When William Agee begins speaking, numbers unfurl like invisible blueprints: 218 corporate programs, ten unfinished manuscripts, over 200 different training seminars delivered worldwide. These are the tally marks of a long career in management consulting—a field he entered, he says writing was his way to mind active and bust during “twelve-hour dead-head flights” between Johannesburg and Jakarta. Yet it was on those very flights that Agee’s literary imagination was born, ultimately fueling The Criminal Brilliance of Tesla: Case File Dragonfly & Anaconda—his first completed novel and the launchpad for a projected series of cerebral thrillers.
Fiction, Agee admits, is a different calculus from consulting. He favors five-to-seven-page chapters: “I like to read that way—finish quick if I need to, then move on.” That brisk, modular rhythm reflects the project plans he once delivered to CEOs—now fictionalized as the “Master Project Plan,” a leather-bound dossier his antihero Tesla creates for elite criminals. Strategy slides easily in Agee’s prose, from boardroom to back alley.
The novel’s premise is bold: a mild-mannered college professor, codenamed Tesla, secretly sells flawless heist blueprints to syndicates and crime families while preserving his spotless public image. Agee, a longtime admirer of Nikola Tesla—“the smartest man to ever walk the earth,” he says—imbues the character with a similarly innovative edge. But instead of electricity, Agee’s Tesla deciphers patterns of human behavior: traffic flows, lobby panic calculated and timed diversions and security cycles. For research, Agee walked city blocks and crawled through tunnels, harvesting sensory data his strategist-hero would demand. “I can smell the musty water,” he says—half novelist, half field engineer.
Despite its technical precision, Case File: Dragonfly & Anaconda is ultimately about knowledge asymmetry—the thrill of seeing a pattern no one else does. Agee seems fascinated by that imbalance. He recalls a photo of gold bars hoarded in a storage locker, which inspired his sequel. The book takes you on two of his case to see the depth of the planning and then the flawless execution when followed. “It’s hiding in plain sight,” he says—a phrase that feels like a key to Agee’s creative method: notice the overlooked, shift the angle, reveal the extraordinary beneath the ordinary. Challenging his FBI liaison he pushed her not to tell him what the FBI would do, or how most criminal would react, what would Tesla do and it will not touch either of the others.
His corporate experience lends a peculiar credibility to the story. While commodity-risk seminars may seem far from FBI task forces, both worlds rely on predictive modeling. Tesla’s 3D “CityScape”—a miniature city with color-coded access points—resembles the stress-test models consultants use. Tesla’s fees include a cut of the loot, much like a performance-based bonus. “What did he just save you? Twenty years of your life? A small fee is worth it,” Agee explains, with the confidence of someone used to pitching executives. The result is unsettling: corporate logic, stripped of ethics, becomes criminal genius.
Much of the novel’s heart lies in the partnership between FBI Agents Lakewood and Campbell—one a disciplined Marine-trained newcomer, the other a grieving, irascible veteran. Their dynamic is based on Agee’s real-life observations of cross-generational teams. “Old school versus new,” he says. The tension grounds the procedural elements in human emotion: Lakewood trusts process, Campbell relies on instinct, and both wrestle with Tesla’s ambiguous threat.
But Agee doesn’t glorify his antihero. Tesla follows a twisted moral code—no children harmed, no churches robbed—but remains ethically murky. The central question: In an era of outsourced expertise, who is truly responsible—the trigger puller or the one who sold the plan? In a metafictional twist, the FBI even enlists Tesla as a consultant on the task force hunting “Tesla.” It’s a sly nod to double-agent tales, though Agee offsets the cerebral play with his dry Southwestern humor. He jokes that romance, that “three-letter word,” manages to sneak into the novel.
Ultimately, this novel can be seen as a study in systems—criminal, bureaucratic, emotional—and the creativity required to navigate them. Agee began writing during layovers, capturing half-formed ideas before jet lag could erase them. That discipline mirrors the historical Tesla, who filed over 900 patents despite no formal engineering degree. Agee still drafts on planes, but now the manuscripts are nearly complete, ready for release. Like his strategist-hero, he’s learned to harness the power of in-between moments.
Readers expecting explosions may instead find suspense built on trajectory math and psychological maneuvering. But Agee never lets the technical outshine the human. Asked how he crafted the agents’ chemistry, he says simply, “I’ve worked with people who had to work together.” It’s a line that could have come from Studs Terkel—plain, but resonant. Systems matter, but it’s the people—flawed, grieving, resourceful—who drive the story.
As Agee readies future installments—one centered on a corrupt prime minister’s subterranean treasure, another introducing new clients codenamed Anaconda and Mammoth—his creative principle remains clear: dig beneath the surface. Whether it’s a professor’s résumé or a mundane locker, every ordinary detail may conceal something extraordinary. In that way, Agee’s thrillers double as meditations on perception itself.
In the end, The Criminal Brilliance of Tesla, Case File: Dragonfly and Anaconda suggests every city holds hidden patterns, and every spreadsheet contains a story. William Agee has spent a lifetime mapping both. Now, through fiction, he hands the rest of us the blueprint.