Barry Eisler's Backstory

I start each Rain story by asking myself questions about the characters from the previous book. For Killing Rain, this task required primary focus on Rain himself. Rain is a guy who's spent a lifetime building up an armor suit of cynicism. He protects himself professionally and emotionally by assuming the worst about people -- "preempting betrayal," as he describes it to Delilah in Rain Storm. But the sacrifice Dox makes at the end of Rain Storm to save Rain's life punctures Rain's emotional armor and forces him to acknowledge that there are people out there who are trustworthy. So in searching for the story that would become Killing Rain, I started by asking how Rain would be dealing with the selfless good Dox did him.

I mentioned what I was working on to a friend of mine (Marc MacYoung of www.nononsenseselfdefense.com), who suggested that I talk to a mutual acquaintance of ours, Terry Trahan. I did so, and learned that Terry has a dark past but turned his life around after meeting a woman whose love, as he put it, he wanted to be worthy of. Terry shared some remarkable experiences about what it's like for a hard man to try to move from darkness to light, and gave me some great insights into what Rain would be going through as Killing Rain began. Specifically, Terry gave me the idea of how an operator can become prone to freezing at the wrong moment while he's in the midst of an emotional and lifestyle transition. Bingo, I thought: Rain, grappling with the emotional fallout of his punctured world view, freezes during an assignment and botches the hit. Now the target, and the target's protectors, would be after him. And wouldn't his employer, fearing exposure, be lethally unhappy with him too? Rain's mistake might earn him a lot of new enemies just at the moment when he's trying to change into something better...

While I was working this character/emotional angle, some of what’s going on in Iraq and particularly in Afghanistan got me thinking in the right direction. The U.S. government has a $25 million bounty on Osama bin Laden, and similar significant bounties on Abu Musab al- Zarqawi and other terrorist figures. When you put that much bounty in play, what do you get? A lot of bounty hunters. So in Afghanistan and Iraq there is a huge private effort to track down and capture or kill these targets. Who are these privateers working for? Who are they responsible to? How are they coordinating with official efforts? It can be hard to say. A case-in-point is a guy named Jack Idema. About a year ago, Idema was picked up in a safe house he had set up outside Kabul where he was torturing a number of Afghani prisoners. A former soldier, he claimed to be working for Special Forces and said he was close to capturing bin Laden. The U.S. military called him a whacko and disavowed him. Idema responded along the lines of, "Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?" Reading about this and similar events, I started to wonder: Who’s in charge when these things happen? Is it a private op, a government op that’s been set up for deniability, or a government op being carried out "off the reservation?" These are the questions that form the backstory of Killing Rain.

And there’s some history involved, as well. At the end of the book, ambiguous bad guy Jim Hilger reflects on Edwin Wilson, the real-life CIA operative who was supposedly fired by the Agency in the late 1970s and convicted several years later of gunrunning, selling explosives to Libya, and several other charges. He was jailed in 1983. Wilson’s defense was that he was carrying out a CIA-sanctioned operation: he claimed that, as part of his cover, arrangements were made so that it looked like he had been fired and had turned mercenary after. That’s how he gained entrée to the Libyans. But he couldn’t prove his contentions in court. No one knows the truth, except, I suppose, Wilson himself and certain higher-ups in the CIA (although documents have surfaced since then that support aspects of Wilson’s story.) You have to admit it would have been a logical strategy… to get close to Gadhafi, Wilson had to be in a position Gadhafi would trust his motivations. I think the same principles hold true today. Hilger’s operation is an example.

So that's how it came together: some emotional insights, a few real world events, and a year of hard work! I think it's the KR is the best Rain book yet and I hope Rain's fans will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

KILLING RAIN is Barry Eisler's fourth novel in the Jack Rain series.

Comments

[Phil]

It's John Rain, not Jack Rain.

[matt]

a very good book...try it