Crime-thriller writer David Baldacci tells Arminta Wallace how contacts in the Secret Service give his novels authority
I think I have discovered why the United States is the only remaining superpower. It's all to do with cool. We are standing outside the Capitol building in Washington DC. Two of us - the transatlantic two - are sweating profusely and growing more bedraggled by the minute. The locals - a PR woman of almost incandescent intensity, a best-selling author and a young man from the office of a Virginia senator who is acting as our guide - are stylish, efficient and frighteningly immaculate. The best-selling author is posing for photographs while telling us what happened last time he entertained a bunch of visiting transatlantic hacks.
"One minute they were snapping away, just like always, and the next minute - whoof - these big guys with Uzis grabbed them and slammed them up against the car. We got it sorted out eventually, of course, but for about 20 minutes it was really bad." We drip uneasily into our jackets. The locals offer crisp smiles. Old world versus new? No contest.
The heroes of David Baldacci's novels never sweat. His books, several of which - Absolute Power and Last Man Standing - have been made into highly successful action movies, are peopled by cool, clean Secret Service agents and high-powered politicos, civil servants and lawyers. Drug busts and hostage-rescue missions abound. Guys - and gals - yell phrases such as "Lock this area down!" while wielding walkie-talkies, jumping over electric fences and bursting into other people's hotel rooms. Normal everyday stories from the centre of world power politics?
Back at his luxurious suite of offices, Baldacci settles into an antique leather armchair and grins. "Washington is a good place for storytelling," he says. "You've got a ready-made cast of characters, many of whom are extremely powerful people. By which I mean they can, in one way or another, make an impact on the entire world. Thrillers deal in high stakes, and Washington is a high-stake city."
His recent novel Split Second cranks those stakes up another notch. It is about a Secret Service agent who, detailed to watch over a presidential candidate on the campaign trail, gets distracted - just long enough for the candidate to be shot dead. Doesn't the Secret Service get cheesed off with him and his best-selling stories? "When I sit down with the FBI or the Secret Service or the US Marshals," Baldacci says matter-of-factly, "invariably what they tell me is: 'We trust you. You tell it the way it is - and you take the time to do your research and get it right.' OK, people in my books make mistakes. But these organisations - the FBI, the Secret Service, the US Marshals - are made up of people, too. And people make mistakes. They respect that."
Hang on a second: sit down with them? He looks apologetic. "Well," he says, "it's not that I'm really tight with a lot of people in those agencies. But when I'm going to write about them, I talk to the people I need to talk to. What really makes them mad is authors who write about them but never talk to them - who just make it up."
The agencies, in any case, have a way of striking back. When Baldacci was researching Last Man Standing he was given a tour of the FBI hostage rescue team's centre of operations, at Quantico. "And I'm sure they checked me out pretty thoroughly before they let me in there," he says - although what skeletons might be found in the closet of a writer who devotes increasing amounts of his free time to work with a cluster of charities, including a number of literacy programmes in his native state of Virginia, is anybody's guess. So does he sit down with the CIA, too? "Well . . ." He chooses his words with extra care. "They're a little bit tougher to get to know very well. And they should be."
Baldacci insists that what interests him as a writer - more than the nitty-gritty of politics, or even spying, ever could - is the nitty-gritty of personal relationships and individual dilemmas. "There are very few jobs where a split-second error can cost you everything. The Secret Service is one of those. The guy in Split Second is an exemplary agent with an outstanding record. Just one mistake and he's gone. Or is he? All of us would like to think that if we mess up in life we get a second chance." Well, naturally.
But, as a writer, does Baldacci ever have doubts about what he does? A cynic might say that his books take a messy, murky world where "right" and "wrong" are composed of many shades of grey and turn it into something glossy, multicoloured and, come the final reel, all tidied up. Does he ever feel morally compromised by that - or even by talking to the sort of people he talks to, some of whom may have done things most of us couldn't even imagine?
He shakes his head. "No. But I've talked to people who do feel morally compromised by things they've had to do - shoot someone in the course of doing their job, for example - and much as I might like to feel they're different from me, the truth is they're not. They have kids, they go to church, they cut their grass just like anybody else. But then they strap on a gun and go to work, and their job, often, is to protect the rest of us. To tell the truth, I have a sneaking admiration for those people."
Split Second, by David Baldacci, is published by Pan, £6.99