Grady Last Days of the Condor

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84344-587-6
Verlag: No Exit Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

Look in the mirror. You're nobody. You know pursuing the truth will get you killed. But you refuse to just fade away. You've been designated an enemy of the largest secret national security apparatus in America's history. All assassins' guns are aimed at you. And you run for your life, branded with the code name you made iconic: Condor. Last Days of the Condor is a breakneck, ticking-clock saga of America on the edge of a startling spy world revolution. Set in the savage streets and Kafkaesque corridors of Washington DC, Last Days of the Condor is shot through with sex and suspense, secret agent tradecraft and full-speed action.

James Grady has published more than a dozen novels and three times that many short stories, and worked in both feature films and television. 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. Grady has been both US Senate aide and a national investigative reporter. He has received Italy's Raymond Chandler Medal, France's Grand Prix Du Roman Noir and Japan's Baka-Misu literature award, two Regardie Magazine short story awards, and been a Mystery Writers of America Edgar finalist. In 2008, Grady was named as one of the Telegraph's 50 crime writers to read before you die, and in 2015 the Washington Post compared his prose to George Orwell and Bob Dylan. He has two children and lives with his wife inside Washington, DC's beltway.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Grady, James

Leseproben

3
RUNAWAY AMERICAN DREAM
- Bruce Springsteen, ‘Born to Run’
This is how you live or die. Answer the knock on your front door. That turquoise slab swung open to the rush of the world and they filled his vision. Woman standing on front stoop. Man posting on the miniscule front yard made of dirt and stone inside the black metal fence. She’s the shooter if this is a Buzz & Bang. But she just stands there on the front porch, green eyes reflecting him. Call her thirty, maybe older. Black coat unbuttoned. Pretty, but you might not spot her in a crowd. Brown hair long enough for styled, not so long it’s an easy grab. An oval face from the stirred ethnicity of modern America. A nose that looked like it had been reset above unpainted lips. She carried her shoulders like a soldier. Her hands hung open by her side, her right strobed gun hand. No rings. Dark slacks. Sensible black shoes for running or a snap kick. She waited in this sundown that smelled like rain on city streets. The hardest thing. Waiting. For the right moment. The right move. For the target to appear. Her backup man cleared his throat. Familiar, he seems . . . Older than her, say fifty, a bald white guy. Muscle in the mass under his tan raincoat. Silver metal briefcase in his left hand, right hand open by his side. He posted backup, a line of sight past her to whoever opened the turquoise door or moved in the front windows, yet the way he cleared his throat marked him as a boss, or maybe - Standing on the black iron front stoop, she said: ‘How are you?’ Tell her the truth: ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Can we come in?’ Her backup man added: ‘You can’t say no.’ ‘I could, but what good would that do?’ Walk backwards into the living room. They follow. The man in the tan coat shut the door to the rest of the world. Her smile lied: ‘Damn, I hope we got the right guy! Your name is . . . ?’ ‘I always hated my born-with-it name: Ronald. For a while, I think I was Joe. Sometimes I think I’m other names like Raul, Nick, Jacques, and oddly, Xin Shou.’ The bald man said: ‘Call him - ’ Peter! The bald backup man’s name is Peter! ‘ - Condor.’ There it is. The silver-haired man said: ‘That’s a fluke.’ ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Because the Agency rotates code names. An earlier Condor was Frank Sturgis, a Watergate burglar. Then me. With a code name back then, I felt like two people. One was regular me, one was like the movie version of your life where you’re better-looking and smarter and get the right girl. While I was locked up, the code name rotated. Something happened to that guy, they won’t tell me what. But they redesignated me Condor.’ ‘Right here, right now,’ she asked: ‘What’s your work name?’ ‘Vin.’ ‘Why Vin?’ ‘The Magnificent Seven. Steve McQueen played him. As long as I’m a lie, I might as well be a cool one.’ ‘My name is Faye Dozier. What do you want me to call you? Condor or Vin?’ ‘Your choice.’ Bald Peter set his silver briefcase on the floor, pulled an iPad out of his tan raincoat. ‘Remember the drill?’ ‘You made the first home evaluation visit after my Reintroduction Settlement.’ Faye said: ‘Was he a charmer back then, too?’ ‘He had more hair.’ ‘I was as bald then as - never mind.’ Faye caught the flicker of Condor/Vin’s gotcha smile. Peter told the silver-haired man: ‘Kick off your shoes, go stand with your heels and head pressed against that bit of bare wall next to your fancy radio.’ Your black stocking feet press the wooden floor. Don’t get caught flexing your knees or bending your hips to sink your weight but make yourself smaller, the option no shoes gave you. The wall of bricks grinds against your skull. Bald Peter raised the iPad to scan the man with his back against the wall. ‘Hold it,’ said Peter. ‘Calculations for metrics and . . .’ The iPad snapped that picture with a FLASH! ‘Turn to your right,’ said Peter. ‘Face your radio setup.’ Faye asked: ‘So you like radio? NPR, the news networks?’ FLASH! ‘I’m lucky. I can afford a radio that pulls in more than that from satellites.’ ‘Tell her about clongs.’ Disdain filled the voice of the bald man with the iPad. ‘Messages from outer space. And turn with your other shoulder to the wall.’ ‘She knows.’ ‘No I don’t.’ ‘Sure you do. You’re somewhere doing something or thinking something. Maybe driving in a car. A song comes on and it’s dead on target for whatever’s happening, for who you are right then. The universe dialing in the exactly right soundtrack as everything epiphanies the message and feels perfect, feels . . . yes!’ FLASH! ‘That’s a clong. I don’t like news on the radio. That’s the invisibles telling me what is. No clongs. Songs coming out of the cosmos show me something, lining up what could be, something about me, us. Like poetry. A movie or a novel.’ ‘But one kind of radio broadcast is about your real life,’ she argued. ‘Yeah.’ Peter muttered: ‘Instead of voices in his head, he gets clongs.’ Condor said: ‘What helps you make sense of it all?’ ‘Me?’ Peter held up his iPad. ‘I follow the program.’ She asked Vin: ‘Any problems at work?’ ‘I show up. Do what’s there. Come home.’ ‘Just so you know,’ she told him, ‘there’s no record of complaints.’ ‘And yet, here you are.’ He smiled: ‘How do you like your job?’ ‘Better than some.’ ‘Better than some people like their jobs, or better than some jobs you’ve had?’ ‘Yeah.’ She strolled toward the kitchen. Bald Peter stared at the wall covered by taped-up newspaper articles and photographs, torn-out color bursts of magazine art, poems and paragraphs ripped from books destined for the furnace, scissored chunks of phonograph album covers and insert sleeves of lyrics from that all-but-dead medium. He raised the iPad. FLASH! Working his way along the wall. FLASH! Okay! It’s okay, routine, just routine. The crazy’s collage wall. Random weirdness. Textbook predictable. Nothing to see. Nothing to analyze. Get your shoes on, go after her! Faye stared into the kitchen’s refrigerator. ‘Milk, hope it’s fresh. OJ, that’s good. Styrofoam boxes of leftovers, butter. Vanilla yogurt: for the granola on the frig? Blueberries. Your bread looks dead. Mind if I throw out those single-serving boxes of white rice? You must eat a lot of Chinese.’ ‘We all do.’ She stared through the bars over the back door to the wooden deck. Said: ‘You look like you’re in good shape.’ See the tile floor come rushing toward your face then you bounce up away from it again. Your arms burn. Set after set after set of pushups on prison time. Then in the Dayroom where the murder has yet to happen, Victor comes over, says: ‘It’s about your root, not your muscle. Your center, not your fist.’ Faye, if that’s not just her work name, Faye angled her head toward the fenced-in back deck beyond the bars, and with genuine curiosity said: ‘Is that where you do t’ai chi?’ ‘That’s where I practice the form. I “do” t’ai chi all I can.’ ‘Like now?’ Give her the void of no answer. She said: ‘Show me upstairs - no: after you.’ They passed Peter on his way into the kitchen to make another FLASH! ‘Do you always make your bed?’ she asked after she’d glanced into his upstairs clutter room, moved to the room with the brass bed where dreams made him fly. ‘Who would do it for me?’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a rule of lockup. A symptom.’ She looked at his clothes hanging in the closet. Peter will photograph them, too. Then she led him into the bathroom. Blue towel over the shower rod. The toilet seat up. She opened the mirrored door for the medicine cabinet above his sink. ‘Holy shit.’ On two shelves of the medicine cabinet stood lines of prescription pill bottles like squads of brave soldiers. Pill bottles labeled with words ending in ‘-zines’ and ‘-mine.’ Drugs whose names contain an abundance of “x”s.’ The pills famous for clearing cholesterol-clogged arteries. Blue pills. White pills. Football-shaped pills. Gel tabs. Hard yellow circle pills. Green spheres. She pointed to one prescription bottle: ‘The TV commercial shows that drug is for a man and a woman sitting naked in side-by-side bathtubs as the sun sets.’ ‘The daily dose is also used for us guys with certain . . . gotta go issues.’ ‘Really?’ She pushed him with her stare. ‘What’s her name?’ ‘There is no her.’ ‘Or he, I don’t - ’ ‘Romance is not as easy as just popping a pill.’ ‘Tell me about it.’ She softened her eyes. ‘If there’s nobody now, who was your last somebody?’ Ruby lips pucker: ‘Shhh.’ ‘I’m not sure.’ Faye said: ‘There are other medications for guys who...