Thriller Novels

"In Spetsnaz, it was a fixed doctrine that you should be in continual motion and most of that movement should take place at an altitude of considerably less than a meter. Standing there like an asshole looked good in cowboy movies but was not a viable tactic in a world filled with fully automatic weapons."

"But Richard had already gone the cop route and found it not nearly as productive as driving around with a sledgehammer and retaining the services of men with oxyacetylene torches."

"This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was."

""Do you know anything at all about Xiamen?” Zula asked. “It is a curious place,” Csongor said. “Maybe a little like Hungary.” “What does that mean?" “Too many neighbors.”"

"“There is nearly always a chthonic link. The object-imbued-with-numinous-power tends to be of mineral origin: gold, perhaps mined from a special vein, or a jewel of extraordinary rarity, or a sword forged from a shooting star. The vast popularity attests to the power of these motifs to seize the reader’s attention, down at the level of the reptilian brain, even as the cerebrum is getting sick.”"

"One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology."

"Ha ha noob, you are pwned by troll. I have encrypt all your file. Leave 1000 GP at below coordinates and I give you key"

"As a fantasy writer, Skraelin was not highly regarded… “…one cannot call him profoundly mediocre without venturing so far out on the critical limb as to bend it to the ground…” “…so derivative that the reader loses track of who he’s ripping off…” “…to say he is tin-eared would render a disservice to a blameless citizen of the periodic table of the elements…” But he was so freakishly prolific…and prolific was what Richard needed at this point in the game."

"“Maybe they’ll just take us into Russia and—” “What?” Zula asked. “Kill us? They could have done that in Seattle.” “I don’t know,” Peter said, “sell us into white slavery or something.” “I’m not white.” “You know what I mean.”"

"The Walmart was like a starship that had landed in the soybean fields. … They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power."

"The young woman had turned toward him and thrust her pink gloves up in the air in a gesture that, from a man, meant “Touchdown!” and, from a woman, “I will hug you now!”"

"He was a quick study. An autodidact. Anything that was technical, that was logical, that ran according to rules, Peter could figure out. And knew it. Didn’t bother to ask for help. So much quicker to work it out on his own than suffer through someone’s well-meaning efforts to educate him — and to forge an emotional connection with him in so doing."

"Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. It didn’t take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold."

"“This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.’”"

"Jones began to draw up a shopping list. “Cooking oil…mosquito repellent…matches…cordless drill…” “Tampons,” Zula called out. “What brand?” Jones asked without skipping a beat. “Lite, Regular, Super, Ultra?” “You’ve actually had a girlfriend?” “Anything else, as long as I’m in the pink-and-pastel aisle…or can I get back to planning atrocities?” “Knock yourself out.”"

"This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved."

"None of Seamus’ crew gave her more than a glance and a nod. They were intensely focused on their laptops: some sort of pitched battle. “Fuckers are trying to flank us on the left!” “Disengaging from the Witch King and pivoting to get your back.” …Fierce clicking and typing, punctuated by roaring, anguished laughter, as (Olivia guessed) each man’s character died in the game world. Planted around the dining area were plastic dolls: troll- or elf-like fantasy characters…Marked on the underside of each was the logo of Corporation 9592. So that answered the question she’d been afraid to ask, for fear of seeming like the stupidest person in the whole world: Are you playing T’Rain?"

"“Welcome to the GWOJ.” “GWOJ?” “Global War on Jones.”"

"This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing."

"Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow where a pinprick could alter the workings of a major organ. Mathematics was one of the few disciplines where it was possible to exert that degree of leverage, and so the Hungarians had become phenomenally good at teaching it to their children."

"“Why do they believe that?” “Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.”"

"Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common. Pants pissing suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion."

"“I don’t think you are actually retired,” Corvallis pointed out mildly.… “It’s a selective retirement,” Richard explained, “a retirement from boring shit.” “I think that’s called a promotion.”"

"Richard resumed reading the T’Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course)... which summarized what had been going on all over T’Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours: Notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines...untoward spikes in commodity prices."

"Schloss Hundschüttler was a cat-skiing resort. They had no lifts. Guests were shuttled to the tops of the runs in diesel-powered tractors. The diesel-scented, almost Soviet nature of the experience filtered out the truly hyper-rich glamour seekers drawn to the helicopter option, who tended to be a mixture of seriously fantastic skiers and the more-money-than-brains types whose frozen corpses littered the approaches to Mt. Everest."

"And so it was that Richard had conceived Corporation 9592’s Writers in Residence Program. Years later, he was astounded by the naïveté of it. Writers, as it turned out, rather liked having residences. Once they had moved in, it was nearly impossible to dislodge them."

"“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.”"

"“What happened to your line?” Hollis asked. “Business happened…We crashed and burned. There might be a warehouse full of our last season in Seattle. If I could find it, get my hands on it, the eBay sales would be worth more money than we ever saw from the line.”"

"“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."

"They don’t know they’re con men…wildly overconfident. Omnipotence, omniscience—that’s part of the mythology that surrounds the Special Forces…Your guy can walk in the door and promise training in something he personally doesn’t know how to do, and not even realize he’s bullshitting about his own capabilities. It’s a special kind of gullibility…psychic tactical equipment. The Army put him through schools that promised to teach him how to do everything, everything that matters. And he believed them."

"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."

"“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.”"

"“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."

"“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."

"“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.""

"“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.”"

""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.”"

"“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.”"

"“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!”"

"“Guys, I’m gonna pretend like all of you are incapacitated or unconscious. And if none of you makes a move, I’ll be leaving you to your own resources. Otherwise, this drone’s detonating its onboard explosives. As the only one of us who’s not physically present, I’ve got zero fucks to give about how that goes. Your call. "We’re muted now,” Conner said to Netherton. Thomas started to cry, in the nursery. “I need to see to my son,” said Netherton, getting up. “You do that,” said Conner, sounding as if he were enjoying his evening."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"“When we nudged Cursion into experimenting with Eunice,” Ash said, “we understood that we’d be destabilizing them…By now, destabilization has tipped over into dysfunction.” “They were functional enough to mount an attack,” Wilf said. “They’re not strategists,” said Ash, “though they assume they are. A fully functional, strategically sound opponent would be a greater threat, but without posing the sort of unpredictable danger they currently do.”"

"Sensing an immense patience, and power, Tito imagined that this old man, for reasons of his own, disguised himself as a revenant from Lower Manhattan's past. Each time the old man received another iPod, accepting it the way an ancient and sagacious ape might accept a piece of some not particularly interesting fruit, Tito half-expected him to crack its virginal white case like a nut, and then to draw forth something utterly peculiar, utterly dire, and somehow terrible in its contemporaneity."

"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."

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

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

"“My mother’s story,” Netherton said, “held that everything would invariably collapse, if the klept were left to their own resources.” “Their tedious ambition and contempt for rule of law would bring everything down, around their ears and ours,” Lowbeer said. “They managed to do that with the previous world order, after all, though then it was effectively their goal. They welcomed the jackpot, the chaos it brought.”"

"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."