2020 · I always wanted to write a spy story that wasn't a story about spies or conspiracies. After several attempts, I finally figured it out.
The Flycatcher
A woman in a bookstore moves a single copy of a travel guide to the philosophy section. That's how he knew she's a Russian spy.
Gary Kopp notices things for a living. As a building inspector in northern Michigan, he reads walls and compression fittings the way other people read faces. When he sees a woman move a travel guide to the wrong shelf in his local bookstore, he reads that too, and what he reads is a communication protocol for a Russian intelligence cell operating on the Old Mission Peninsula.
He documents everything on a yellow legal pad and calls the FBI. The agent on the other end is noncommittal. Nobody calls back. So Gary starts following the woman himself, in a county truck with a Building Safety placard on the tailgate, armed with binoculars and thirty-five years of spy novels.
The cell is real. Gary can prove it. The problem is that the quality that lets him see what trained professionals cannot, an attention that has been running since he was eleven years old watching for a car that would not come back, looks to everyone else like something that belongs in a file, not a field office.
Then a senator dies at one of the addresses on his legal pad, and the FBI gets interested. Not in what Gary knows. In Gary.