I Am Pilgrim (Pilgrim, #1)

by Terry Hayes

For almost a decade I was a member of our country’s most secret intelligence organization, working so deep in shadow that only a handful of people even knew of our existence. The agency’s task was to police our country’s intelligence community, to act as the covert world’s internal affairs department. To that extent, you might say, we were a throwback to the Middle Ages. We were the ratcatchers.

My father walked out before I was born and was never seen again. Several years later my mother was murdered in her bedroom in our apartment just off Eight Mile Road in Detroit—like

world doesn’t change in front of your eyes; it changes behind your back.

“The point is—if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.”

The driver thought I was crazy—but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.

Like people say—if you want to make God laugh, tell him you’ve got plans.

the House of Saud, the ruling dynasty made up of the king, two hundred powerful princes, and twenty thousand family members.

bad taste and extravagance are not haram—“forbidden”—in Islam. Prostitution, gambling and alcohol certainly are.

The Mabahith, the Saudi secret police—a law unto itself—and its network of informers hear everything, know everything.

Saudi judicial proceedings, conducted in secret, aren’t concerned with time-consuming niceties like witnesses, lawyers, juries, or even evidence. The system relies entirely on signed confessions obtained by the police.

you can kill a thinker, but you can’t kill the thought.’ ”

It meant, not for the first time, that the lives of countless people would turn on a tiny event—if only the bomb hadn’t been placed under an oak table in the Führer’s conference room. If only the tsar of Russia hadn’t executed Lenin’s brother. If only—but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good.

“Amina was what most people knew her by. Amina Ebadi,” the Saracen said. “My wife, the mother of my only child.”

the most important rule of cyberspace—computers don’t lie but liars can compute.”

The funnel web, native to Australia, is almost certainly the most venomous spider in the world—worse even than the Brazilian wandering spider

“Yeah, it seems to fit,” the president replied. “That’s it then—Pilgrim.”

And they say drugs don’t cause brain damage.