@P. McSorley

Like in 3 Days of the Condor I believe the CIA read novels to get ideas.
 

I believe you have the concept not exactly backward but inside-out: novelists like Koontz, Baldacci, Silva, Thor, Meltzer, David Ignatius -- a raft of others who have made it to NYTimes best seller status, are (I speculate) on some US department payroll to prepare or socially engineer the public to begin to perceive as normal and acceptable things like assassinations (i.e. Daniel Silva's plot lines parallel Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First);
infiltrating other nation's universities, research labs to turn scientists into traitor-spies for USA (David Ignatius -- The Increment, Quantum Spy);
Almost everything Baldacci writes is "ripped from the headlines" of the latest foreign policy scandal -- sometimes even before the headlines become headlines.

USA has been doing this at least since WWI.

Public libraries in the US are a major outlet for US government propaganda pumped out in collaboration with major publishing firms.
Public libraries spend hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars -- tax payer dollars-- on these pop culture novels -- far more than is spent on balanced coverage of US wars.

I was still young and innocent when I started to notice that the bad guy, either the main bad guy or at very least some ancillary bad actor is German, Iranian, Italian, Arab. If Nazis/Holocaust/Hitler/white supremacists are not mentioned in one of these NYTimes best seller-dude's books it's a rarity.
There was never a Jewish villain in these pop novels: the Jewish character was always benign, kindly, a victim, or a helper, but never an evil doer.
Then -- face palm: NYTimes best seller. You know, where you'd find David Irving, and Carlo Mattogno and Arthur Butz -- that NYTimes.

John B. Hench's Books as Weapons: Propaganda, Publishing, and the Battle for Global Markets in the Era of World War II is an eye-opener, disturbingly so: Hench is retired VP of the American Antiquarian Society -- a harmless, maybe dotty old man, right?
Wrong.
I've come to think of Hench as a depraved warmonger, one step removed from a neocon who applauds as Germany and Western Europe were raped of their own culture while American publishing houses raced to fill the vacuum with their ideas -- and revenue-generators-- of what Europeans and the rest of the world ought to read and think and believe.

Replies: @Parfois1, @Anonymous

@P. McSorley

Dean Koontz had it all figured out in his 1981 novel, The Eyes of Darkness.
 

For the curious, this book is not worth your time. I wasted a few hours reading it last weekend.

The Wuhan-400 virus is simply a MacGuffin to sew things up neatly at the end.

The plot is very linear and the protagonists are the embodiment Gary Stu/Mary Sue. The tone of the novel is more young adult than anything else.

The final chapters are nothing but an endless stream of deus ex machina events on the way to the neat and tidy conclusion.