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The first was the obvious no-brainer: inappropriate clothing.
The second point is: a robotic walk. Significant at a checkpoint
Points three through six are variations on a subjective theme: irritability, sweating, tics, and nervous behavior.
Dynamite is wood pulp soaked with nitroglycerine and molded into baton-sized sticks. Wood pulp is a good thermal insulator. So sweating comes with the territory.
Hence suppressed panic, with all its visible signs.
Therefore point seven: breathing.
She was panting, low and controlled. In, out, in, out.
Point eight: suicide bombers about to go into action stare rigidly ahead.
Point nine: mumbled prayers.
Surviving eyewitnesses report long formulaic incantations run through and repeated
endlessly and more or less inaudibly, but with visibly moving lips.
Point ten: a large bag.
Dynamite is a stable explosive, as long as it’s fresh. It doesn’t go off by accident. It needs to be triggered by blasting caps.
Blasting caps are wired with detonator cord to an electricity ...
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Point eleven: hands in the bag.
If your suspicions were aroused, you didn’t run.
What you did instead was grab the suspect in a desperate bear hug. You pinned their arms to their sides. You stopped them reaching the button.
Now they are taught to keep their thumbs on the button at all times, to make the bear hug irrelevant. The button is in the bag, next to...
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The train rocked onward, with its characteristic
symphony of sounds. The howl of rushing air in the tunnel, the thump and clatter of the expansion joints under the iron rims, the scrape of the current collector against the live rail, the whine of the motors, the sequential squeals as the cars lurched one after the other through curves and the wheel flanges bit down.
Therefore their brakes are very powerful. Too powerful for finesse at low speeds. No feathering is possible. They clamp and jerk and grind. Trains often skid the last yard on locked wheels. Hence the characteristic screech as they stop.
Technically the propellant charge does not explode. It deflagrates, which is a chemical process halfway between burning and exploding.
I like rats. There are a lot of myths about them. Sightings are rarer than people think.
Rats are shy. Visible rats are usually young or sick or starving.
The U.S. Capitol. It had been built to impress. Foreign diplomats were supposed to visit during the fledgling days of the Republic and come away convinced that the new nation was a player.
She was tall but not too tall, and she was slender but not too slender. She had dark skin, like a perfect beach tan. She had long dark hair. No makeup. Huge, hypnotic eyes, the brightest blue I had ever seen. As if they were lit from within.
We had shipped a hundred million tons of woolen and cotton goods to the Russians. Plus fifteen million pairs of leather boots, four million rubber tires, two thousand railroad locomotives, and
eleven thousand freight cars,
fifteen thousand airplanes, seven thousand tanks, and 37...
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Then she said, “Even if you’re not a friend,” and I heard the tiniest bat-squeak of a threat in her voice. Just a faint far-off chime of
menace, a hint of danger, barely audible behind the words, accompanied by an imperceptible chill in her amazing blue eyes.
The alleged mother fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch.
“I was telling Sansom about how we studied the Red Army. You
know what they were most afraid of? Not us. They were most afraid of their own people. Their worst torment was spending their whole lives proving their own innocence, over and over again.”
I wouldn’t send them to look for a book in a library.”
Found a back hallway with restrooms. Two doors, labeled Ladies and Gentlemen. Brass signs, proper words. No pictograms. No stick figures in skirts or pants.
