Conspiracy on the run
In his new thriller, “No Place to Run,” Malibu writer Tom Sawyer lays out the mother of all conspiracies. But this is not new territory for the veteran television writer who plots his narrative like a movie script, scene by scene, into a terrifying tale that grabs the reader from page one and never lets up.
As conspiracy theories go, this one is gripping as much for the way the innocent young protagonists are caught in its web as for the fact that it all could have happened just that way.
Sawyer said, “I absolutely, passionately believe that 9/11 was enabled by forces and interests high up in America-both government and commercial-people who knew it was in work could have prevented it, but decided instead that it offered an excuse for another war. Something upon which our entire economy and incredible prosperity has depended since World War II. Something that, as 2001 neared its end, it was time for once again.”
The story goes something like this: Fugitives Claudia Lawrence, 24, and kid brother Adam, 12, able to trust no one, thrown together in a baggage-heavy relationship, stay barely a step ahead of rogue federal agents determined to kill them as they race across the country, learn the truth about their parents’ murders, and decipher the baffling puzzle that exposes a startling conspiracy not reported by the 9/11 Commission.
The character of Adam seems to have been drawn from Sawyer’s own attitudes in childhood, which he said “invariably caused me to question authority, to regard it with automatic skepticism or outright contempt.”
Claudia, however, was more of a challenge. “My original concept was to tell the story of two fugitive brothers, but then I asked myself, what if the older one was female? That offered fresher, more dramatic possibilities in terms of her vulnerability and the potential for an edgier more interesting relationship between the two.”
Even the heavy, Vince Garrity, is not one-dimensional. An FBI agent turned bad, he orders his two cohorts to murder, and often pulls the trigger himself, with icy resolve. There’s just enough back-story to explain his defection to the dark side and plenty of detail about how the agency works, but nothing slows the pace of the narrative.
Sawyer and I talked on the phone last week from the annual film festival in Eugene, Oregon, where he was teaching a screen and book writing course.
He outlined the entire 9/11 scenario: future hijackers known to be taking flight training, supposedly not monitored; the lack of USAF fighter planes in the Northeast Corridor and anywhere near Washington, DC on that day; and the “confusion” in which long-standing, previously followed protocols about what should happen when airplanes are hijacked or even go off course, were ignored.
“It was clear then, and now, that something was certainly not kosher,” he said. “In the writing trade, we refer to such things as ‘plot conveniences,’ devices that, in fiction, are so obvious that they are to be scrupulously avoided.”
He added that with the “highly questionable” collapse of the Twin Towers and the cover-up of Flight 93 having been shot down, there are far too many such “Whoa – just a minute now” red flags.
Sawyer said he finds it difficult to imagine that anyone, on carefully reviewing as he did the events of that day, what led to them and what has followed, could arrive at any other conclusion.
Making that point was his main reason for writing the novel, he said. “It struck me that I might try via popular fiction to reach even a few people who wouldn’t normally view things that way. All of us view the world and process what we see, hear and read through our own filters. But I continue to be boggled by how readily-eagerly, really-the public buys into the many lies we’re handed.”
Watching that indelible spectacle on 9/11, Sawyer knew he perceived it differently from most people. “I was witnessing the single most dramatic statement of rage in the history of the world and the question it raised was: What does it take to make people that angry? That was quickly followed by my next question: Is anyone in America going to ask the first one?
“The answer was: No.”
His take on the reason for that refusal: “America is the World Capital of Denial. We seem congenitally unable or unwilling to question our own or our government’s true motives.”
“Incidentally,” Sawyer added, “The 9/11 Commission Report, which appeared at about the time I was finishing “No Place to Run,” failed to refute any of what my novel posits about the events of that day.”
Tom Sawyer will discuss and sign copies of “No Place to Run” at Diesel, a Bookstore, in Malibu on Oct. 22 at 7 p.m.