Finally, in March 2011, I was ready to start writing the first draft. It should have been pretty straightforward. I’d created this huge, forty-page, chapter-by-chapter synopsis which told the whole story from start to finish, and I honestly thought I’d have the whole thing done and dusted by the summer.
But as I’ve discovered more than once in my writing career, what looks like a straightforward story doesn’t always turn out that way. Almost as soon as I started writing, I ran into complications. Because of the sheer number of characters and the limited physical area in which they were operating, coupled with the short chapters (most of which had to end in cliffhangers), the logistics of the plot – choreographing where people were so that they ended up in the right places during the climactic scenes – became a bit of a nightmare. Also, trying to make the police response realistic was a challenge. I had visions before I started the book of the police HQ at the scene being like something out of
24
, with scores of highly coordinated officers armed with laptops and high-tech comms devices. But when I talked to one senior officer in Counter Terrorism Command, he said that, although the Met trained regularly for these sorts of scenarios, in reality, the initial couple of hours would be pretty chaotic as officers, acting on sketchy and sometimes conflicting information, battled to get to the scene through gridlocked traffic, while those already there were forced to operate pretty much ‘on the hoof’. I wanted to capture this sense of confusion and fear, as well as the coming together of the police response as the lines of command were established. I did take a couple of liberties to ensure the story worked smoothly (most obviously, largely ditching Silver Commander, and having Gold liaise directly with Arley, the Bronze Commander, which wouldn’t usually happen), but I hope I gave an approximate impression of what things might be like in such a tense and fast-moving situation.
Strangely, some characters worked far better than others. The guests in the hotel, and Elena the manager, came quite easily to me – probably because, as a pretty ordinary person myself, I was able to identify with them. More worryingly, though, so did the terrorists, especially Fox, whose character I really enjoyed writing. I was even intending for him to escape at the end of the book, but because he was such a horrible piece of work, with so few redeeming features, I ended up changing my mind.
Scope, though, was a problem from the start. Originally, I didn’t want him to be a good guy. I wrote him as an American hitman carrying out a hit on an American businessman in the Stanhope, but that didn’t work. Then I wrote him as a British drug dealer, who was at the Stanhope to make a major deal, which ended in bloodshed. But the problem was, there were already too many bad guys in the script. So, in the end, I compromised and made Scope a mysterious killer, one who turned out to be a basically good man who’d done some bad things, but only in a bid to avenge the death of his daughter.
Changes were made constantly to the script as I wrote. In one draft, Abby and Ethan were captured, and Scope gave himself up to the terrorists so that they could be freed. He was then tortured for several hours before finally making an escape, helped by Clinton. I later changed this because it seemed implausible that the terrorists would keep Scope alive if they captured him. Elena, too, nearly didn’t make it to the end. In an early draft, she was executed by Cat about halfway through, but I liked her too much, so she came back. That’s one of the fun things about being a writer – being able to commute people’s death sentences.
Even the ending changed pretty dramatically, after I got some negative feedback from my editor (which proved bang on target). Unfortunately, this was only three weeks before the book was due, which meant a whole load of rewriting, so it was all ‘skin of your teeth’ stuff.
Incredibly, I didn’t read it the whole way through until two days before the 21 October deadline, and I was terrified that it would be a load of crap, given how many changes had been made. That’s one of the less fun things about being a writer. You’re so close to the work that it’s very difficult to be objective about how good it is.
Thankfully, when I did read it, I was pretty pleased (and mightily relieved) with the result. More importantly, I hope you were too.
Either way, I’m praying the next one’s easier.
Simon Kernick
November 2011
There are plenty of people who provided me with information to help write this book. Most of them, as always, have to remain nameless, but I am allowed to say a big thank you to Siobhan Thomasson, the General Manager of the Holiday Inn in Winchester, who was kind enough to give me an insight into the workings of the hospitality industry. Thanks, too, to my editor, Selina Walker, and agent, Amanda Preston, who, as usual, made some great suggestions to help improve the story.
Without all of you, it would have been a far lesser piece of work.