and so had the programmers of the cars GPS. The road was curvy and unkempt and, in mid-April, icy in places. Still, Rebecca drove very fast, the way she always did. She did not know whether she was running away or running toward. She was thirty-four years old and for most of her life had felt as if she were running sideways, a cheerleader watching others play the game. She had grown accustomed to her role, and hated to be dragged onto the field. She had not wanted to make the journey, but she had no choice. Jericho Ainsley was dying, and although hardly anybody remembered nowadays exactly what Rebecca and Jericho had been to each other, everybody agreed that they had once been something. Beck herself had trouble recalling the precise details of their eighteen months together, even though, once upon a time, she had given interviews about it.

Come on, she urged the poky car as it struggled up the slope. Like many lonely people, Beck was on terms of easy conversational familiarity with the objects around her, and, often, with herself. Come on, you can do this, dont quit on me.

The car seemed to grumble back at her.

Its okay. Patting the dashboard as its screens glowed sullen rebuke. Its okay. You can do this.

The car finally upshifted, and picked up the pace. Rebecca smiled, although another part of her would happily have missed the trip entirely.

Jericho was not supposed to die. Not yet. He and Beck were supposed towhat? Reconcile? Apologize? Have an ordinary human conversation? There was some ceremony left, anyway, and they were supposed to have all the time in the world to perform it.

Guess not, she muttered.

Beck had learned of Jerichos condition not from his family but from an enterprising reporter, who had tracked her down in Boston. The reporter called not the BlackBerry she used for business but her personal cell, a number known to perhaps a dozen people. It was Saturday. She liked weekends, because the stores were crowded, and you could observe the flow of customers, looking for bottlenecks and underused spaces.

Im updating Ambassador Ainsleys obituary, the reporter had shouted, because Rebecca was walking the sales floor and could hardly hear over the din. Not the national-security angle, the reporter explained. The personal side. The scandal. In case he dies this time.

And wondered whether she would care to comment.

Beck had said something rude and unprintable. Hanging up, she had called the house, the number she never forgot although she had not used it in years. She feared and half hoped the number had been changed, but Audrey answered on the second ring and said that Jericho had been asking for her: Audrey, who never went anywhere. If Audrey was at the bedside, things were grim indeed. The doctors have surrendered, she said. My fathers future is in Gods hands, added Audrey, who preached that all things were.

Beck promised to come at once.

At once proved complicated. She arranged for her conniving deputy to take over the semi-annual inspection tour of the nineteen New England stores owned by the retail conglomerate that employed her, then called her boss, an acerbic little man called Pfister, who grumbled and fussed and told her that this was a really lousy time to take family leave. Had Rebecca finished college, she would be Pfisters boss rather than the other way around: they both knew it. He scolded her all the harder as a result. But when Rebecca for once stood her ground, Pfister, astonished at his own generosity, told her that she could have three days, no more. He needed her back in time for the regional managers meeting, set to begin Friday morning in Chicago. Beck promised she would be there.

Actually, she would not.

By Friday, Rebecca DeForde would be running for her life.

SUNDAY NIGHT
CHAPTER 1
The Mountain
(i)

Darkness bore down on her as the car shuddered up the mountain. Distant lights danced at the edge of her vision, then vanished. Beck wondered how bad it would be. In her mind, she saw only the Jericho she had loved fifteen yeas ago and, in some ways, still did: the dashing scion of an old New England family that had provided government officials since the Revolution. One of his ancestors had a traffic circle named for him in Washington. A cousin served in the Senate. The familys history was overwhelming; the Jericho for whom Beck had fallen had certainly overwhelmed her. He had been brilliant, and powerful, and confident, and fun, ever ready with eternal wisdom, or clever barbs. She did not like to think of that mighty man ravaged by disease. She had no illusions. She remembered what cancer had done to her own father.

Whatever was waiting, she had to go.

On Saturday afternoon, having cleared her decks with Pfister, Beck took the shuttle from Boston to Washington. She lived in Virginia, a stones throw from Reagan National Airport. Her daughter was at a church retreat, church being a thing that Beck did because she had been raised that way, and her mother would be offended if Rebecca dared differ. Beck decided to let Nina stay the night with the other kids. The two of them could ride together to the airport on Sunday, then enplane for their different destinations. Rebeccas mother, Jacqueline, had been after her for weeks to send Nina for a visit, and maybe this was the time. The child was only in second grade; missing a few days of instruction would do her no harm. Beck hesitated, then made the inevitable call to Florida, to ask if her mother could look after Nina. The conversation soon turned into a battle.

I dont know how you could even think about taking a six-year-old to visit a man like that.

Im not taking her, Mom. Thats why Im calling you.

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