Media mogul Ted Turner used to say that he was “cable before cable was cool.” Michael Osbourne, the hero of my second and third novels, The Mark of the Assassin and The Marching Season, was counterterrorism before counterterrorism was cool.
If anyone was born and bred to be a spy, it was Michael. The son of an “old boy” CIA officer whose career was destroyed by the mole hunts of James Angleton, Michael was raised mainly in Europe and the Middle East and learned to speak Arabic as a child. He returned to the United States to attend Dartmouth, one of the CIA’s favorite recruiting grounds, and was offered a job at the Agency soon after graduation. Like all recruits destined for a job overseas in the field, Michael underwent training at “the Farm,” the CIA’s school at Camp Peary, Virginia. He then embarked on a career as a professional spy, or case officer, in the lexicon of the Agency.
Unlike most CIA officers stationed abroad, Michael did not have State Department cover or work from an embassy. He was what the Agency referred to as a NOC. Pronounced knock, it stands for “nonofficial cover,” meaning that he operated without the protection of a diplomatic passport. Posing as an American businessman and equipped with fluent Arabic, Michael recruited and ran spies across the Middle East throughout the 1980s. His exposure to the region made him one of the Agency’s foremost experts on terrorism, which, at the time, wasn’t high on the list of CIA priorities. The Agency was still focused on another enemy: the Soviet Union.
Michael would have remained overseas as an agent-runner were it not for the murder of his lover, Sarah Randolph. His cover blown by the affair, he returned to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia, and took up a post at the CIA’s new Counterterrorism Center. He also fell and love with and married Elizabeth Cannon, a prominent Washington lawyer and the daughter of New York Senator Douglas Cannon.
Their quiet life together in Georgetown was shattered when an American airliner was shot down by a Stinger missile off Long Island, New York. Michael’s investigation of the incident, told in The Mark of the Assassin, would conclude that the attack was not the work of terrorists but an international conspiracy with tentacles reaching into the CIA itself. His quest would also bring him face to face with the man who murdered his lover: Jean-Paul Delaroche, a KGB assassin, living in France under deep cover.
Michael’s actions during his investigation ruffled many feathers at Langley, and at the end of the affair, his career was in ruins. He and Elizabeth moved to New York, where Elizabeth practiced law and Michael devoted much time to their newborn twins. But he was drawn back into the CIA when his father-in-law was appointed to be the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and was targeted for assassination by Protestant terrorists from Northern Ireland bent on undermining the Good Friday peace agreement. The book was called The Marching Season, and it would turn out to be Michael’s last assignment. Deciding I needed a break from the CIA, I created a character named Gabriel Allon. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, Gabriel would alter the course of my career.
In many respects, the Gabriel Allon series is a direct “spin-off” from the Michael Osbourne series. Gabriel’s mentor, Ari Shamron, was a bit player The Mark of the Assassin and The Marching Season and quite the villain. I recast him completely and turned him into the fully formed character that he is today. Adrian Carter, who features prominently in A Death in Vienna, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, and Moscow Rules, was Michael’s boss at the Counterterrorism Center. Jean-Paul Delaroche, the KGB assassin with a passion for watercolors, is almost certainly a charcoal sketch of Gabriel Allon. Indeed, I have often thought that I simply combined equal parts of Michael Osbourne and Jean-Paul Delaroche in a mixing bowl and produced Gabriel Allon.
I receive thousands of emails each year from readers, and a very large percentage pose a single question: Are you ever going to write about Michael Osbourne again? The answer is, I don’t know. For the moment I feel obligated to publish an Allon book once a year. Given my current touring schedule, there simply aren’t enough months in the year, or hours in the day, to produce a second book. And unlike many bestselling authors who work with collaborators or coauthors, I prefer to work alone. It is one of the reasons why I became a writer in the first place.
That said, I would definitely like to write another Osbourne book, and I’ve even got a couple of rough plot ideas scribbled on my “books to get to” list. He and Elizabeth moved back to Georgetown recently, and, if I’m not mistaken, I saw him walking a dog along 35th Street the other day. There’s a rumor he’s about to take a teaching position at Georgetown University. There’s also a rumor he’s working for the Agency again. Knowing Michael, it’s probably a combination of the two. Hmm… A Georgetown University professor who moonlights as an undercover CIA agent. Sounds like the start of a good novel.
