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Believe me, there has never been a shortage of testosterone at the highest levels of the intelligence world.
Work, I had always thought, filled an emotional void for him, and—to be honest—it wasn’t unusual in an agency renowned for its eccentrics and misfits.
As one historian has said, with uncontrolled viruses, climate change, catastrophic hurricanes, massive floods, and endless terrorism, truly, this is the Age of Panic.
At some time in the years that followed, he experienced a revelation, and like most people who find—or rediscover—their religion, he fell for it very hard. He emerged from the wilderness, the desert, or wherever it had taken place as a believer in the most exacting and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.
she had been raised within earshot of a freight line in West Virginia, on the outskirts of one of the scores of towns full of what she called “the architecture of despair”: boarded-up stores, abandoned houses, and acres of derelict industrial buildings.
“One thing had struck him, he told me—how many times the doctors kept going back in, making tiny adjustments, trying to improve their work, determined to get it exactly right. On plenty of occasions he had watched those tiny adjustments unravel and the operation go completely wrong. He shrugged and told me perfect is the enemy of good.”
I knew that among the agency’s twenty thousand employees there was a host of similar men and women—shy or awkward, often downright eccentric—and it was especially true in research and analysis. I sometimes wondered what half the social misfits in America would do if there weren’t a CIA.
Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking that something in the rocks or somewhere close by must have troubled me. Most people call it intuition, but I often think it’s more like a message, a faint communication, from an older, far more primal part of the brain. It picks up tiny signs that have been lost to rational thought—the sort of things that might have kept us alive when we left the firelight and ventured out into the valley with nothing more than our senses and a few primitive weapons to keep us safe.
Crucifixion is more than just an execution; it is actually death by torture.
Popularized by the Romans, the practice was specifically designed so that the pain would continue for hours—days sometimes—as the entire weight of the body, supported only by the nails, forces the hands and feet to spasm and freeze into something more like claws. Unable to move any limb, the victim, in agony, gradually becomes dehydrated and suffers from a raging thirst. Gravity, meanwhile, slowly forces the internal organs down until they begin to crush the diaphragm. Once movement of the diaphragm is restricted, breathing in can still be managed, but exhaling becomes increasingly difficult,
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There is no common ground on earth anymore—we’re a group of different tribes forced by circumstance to inhabit the same cave. That’s what has happened to the world—everything divided. ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.’ ”
“Yeah, I thought I’d slip it in. ‘The Second Coming’—one of the best. ‘Anarchy is loosed upon the world… innocence is drowned,’ ” he quoted. “ ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’
It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness:
America’s most magnificent nineteenth-century mansion. Built by one of the era’s great robber barons, it was a remarkable place with countless barns, secluded guesthouses, servants’ quarters, and a bathing pavilion, all set among acres of manicured lawns. What do they say? Behind every great fortune lies a great crime? Although the plaque next to the front doors didn’t mention it, the estate was, in fact, funded by one of the largest securities frauds in US history. Unfortunately, it meant that when, after several generations, the money ran out, the house—horrendously expensive to
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“It’s not much of a risk. Once you hold a baby in your arms, I think you’re going to change your mind—there’s a reason DNA is built like a chain.”
Of course, the surveillance state is a terrible thing—until it’s approaching midnight and you are trying to track the most dangerous man in the world.
“It used to be humanity’s greatest dream, didn’t it? To explore the universe, to boldly go where no man or woman has ever gone before, as Captain Kirk would say. Now space is just a strategic and corporate opportunity. Taking tourists into orbit ain’t the half of it, for Chrissake! I know I’m old, but do you ever wonder what happened to us?”
“It’s like Lenin said: ‘There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades
“A virus is simply a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein,” the Nobel winner Sir Peter Medawar once said. “No virus has ever been known to do any good.”
‘Never confuse education with intelligence—you can have a PhD and still be an idiot.’ ”
I am no biologist, but it seems to me that it is the vanity of our species to think that evolution stopped with us, that humankind is—and always has been—the final destination. The truth is far more inspiring and much more terrifying: the process of evolutionary change never ceases.
