Ruthless.com.

• Author: Godwin, Mike
• Position: Review

With my own Clancyworld paranoia running at full throttle, I pursued my dark suspicions about Ruthless.com. Perhaps, I thought, Clancy's highly placed government connections asked him to publish this book to put his imprimatur on an anti-encryption policy that is increasingly being questioned both in the press and by civil liberties groups. Even more suspicious, I thought, was the fact that no one is actually credited as the author of the book - both the cover copy and the interior copy evasively say Ruthless.com was "created by Tom Clancy and Martin Greenberg."

Perhaps this book, which reads almost like a parody of Clancy's hammer-it-home literary style, was actually written by someone else. If so, who wrote it? FBI chief Louis Freeh? Some nameless spook at the NSA?

In the best Clancy tradition, I decided to do a little investigating of my own. I began by calling the publicity office at Ruthless.com's publisher, Berkley Books. I told the woman I spoke to that I wanted to interview the author of the book - "whoever it is; I guess I know it's not Mr. Clancy" - about the sources and inspiration for the novel. Seeming a bit flustered, she told me that she couldn't help me then - "it's late in the day," she said - but she'd have a publicist call me the next day. But no publicist ever contacted me, and when I called again a few days later, I was told that the publicist for the book was "unavailable." No clue as to when that situation would change.

So I tried a different tack. I called up the secretary for Robert Gottlieb, a literary agent at William Morris who's thanked in the book's (unsigned) acknowledgments. When I asked her for contact information for "co-creator" Martin Greenberg, I ended up being transferred to Greenberg himself. This was so sudden that it caught me flatfooted, but I was still able to nervously frame a question to Greenberg about the inspiration for the book's encryption theme. Greenberg was even more nervous than I was. He said that, although he's a former political science professor, he wasn't too knowledgeable about technical issues, and that I'd be better off talking to someone at Red Storm Entertainment, the company responsible for the game version of Ruthless.com.

"Don't worry about the technical stuff," I told Greenberg. "I know that well enough. What I really want to talk about is the genesis of the idea for the book."

But Greenberg was afraid to say anything on the record. He explained that he was nervous when it...