The Story Behind the Story: “Temple Mount,” by Keith Raffel

(Editor’s note: For this 53rd entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome back Northern California high-tech entrepreneur-turned-author Keith Raffel. After writing for this page about three previous works--Smasher [2009], Drop By Drop [2011], and A Fine and Dangerous Season [2012]--below he recalls the difficult birth of his brand-new thriller, Temple Mount.)

Thrillers and spy fiction have not recovered from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. On the frontier between East and West Germany, two different ideologies rubbed against each other, steel and stone, and if a spark was going to set off a worldwide conflagration, chances were good it would be struck there. Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, Ross Thomas, and John le Carré all took advantage of those high stakes in writing their classic novels.

So for my next book, I wanted to find the equivalent trouble spot in the contemporary world. Where, I asked myself, are two civilizations colliding today? Is there another line that divides two worldviews, so fraught that a misstep could lead to a cataclysmic clash between civilizations? That question was not hard to answer--Israel’s border with its Arab neighbors.

OK. I’d never been to Israel, and it was time to go. My son was 9 years old and ready for adventure. I read plenty about the area before going, in order to get my imagination revved up. Two thrillers stood out. Lionel Davidson’s fabulous, but largely forgotten The Menorah Men (1966) played around with the idea of uncovering the ancient menorah of the Israelites. The Alexandria Link (2007), by the redoubtable Steve Berry, suggested that Solomon’s Temple wasn’t even in Jerusalem.

For 10 days after our arrival in Israel, my son and I traipsed up and down the country. We went up to the Golan Heights. Through binoculars, we watched Hezbollah riflemen across the border in Lebanon pointing their Kalashnikovs at us. But being a target did not encourage any plots to pop into my head. We traveled to Tel Aviv and saw where David Ben-Gurion declared Israel’s independence on May 14, 1948. Six countries greeted that announcement, approved by a vote of the United Nations, by invading the brand-new State of Israel. Leon Uris’s Exodus (1958), which had made such a huge impression on me in eighth grade, tells that story. I really couldn’t find anything left for my potential thriller.

We went up to the top of Masada, where Jewish Zealots opted for suicide rather than submission to the Romans. (It’s where many Israeli combat soldiers get sworn in today.) While my soul cringed to think of the Roman war engines moving forward to crush fighters for religious freedom, the writer in me wondered what if a modern-day discovery showed there had been no mass suicide, that the Zealots had escaped to fight another day? I marked that idea down as a possibility.

Author Keith Raffel on Temple Mount.

Finally, we arrived in the holy city of Jerusalem.

We started our explorations at King Hezekiah’s Tunnel. Hezekiah of the ancient kingdom of Judea had it dug in the 8th century BCE to ensure a water supply in case of an Assyrian siege. So, my son and I plunged into the tunnel with dozens of other tourists. The passageway is dark, most of it about five feet high and no wider than my shoulders. Water swished around my calves. Three hundred yards into the tunnel, I stumbled into the person in front of me--my son was up ahead with some other kids. In a chain collision, the person behind me ran smack into my back. So I was crouched over, my shoulders scraping the side of the tunnel, cold water swirling around my legs, and unable to move. I had not known till that moment that I was claustrophobic. Seconds ticked off and then minutes. The writer in me floated over my head and whispered, “So this is what panic feels like. Remember and you can use it.”

Still, knowing I was going to use claustrophobic panic in my book was far from finding a story. A day or two later we were scheduled to walk in another tunnel, one that ran underneath the Kotel, the Western Wall. I sucked it up and, heart pounding, got ready to descend again. Thank the stars, this tunnel was wider. We marveled at the size of the stones that made up the Wall. How had the ancients moved the Western Stone, which weighs 570 tons, into place? In a nook in the tunnel, a huddled coterie of a half-dozen women prayed at the point closest to the Holy of Holies, the room in Solomon’s Temple where the Ark of the Covenant was ensconced. And why was the Ark so holy? Because it held the tablets Moses is said to have received on Mount Sinai.

(Right) A tunnel beneath the Western Wall in Jerusalem

So my son and I continued moving along the tunnel until we came to a circle of concrete amidst the massive stone blocks. I asked what it was and learned of two prominent rabbis who believed the Ark of the Covenant had been hidden in a shaft under the Holy of Holies when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem 57 centuries ago. The rabbis drilled and dug at night. But the Muslim authorities on the surface of the Temple Mount felt the vibrations of the jackhammers. They complained to the Israeli authorities who, fearing violence, put a stop to the midnight digging and plugged up the excavation.

OK, then. The magical two-word question for any thriller writer is “What if?” What if, I asked myself, the two rabbis had seen the Ark, before their excavations had been plugged up? And then, what if our hero’s grandfather had been with those rabbis and also seen the Ark?

I was off and writing. At the opening of my new novel, Temple Mount, Alex Kalman has sold his high-tech company in California’s Silicon Valley and is wondering what to do with his life. The phone rings. On his deathbed, his estranged grandfather tells him he has seen the Ark under the Temple Mount. Kalman embarks on a quest that takes him from Washington, D.C.’s corridors of power to the ancient passages under Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Finally, Americans, Arabs, and Israelis agree on something--the need to stop Alex Kalman.

The trip to Israel my son and I took left me with great memories and two souvenirs, my fifth novel and a lingering case of claustrophobia.

The Story Behind the Story: “A Fine and Dangerous Season,” by Keith Raffel

(Editor’s note: This 37th contribution to The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series brings back Northern California author Keith Raffel. This is, in fact, his third “Story Behind the Story” essay. He wrote previously about his 2009 Silicon Valley novel, Smasher, and his 2011 political thriller, Drop By Drop. Below, Raffel traces the inspiration and research that went into his new work of speculative historical fiction, A Fine and Dangerous Season, which is available from Amazon as well as from Barnes & Noble. Read an excerpt from the novel here).

Who knew that future president John F. Kennedy had spent the fall quarter of 1940 at Stanford Business School in my hometown of Palo Alto, California? Well, once I found out, I asked myself the two-word question that all thriller authors ask: “What if?” What if during his time at Stanford, JFK becomes fast friends with someone from a completely different background who is Jewish, not Catholic, San Franciscan rather than Bostonian, with a famous left-wing father, not a buccaneering capitalist one? And what if JFK and this fictitious character, Nate Michaels, have a falling out? Kicking around these ideas with college pal Rick Wolff, he asked the best “what if” of all: What if JFK needs this guy’s help 22 years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

In the fall of 1940, Kennedy was just killing time at Stanford. He’d already graduated from Harvard College. His book Why England Slept (based on his senior thesis) had hit the bestseller lists in the spring. He figured war was coming, and he’d enlist. His father, the formidable Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., the American ambassador to Great Britain, wanted him to go to Yale Law School. But his older brother’s college roommate had expounded on two major differences between Harvard and Stanford--the weather and co-education. That was argument enough to make JFK beat it to Palo Alto as a special student at the business school. What better place to hang out?

I could empathize with “Jack” Kennedy. After graduating from college, I was trying to figure out what to do as well. To get far away from my hometown (which, after all, is Palo Alto), I headed over to England to study history. Good decision. I am just now realizing that what I loved about studying history is the same thing I love about composing thrillers. In both, I get to look at how people react to an emergency, a time of high drama, and how they show courage--or not. That’s a theme I explore in my new e-book, A Fine and Dangerous Season. Using primary research whenever possible, I try to fit the events of the novel into the interstices of the historical record.

As a first step, I drove by 624 Mayfield on campus where Kennedy lived in a guest house that he rented for $60 per month. (The house is long gone.) JFK used to head down to Los Angeles, too. In his 1980 memoir, Straight Shooting, actor Robert Stack of The Untouchables fame describes how JFK took advantage of Stack’s “little pad” on Whitley Terrace for rendezvous with various Hollywood starlets. At the Palo Alto Library, I found old menus from JFK’s favorite hangout, L’Omelette. The prices seemed reasonable enough--a quarter for a martini and six bits for a French lamb chop dinner! I discovered JFK’s favorite courses at Stanford weren’t business classes at all, but--no surprise--courses on politics and international relations. From the archives of the student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, I learned that the closest call in Stanford’s 1940 undefeated football season came against the University of California, Los Angeles, where a fellow named Jackie Robinson almost beat the Stanford team single-handed.

(Right) The bar at L’Omelette

Back at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, I found a teasing and witty letter from Kennedy’s Stanford girlfriend Harriet “Flip” Price, who chided, “You wouldn’t exactly win a prize for the world’s best correspondent.” I got the biggest kick of all when I came across the schedule of movies at the Stanford Theatre--which, amazingly enough, is still showing great films from the 1940s in downtown Palo Alto. In one scene of my novel, set on a Saturday night in October 1940, my man Nate and his girlfriend eat popcorn and hold greasy hands while the movie showing is The Quarterback. Wayne Morris plays twins, one a star football player without too much upstairs and the other an egghead studying to be a professor. Inevitably, both loved the same girl, an oblique metaphor to what was happening in the “real life” laid out in my book.

Now, how was I going to find a role for Nate Michaels in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis? I remembered from a college course that John Scali, an ABC News correspondent, had opened a back channel during the crisis with a known KGB agent in Washington, D.C. In the history of that crisis, as recounted in Fine and Dangerous, Scali was out and Nate was in. Back in the 1930s, a Soviet consular official in San Francisco named Maxim Volkov had kept in touch with potential sympathizers like Nate’s own father, a lawyer for the communist-leaning Longshoremen’s Union. Now, in the 1962 of my novel, Volkov is head of the KGB in Washington, and JFK needs Nate to reach out to him to see if there is a way to stop the headlong rush to nuclear war.

Doing the research on the Cuban Missile Crisis itself was much easier than the work I did on Stanford in 1940. Few modern events have been more scrutinized by historians. With my preference for primary sources, I relied on the book The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, some 500 pages of word-for-word transcriptions of administration deliberations. That volume was co-edited by the late Ernest R. May, a great historian and a favorite college professor of mine. Thanks to May’s work, characters in my own book could use the same words they’d spoken in 1962. The only difference is that I place Nate in the room sitting just behind JFK.


ExComm meeting at the White House, October 29, 1962

I kept a book called Designing Camelot: The Kennedy White House Restoration next to me as I wrote to ensure that I accurately described White House rooms and the labyrinthine passages between them. It was much easier to get the architecture of the KGB safe house right. As a model, I used the house on Swann Street NW in D.C. where I’d lived myself for three years. Online, I found snapshots of the Steuart Motor car dealership in the nation’s capital, where U2 reconnaissance photos of Soviet missiles in Cuba were in fact analyzed. A person in the parish office at St. Stephens Martyr Church told me there is a little brass plate on her building, noting that JFK frequently worshipped there. One early reader of my manuscript suggested that the flight from Washington to San Francisco that Nate catches at the end of the book seemed too short for half a century ago. Nope. Fifty-year-old flight schedules show that 707s high-tailed it across the country faster than today’s advanced jetliners.

Oh yes, airplanes. In the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nate frequently harks back to his years flying bombers during World War II. When a B-17 Flying Fortress showed up at Moffett Field, just a few miles from my place in Palo Alto, my son and I hustled down there and crawled through the plane. I spent more than my fair share of time squeezed into the pilot’s seat and then came down to chat with B-17 veterans who recounted in unadorned words what it was like on those long, cold flights from southeast England to targets in the German industrial heartland.

Certainly, the risk in writing a historical thriller is losing the thread of the plot and making readers feel that they are being subjected to a graduate thesis. Believe me, I did try hard not to make that mistake with A Fine and Dangerous Season. I promise I murdered lots of darlings. Still, the magic of writing this book transported me right back to Palo Alto in 1940 and the White House in 1962. Even today, when driving down El Camino Real in Palo Alto, I pass the corner where the old L’Omelette stood and see a hazy outline of John F. Kennedy at the bar surrounded by a passel of admiring women.

The Story Behind the Story: “Drop By Drop,” by Keith Raffel

(Editor’s note: This 22nd installment in our “Story Behind the Story” series welcomes back Northern California author Keith Raffel. After writing here a couple of years ago about his Silicon Valley novel, Smasher, he returns now to offer some background on his brand-new, Washington, D.C.-based political thriller, Drop By Drop, which is available as an e-book from both Amazon and Smashwords.)

I’m going to confess a deep, dark secret right up front--I went to law school. This was in the Northeast during the second half of the 1970s. In my own defense, though, I must mention that a summer working for a big Wall Street firm cured me of any desire to enter private practice.

Being young and idealistic, I went down to Washington, D.C., after graduation and managed to wrangle an interview with the staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It went well, but I then needed to pass muster with the chairman, Senator Daniel K. Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii. I knew he’d lost an arm as a hero in World War II, and while sitting in his anteroom, I panicked. How would I shake hands with him if it was his right arm that was missing? It turned out that his right sleeve was indeed the empty one. I stuck out my left hand and shook his. That seemed to work out fine. (I later learned that Inouye preferred to grasp your right hand while twisting his left one.)

Senator Inouye opened the interview by saying, “By the time you get to me you probably will get the job, unless you’ve done something bad in the last few weeks. Have you?” I smiled and said, “Well, I’ve taken the bar exam.” He barked, “Did you pass?” No joking with him. The results were months away, but I still replied, “Yes, sir.” I got the position.

The Intelligence Committee had just been made permanent based on the recommendation of the Church Committee, which had deemed the CIA a “rogue elephant.” I started as the junior of three lawyers on the committee staff. Before the end of my first year, the other two had left. I was 27 years old and suddenly the senior attorney on the committee overseeing the government’s secret intelligence activities. Holy shit!

I didn’t realize how much of what happens in my new novel, Drop By Drop, was inspired by my experiences back then till I started writing this “Story Behind the Story” essay. One example: The hero of the book, former Stanford professor Sam Rockman, has to figure out how to shake hands with U.S. President Lucas, who lost his right arm in Desert Storm.

Senator Birch Bayh (D-Indiana) replaced Inouye as chairman of the committee in my second year on the staff. When I walked down the halls with Senator Bayh, he emphasized each important point with a physical imprint. I gave my book’s Senator Marty Vincent that same quirk:

The senator put his arm around my shoulder as we walked through narrow, twisty corridors. He squeezed. No politician since LBJ pressed the flesh as literally as Senator Vincent. He used a touch, slap, or squeeze to punctuate each statement, just as a writer would turn to an exclamation point, italics, or a bold font.

One time, Senator Bayh called another staff member and me up to his office because we’d given him conflicting recommendations on how to vote on a bill. After 20 minutes or so of discussion, he asked my colleague, “Why are you advocating this position?”

“Because you are running for reelection and your opponent will hammer you if you vote the other way.”

“But Keith is right,” he said.

You can see why Birch lost his seat in 1981 to Dan Quayle. That result was enough to make me question my commitment to democracy. I still gave my fictional Senator Vincent the same deep commitment to the Constitution and doing what’s right that I saw from Birch in real life.

The head of the legislation subcommittee for most of my stint on Capitol Hill was Senator Walter D. Huddleston (D-Kentucky). Unlike almost all his colleagues, he had not run for president, was not running, and had no desire to run. In Drop By Drop I give Senator Vincent that same distinction, as well as the same Bluegrass State background. Huddleston’s staff used to call him “Senator” as if that were his first name. I might get a call from his admin who would say, “Senator wants you up here.” Or I might come up to speak to him and be told, “Senator is on the floor.” I use all of that in the book, too.

In the photo below, I’m in the White House with Senator Huddleston. He’d been invited to the Executive Mansion to discuss the legislative charter for the CIA and the intelligence community we’d been working on. He had been told the meeting was for “principals only.” Senator thought that “principals only” was baloney. He figured congressmen and senators were principals--they were elected by the people. By that criterion, the president and vice president were the only principals in the executive branch. In his view the head of the CIA was no “principal”; he was just a staffer, same as I was. “Principals only” was code for excluding congressional staffers and obtaining an advantage in negotiations. Anyway, when Senator stopped his car at the White House gate before this meeting, the uniformed guard noted that he was on the admission list, but I was not. Senator Huddleston said, “If I’m on the list, so is he,” and he pushed down on the accelerator. What a way to inspire loyalty! An incident unfolds pretty much that same way in Drop By Drop.


A meeting at the White House in 1980. Vice President Walter Mondale sits at the head of the table, with CIA Director Stansfield Turner to his right and Senator Walter D. Huddleston to Mondale’s left. Author Raffel appears in the foreground, on the right.

Over half of the book’s Senator Vincent I made up. The rest is an amalgam of other senators, including Bayh and Huddleston.

My duties with the committee took me to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, pretty regularly. A fellow in his late 60s or early 70s, whose furrowed, weathered face was protected from the sun by a pith helmet, directed parking at that secure facility. Effusive as could be, he always called me “Senator” when I hopped out of my car, though I promise in those days I looked more nerd than lawmaker. I use a character based on him in the book, as well.

A signal accomplishment of the Intelligence Committee in those days was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which set up a procedure to obtain warrants for national security wiretaps. (The law seemed to work fine until the second Bush administration decided to ignore it.) Anyway, I was on the Senate floor during the vote on FISA when Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), co-manager of the bill along with Senator Bayh, asked me for a count.

“Ninety-five to one in favor,” I told him. (Note: There were two Republican Senator Scotts in those days, the respected Hugh Scott from Pennsylvania and William Scott from Virginia, once voted the stupidest senator in a Capitol Hill poll.)

“And who was the one?” Senator Kennedy asked.

“Scott of Virginia.”

Senator Kennedy rubbed his hands and said, “Ah, better than unanimous.”

I confess to stealing that line for an early draft of Drop By Drop, but perhaps my conscience eventually got the better of me, because I can’t find it in the final draft.

Two FBI agents visited me one afternoon in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. An internal memo written by the CIA’s general counsel had been found on the sidewalk near my house. They wanted to polygraph me to see if the general counsel and I were conspiring somehow. (To this day, I wonder what was going on.) Unsurprisingly, Sam Rockman has a similar experience in Drop By Drop.

In my fourth year in Washington, the Republicans gained control of the Senate and, as a consequence, conservative lion Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) took over chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee. Once in a closed hearing, I was seated directly behind Senator Huddleston, ready to whisper in his ear as required. Senator Goldwater’s back was creaky, so whenever he turned to ask a staff member a question, he could only make it three-quarters of the way around. That left him looking directly at me, someone who worked for a Democratic senator. At one point, Goldwater asked a question, and his own staffer hastened to answer as usual. But Goldwater pointed a thumb in my direction, glared at the guy who’d spoken, and growled, “I didn’t ask you. I asked him.” When it came to foreign policy, national defense, and intelligence activities, Senator Goldwater didn’t care much for partisanship.

In fact, partisanship on the committee overall was not quite at the level it reached elsewhere on the Hill. Late one afternoon, I heard from then-Senator Joe Biden (D-Delaware) that he wanted to deliver a speech on the Senate floor the next morning concerning a bill I was working on. I stayed up all night drafting and editing. At 9 a.m. the next morning, I went up the senator’s office, speech in hand. His chief of staff told me that Senator Biden had changed his mind about making the speech. I went back downstairs and hurled the binder holding the draft against the wall of my cubicle. A staffer from the other party, whom I rarely agreed with on anything, heard the crash and stuck his head around the corner to see what was going on. I told him, “Three-quarters of what I do around this place is wasted effort.” He smiled and said, “That makes you the most effective staffer on Capitol Hill.” Republican and Democratic staff members even socialized. A colleague from those days tells me she still has a photograph of Fred Thompson, Law & Order district attorney and real-life Republican senator and presidential candidate, taken during a party at my place near Dupont Circle back when Thompson served as special counsel to the committee.

Despite the cross-aisle fraternization, I knew no one in the nation’s capital like Drop By Drop’s Cecilia Plant, the smart-as-a-whip, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, red-haired six-footer who serves as the Intelligence Committee’s majority staff director and the nemesis of Sam Rockman, who works for the minority party. Even though she was smart, my girlfriend back then in D.C. was a tennis-playing dark blonde who, to the best of my recollection, never once dropped an F-bomb. Where did Cecilia come from? My imagination?

When I started writing Drop By Drop, I worried whether that imagination of mine would be able to transport me back to Capitol Hill. As it turned out, once I sat down in my regular place at the local café and started guzzling my green tea, I became Sam Rockman, the Senate Intelligence Committee staff member. It was as him I entered a parallel world, similar to this one but different, where a terrorist bomb explodes just yards away from me, where secret documents show up on my doorstep, and where Russians try to poison me. I guess that’s the magic of writing fiction.

READ MORE: “Keith 5.0,” by Keith Raffel (Dot Dead Diary).

The Story Behind the Story: “Smasher,” by Keith Raffel

(Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series. Today we hear from Keith Raffel, author of the brand-new Silicon Valley thriller, Smasher. A former counsel to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and the founder of UpShot Corporation, an Internet software company, Raffel previously wrote Dot Dead [2006], which was also set in California’s high-tech corridor. He’s a contributor to the Inkspot blog, but writes a blog of his own as well, called Dot Dead Diary.)

My wife and children are careful to correct anyone who calls me a native of California. Seventh- and eighth-generation Californians, respectively, they view me as a greenhorn just off the boat. Although I’m Chicago-born, I have lived in Palo Alto in the midst of Silicon Valley since I was 8 years old, before it was Silicon Valley, when it was still known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Back then, two-thirds of the nation’s apricots were grown here and San Jose, now one of the 10 largest cities in the United States, was a sleepy canning town.

Still, while I was growing up, I did have some clues as to the wondrous things that were happening hereabouts. My dad worked on the first videotape recorders as an engineer at Ampex. I went to high school with the children of Hewlett and Packard. Bob Noyce at Intel was developing the microprocessor, Doug Engelbart was putting together a wooden prototype of the computer mouse, and Bob Metcalf and Dave Boggs at Xerox PARC were coming up with the Ethernet networking protocols. Today these achievements make up whole chapters of the Valley’s creation story.

Something else was going on back then that I didn’t notice at all. Over at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), physicists were discovering what our universe is made of. You’ve seen that picture of an atom with spheres clustered in the middle representing neutrons and protons and electrons whirling in orbit around them? It’s employed as an icon to symbolize cutting-edge science. But everything in the picture is wrong. Protons and neutrons are not balls; they’re made up of three particles called quarks (which come in six flavors: up, down, top, bottom, strange, and beauty). I know your new Mac, PC, or iPhone with the incredible user interface and fast graphics accelerator chip is cool. And for all I know, you thank the gods of Silicon Valley everyday for developing its underlying technology. But is it cooler than the building blocks of the universe, the leftovers from the Big Bang?

I took a tour of the building at SLAC where quarks were discovered four decades ago. And you know what? It’s a warehouse. Thomas Edison’s lab is a national historical park. The Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk is a national memorial. But in the midst of Silicon Valley, the very place where scientists identified key building blocks of the universe is filled with dusty boxes.

What kind of people made that discovery? Shouldn’t they be celebrated? Maybe, but in a work of fiction, cautiously. As a thriller writer, my main job is to entertain. But I figured I could sneak in a fictionalized story of the discovery of quarks. Fun physics? Sure. What if someone were zapped by an electron beam moving at more than 99 percent of the speed of light? The key was focusing not on the particles, but on the people.

So how could I tell the story in compelling fashion? Nothing makes even a crotchety man like me a feminist faster than having daughters. And I have three of them. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a book on Rosalind Franklin. Her work provided the key that opened the door to the discovery of the structure of DNA. But James Watson, who won a Nobel Prize for this discovery, disses her badly in his book Double Helix. He wrote: “The real problem, then, was Rosy. The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.” In fact, Dr. Franklin was one of the top experimental scientists of the last century. Her lab colleague showed Watson an X-ray she had taken, and it was that picture that demonstrated to Watson the double helix topography of DNA. Franklin died at 37, never knowing the vital role her research had played in that discovery. Now there’s a story fraught with intrigue, personalities, and high stakes. I borrowed from the outlines of Rosalind Franklin’s life by giving Smasher’s protagonist, Ian Michaels, a great aunt who made a key discovery about quarks in the 1960s at SLAC. She died young and without the Nobel Prize her colleagues received. It falls to Ian to win her posthumous justice. I try not to be too preachy or didactic and focus on the plot, rather than the physics or the lessons learned.

But injustice two generations old was not a big enough hook to hang a thriller on. I also wanted to infuse Smasher with some of what I’d experienced--as a child and an entrepreneur--in Silicon Valley. At times, I wax nostalgic for the Eden-like Palo Alto of my youth where doors remained unlocked, cherry and apricot orchards abounded, children frolicked, and the sun always seemed to shine. Still, I wouldn’t go back to those days of yore. I’ll opt for 21st-century excitement every time. Palo Alto now sits at ground zero of the high-tech world. Hewlett-Packard and Facebook are headquartered here. Google is just to the south of us, Oracle a few miles to the north. Companies in the Valley consistently receive about a third of all the venture capital invested in the United States.

Priests look to the Vatican, financial whizzes want to be in New York City, aspiring actors head to Hollywood. For entrepreneurs, the sun rises and sets in Silicon Valley. This is the major leagues, filled with smart players from all over the world. Too many novels to count have featured Rome, Manhattan, and Hollywood. A lot fewer have been based here in Silicon Valley.

How the Valley operates reminds me of the scene in The Godfather where a gangster excuses a murder by saying, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” Here in the Valley, “it’s strictly business” justifies almost anything. If there’s a chance for an investor to extract some more shares of stock from the founder of a company, go ahead-- it’s business. If one corporate director hires a private investigator to spy on a fellow board member--well, that’s business, too.

As the founder of a Valley company, I have lived with real-life drama. One Friday, for example, money arrived from a customer just 15 minutes before our payroll checks would have bounced. That disaster could have taken down the whole company. Now, Ian Michaels of Smasher is not me. He’s better looking, smarter, more resourceful, richer, and more attractive to women. But I wanted him to live some of the real-life drama of being an entrepreneur. In today’s harsh financial environment, good companies fail because venture capitalists lose their nerve or run out of money. The stakes are high. Certainly, in a fictional world, high enough to kill for. I had to use all of that in Smasher.

It’s against this background that Smasher’s Eddie Frankson operates. He’s the CEO of Torii Networks and the second richest man in California. I’ve met some of the Valley’s biggest names, but he’s not based on any one of them. Smart and ruthless, Frankson sees it’s a good time for “a smash and grab” of Ian’s company. That’s the way these things work.

So now I had two story lines. In the first, Ian seeks to obtain recognition for his great aunt’s seminal discovery. At the same time he is fending off a predator who’s ready to wolf down his company. In the midst of all this, Ian’s wife, Rowena Goldberg, a deputy district attorney, is trying her first murder case. It’s a frenetic combination of events, but that’s how things work in Silicon Valley.

I had the characters and the setting for the book then. All (?!) I needed was a plot. Where would that come from? I waited for inspiration to strike. And then it did.

I’ve long wondered where inspiration comes from. If I wake up in the middle of the night with the answer for the plot twist, did it come from my subconscious? The gods? I don’t know. Smasher was a new experience, because this time I know the source of the spark. I was walking down Castro Street in the town of Mountain View talking to my polymathic friend Brian Rosenthal (who’s been an auto mechanic, a psychologist, and a high-school science teacher), when he said something about Nobel Prizes. A supernova exploded in my brain. Bingo! Smasher starts when someone in a black car runs down Ian’s wife. Who was driving that vehicle? Why was Rowena the target? Sorry to be coy, but I don’t want to spoil the book for any potential purchasers. As they say in the movies and here in Silicon Valley, “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.”