“French Twist”
Unraveling French Twist
A spy novel for people who hate spy novels.
FRENCH TWIST (100,000 words) is the spy-adventure-romance mashup you didn’t know you needed. It’s a swashbuckling adventure, a harrowing thriller, and an exploration of the power of love, wit, and imagination to push back against darkness.
Following the theft in France of powerful U.S. cyberweapon Corpse Flower, ASTRID agent Chet Fletcher and French colleague Sylvie Allaire travel from Saint-Tropez to Bordeaux to Paris as they struggle to prevent deranged opthalmologist Dr. Hervé Gosse (and anti-democratic cabal LEOPARD) from unleashing Gosse’s devastating optical weapon Helios on the unsuspecting residents of the City of Light.
That’s the gist of FRENCH TWIST. Below are a few more details and some excerpts:
- The novel speaks to the times. The role of LEOPARD reflects the anti-democratic forces currently on the march in the real world. And Helios, which is transmitted through cell phones and streaming TVs, exploits people’s addiction to the modern opiate of constant connectivity.
- It’s the first in a projected series of novels in which Chet travels to foreign lands to do battle with country-level malefactors sponsored by LEOPARD (i.e., the League of Enemies of Participatory Democracy).
- ASTRID (the Alliance in the Struggle for Radiant Development) is a private spy agency founded by the idealistic heiress to a U.S. armaments fortune.
- Chet Fletcher was born Chester Butts but changed his name after leaving home to distance himself from his difficult family.
- While growing up in provincial Tidewater, Virginia (his father owned a fencing company), Chet learned that foreign languages offered a means of escape and eventually made himself an expert linguist. After graduating from Dartmouth, he spent a year in the Peace Corps in Cambodia where a Buddhist monk friend taught him the ancient combat art of pradal serey. He then worked for the CIA—until his anger at the agency’s use of waterboarding led him to quit and sign on with ASTRID.
- FRENCH TWIST is full of glamorous French atmosphere and substantive geographical and cultural information.
- It balances a fast-paced plot with carefully drawn characters, lots of banter, and rich camaraderie.
- Every chapter ends on a cliffhanger and the last 70 pages are intended to have the velocity of a bobsled.
- Despite its genre framework, the book is very personal. Its commitment to exploring its characters’ emotions approaches that found in literary fiction, and in many respects, Chet’s adventures and inner life are heightened reflections of my own.
Here are some excerpts:
From Chapter 1:
LEOPARD’s ultimate plan—one Chet Fletcher would nearly lose his sight and life trying to foil—was to blind a million people and bring France to its knees. But before that happened, an unassuming American cybersecurity expert working as a professor on the French Riviera called for a taxi to take him from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis to Cote d’Azur airport. It was the last ride he would ever take.
Alan Lomax took the elevator up from his basement office, padded down the empty halls of his university’s administration building, looked out through the bronze and glass side door. Waiting in the night was a black Citroën taxi with its headlights on and roof light dimmed. After pressing his waist to make sure of the encrypted flash drive hidden in his money belt, he hitched up his backpack, pushed through the door, and went outside.
The blades of the yucca trees pierced the night like bayonets and the resinously volatile Mediterranean air pricked his nostrils.
Pudgy, pale, and soft, Alan had a moon face and sandy hair, and he was wearing a pair of baggy khaki pants and a shortsleeve plaid shirt.
The front window slid down, revealing the driver to be a large, bearish man with cynical eyes and a beard like black metal filings.
“Monsieur Lomax?”
“Oui, c’est moi,” said Alan in his strongly American-accented French.
He got in the back and was pleasantly impressed by the plush black interior—then he noticed that the uphostlery was badly worn in place and that the car reeked of cigarettes.
The driver pulled out and Alan looked back at the Greek Revival–style building’s white pediment and fluted columns. He felt a pang at leaving but consoled himself with the thought he would only be away for three days.
From Chapter 2:
In going out in his boat this afternoon, Chet Fletcher wasn’t asking for the moon, only a rowing session intense enough to wear him out to the point where his thoughts stopped racing and he was able to relax, a state he otherwise rarely achieved. Mostly, he hoped that nothing would happen to derail him in the forty or so minutes it would take him to row the circuit.
His boat was a white fourteen-foot Whitehall Spirit with a sculling seat, outrigger oars, and teak woodwork, and the circuit was a triangular four-mile course that went from the dock behind the boathouse containing his apartment across McAllister Bay to Sunday Harbor, down the shore to Wicker Point, and then diagonally across the bay and back to his dock. Gently rippled, the water was scattered with vivid blue ribbons under the exuberant June sky.
In cycling through his stroke, Chet pulled hard through each catch, driving himself back with his legs then laying back with the oar handles at his chest as the boat whooshed forward, trailing a white wake flanked by creamy swirls.
At Sunday Harbor, he turned left around the orange buoy off the town dock then set off along a shore given over to emerald marsh grass, landscaped yards, and tangled second-growth woods full of tender new leaves. At Wicker Point, he passed out into the main part of Narragansett Bay then swung around a red and white crabpot float and struck off diagonally up McAllister Bay toward home.
Tall, slender, and muscular, Chet had clean-cut features, thick dark brown hair, and gold-flecked blue eyes currently protected by a pair of tortoiseshell Wayfarers, and he was wearing running shorts and a well-worn white and green Dartmouth T shirt. To the extent his appearance suggested a blue-blooded New Englander, it could not have been more deceiving since he had grown up in a downscale evangelical family in Virginia Beach, the son of a homemaker mom and a dad who owned a fence-installation company, an occupation with which Chet’s own eventual occupation was in telling contrast. His name was as much of a self-invention as his appearance since at birth he had been christened Chester Butts.
From Chapter 4:
The road to Saint-Tropez wound southwest along the coast between the blue sea and a range of rugged brown hills. With the windows up and air conditioner on, the Audi was a cool, quiet retreat from the heat and glare. Chet’s hunch about the car counting as basic transportation was proven correct as he passed or was passed by one Bentley, Range Rover, and Ferrari after another. Still, the car had more than enough pep to satisfy, he found. Working the stick like Steve McQueen, he eagerly banked through the curves and sailed over the rises as his body was pushed from side to side and occasionally floated up against his seat belt.
The road unfolded one glimpse of heaven-on-earth after another. There were pocket beaches, red-tile villages, rock-bound coves. Cliff-top villas that looked out over the sea. The sight of a group of golden children hurling themselves off a yacht’s swim platform caused an envious tightness in his chest. When he was those kids’ age, he recalled, vacations had usually consisted of him playing alone in the dirt of the backyard while listening to his father belittle his mother inside the house. Later, as he passed a lovely young woman with no top on reaching up to close the back of her car, his stomach grew hollow with longing.
At one point he found himself thinking about the Riviera phases of the careers of various writers and artists he liked. Fitzgerald in Antibes, Somerset Maugham on Cap Ferrat. The Rolling Stones recording Exile on Main Street in the basement at Nellcôte. Unfortunately, he reflected, the days when the Riviera had offered any kind of Bohemian refuge for artists were long gone. Dominated as it was by an unsavory grab bag of oligarchs and autocrats, the contemporary Cote d’Azur had all the soul of a twenty-four-karat conflict diamond.
From Chapter 5:
The ski turned out to be a new Kawasaki with a motorcycle-style seat and adjustable handlebars. By a miracle, the key was in the ignition, attached to a curly purple shut-off lanyard. Mentally begging the owners’ pardon, he pushed the ski into the water, guided it over the mild surf, and mounted up. When he pushed the start button, the machine rumbled to life like a rocket at Cape Canaveral. Two minutes later he was streaking across the bay at fifty miles an hour.
As soon as the boat driver saw him coming, he bore away toward the open sea like a rabbit. He had no problem ambushing an unsuspecting beachcomber but apparently lacked the stomach for a scrap with a resolute opponent. However, the parasail affected him like a drag chute, giving the jet ski the edge in speed. As Chet closed in on the boat’s starboard quarter, the sailer directed a few desultory bursts at him then fell silent, whether because he was out of ammo or feared sinking the boat Chet neither knew nor cared. Finally, taking the key with him to shut the ski off and prevent its getting into trouble, Chet leapt from the footwell onto the boat like a rodeo cowboy tackling a calf.
From Chapter 9:
The couple made their way out to a blue sixteen-foot Cap Ferrat runabout with a large Mercury outboard, a white plastic interior, and a central steering console with a high padded seat wide enough for two. They put their gear in the back then Chet started the engine and Sylvie cast off. With Sylvie beside him, Chet steered slowly out through the maze as the sun beat down, the motor rumbled, and the boat vibrated beneath them. A long stone mole with cars parked on it protected the entrance to both harbors. They turned left and drove along with the mole to starboard then turned right around the lighthouse at the end and ventured forth into the Gulf of Saint-Tropez.
The sky was blue, the surface rippled, and air laced with occasional thread of exhaust. To the left the world was enclosed by brown hills, but on the right the bay lay open to the sea. As they curled around to starboard, Chet rolled on the gas and the boat gathered speed. Soon they were ripping along on plane with the boat jouncing beneath them and the wind streaming over their heads.
They headed east, staying a few hundred yards off a line of brown cliffs crowned with villas. After a few minutes they crossed the Bay of Canebiers then curved right around a cape and bore south down the coast. Soon they passed between La Mouette beach and La Croissette, a gray rock offshore that had been claimed by a gang of seagulls. Five more minutes carried them to Pampelonne Bay, whose mild splendor was unchanged from yesterday.
Still going south, they angled toward shore and eventually Chet identified La Cabane Jolie by its green and white awnings and grid of lounges. He headed back out and noodled around until their view of the beach, hills, and headland matched the mental photograph he had taken yesterday, then he throttled back and shut off the engine. The boat subsided in the water and backwash whooshed audibly sternward then Sylvie tossed the anchor out. Following the splash, a deep hush descended, leaving them more exposed to one another than they had been so far.
From Chapter 12:
It was soon after moving on from the palace that they crossed an invisible boundary into a new world. The southern third of the plaza was a realm all its own. Here the well-dressed and -coiffed arts lovers that predominated up north gave way to a tribe of rough, anarchic vagabonds more interested in defiance than community. In attire running to ripped jeans, motorcycle jackets, spiked collars, and combat boots—accompanied by run-amok piercings and tattoos and outré hairstyles—the people stalked about in scowling twos and threes, exuding mistrust and often clipping each other’s shoulders as they passed.
At first Chet and Sylvie found the change bracing. A person could only spend so much time among impeccably genteel people with modulated voices before he or she started craving a little fiber. However, as they penetrated deeper into the new territory, the inhabitants’ nihilism began to weigh on them. In addition, some of the men started intentionally brushing against Sylvie and even cutting in between the two of them, aggressions which made her stiffen and fall silent. Chet considered offering to take her arm but worried she might decline out of pride. Finally, he simply erased the distance between them and slipped his arm through hers. “You don’t mind do you?” he said. “I always get nervous around people who look like they wandered off the set of Mad Max.” Pulling him even closer, she gratefully squeezed his arm, and after that she was mostly left alone.
This section also had its buskers, but they could hardly have been more different from the ones in the mainstream part of the plaza. One act they saw consisted of a group of a dozen people dressed like plague doctors who were skipping around in a circle playing finger bells. Another was made up of a handful of people dressed like medieval troubadours who were walking around bent double with their heads and arms between their legs and their butts in the air.
From Chapter 22
He felt bad for her, but sympathy was a luxury he couldn’t afford. At any moment Gosse was going to appear and his time alone with her would be over.
“I think Hervé’s strapping sheep in front of banks of televisions and blinding them with bright flashes of light,” he said.
“What would the point of that be?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Well, I don’t know what he’s doing!”
“Doesn’t that bother you? A cute little sheep having its eyes burned out for Hervé’s amusement?”
“People kill millions of animals every day. I can’t be worrying about that.”
He turned in his seat and pretended to look for the sheep.
“He’s not far from here,” he said. “I saw him when I was walking up to the house. Maybe he’ll stagger up and fall into the swimming pool.”
“If you haven’t noticed, I live like a queen thanks to Hervé. You’re foolish if you think I’m going to betray him and help you.”
“We think Hervé stole that computer virus and that he’s planning to do something bad with it.”
In the silence that followed this remark, to which she made no answer, he decided it was time to stop sparring with her and make her an offer.
“Tracy, I’ll do everything I can to make sure you land on your feet. Just confirm for me what you can, or tell me what you can about his plans. . . .”
“That flash drive is protected by a big password, isn’t it?” she replied. “Hervé couldn’t get into it if he wanted to. . . .”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Is that big password big enough?”
The next entry in the conversation, not anyone’s speech but rather a noise that came from across the pool, brought his hopes of winning her over to a jarring and frustrating end. It was the chuff of the door being thrust open, and it immediately restored her to her original mood of arrogant invulnerability.
“Why don’t you ask Hervé?” she said with a smile, as he emerged from the chateau and started walking their way. “Here he comes now.”
From Chapter 23:
“You might find this interesting, Mr. Fletcher. Did you know that, when the Germans occupied Bordeaux during the war, the German Navy made their headquarters for this region right here at Château d’Apollon?”
“It’s things like that that make a house a home,” said Chet.
“In fact, two of the captured British commandos from the Frankton Raid were executed in the garden just a short distance from here. Are you familiar with the Frankton Raid? Sometimes they’re referred to as the Cockleshell Raiders. They paddled kayaks up the Gironde and detonated limpet mines on a handful of German ships in Bordeaux Harbor. You can still see the pockmarks in the stone wall where the two prisoners were lined up and shot. Perhaps I can show you the spot after lunch.”
The expression in his eyes made Chet to resolve to go nowhere near that particular wall, if he could possibly avoid it. They were gleaming like torches.“
Just so long as you take your phone, you can show Chet anything you want,” said Tracy. “I want to be able to find you when Bernard arrives.”
The subsequent hardening of Gosse’s expression was indivisible from the satisfaction that now spread over it, though both gave way in short order to one of regret, albeit a regret that was tissue thin.
“That reminds me, Tracy,” he said. “Unfortunately, Bernard called this morning and said he won’t be able to make it today. Something urgent came up which he couldn’t possibly put off.”
For a moment she stared at him with her brows knit and mouth open. Then she grabbed her fork and tried to stab him in the arm.
His response had to be seen to be believed. With astonishing swiftness, he jerked his hand up and intercepted her wrist, like a frog snatching a bug out of the air with its tongue.
“That is bullshit, Hervé!” howled Tracy. “It’s bullshit and you know it! You told him not to come!”
Now a real physical sadism began leaking out of him. Conveniently for him, Tracy continued to grip the fork. So he began pinching her radius and ulna together with his thumb and forefinger, both of which were thick and powerful. Her face turned white—and Chet, certain physical intervention on his part would not work out, scrambled to think up something to say that would get Gosse to lay off. Before he could, Tracy cried out and dropped the fork and Gosse let go, then she angrily pushed her chair back and jumped to her feet.
From Chapter 25:
Suddenly a plan for the future came to him, a plan that seemed as essential as it was insane.
“Leave Hervé,” he said. “Be with me.”
“What? No!” said Tracy.
“Why?”
“I still want my money.”
“What?”
“My little bag of gold.”
“You think he’s going to give you some money?”
“He said he was going to marry me and give me some.”
“You should jump clear.”
“I’m going to make him do it, too.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Mine,” she said.
“I’m also on your side.”
“If those two catch me with you, I’m in big trouble,” she said. “He’ll cut my eyes out.”
“I’ll protect you.”
It was bold talk for someone pinned flat on his back and seeing stars. He couldn’t have protected her from a kitten.
Suddenly he felt her body go rigid and realized she had raised her head.
“They’re back!” she hissed. “Get up! Get up!”
He wished he could, but there was no chance. He might as well have been painted to the floor.
“I can’t,” he said. “You better go.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Go on!” he whispered. “It’s you they’re looking for. They don’t even know who I am. I’ll be okay.”
Suddenly, acting as if she were under the pressure of an emotion she did not accept, she grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled at the roots—pulled tenderly and urgently, in a manner infused with manic desperation. Then she let go, slapped his face and whispered furiously in his ear, “I hate people like you, do you understand? I hate them!”
Finally, astonishing him even more, she caressed his cheek then kissed him on the mouth, kissed him softly and lingeringly, with a sweet, searching gentleness that turned him inside out. Then she jumped up and ran away, with a nearly noiseless padding of feet which told him that, somewhere in the course of turning his world upside down, she had found the time to take her sandals off.
From Chapter 29:
Gosse stepped to the operating chair and snapped on the boom light, splashing Chet’s face and closed eyelids with illumination. Then he raised Chet’s left lid and directed the beam of a penlight into his eye. Assailed by inpouring light, Chet’s gold-flecked blue iris defensively widened, reducing the pupil to a pinpoint.
“Pupillary response normal,” murmured Gosse. “I would venture to state that Mr. Fletcher is quite cognizant of his surroundings. Mr. Fletcher?”
Chet’s eyes fluttered open in surrender then, as the light from the boom struck, he squinted tightly to try to screen it out.
“Good evening, Mr. Fletcher!” said Gosse. “Pretending to be unconscious, are we? That will do you no good in here. We physicians know all!”
Chet threw himself against his bonds like a wolverine hurling itself against the bars of its cage.
“Let me up!” he yelled. “There’s nothing the matter with me! Nurse, this is wrong and you know it! There’s no reason to operate on me!” He strained violently upward, thrashed madly from side to side. “I’m working with the U.S. government and the French police! You took an oath, both of you! Nurse, if you help him mutilate me, you’re just guilty as he is!” “I’m afraid you are wrong on all counts, Mr. Fletcher,” said Gosse pleasantly. “When you collapsed in my office, I took the opportunity to examine your eyes. I had observed a swollen, reddened appearance in them when you first came in that caused me a great deal of concern.”
While speaking, he rubbed an alcohol-dipped cotton ball on Chet’s arm then accepted a small syringe from the efficient nurse.
“Unfortunately, I discovered that they have been colonized by tumors,” he said, while deftly administering the injection. “To prevent the cancer’s reaching the brain, an emergency enucleation was indicated for both eyes.”
Chet’s body strained up against its bonds one last time—then collapsed like the hose of a vacuum cleaner when the power is switched off. Now only his eyes remained under his control, and they were rolling around in their sockets like those of a horse trapped inside a burning barn.
From Chapter 31:
After galloping halfway around the mile-and-a-half long oval of the Longchamp race track, Chet and the horse exited the grounds through a back gate that was open to admit a truck bringing a load of hay. Then they cantered across the Bois de Boulogne, loped up the Avenue du Président Kennedy, thundered past the red, white, and blue rooster tails of the Trocadero fountains, and turned right onto the Pont d’Iéna, the bridge commemorating Napoleon’s 1806 victory over the Prussians.
As they crossed the bridge, Chet risked a look up at the Eiffel Tower directly in front of them. Though strikingly brawny at the base, it tapered swiftly, and its distant summit appeared delicate and minute. For a split second, he imagined the structure as a steampunk mooring tower for intergalactic spacecraft, then he and the horse cantered beneath the wide, stretched-open U of the base on this side and scattered the tourists like pigeons.
“For God’s sake, stay off the Internet!” he yelled to them, in every language he knew. “Stay off the Internet if you value your eyes!”
Then, leaving turmoil in their wake, the horse and rider loped smoothly away down the Champs de Mars.
From Chapter 33:
He slipped inside, eased the door closed behind him and swiftly looked around. He was in a spottily illuminated chamber that was like a red and gold grotto broken by stone pillars. The relatively low height of the ceiling and the lack of windows puzzled him till he remembered having read somewhere that Sainte-Chapelle actually included two chapels, a modest one for the help and a fancy one for the king and his court. This was obviously the former. He also registered that there was no one in sight and that it was dead quiet. Then he heard—from the direction of the line of green canvas gift-shop stalls along the left-hand wall—a splenetic rustling sound such as might be made by a thief rummaging through merchandise.
Suddenly the rustling came to an abrupt and suspicious halt.
A second later a large man in black stepped out of one of the stalls, stared at him, and started raising the Uzi in his arms. Chet jerked the Beretta up and pulled the trigger twice, and a loud double bark caromed around the room. Then the man took two unsteady steps, grabbed a postcard carousel, and toppled over, taking the carousel down with him. As they hit the floor with a thud and a metallic shivering sound, some of the cards in the rack were cast out and slid smoothly away across the buffed terrazzo.
Feeling sick over the close call, Chet dashed farther into the chapel, took cover behind a pillar, and looked back and forth between the thresholds of the stair towers on either side of the front doors. He expected armed goons to come pouring out of one or both of them at any moment. When none did, he tentatively concluded that the turns of the stairs had kept the noise from reaching the upstairs chapel. Finally, mindful that time was short, and steeling himself for additional confrontations, he ran to the stairway on the right and began to climb.
From Chapter 37:
Sylvie sprinted down the quai with the iron spires of the fence fanning past her in a blur. Then she ran down the first two steps of the water stairs, launched herself into the air, and sailed out toward the Zodiac. After crashing down onto the plastic deck, she frantically started the engine, undid the painter, and headed downstream.
Her chances of finding Chet were slim, she knew. She didn’t see how he could make it back to the surface with his hands tied. And if by some miracle she found him, she doubted she would have the strength to haul him into the boat. Then something happened that made her worry give way to full-on fear. She heard swiftly running footsteps overtaking her from behind.
Suddenly she was certain that another of Gosse’s men was coming after her. She knew immediately that she should steer away from the quai and out of his reach—but she couldn’t make herself push the tiller away, she was paralyzed with fright. Then, inevitably, horribly, she saw in the corner of her eye a male runner in dark clothes running along on the quai and drawing even with her—then he leapt off the quai and came flying out toward the boat.
He crashed down in the bottom of the Zodiac with a weight and force that nearly catapulted her off her seat. They had her, she thought, bowing her head to try to hide. It was all over. Not only would she be unable to look for Chet, she herself might be doomed. Then, with a feeling of infinite dread, she raised her face to confront the evil that had come for her. But the sight she beheld filled her with joy. The man who had jumped into the Zodiac was wearing the uniform of a member of the Brigade Fluviale. Embroidered on the front of his vest were the slanting silver bars of a captain.
“André!” she cried.
From Chapter 37:
As the Zodiac streaked toward the ladder, André crouched in the bow, Chet knelt behind him, and Sylvie occupied the stern keeping the throttle on as far as it would go. Not that she really wanted Chet to succeed in catching the ladder. He had just wriggled out of one situation that should have killed him. Did he really have to throw himself into another? Suddenly, interrupting her thoughts, André called back over his shoulder in alarm: “They’ve seen us! The helicopter’s moving away!”
It was indeed, Chet saw. It had started flying slowly toward the north end of the Pont des Arts and begun to ascend.
“Get after them, Sylvie!” he yelled. “Get on them like a barnacle!”
Chet watched in agony as the ladder’s silver rungs rose one after the other out of the water. He was afraid every rung might be the last.
He became aware André was speaking to him.
“Do you want this?” the Frenchman asked, shouting to be heard above the roar.
He was offering Chet his service automatic.
Chet thanked him and tucked the gun in the back of his waistband.
Then André got up, turned toward the stern, and made a stirrup of his hands while telling Chet, “Put your foot here!”
Chet did so—and then, twenty yards ahead, he saw a sight that wrenched his heart. The ladder’s final rung rose dripping from the river and fluttered backward on the wind. The ladder was getting away from them.
But Sylvie flew after it like an arrow to its mark—then Chet and André dipped as one and smoothly rose up, with André flinging his hands after the ladder like the pouch of a slingshot firing. Chet pushed hard with his left leg, launching himself off André’s hands.
For a few seconds, Chet flew through the air at a rising angle as if he had been shot out of a cannon—then he grabbed the bottom rung and began to climb.
If you’re a literary agent and you liked what you just read, contact me and I’ll send you more of French Twist.