Rendition noun
1. A performance or interpretation of something
2. The seizure and transfer of a person suspected of involvement with a terrorist group to another country for imprisonment and interrogation without legal process.
—see also Extraordinary Rendition
I was a soldier once and as soldiers do, I found myself carrying a rifle and a heavy pack up and down the mountains of Afghanistan. It was during those long and hot fifteen months that I first considered writing a book, but never in a thousand years would I have ever imagined that I would be writing for the Ludlum Estate.
Yet here I am.
In many ways, writing a book is like fighting a war and as an author I tell stories to honour the dead. Stories like The Treadstone Rendition where an operative named Adam Hayes finds himself called back to the last place he wants to return to.
There is something enigmatic about Afghanistan, a nobility to be found in the harshness of the terrain and the deprivation those who live there must endure on a daily basis. It is a stark land. Equally beautiful and rugged. A place where honour and treachery, truth and fiction often walk hand in hand, which makes it a damn good backdrop for a Ludlum book.
As far as heroes go, Adam Hayes is a complicated as they come. On the one hand he is a killer a genetically modified assassin trained to hunt and kill without the slightest remorse. But at the same time, he is a loving husband and a doting father.
A man like all the rest of us.
There is a part of me that thinks it unkind to send such a man back to such a place. Yet as Joseph Campbell once said, “a hero is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself.” Call it honour or hubris, folly or fear, it is this trait more than any other connects us in a way that only fiction can.
Out of all the books I have written, The Treadstone Rendition is the one that hit closest to home, and more than anything I hope it resonates with the reader and perhaps in a small way serves as a tribute to those who were there.
