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DANIEL SILVA 
Silva on creating his assassin:
367k WAV audio file
1.6Mb QuickTime movie
Silva discusses researching his thriller:
BEGINNINGS
When Michael Osbourne of the CIA is called in to investigate the terrorist bombing of an airliner off the coast of Long Island, there is one relevant clue that drives him: a body found in the water near the crash site with three bullet holes in its face. Osbourne recognizes the deadly markings as the work of a world-class assassin, a man whose very existence has never been proven because the only people ever to have seen him became his victims.
Read the first chapter here.
Silva's book The Mark of the Assassin
Latest thriller gives political twist to tragedy
April 24, 1998
Web posted at: 3:32 p.m. EST (2032 GMT)(CNN) -- Daniel Silva, the author of 1997's surprise best-seller "The Unlikely Spy", has returned to bookshelves with a new thriller that could be mistaken for a story taken straight out of today's headlines. "The Mark of the Assassin" depicts the investigation of the terrorist bombing of an airliner off the coast of Long Island. But the similarities to the probe into TWA Flight 800 end there. Silva spoke with Miles O'Brien and Bobby Battista on CNN's Sunday Morning.
O'BRIEN: What you may not know about Daniel Silva is that he was once an executive producer for CNN in Washington. That is, until he started writing fiction and joined the ranks of people with weekends off. And that's why you do it, right? It's the weekends off, right?
DANIEL SILVA, AUTHOR OF "THE MARK OF THE ASSASSIN": Weekends are not off when you're trying to finish a book.
Everyday's a work day, when I'm in that hyper-drive to try to finish up, it's...
BATTISTA: You have to write something every day?
SILVA: Seven days a week. I get up and try to do it early in the morning so I don't impinge on family life too much. But I work weekends too, Miles.
BATTISTA: The new book starts off with a familiar news event and it goes with the missile theory.
SILVA: Well, it's inspired by a familiar news event (the TWA Flight 800 disaster). I mean, there was that period when the government suspected it might have been a missile and a lot of people still believe it is a missile. I do not think it. ...It's not a fictionalized version of what I think happened to the plane, but certainly the plot was inspired by a "What if?" scenario ...
BATTISTA: It does go way beyond that, we should say.
SILVA: It does go way beyond that. It starts that way and it ultimately is a thriller about the role of money in politics in Washington.
O'BRIEN: In the book, you draw upon Whitewater. You draw upon the death of Vince Foster. There's a lot of reality which you might read into this. Obviously, with your news background, that's a likely place to draw from.
SILVA: And Washington has been an interesting place over the last few years. And I think some of these events and theories about what might have been behind them were sort of too interesting and too good to ignore.
BATTISTA: Well, news background or not, you certainly know an awful lot about espionage in this book. I'm curious as to whether you gained access to the CIA and how much you learned.
SILVA: I've always been an intelligence buff and so I've read every book out there on the CIA, but I also did get to go inside the CIA, inside a counter-terrorism center, which is a unit inside the CIA that focuses specifically on terrorism. It draws a number of people from different disciplines and agencies, like the FBI and the FAA and Justice Department and Coast Guard, and it's really an interesting place and I got to meet a lot of officers and talk to them about their backgrounds and a little bit about their work.
BATTISTA: Were the people you talked to spies or case workers?
SILVA: Case officers. And we don't discuss sources or methods, and I'm not interested in compromising anything. I just want to learn more about these people and a little bit about how they go about their work.
O'BRIEN: Your first book set itself apart by being set in and around World War II. This one is set in the present day, which puts you in a field with a lot of other authors. Were you thinking about that as you're going, 'I've got to out-do Tom Clancy' here?
SILVA: Gosh, no. I mean, who's going out-do Tom Clancy? I think the question I've been asked most is why make the jump to present day, if I've already had success in historical fiction. And I didn't really sit down and plot out my career very carefully. It sort of happened very quickly, but I did decide that I didn't want to be pigeonholed as writing only historical thrillers or only World War II thrillers. I thought it would be better to make the jump now rather than three or four books down the road. I'm not trying to compete with Tom Clancy, but it's a different style book than a Tom Clancy book, and I think it has its niche.
BATTISTA: It's interesting to note to me that the assassin in this book is a fairly sympathetic character...
SILVA: I like a sympathetic villain much more than a sort of a cardboard cut-out, mustache-twirling bad guy. I think they're more interesting for me to work with as a writer, and I think it's more satisfying for the reader to have a real human being that you can identify with. And the assassin in my book is a former KGB assassin who's now a freelance assassin and terrorist. He was great fun to work with, and without giving too much away, he's going to make some further appearances in my books.
O'BRIEN: We always ask our authors what they are reading. Do you have Clancy on your book shelf or something else? Do you like to get completely out of your realm?
SILVA: I just finished the "Secret Sharer" by Joseph Conrad, a short story classic of his, and I'm reading "The Beautiful and the Damned" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. My next book is set in Northern Ireland, so I have a stack of books on Northern Ireland that are beside my bed and I just got back from a research trip there. I generally try to just read really good stuff.
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