I spotted Delilah instantly. She was one of a handful of people quietly attending the room’s lone baccarat table, and the only non-Asian in sight. She was dressed plainly, in black pants and a black,...
I could feel her soft shape, the heat of her, conducted with electric clarity through the wet of our clothes. I felt my body responding. I knew she felt it, too. Ah, shit.
Provocation.
It came to feel more a fortress than a home. A fortress of solitude.
Client? I asked the same question. Hort wouldn’t tell me. For your ears only. But if you want to share, I’m a good listener. I said
You have to remember, the history the powers-that-be feed you always excludes what they managed to bury. Or whom.
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
We put our shoes away. I had already purchased the necessary accouterments at the convenience store across the street—shampoo, soap, scrubbing cloth, and towels—and handed Tatsu what he needed as we w...
War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It too...
Three meters. I felt a fresh adrenaline dump in my torso, my limbs. His partners must have seen his face. Their shoulders tensed, their heads began to turn. Two meters. The guy to my right was closest...
Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong. What? Three guys just tried to kill me in Hong Kong. I heard you. Are you serious? I didn’t detect anything in his voice, but it was hard to tell over th...
Tatsu was true samurai, and would continue serving the same master no matter how many times that master ignored or even abused him. Devoted service was the highest end he knew. It
Springbank.
Now death was a place, a place to which people disappeared forever when they died, a place that gradually sucked away the clarity of memory afterward for a similar one-way journey.
It’s funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong i...
Is there any teacher better, more patient, more determined than fate?
If you wanted to understand the mentality of most Washington insiders, all you had to do was put yourself in the mind of an insecure teenager, at which point it all began to make sense.
If you want something you’ve never had before, you have to do something you’ve never done before.
If there was one thing Snake knew about people, it was that once they got attached to a theory, it was hard to get them detached. They’d screen out unhelpful facts, invent favorable ones, and ignore c...
I was taken aback by his gumption. He sounded more petulant than afraid. I realized this kid didn’t understand the kind of trouble he was in. If he didn’t tell me what I wanted to know I would have to...