Stonewall’s Head
And now for the thriller, Stonewall’s Head. During the time I was completing Seduction of a Wanton Dreamer, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were raging, and the U.S. was creating a lot of resentment around the world with its heavy-handed attempts to export Western democracy. I’ll never forget the breathtaking spectacle of the famous press conference held by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. When a reporter asked him about the damage being done to museums and artifacts in Iraq, he shrugged and said, “Stuff happens.”
Surely, I thought, the fatwa will be issued shortly. Apparently it never was, or it was kept quiet somehow. But that started me thinking about the possibility of writing a geopolitical thriller. Rumsfeld struck me as a likely candidate for victimhood in a revenge crime. So he became SecDef Chandler Kean, aka Stonewall, and the plot for a new book began to take form.
Ring Zero
The thought occurred to me that my fictional SecDef might have created a new security agency based in the Pentagon, separate from the traditional Pentagon agencies and the CIA, but even more secret. “Ring Zero” came to mind as a name for the group because of two things:
1) Ring Zero was a term used in the IBM OS/2 operating system to designate the core of the system. That core was so ringed off from intrusion by non OS software that no bugs, malware, or bad applications could penetrate it.
2) The Pentagon, as a building, already had rings. The corridors are arranged in rings that are lettered, rather than numbered, starting with the innermost Ring A to the outermost Ring E. So rings were already built into Pentagon-speak. Why not have a new security agency, spawned by the situation after the 911 attacks, that bore the title Ring Zero?
I had my victim. I had a location — Rumsfeld had a ranch in Taos, New Mexico, an area I knew something about. I had my spy agency and my first good guy, Achilles Smith, a fencing enthusiast. So far so good. I still had to devise an opening, an event, that would draw Achilles into action.
The Dominoes Take Over
I had just purchased the box of dominos you see elsewhere on the blog: replicas of hand-carved Renaissance dominoes. I wondered if there might be other possible uses for dominoes, something more earthbound than the mystical approach I had taken in Seduction — some sort of criminal activity, for instance.
A vision flashed in my mind: SecDef retires to his ranch, then his severed head is found in the desert, with the double-six (death’s head) domino from that set stuffed in his mouth and the letters SODM branded on his forehead. I had my plot, and I was off and running.
The Russians Make an Appearance
While I was thinking of themes, and what characters might be involved in the plot, I came up with some ideas for a Russian contingent. I knew many Russian and Ukrainian expatriates from my years at New York City Opera, and I found them to be a wonderful, fascinating bunch. But something had caught my attention when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. I asked my Russian and Ukrainian colleagues if any of them were thinking of going back, now that democracy had sprouted some twigs. Every one of them said something like “Not a chance. They’ll go right back to their old ways.”
Now, as I write this in 2022, we see a real war being waged between Russia and Ukraine. My colleagues had been absolutely right. And there are many mystifying, and colorful, characters in this book who reflect the strange phenomenon that made them so leery of returning.
Signs of the Times
I should mention that many elements of the story are obviously of their time, just like many of the details in Agatha Christie or Dashiell Hammett novels. I recently considered updating those elements, but decided against it; better to let the time, ephemeral as it was, speak for itself.
Since I do not want to create spoilers, I’ll leave it at that for now. If you wish to find out how Russians and dominoes play a part in Stonewall’s Head, I invite you to read the book.