Victor in the Rubble
Alex Finley
Victor in the Rubble started as a catharsis. It was my way of dealing with the trauma that was forced on the Intelligence Community in the wake of 9/11, Iraq, and the 2004 intelligence reform.
One day, I was at the office when something blew up in Yemen (it is a sign of the times that I no longer recall what, exactly, blew up) and a manager in the office I was in approached a case officer at his desk. On a nearby TV screen, we could see the fire in Yemen burning, people carrying out the dead. The manager asked the case officer—at that point a 12-year veteran of the Agency’s Counterterrorism Center—why he hadn’t yet filled out a survey on Agency employee satisfaction.
I thought the case officer’s head was going to explode. He managed to keep his cool just long enough to say to the manager (loud enough for the entire office to hear), “The terrorists aren’t filling out any [expletive] forms.” Then he walked out.
And I thought: What if terrorists did have to fill out forms? That would be hilarious.
When I left the Agency, I pulled together the bureaucratic ridiculousness I had experienced myself, combined it with some pretty great anecdotes from friends and colleagues, and decided to transpose that bureaucratic system on the terrorists. Indeed, what if terrorists had to fill out forms and go through the same bureaucratic rigmarole our Intelligence Community must go through? And just like that, I had a novel.
"Victor Caro is a counterterrorism officer with the CYA, caught in a world where job security trumps national security. On assignment in West Africa in a post-9/11 world, he is tasked with hunting down the terrorist Omar al-Suqqit, who is looking to launch his group of ragtag militants onto the international jihadi stage. But chasing a terrorist proves an easier challenge than managing his agency’s bureaucracy. Omar, meanwhile, faces his own bureaucratic struggles as he joins forces with a global terrorist group that begins micro-managing its franchises in an effort to streamline attacks. When Victor appears on his own country’s Terrorist Watch List and Omar finds himself struggling to write ‘Lessons Learned’ in the suicide bomber program, they each realize they might have a common enemy: red tape."
Victor in the Rubble at Amazon.