Redemption Games (John Rain #4)

by Barry Eisler

He looked at a WMD attack on America in much the same terms. There was so much post-Soviet matériel out there, and so many fanatics who wanted to use it, that it was just a matter of time. But no one wanted to accept this fact, any more than the Los Angeles suburban homeowners wanted to accept that a little annual soot on their wood siding might be a small price to pay to avoid a fucking holocaust. It was just how people’s minds worked. There wasn’t much you could do about it. He shook his head, disgusted. It all made him think of the way municipalities install traffic lights. After a certain number of auto fatalities at a given intersection, the politicians say, “Hmm, we really ought to put in a light there.” They were going to do the same thing when New York had disappeared under a mushroom cloud. “Hmm, we really ought to do something about the threat of WMDs.”