Sometimes, though, when you’re having a bad run—and everyone does—an evening of having people hang on your every word is a lot less expensive than therapy and reminds you of just how lucky you are to be able to earn a living in such a glamorous business. Though I grew up far from Hollywood in Ohio, my father was a theatre owner and master showman who sometimes brought traveling movie stars and other entertainers home for dinner. The night before I was born, my father and Desi Arnaz—only a bandleader then—partied all night in an after-hours club then showed up at the hospital in tuxedoes to sing and tap dance for the nuns attending to my mother. I’m not sure how good the hallway show was, but I’m told the nuns loved it, and the monsignor came by for Desi’s autograph. Family legend has it that my mother was less enthused. My father also knew important people in other walks of life, and he frequently included my sister and me when he socialized with them. As a result, I’d met a lot of famous faces before I went west and thought I was beyond being star-struck. That lasted until I found myself at a party seated next to John Wayne. But that’s another story. The forty-person dinner in Washington that night was one of those dressy affairs populated by people in the news and others who are much more important but don’t get press. In status-conscious Hollywood, the blood and tears that go into a dinner seating chart is rarely trifled with, but in Washington—also very status-conscious but much more aware of how stations change when political winds shift—it’s not uncommon for the host to rearrange seating after each course. It’s advertised as making for livelier conversation, but I think it’s to give everybody an opportunity to schmooze with the more intriguing invitees and not feel left by the side of the road. By the time the entrée was served, the wine had been flowing for a couple of hours, and we were all having a very fine time. We had just changed seats again, and I was sitting between an attractive local television reporter, who had been the verbal star of each group she had been with, and a man who, by contrast, had said very little. He didn’t appear to be a curmudgeon, just reserved. I have a friend in Chicago who is a federal judge and who has such presence that strangers sometimes approach him, thinking he’s famous. Invariably they ask, “I should know you, shouldn’t I?” He always smiles and says, “No, you’ve got me confused with celebrity. I’m power.” That’s what the man next to me exuded—power. We introduced ourselves and began a conversation. An hour later, we were still at it, despite the fact that the other chairs at our table had been reassigned twice more. He had turned out to be an uncommonly engaging individual, and his rarified position in government made him even more compelling. My questions just kept coming. At the end of the evening, he asked if I would like to join him for lunch the following day in his private dining room. He said he would send his car to pick me up. I will never forget that lunch. If nothing else, the history of the furniture and the paintings on the walls were enough to make it memorable, but in attendance were some of the most important people in government. Not household names, but people who deal in life and death without headlines. And they were sharing experiences that I was stunned to be hearing. I confess that I did some storytelling too, but I really just wanted to listen. That’s another thing about being in the movie business. No one perceives you as a threat, so you sometimes hear things reporters would give their careers to know. This was one of those times. After lunch, my host said he wanted to show me something. As we descended in the elevator to his car, I was so busy making mental notes about what I had just heard that I walked the wrong way through a security checkpoint and ended up with a lot of men carrying M-16’s moving really fast in my direction. Fortunately, they cut me some slack, and my host had a good laugh. I have seen a great many things that riveted me. The Oval Office, Cheyenne Mountain, Skywalker Ranch. I’ve sat in the cockpit of an SR-71, watched NFL games from an owner’s skybox, ridden in race cars and Coast Guard chase boats. And once, over a South American rainforest, the engine of the private plane I was in quit, resulting in a very long, very quiet three minutes until the pilot managed to restart it. But except when the doctor handed me my newborn sons, I have never had my breath taken away in the manner it was that fall day in Washington. Never. Almost as surprisingly, no one asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement or told me I couldn’t talk about what I had seen. In fact, my host seemed genuinely pleased to have left a Hollywood guy speechless. When I got back to Los Angeles, I related my experience to a few close friends, but their looks said, “Yeah, right,” so I stopped. I also attempted to interest a screenwriter in using it as the basis for a movie, but as good a salesman as I thought I was, I struck out. Time passed, until one day, with a little encouragement from the reluctant screenwriter, I decided to stop being lazy and just tell it—my way. I already had a character, Rail Black, whom I had conceived for another project, so I sat down at my keyboard and began putting one foot in front of the other. When I finished, I had no idea where all of the elements had come from, but apparently, they had been there all along and just needed to be let out. I held my breath while several publishers read my manuscript. Then held it again when they said they liked it. From an entertainment business perspective, no one handles a book better than HarperCollins, so when HC’s Doug Grad not only wanted to publish CITY OF WAR but wanted a sequel too, it was beyond anything I could have hoped for. I would have had a martini, except I can’t get one down. I opted instead for a glass of cabernet and a cigar I’d been saving and toasted in the direction of New York. Now about the song: Early in CITY OF WAR, one of the characters, Amarante Grasciosa, a dazzling Brazilian singer/songwriter, suffers the tragic loss of the man she loved. Suddenly, Christmas Always Breaks My Heart, which I had written several years earlier about just such a loss, came to mind. And even though the book has nothing to do with Christmas, the song and story seemed like a perfect fit. I hope when you hear it then read CITY OF WAR you’ll agree. More to the point, I hope the book takes you to the edge of your seat. It is, after all, a thriller. CITY OF WAR is fiction, and other than well-documented historical events, none of the situations or characters portrayed are real. I also took some liberties with my description of the place I was taken that day in Washington—though not as many as I probably should have. As for the man who showed it to me, he has long since retired from government, and I hope that if he happens to pick up a copy of the book he will enjoy it. Our chance dinner turned out to be one of the seminal moments of my life. My one regret is that neither of my parents lived long enough to hear the song or read my manuscript. I hope that wherever they are, they know about them now. Separately, I want to thank Jay Coggan, my very fine attorney and even better friend, without whom I could not have written this book. Everyone needs a guy like Jay in his life—even Rail Black. Neil Russell