CODE 6
Read the play within the novel.
Harper Lee Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author James Grippando returns with a bold new thriller that asks at what price do we open our lives to Big Data.
Aspiring playwright, Kate Gamble, is struggling to launch a script she’s been secretly researching her entire life, mostly at the family dinner table. Her father is Christian Gamble, CEO of Buck Technologies, a private data integration company whose clients include the CIA and virtually every counter-terrorism organization in the Western World. Kate’s father adores her, and a play about the dark side of Big Data would be the ultimate betrayal in his eyes. But Kate is compelled to tell this story—not only as an artist exploring the personal information catastrophe that affects us all, but as a daughter trying to understand her mother’s apparent loss of purpose, made even more disturbing by the suicide note she left behind: I did it for Kate.
Then Patrick Battle comes back into her life, changing everything she has ever thought about her play, her father, and her mother’s tragic death. Patrick is a childhood friend, but he is now Buck’s golden boy with security clearance to the company’s most sensitive projects. When Buck comes under investigation by the Justice Department and Patrick suddenly goes missing, Kate doesn’t know who to trust. A phone call confirms her worst nightmare: Patrick has been kidnapped, and the ransom demand is “Code 6”—the most secret and potentially dangerous technology her father’s company has ever developed.
Kate’s fight to bring Patrick home safely reveals a conspiracy and cover up that may implicate one of the most powerful executives in the tech industry, while the development of Kate’s play unleashes family secrets and the demons behind her mother’s cryptic final note. The two paths converge in explosive fashion, leading to a shocking and terrifying discovery that puts Kate and Patrick in the crosshairs of forces who will stop at nothing to control Code 6.
“Expect combustion of all sorts from the New York Times bestselling Grippando.”
— Library Journal
“Exceptionally cool … and so is James Grippando.”
— Miami Herald
“A Pandora’s box of demons. … High-stakes espionage, family drama, double crosses, noble gestures … it’s all here.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“Grippando masterfully weaves the various plot threads together, revealing unexpected connections … this is an ambitious thriller that asks the reader to follow a complex story and delivers a deeply satisfying conclusion. Grippando’s biggest strength has always been his ability to create characters who feel as real as people we might meet on the street ... CODE 6 features some of Grippando's most compelling characters and one of his most intriguing stories.”
— Booklist
“There’s a reason that James Grippando is a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. . . . Twenty certainly works well as a stand-alone title, but it also will inspire readers to delve into Grippando’s backlist, so be prepared.”
— Book Reporter on Twenty
“Highly addictive . . . impossible to put down” — Mystery Scene on Twenty
“An excellent legal thriller by an experienced hand at storytelling.”
— New York Journal of Books on Twenty
Behind the book
“BATTLE STRONG”
The legal disclaimer says, “any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.” It’s in all of my books. This time, there’s a twist.
The friendship between the Battle and Grippando families goes back more than two decades, predating the birth of Patrick Trowbridge Battle, Jr. in 2002. To his parents and all those who knew him in diapers, he was “Baby Patrick.” Patrick received a cancer diagnosis in 2017, and despite the love, prayers, and optimism of the “Battle Strong” movement, he passed away on December 11, 2018 at the age of sixteen. In a moment of love, compassion, and perhaps temporary insanity, I promised his parents I would write Patrick into one of my novels.
What was I thinking?
We’ve all been there: wanting to do something when there’s nothing we can do. But I was way out there. In a way, I had promised to bring Patrick back to life.
Over the years, I’ve supported a number of charities by donating the right to name a character in one of my novels to the highest bidder at fund-raising auctions. But those were just naming rights. Patrick was very different. I couldn’t just name any character “Patrick Battle,” and be done with it. I’d known Patrick his entire life. I still see his parents.
I’ve never experienced writer’s block as a published author, but I simply couldn’t find a place for a teenage boy in my next two novels. My promise to Patrick’s parents was hanging out there, but I came up empty—no Patrick.
Then, when the seeds for Code 6 were just taking root, it occurred to me that by the time the book would be in bookstores, Patrick would have been a young man in his twenties. It was a lightbulb moment: I would age Patrick in real time. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to his Godfather, Walter Strump, for helping me imagine Patrick as a twenty-something-year-old whiz kid in the tech industry.
As any novelist will tell you, writing fiction is a strange exercise, and that “other world” we create is very real to us. Putting Patrick in my world, and imagining him as a young man, made me realize how well I knew him. And how much I missed him.
Patrick doesn’t just “appear” in my novel. As it turned out, he’s one of the main characters. I hope you get to meet him. For a moment, you might even feel “Battle Strong.”
Finally, I am also deeply grateful to GableStage and its founding artistic director, Joseph Adler. Joe developed and directed my first play, Watson, which made its world premiere at GableStage in 2019. Based on events in the life of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Sr., Watson is the story of Nazi exploitation of IBM technology in the Holocaust and the world’s first personal information catastrophe: the systematic identification of Jews for extermination. Sound familiar? If you’re wondering how Kate’s play turned out, check out Watson.
