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The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.

Even as the whole world tries to hang on to its job, there is also this weird parallel sense - almost a covert longing - that the old corrupt structures on which that job depends needs to be, ought to be, swept away.

We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.

The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It's the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.

The American people might have a criminal syndicate running their government.

Many citizens see all the leadership of these large institutions together in a conspiracy against them rather than in any adversary relationship with each other.

We must confront the privileged elite who have destroyed a large part of the world.

We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.

In much of the world, there is a sense of an ultra-powerful CIA manipulating everything that happens, such as running the Arab Spring, running the Pakistani Taliban, etc. That is just nonsense.

You basically have a group of four spies who are chosen for a mission they feel for the fact of how competent they are and how their expertise and they're the right one for the job. But ultimately they find out they've been actually chosen for their incompetence.