Terrorists

by Marcus Clark

Conrad Warren is out of work and broke when he is offered a job to infiltrate a terrorist cell in his home town, Sydney. Australian Security tell him that Palestinians have arrived from London to carry out the assassination of a visiting Israeli politician. All Conrad has to do is report on their plans, and then Security will take care of the terrorists. What could go wrong?

But Conrad finds himself drawn into a violent world of danger and double dealing. One Palestinian is an attractive woman who has finally rejected the idea of violence, but she is unable to break from the cell without being killed. After Conrad becomes involved in a sexual relationship with her, he tries to protect her from the Israeli Mossad who are hunting the Palestinians. When he reveals the assassination plans to the authorities but protects the woman, he knows he has betrayed everyone.

Conrad soon discovers he has been duped. He is not working for Australian Security, but the Israeli Mossad. And they have only one thought in mind: "targeted killings". Suddenly Conrad finds that he too is on their list. More ...

299 pages, ebook

First published June 17, 2000

About the author

Marcus Clark

I was born in the mid-1940s, and grew up in Sydney, since then I have lived in various cities in Australia.

I became interested in writing because I loved to read. I joined the local library when I was eight years old, and rarely stopped reading.

Perhaps I was influenced to write because my name was (almost) identical to a famous Australia writer: Marcus Clarke. Although he died long before I was born, during the 1950s he was probably the most famous of all Australian authors. He wrote a few books, but the most striking was For The Term of His Natural Life-- a story of a wrongly convicted man, sent from
England to be imprisoned in Australia under the most brutal conditions.

Before I even got to my teens, adults would always ask was I related to Marcus Clarke. No I was not, but perhaps it started my thinking
that I could write books.

At the age of 17 I was reading copiously, and at the same time I was wondering what career path I should take. I had already embarked on an apprenticeship as a telephone technician, but that was not where my head was. The work was okay, boring mostly, but many jobs are. It seemed mechanical, repetitive, and of little real value. In retrospect, I see that it was of value-- it was the hardware of the internet.

The problem for me was, that day to day, it was not connected with the greater world where my thoughts were. I was interested in the things that were shaping the world: history, ideas, philosophy, discoveries ... not just physical but mental discoveries, such as hypnosis, suggestion, psychology.

At 17 I had read Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Brave New World, any number of books on the Occult/ Mysticism, and novels of all kinds. Unfortunately Ayn Rand and Occultism were never going to be reconciled to each other. Yet I could see value in both philosophies. (Just not at the same time!)

But in writing, it could all come together. I could explore ideas, and create characters who would be subjected to interacting with other characters. And I would be connected with books that I loved.

So that's why I wrote. That's why I still write. I write because I become passionate about contemporary history, about ideas, events, people.

As an example, back in the late 1970's I started reading newspaper reports about Vietnamese boat people who were fleeing the harsh regimes in Vietnam and Kampuchea, their boats were attacked by pirates as many as ten different times before they reached Malaysia. The women were raped, children thrown overboard, men murdered, they were robbed again and again, even their food and clothes were stolen by the pirates.

I began to gather information about the situation in Kampuchea and Vietnam. While Australian and American troops were in Vietnam, there were plenty of reporters, cameramen, and TV crews, but after 1975 their was little information getting out. But it did come out from the refugees fleeing.
And that became the basis of my book EXIT VISA.

There are literally more than a thousand books written about Vietnam in English. Unfortunately most of them were written by combat soldiers or journalists. They nearly all told the story from that perspective. Very few (in English) ever told the story from the Vietnamese point of view.

And that is what is different about my book Exit Visa. Although it is a novel, it was drawn from the lives of the oppressed. When it was being published (1989) the publisher asked me when I was in Vietnam. I said, I've never been there. He looked puzzled. But because I had never been there, I was able to write the novel not about my experiences, but about the Vietnamese experiences. It made a world of difference.