Maybe. You can’t retire. I paused. When I spoke, my voice was quiet, not much more than a whisper. I hope you’re not saying you might interfere. He didn’t flinch. There would be no need for me to inte...
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 there’s one lesson I learned early on during the decades I’ve spent in this business, it’s that of all the qualities that distinguish a hard target from everyone else, among the most important is s...
I finished eating and motioned to the waiter that I was ready for the check. I looked around the restaurant one last time. The office party had broken up. The Americans remained, the white noise of th...
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.
He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn’t want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naïve sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not s...
Harry, I only ask because, when you’re young, you sometimes think you can have it both ways. If you’re just having fun, you don’t need to tell her anything. You shouldn’t tell her anything. But if the...
Death catches everyone eventually, and I had never harbored any illusions about its ability to catch me. That it had hesitated so long to do so seemed born more of a desire to mock me than of any real...
His pipe.
But the truth was, his apology meant nothing to her. In her mind, behavior was the truth, not words.
Astute
When I was about a meter away and beyond the range of his peripheral vision, I took a deep step in, dropped into a squat just behind him, and wrapped my arms tourniquet-tight around his legs just abov...
What did Ian Fleming say? Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. And I don’t believe in waiting for even that much evidence. It was past time to act.
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
Tokyo is so vast, and can be so cruelly impersonal, that the succor provided by its occasional oasis is sweeter than that of any other place I’ve known. There is the quiet of shrines like Hikawa, indu...
There wasn’t any
There was Asuka, birthplace of Yamato Japan, with its long-vacant burial mounds, surfaces carved with supernatural images of beasts and semi-humans, their makers and their meaning lost in the timeless...
So much of being a good interrogator was just knowing how to actively listen to someone,
She nodded. At first what I thought I wanted was revenge. I kept thinking of how to hurt you, how to cause you pain, like the pain you caused me. I wasn’t surprised. And I resented you for that, she w...
Preemptive