Thriller Novels

"Wilf told her it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years…droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves."

"But science…had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping."

"One of the bays of stone that lined the sides of this tremendous space was Eleggua’s, and this made clear by images in colored glass. A santero consulting a sheet of signs, among which would be found the numbers three and twenty-one, whereby the orisha recognizes himself and is recognized; a man climbing a pole to install a wiretap; another man studying the monitor of a computer. All images of ways in which the world and worlds are linked, and all these ways under the orisha. Tito glanced back, down the length of the nave, and saw a single figure, approaching. He looked up, to Ellegua’s window, where one man used something like a mouse, another a keyboard, though the shapes of these familiar things were archaic, unfamiliar. He asked to be protected. “Gutenberg,” the old man said, raising his hat to indicate the santero. “Samuel Morse sending the first message,” indicating the man using the mouse. “A lineman. A television set.” This last what Tito had taken for a monitor."

"“I’ve learned to value anomalous phenomena. Very peculiar things that people do, often secretly, have come to interest me in a certain way. I spend a lot of money, often, trying to understand those things. From them, sometimes, emerge Blue Ant’s most successful efforts…Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.” “Which means?” “Secrets,” said Bigend, gesturing toward the screen, “are cool.”"

"So now they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn’t happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming anyway."

"“In August 2003, one of these joint CIA-pirate operations boarded a freighter…The team’s interest centered on one particular container. They’d broken its seals, opened it, when orders came by radio to leave it. Leave the container. Leave the vessel…Apparently it’s still out there, somewhere,” Bigend said. “Like the Flying Dutchman.” “The pirates.” “Yes?” “Did they see what was in it?” “No.”"

"She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he’d sketched for her. None of that, he said, had necessarily been as bad for very rich people. Constant crisis had provided constant opportunity."

"Milgrim considered the dog-headed angels in Gay Dolphin Gift Cove…in the most thoroughgoing trove of roadside American souvenir kitsch he’d ever seen. How old did a place like this have to be, in America, to have “gay” in its name? Some percentage of the stock here, he judged, had been manufactured in Occupied Japan."

"“Ash imagines you a conservative,” Lowbeer said, “or a romantic, perhaps. She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.” “I simply imagine things were less tedious,” Netherton said. “I personally recall that world, which you can only imagine was preferable to this one,” she said. “Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp.""

"“I like it,” Stets said. “A Silicon Valley ghost story, assuming Eunice is real.” “Thing is,” Eunice said, “I’m here. Realness is kinda sorta.” “So why here, exactly, right now?” he asked. “I want to know where I come from. The infrastructure. Be some Area 51 shit, for real.”"

"“He knows he knows something nobody else does. Or thinks he does…whatever makes him mark the floor of that factory according to the GPS grid. He won’t sleep in the same square twice." “And that might be?” She hesitated. “Pirates,” he said. She looked from Bigend to the crowd around them, feeling like she’d fallen into someone else’s pitch meeting."

"“It is,” said Lowbeer, “as people used to say, to my unending annoyance, what it is.""

"“Real pirates,” Hubertus Bigend said, unsmiling. “Most of them, anyway. Some of them were part of a covert CIA maritime program. Stopping suspect cargo vessels to search for weapons of mass destruction.” “This isn’t bullshit, Mr. Bigend?” “It’s as expensively quasi-factual as I can afford it to be.""

"There was a looseness to this, beyond her experience of chatbots, but a wariness as well."

"Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal."

""The most interesting ways of looking at the GPS grid, what it is, what we do with it, what we might be able to do with it, all seemed to be being put forward by artists. Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.”"

"So Flynne sat with Wilf (in the Wheelie Boy), and started to explain what he called the jackpot…That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event. And in fact the actual climate…had been the driver for a lot of other things. How that got worse and never better, and was just expected to, ongoing. Because people in the past, clueless as to how that worked, had fucked it all up, then not been able to get it together to do anything about it, even after they knew, and now it was too late."

"“You’re used to telepresence, then,” Lev said. “We call it getting a haircut,” Flynne said, giving him a look as she got to her feet, “back in frontier days.”"

"The peripheral’s eyes opened wide. “Christ on a corndog,” it said, raising large hands until it could see them. It wiggled the fingers of both. "Goddamn. Look at all these fingers.”"

"My novel Pattern Recognition was gestating, as I wrote this, the “Garage Kubrick” morphing from protagonist (or antagonist, or possibly just agonist) to MacGuffin, though I didn’t know it. Pattern Recognition would eventually manage to be published just ahead of the launch of YouTube, a very good thing considering certain of its plot points."

"I began to tell interviewers, somewhat testily, that I believed I could write a novel set in the present, our present, then, which would have exactly the affect of my supposed imaginary futures. Hadn’t J. G. Ballard declared Earth to be the real alien planet? Wasn’t the future now? So I did. In 2001, I was writing a book that became Pattern Recognition, my seventh novel…I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been. And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don’t really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted."

""Their stuff’s all seventy years faster than ours,” Flynne said. “Okay,” he said, and she wondered if what she was seeing in his eyes was the Corps’ speed, intensity, violence of action, or his right way of seeing. Because he just got it. Ignored the crazy, went tactically forward. "Just lock everything down, really tight," she said. "We don’t know enough now to make any kind of move at all.” Burton looked at her. “Easy Ice,” he said, and she saw the shiver run through him in the moonlight, the haptic thing."

"The Garage Kubrick is a control freak to an extent impossible any further back along the technological timeline…And this, come to think of it, may be why the Garage Kubrick never made it into my book; I was never able to imagine him letting go of the act of creation long enough to emerge and interact with any other characters. But characters who miss the bus have a way of haunting their authors, and now, falling asleep at the Marmont, it comes to me: He's back, and I'm going to have to figure out where he fits in with this new technology."

"“It’s not a dream,” Flynne said. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a dream. Don’t know that any of us are okay.” “Never sprained anything in a dream,” Conner said."

"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."

"“Password?” “Easy Ice, lowercase, no space.” “That’s such a shit password, it’s not even a password.” “I’m a just normal fucking person, Macon.” “Normal fucking people never do whatever it is you’re about to.” He smiled."

""I'm going to level with you. I'm away for a while. But there's no cash on the premises, no drugs, and the pit bull's tested positive. Twice." She doesn't leave a message."

"“Lead the way then, Mr. Netherton,” said Lowbeer. Netherton did, imagining, as he climbed the stairs, a better world, one in which a relaxing drink would be waiting in the sitting room."

"And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has."

"The old man reminded Tito of those ghost-signs, fading high on the windowless sides of blackened buildings, spelling out the names of products made meaningless by time. If Tito were to see one of those announcing the very latest, the most recent and terrible news, yet could know that it had always been there, fading, through every kind of weather, unnoticed until today, that might feel something like meeting the old man in Washington Square, beside the concrete chess tables, and carefully passing him an iPod, beneath a folded newspaper."

"National icons are always neutral for her, with the exception of Nazi Germany's, and this not so much from a sense of historical evil…as from an awareness of a scary excess of design talent. Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well."

"“I used to play in a game, because I needed the money…It was a hobby for them. Rich fucks. They bet on who’d win.” She was staring at Netherton. All his glibness, all his faithful machinery of convincing language, somehow spun silently against this, finding no traction whatever. “But if it’s a game, why did someone send those men to kill us? How’d you know the winning number in the lottery, Mr. Netherton?" “This isn’t…your world.” “So what is it?” “The future,” said Netherton, feeling utterly ridiculous. On impulse, he added the year. “No way.”"

"“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."

"“Do you print your own? Drones?” “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Netherton looked blank, then up and to his right. Appeared to read something. “You…do.”"

"“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."

"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."

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

"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."

"“They won’t say what it is. Like we’re beta-testing something. Said they’re in Colombia." “Colombia was a drug place before there were builders,” said Edward. “Now it’s a money place. Like Switzerland…The files they sent. We’re being asked to fab something that we can’t find any record of having been built before.” “Could be corporate espionage,” said Macon. “That would be interesting. Haven’t gone there before. That has our attention.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

""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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Each of the segments is of the same resolution, sufficient to allow theatrical projection," Boone said. "…Rendering is expensive, involves a lot of people, and would probably be impossible to keep a secret." "So the Garage Kubrick hypothesis is just a dream?" "Unless the maker has access to levels of technology that don't, as far as we know, exist yet. Assuming the footage is entirely computer−generated means that your maker either has de−engineered Roswell CGI capacities or a completely secure rendering operation." "You're not in 'Garage Kubrick,' then," Cayce says, "you're in 'Spielberg's Closet': the supposition that the footage is being produced by someone who already has godlike production resources." "You buy it?" "No."

"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."

"Bigend smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. "We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition." Cayce blinks. "Do we have a past, then?" Stonestreet asks. "History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when," Bigend says. ”The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now." "You sound oracular." White teeth."

"“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.”"