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The pale jacket and chinos of a certain type of Englishman abroad are not made for arson.
Memory erodes from the inside out: Beginnings and endings sharpen as the rest grows vague.
What riled me with the trend for high-tech forecasting wasn’t so much my own potential redundancy as the idea of fate: that lives were inevitable, and you were born with your destiny coiled inside you, awaiting its own birth. We think we are living our lives, but they are living us, she had once said. My life had been a war against that.
Death had made me aware of how many people live suspended in the midst of half-completed gestures.
a poem by Taras Shevchenko. Bury me, be done with me, rise and break your chain; water your new freedom with blood like rain. 1840s, maybe 1850s.
After another twenty minutes, the bottle and glasses came out. Ten thirty a.m. I’d had worse. And I respected the tradition. The vodka in the drawer was like a confession: Of course, none of this is really bearable. It made you conscious of its absence in Western offices, and wonder what psychopathy replaced it.
“In the US they only call a place corrupt when the bribes stop working.”
You never know with people. That was what I’d learned in fifteen years manipulating their souls. The closer you look, the more things come apart. One of the big shocks is how readily people will remake themselves for you, shape themselves to your own desires, especially those with shallow roots. No one’s depthless, but sometimes you look inside and sense nothing whatsoever beneath the façade. Except, perhaps, a quiet, consistent screaming. People like that will seize any scheme you offer them.
“You have to understand, for Russia, it’s central to their view of modern warfare: The main battlespace is the mind. Vishinsky draws on what the Soviet General Staff call reflexive control theory. It means feeding an opponent specially prepared information so that they make a decision of your choosing.
Images are powerful because they suggest you don’t have to think. Here’s truth. But there’s always a story behind them.
These were bright kids. They wanted a ticket into their future, the perpetuation of achievement that had borne them this far, oblivious that others would use this for their own ends. So as a secret favor, Kane gave them something beautiful and useless: a history of poetry. And they wrote it down as if it would help them.
A familiar curiosity returned, with a familiar caveat: being let into secrets is one thing, being let out, another.
He had lost someone special to him in that final escapade, and grief had a way of haunting you with the future you had imagined.
Missions like this took a particular kind of willpower. A suspension of disbelief. He knew men braver than any, the ones you sent in when no one else would go, who one day kitted up and couldn’t walk out the door. And they had to step away from the front line forever because—this was Kane’s analysis—they had become sane: suddenly, painfully sane. They didn’t crave the cocktail of testosterone and adrenaline that overrode this sanity, couldn’t justify the willingness to inflict pain on others. They were healed.
