Another gripping instalment in the internationally bestselling series featuring art-restorer, assassin and spy, Gabriel Allon.

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If the president of the United States had asked Gabriel Allon for advice on September 12, 2001, what would Gabriel have said?
He would have warned the president about the terrible price of climbing into the sewer with terrorists and fighting them on their terms. He would have told the president that the fight against terrorism was not only morally just but also morally imperative. But he would have cautioned the president not to resort to practices that don’t look terribly flattering with the passage of time. A few years ago I wrote a book called A Death in Vienna. It dealt with one of the more unsavory aspects of the Cold War: the CIA’s use of Nazi war criminals as paid assets. The novel was really a private plea to policy makers not to take similar morally questionable steps in the war against terrorism.

Your new novel, The Secret Servant, moves at a blistering clip from beginning to end doesn’t it?
There is definitely a ticking clock in the book, yes, with the life of an extraordinary young woman, and perhaps even the fate of a nation, hanging in the balance. It means the characters have to make decisions of great moral significance under conditions of extreme time pressure. It also means that the novel plunges forward at a breathless pace, particularly toward the end.

It’s set in a number of cities: Amsterdam, London, Copenhagen, Cairo, and Jerusalem, to name a few. Did you spend much time in Europe researching the book?
Yes, my family jokingly referred to it as the “Summer Euroterror Tour of 2006.” The first stop was London, where MI5 and Scotland Yard had just broken up the plot to bomb transatlantic jetliners with liquid explosives. Then it was on to Amsterdam and Denmark. My children are old enough to help out now. When their teachers ask them what they did on their summer vacation, they say they spent it helping their father pick out places to kill people.

A central theme of the novel is the morality of torture and the practice known as “extraordinary rendition” - taking known or suspected terrorists from one country and transferring them in secret to Middle Eastern countries - Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt - for questioning. Why did you choose to deal with this in the book?
For me, the rendition program has been one of the most troubling aspects of U.S. response to the attacks of 9/11 - and mind you, this is coming from someone who believes Islamic extremism and terrorism are grave threats to American security and must be dealt with harshly. But the regimes you mentioned are some of the most repressive in the world. I believe they’ve helped create and foster the problem of terrorism by attempting to deflect the anger of their people outward to America and Israel. Ultimately, they’re part of the problem, not part of the solution. Borrowing their torture chambers is one of the big moral lapses of our response to the attacks of 9/11.

The book also contains some disturbing descriptions and accounts of torture as practiced by the Egyptian secret police. Are the accounts in your book based on fact?
Unfortunately, they are. I did a considerable amount of research on the practices of the Egyptian security services, and I heard first-hand accounts of their work when I was based in Cairo in the 1980s as a correspondent for United Press International.

That experience must have been very helpful to you when you were working on this book.
Very much so. I interviewed Islamic militants during that period, men who, I assume, went on to become members of al-Qaeda. They made it clear to me then what they wanted to do - they said they wanted to destroy us - and I believed they were serious. During the late eighties and early nineties, I told anyone who would listen that we would one day face a grave threat from militant Islam, and my fears were proven correct.