Goodreads asked Timothy Jay Smith:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Timothy Jay Smith My most recent book is The Fourth Courier, due to be released in April 2019. This book goes back a long way for me. In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Solidarity won the first free election in Poland. In the same year, Mikhail Gorbachav introduced new cooperative laws in the Soviet Union, which was an area of my expertise. I was invited to the Soviet Union as a consultant, which eventually led to my consulting in six of the former Soviet republics, and ultimately living for over two years in Poland, where The Fourth Courier is set.

At the time, there was a lot of smuggling across the border between Russia and Poland, giving rise to fears that nuclear material, too, might be on the move. While on an assignment in Latvia, I met with a very unhappy decommissioned Soviet general, who completely misunderstood my purpose for being there. When some official meetings concluded, he suggested we go for a walk where we could talk without being overheard.

I followed him deep into a forest. It was strange but didn’t feel unsafe, and I couldn’t imagine what he wanted. When we finally talked, he told me, “I can get you anything that you want.” I must have looked puzzled, because to clarify, he muttered, “Atomic.” Then I understood. In a conversation, there had been some passing remarks about the nuclear arsenal in Latvia, for which he had some responsibility, and he was trying to take advantage of still having access to it. While I was actually in Latvia to design a business program for Peace Corps volunteers, he assumed that was a front, and my real motive was to spy. Or perhaps he thought, I really did want to buy an atomic bomb!

I made it clear to him I was not in the market for nuclear material and I wasn’t a spy. I never forgot the incident, and some years later, when I decided to write a novel set in Poland, that was the kernel I used to develop a whole story that springs from a nuclear smuggling operation.

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