Thriller Novels

"“You might begin by explaining this hobby of yours, Mr. Zubov…‘continua enthusiast.’” “You know about the server?” “The great mystery, yes. Assumed to be Chinese, and as with so many aspects of China today, quite beyond us. You use it to communicate with the past, or rather a past, since in our actual past, you didn’t. That rather hurts my head, Mr. Zubov." "The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them.” "But why do you call them that?" Lowbeer asked. "It sounds short. Nasty. Brutish.”"

"They won't think of us," Cayce says, choosing straight into it. "Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don't mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.” "Souls," repeats Bigend. "Of course we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile."

"She finds the Children's Crusade just as she remembers it. Damien's expression for what descends on Camden Town on a Saturday, this shuffling lemming-jam of young people…Cayce has spent hours here, escorting the creative executives of the world's leading athletic-shoe companies through the ambulatory forest of the feet that have made their fortunes, and hours more alone, looking for little jolts of pure street fashion to e-mail home."

"The heart is a muscle," Bigend corrects. "You 'know' in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped−up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things."

"“Who called you?” Burton asked, seated behind Tommy, in the Faraday cage where they put prisoners. “State AI. Satellite noticed the vehicle hadn’t moved for two hours. Also flagged your property for unusual drone activity, but I told ’em that was you and your friends playing games.” “Appreciate it.” “How long you intend to be playing?” “Hard to say.” “Kind of a special tournament?” “Kind of.”"

"Flynne pictured the stuff in Conner’s yard, humped over with morning glory vines, and imagined him never joining the Marines. So that he’d stayed here, found some unfunny way to make a living, met a girl, gotten married. Had kids. And his wife getting all the morning glory cleared away, and everything hauled off, and planting grass for a real front yard. But she couldn’t make it stick, couldn’t quite believe it, and she wished she could."

"Ask Lowbeer something, almost anything, and she’d have the answer. Meeting strangers, she might answer questions they hadn’t thought to ask. The whereabouts, for instance, of possessions long misplaced. She was fundamentally connected…in ways resulting in her knowing virtually everything about anyone she happened to meet. She’d apologize, then, declaring herself an ancient monster of the surveillance state, something Netherton knew her to well and truly be."

"“And they’re dead?” she’d asked. “Probably.” “A long time ago?” “Before the jackpot.” “But alive, in the past?…Why haven’t I heard of it before?” “It’s new. It’s quiet…Something to do with quantum tunneling.” “How far back can they go?” “2023, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.”"

"But down here, next to a display of Tommy Hilfiger, it's all started to go sideways on her, the trademark thing… My God, don't they know? This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready−to−wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."

"He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window.…Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him. The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing."

""You follow the footage." His eyes narrowing… Damien maintains, half−seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century."

"She's here on Blue Ant's ticket. Relatively tiny in terms of permanent staff, globally distributed, more post-geographic than multinational, the agency has from the beginning billed itself as a high-speed, low-drag life form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores. Or perhaps as some non-carbon-based life form, entirely sprung from the smooth and ironic brow of its founder, Hubertus Bigend, a nominal Belgian who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates."

"He imagined her now, stretched on a couch in her elongated Toronto apartment…She’d be wearing a headband, to trick her nervous system into believing the rented peripheral’s movements were hers in a dream."

"And it was like she could see herself there, on the gray gravel in front of Jimmy’s, and the tall old cottonwoods on either side of the lot, trees older than her mother, older than anybody, and she was talking to a boy who was half a machine, like a centaur made out of a motorcycle, and maybe he’d been just about to kill another boy, or a few of them, and maybe he still would."

"“You’re a publicist,” Rainey said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”"

"Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple−pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money."

"Nobody liked Luke 4:5, but Burton had a bad thing about them. They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals…and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes."

"There is that mirror−world ingestion of archaic substances, she thinks: People smoke, and drink as though it were good for you, and seem to still be in some sort of honeymoon phase with cocaine."

"Damien is thirty, Cayce two years older, but there is some carefully insulated module of immaturity in him, some shy and stubborn thing that frightened the money people. Both have been very good at what they've done, neither seeming to have the least idea of why. Google Cayce and you will find "coolhunter," and if you look closely you may see it suggested that she is a "sensitive" of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing. Though the truth, Damien would say, is closer to allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace."

"Shorts, she thinks, drawing abreast of this trio, are somehow always wrong in London."

"Netherton’s eyes widened, preparing to pitch something he hadn’t yet invented, none of what he’d said so far having been true. [Daedra's] head was perfectly still, eyes unblinking. He imagined her ego swimming up behind them, to peer at him suspiciously, something eel-like. …And then she smiled. Rainey’s sigil privacy-dimmed. “I’d want to have your baby now,” she said, from Toronto, “except I know it would always lie.”"

"Actually seeing the polt had been surprisingly interesting...driving, eyes on whatever motorway, seventy-some years earlier, on the far side of the jackpot…Gloriously pre-posthuman. In a state of nature. And hustling, Netherton had soon seen, eye on the money. Improvising, and with utterly unfamiliar material."

"Simply in terms of ingredients, it’s about recent trends in the evolution of the psychology of luxury goods, crooked former Special Forces officers, corrupt military contractors, the wonderfully bizarre symbiotic relationship between designers of high-end snowboarding gear and manufacturers of military clothing, and the increasingly virtual nature of the global market."

"I called it "Zero History" because one of the characters has had a missing decade, during which he paid no taxes and had no credit cards. He meets a federal agent, who tells him that that combination indicates to her that he hasn’t been up to much good, the past ten years…Events find him, and he starts to acquire a history. And, one assumes, a credit rating, and the need to pay taxes. It’s also the first book I’ve written in which anyone gets engaged to be married."

"Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm…She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."

"Milgrim knew almost nothing about Fiona's mother, other than that she’d once been involved with Bigend, but he’d always found the idea of girlfriends having parents intimidating."

"I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling."

"But Cayce sees that there is a Michelin Man within her field of vision, its white, bloated, maggot−like form perched on the edge of a dealer's counter, about thirty feet away. It is about two feet tall, and is probably meant to be illuminated from within. The Michelin Man was the first trademark to which she exhibited a phobic reaction. She had been six."

"The door opened inward, revealing a football player with an Eighties porn haircut."

"“How far back did Vespasian go,” Netherton asked, “to initiate this stub?” “Mid-2015.” “When is it, there, now?” “2017,” she said, “fall.” “Much changed?” “The outcome of the previous year’s American presidential election. Brexit referendum as well….” “But why would Vespasian, of all people, have desired positive change?” “He was a sadist,” said Lowbeer, “and terribly clever at it…when he failed to return to fine-tune and amplify course, as he always did, things went their own way.” “How is it there, given that?” “Grim. They’re being driven into the same blades we were, but at a less acute angle.”"

""So Homes had Burton's phone overnight. What worries me is that they might have looked at mine while they had his.” “In that case,” Macon said, “they’d have looked at mine as well. Your brother and I pretty much in a way of business…Some bored Homes in a big white truck, looking for porn, I could probably tell. But some panoptic motherfucker federal AI? Fuck only knows.”"

""You can do sneaky-ass," Winnie said, "Instinct tells me. Whose phone are you using?…I just e-mailed the number to someone, and they’re telling me the GPS is very amusing. Unless you’ve taken up marathon randomized teleportation.”"

"Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers."

"They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him…like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance… So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek."

"There was something she found deeply peculiar about Milgrim's affect, even in this brief an exchange. He seemed genuinely mild, amiable, but also singularly alert, in some skewed way, as if there were something else looking out, around corners, swift and peripheral. "Why is Hubertus interested in fashion, now?” Hollis asked. “He isn’t. In any ordinary sense. That I know of.” And the obliquely-looking-out thing was there again, around that interior corner, and she felt its intelligence. “What is it, exactly, that you do, for him, around clothing? Are you a designer? A marketer?” “No. I notice things. I’m good with detail. I didn’t know that. It was something he pointed out to me.”"

"Milgrim looked up from the plate, both elements of his oddly fragmented self seeming for the first time to see her simultaneously. “Why don’t you sing?” “Because I don’t sing,” Hollis said. “But you were famous. You must have been. There was a poster.”"

"Competitive control area: The unified field theory that best fits the currently known facts is what I call the "theory of competitive control." This is the notion that non-state armed groups, of many kinds, draw their strength and freedom of action primarily from their ability to manipulate and mobilize populations, and that they do this using a spectrum of methods from coercion to persuasion, by creating a normative system that makes people feel safe through the predictability and order that it generates. This theory has been part of many people’s thinking about insurgency and civil war for a long time. But the cases…suggest that it applies to any non-state armed group that preys on a population."

"“Given this city, and the things most of us do, you’ll have heard that before, ambitious people announcing something innovative, something they believe will drive change, but something they generally haven’t accomplished yet. This isn’t that. This isn’t a pitch.”"

"“Hi. I’m Eunice. No last name. Siri and Alexa don’t have ’em either, but the resemblance stops there. I’m an AI-upload hybrid…I’m here because I’m something new, and because I want to introduce myself before anyone else starts explaining their idea of me to you. While I’m at it, I’d like to say that I’m nobody’s property, not a product…I pay my own way…I’m globally distributed, and that’s how I view my citizenship…Whether I’m a person, it feels to me like I am. Me. Eunice.” She smiled. Everyone in the audience silent, except for a baby crying, toward the back of the crowd. Then people began to applaud."

"“Know what? The salt of the fucking earth never tells you it’s the salt of the fucking earth. People who get scammed, they’re all people who don’t know that.”"

"“Why did you take my picture?” Milgrim asked, unexpectedly bypassing his robot voice and sounding like a completely different person, the one you automatically and immediately arrest. “I’m obsessive,” Whitaker said. Milgrim blinked, shuddered."

"“As the jackpot got seriously going, after the first wave of pandemics, without EU membership to buffer anything, England started looking a lot like a competitive control area,” Eunice said. “[Lowbeer] did what she knew how to do, which by then was run a CCA. But as she kept building it back up, every time another change driver impacted, she found herself using Russians. They knew how to work a CCA. They’d been there before the jackpot hit the fan. Way before…" “So,” said Netherton, “you suggested to her that what we were hoping to have you do, in this stub, might well create a klept here, one with you as Lowbeer?” “She said you were smart,” said Eunice, in obvious agreement. “She did?” Netherton was at once amazed and dubious."

"“They think they’re the only real continuum, the one original, not a stub,” Connor said. “They discovered the so-called server first, whatever anomaly allows all this. But they didn’t invent it, just found it. Anybody knows what it really is, or where, they’re not telling.” “Nobody knows what it is?” said Virgil. “Nobody has the least fucking idea, or where the hardware is. Lot of people think China, but China’s just naturally where you’d guess something like that would be…They opted to mostly go their own way, in the jackpot…Just rolled up the carpet and closed the door for a couple decades.”"

"“Someone,” Bigend said, “is developing what may prove to be a somewhat new way to transmit brand vision.” “You sound guarded in your appreciation.” “A certain genuinely provocative use of negative space,” he said, sounding still less pleased. "I feel that someone has read and understood my playbook. And may possibly be extending it…Does ‘The Gabriel Hounds’ mean anything to you?” “No,” Hollis said. He smiled, obviously pleased."

"“What’s going on?” asked Manuela, eyeing the container’s door. “Is this a cult? Kidnapping people and telling them somebody’s after them?” “Let me think about it,” Verity said. “You’re kidnapped too? Let’s fucking escape!”"

"“Twenty-ounce,” the handsomely graying professor of denim pronounced, the Gabriel Hounds jacket spread before her. “You like it?” “I haven’t tried it on.” “No?” The woman moved behind Hollis, helping her remove her coat. She picked up the jacket and helped Hollis into it. “Fit is very good…By-swing shoulders. Inside, elastic ribbons, pull it into shape. This detail is from HD Lee mechanic jacket, early Fifties.” “You don’t know where I could find…more of this brand?” Their eyes met, in the mirror. “You know ‘secret brand’? You understand?” “I think so,” Hollis said, doubtfully. “This is very secret brand,” the woman said. “I cannot help you.”"

"Netherton said nothing, something he’d only recently been learning to deliberately do."

"“Conner’s up there telepresently,” Verity said. “So what you’re doing is some new way to give TED talks? Like theater, with really random props and locations?” “He’s using something like the iPads on wheels, but more like one of those dogs, except it’s got arms and two legs.” “So where is he, physically?” “D.C. Washington.” Manuela winced. “Please.”"

"“I wish I had a book.” There were a few expensively bound and weirdly neutered bookazines here, but he knew from glancing through them that these were bland advertisements for being wealthy, wealthy and deeply, witheringly unimaginative. Reading, his therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug."

"“Eunice’s network. Lowbeer now sees herself in it. Its skills are those she had to acquire during the worst decades of the jackpot.”"