In THE CONTRACTOR, Rick Behringer runs a private FMA company, Global Reach Technologies. Ostensibly his company designs communications systems, but ultimately he is a contractor for the CIA. He is given a DVD by a Pakistani engineering that provides a lot of information about the Pakistan communications systems involved with their nuclear program. Behringer passes it onto his employer--the CIA. "They take one look at it and go ape when they see what's on it. They find some very funny Pakistani companies on it and they want a closer look. So Rick Behringer is one of the people they rely on to do that."

The novel revolves around a protégé of A.Q. Kahn, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, who is attempting to acquire highly enriched uranium to make an atomic bomb to be used by terrorists. MacKinnon cites two inspirations: first was a story in The Washington Post about ten years earlier about a company in Alexandria, Virginia that was under investigation by the government. "There was talk of the company trading specs on American weapons to the Chinese in order to get Chinese weapons for the Americans. It was very murky. Nothing ever got prosecuted, but it struck me as being an interesting story for a book and for a character."

The second bit of inspiration was a friend MacKinnon knew when he was younger. A failed jazz pianist, he was drafted into the Army, put into intelligence and after the military went into engineering school. He eventually invented one of the first computerized devices for grocery stores to keep track of their inventory. MacKinnon says, "I kind of melded the two characters. The main character, Rick Behringer, was a failed jazz pianist. He joined the Army, they put him in intelligence school, then he came out and went to engineering school, was a whiz at engineering, came out and was hired by a black defense firm in DC, then started his own firm, which is where he got into the FMA business."

And, of course, much mayhem ensues. When asked why he's interested in the espionage genre, MacKinnon says, "The spy is forever trying to find things out, trying to learn the secrets of inscrutable people and their governments. As a writer, I'm interested among other things in the problems different cultures have in communicating, in understanding each other.... A spy story can be a metaphor for how we try to solve the mystery, the enigma that other peoples and other cultures present to us. Also, I want to evoke some of the faraway places I had known--Pakistan, Turkey, the Persian Gulf."

MacKinnon lives and writes in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he is hard at work on his next international thriller.

Contributing editor Mark Terry is the author of the Derek Stillwater thriller series. His newest thriller, THE SERPENT'S KISS, is available in stores and online.