condor.net

By James Grady

A short story of conspiracy and mayhem by the author of Six Days of the Condor, reimagining the classic spy thriller in our post-9/11 world.
 
In this chilling short story, a CIA analyst codenamed Condor is caught in the grip of a conspiracy he can barely understand. When he finds something strange linked to a covert operation in Afghanistan, he makes the mistake of contacting his superiors. Soon after, a gunman attacks during an office coffee break, killing all but Condor. Alone and out of his depth, Condor chases the conspiracy while on the run, learning quickly that, though the Cold War may be over, espionage remains a dangerous game.
 
This heart-pounding spy story continues the adventures of Condor, James Grady’s unforgettable character immortalized by Robert Redford in the classic film Three Days of the Condor, and currently portrayed by Max Irons in the all-new TV series Condor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Nov 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781453237533

James Grady

James Grady is the award-winning author of more than a dozen novels and three times as many short stories. His first novel, Six Days of the Condor, became the classic Robert Redford movie Three Days of the Condor and the current Max Irons TV series Condor. A Mystery Writers of America Edgar finalist, he has received Italy’s Raymond Chandler Medal, France’s Grand Prix Du Roman Noir, Japan’s Baka-Misu literature award, and two Regardie's magazine short-story awards.

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condor.net

James Grady

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MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

RHYME

An Introduction to condor.net

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

—Mark Twain

CONDOR.NET is a story I wish history had never triggered me to write.

When I was twenty-three, I wrote a slim first novel called Six Days of the Condor that four decades later crackles like lightning through our culture because Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Sydney Pollack, Dino De Laurentiis, Max von Sydow, Cliff Robertson, Tina Chen, and their fellow cast and crew members followed my novel’s adapted script by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel to create a great, better-than-the-book movie shortened to Three Days of the Condor.

Both my novel and the movie came from a world of peril and paranoia. Back then, Americans were imperiled by the atom bomb–haunted Cold War, the hot-bullets Vietnam War, multiple assassinations of America’s political leaders, domestic turmoil for causes honorable and horrific, heroin plagues, plus scandals exploding from behind veils of secrecy about the FBI, CIA, and something called Watergate. And then came the first energy crisis and foreign oil embargo.

No wonder I was a paranoid young man.

Who, while working as a lowly college intern for a U.S. Senator, walked to work every day past a U.S. Senator townhouse office no one ever seemed to go in or out of and wondered: What if it’s a CIA front? And: What if I came back from lunch and found everyone in my office murdered?

John Le Carré said: If you write one book that, for whatever reason, becomes iconic, it’s an extraordinary blessing.

I am so blessed, and write about that in more detail—such as how my fictional Condor influenced the real Soviet spy agency, the KGB, to create a secret 2,000-man Condor-mimicking spy unit—in the preface to the Mysterious Press ebook edition of Six Days of the Condor, but what’s important here is what came after that novel’s birth.

After the book and movie, I got to publish more than a score of other novels, lots of short stories, took on the way things are as an investigative reporter, ran solo through the noir streets of America and got out alive—fictionalized in my novel The Nature of the Game, also available as a Mysterious Press ebook—worked in Hollywood, won some awards, somehow got a wonderful family and a comfortable middle-class life from my so-lucky slice of what my generation’s great American author Bruce Springsteen calls our runaway American dream.

But Condor forever shapes my shadow.

As the movie neared the world’s screens, fearful any chance to publish again would vanish when they realized they’d given a twenty-four-year-old kid from Montana a huge break, I cranked out a traditional sequel to Six Days—an adequate novel with a bold idea that worked and sold well. But even though the prose was more confident and polished, it was still written by a young man. Then when I saw Robert Redford embody my concept on the screen, I knew my prose character, my innocent CIA analyst who just read books, could not and probably should not compete with the glow of Redford’s cinematic art.

So, after the sequel, I left both the concept and the character of Condor alone, except for a cameo accounting of what happened to my Condor character years later in my novel Mad Dogs.

Until 9/11.

A few years after that terrible, history-defining day, picture me driving our family car on the eight-laned New Jersey Turnpike that runs north from my Washington, D.C., home through industrial and suburban sprawls. My wife, Bonnie, sits beside me in the front