Brad Meltzer

And they were going, why are they, why do they want this person that I'm working on at this point?

There's a different body.

And they realized quickly that the body they were working on was actually one of the pilots of the plane.

It was one of the terrorists because what came in were pieces of people, you know, things, and they were trying to put truly things back together to piece together what was happening and

And I was blown away.

Like, as you said, someone who has the wherewithal to do that on a plane and know to do that, we forget that, yes, fallen soldiers go to Dover.

But when the space shuttle exploded, those bodies went to Dover, too.

And even in Venezuela right now, all the CIA people that helped us with this operation, all our CIA people around the world, if something goes sideways, their bodies go to Dover as well.

And Dover is where

Truly, it's America's most secretive funeral home.

And that's where I set the viper in all my books because, you know, the morticians there will spend 12 hours rewiring someone's jaw, smoothing it over with clay because the family wants to see their fallen soldier's son one last time.

Rebuilding someone's hand because someone says, I want to hold my son's hand one last time.

These are the best of the best of us working on the best of the best of us.

obviously became the best setting for a book for me just to honor these people and show the dignity and respect they show our fallen troops.

Well, Glenn, you know, I've taken my readers into the secret tunnels below the White House.

into the labyrinth below the Capitol for the Viper, I wanted to do witness protection to see, can you disappear?

And I was obsessed with it.

It's one of the hardest things I've ever had to research for obvious reasons.

They're not going to tell you, you know, how witness protection works.

And when you think of witness protection, what do you think of?