Thriller Novels

"“Good to see you, Wilf,” Janice said, from her black mesh workstation chair, his phone’s feed provided by her device’s camera…He’d forgotten about her having painted their living room Baker-Miller pink, an institutional shade once thought to reduce aggression in prisoners. Homeland Security had given the county drunk tank three more gallons than necessary, so she’d bartered a box of her preserves for them, at a community event."

"“There’s lots of people happier with a dumbfuck in the White House…The people who were the most trouble, under Gonzalez, aren’t unhappy enough, now, to be much trouble at all,” Janice shrugged. “Life in the county, life in these United States.”"

"“Turkey and Syria weirding you out?…Folks in Frankfurt made me feel like the Cold War never really went away. Somebody shoots down a couple of Russian jets, wham, it’s Cold War Atlantis, risen from the depths.”"

"“You’re too young to remember it,” her mother said, “but we were expecting nuclear war all the time, really, up into my early thirties. Later, all of that felt unreal. But the feeling that things became basically okay turns out to have actually been what was unreal.” “But it didn’t happen. That war,” Verity said. “Decades of background dread did.”"

"“How do you keep this all sorted?” “My ass is legion,” said Eunice."

"The city so quiet, in that moment, that he could hear the gulls. Then a car passed, an antique Rolls, unoccupied, its driver a dash-top homunculus, in what he took to be a tiny chauffeur’s uniform. He walked on, intent on milk, his dreams of skating forgotten."

""You’ll be contacting Verity Jane instead,” Lowbeer said. “Who?” “…you’ll help enlist her as our agent there. She’s not at all the person I’d choose for the job, but there it is. I’m repeatedly placed in the position of choosing which innocent to sacrifice, to whatever current idea of the greater good. I’m weary of that. You’ve no idea how weary.”"

"Money launderers, in Netherton’s experience of Flynne’s stub, were the sort of people least destabilized by discovering that their world was a branch of someone else’s. They immediately looked for advantage in the knowledge."

"“What are you doing?” Netherton asked, reminded of how Conner made him uneasy. “Running systems checks,” Conner said. “This is a fabbed-up repro of something at least six generations behind the oldest I ever piloted, but the software looks like it’s either ours or we’ve rewritten it. Seriously fucked up…but I meant 'fucked up' like I can’t fucking wait to use it.”"

"“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.”"

"“Rose Garden in ten,” Conner said, “got it.” “Say what?” Virgil asked. “My day job,” Conner said. “President’s taking questions from the press in half an hour, likes me to check if the translation from future-ese to folk wisdom’s solid. You need me, I’ll be right on it.” “Break a leg,” said Virgil. Verity, her mouth full of croissant and raspberry jam, said nothing."

"The City, Netherton had heard Lowbeer say, explaining the klept to Flynne, had long been, and well prior to the jackpot, a unique species of semi-autonomous crypto-state, the single least democratic element of elected British government. It was this singular status, according to Lowbeer, that had allowed it to ride out the eventual collapse of democracy. That, and its core expertise in laundering money, had brought it into a mutually beneficial synergy with the émigré oligarch community, dominated by Russians, who had themselves first been attracted to London by the City’s meta-criminal financial arcana, plus the lavish culture of personal amenities for those requiring same. With this in mind, he picked up the bowl of coffee and regarded Lev over its rim."

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

"“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.”"

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

"“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.”"

"“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!”"

"“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.”"

"“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."

"“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."

"“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."

"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."

"A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere ... [They] were people who were content with their lives in the high-rise, who felt no personal objection to an impersonal steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people were the first to master a new type of late twentieth-century life, they thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were never disappointed."

"Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months."

"At first Laing found something alienating about the concrete landscape of the project — an architecture designed for war, on the unconscious level if no other."

"The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation."

"At times he felt that [his fellow tenants] were all waiting for someone to make a serious mistake."

"The internal time of the high-rise, like an artificial psychological climate, operated to its own rhythms, generated by a combination of alcohol and insomnia ... All the residents he had met, upon learning he was a physician, at some point brought up their difficulties in sleeping. At parties people discussed their insomnia in the same way they referred to the other built-in design flaws of the building. In the early hours of the morning the two thousand tenants subsided below a silent tide of Seconal."

"'It's almost as if these aren't the people who really live here'."

"The high-rises seemed almost to challenge the sun itself."

"Somehow the high-rise played into the hands of the most petty impulses."

"The spectacular view always made Laing aware of his ambivalent feelings for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man's absence."

"Within half an hour almost all of the women were drunk, a yardstick Laing had long used to measure the success of a party."

"'One rule in life,' he murmured to himself. 'If you can smell garlic, everything is all right.'"

"He enjoyed watching Steele at work, obsessed with these expressions of mindless violence. Each one brought them a step closer to the ultimate goal of the high-rise, a realm where their most deviant impulses were free at last to exercise themselves in any way they wished. At this point physical violence would cease at last."

"Ironically, the standard of cuisine in the apartment building had begun to rise during these days of its greatest decline, as more and more delicacies came to light."

"Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this — sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted."

"Let the psychotics take over. They alone understood what was happening."

"The darkness was more comforting, a place where real illusions might flourish."

"Now the new order had emerged, in which life in the high-rise revolved around three obsessions — security, food and sex."

"... [F]or all their descent into barbarism, the residents of the high-rise remained faithful to their origins and continued to generate a vast amount of refuse."

"Without knowing it, [the architect] had constructed a giant vertical zoo. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realized that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned how to open the doors."

"The untruth of the accusation, which they all knew well, only served to reinforce it ... By the logic of the high-rise those most innocent of any offence became the most guilty."

"... only in the darkness could one become sufficiently obsessive, deliberately play on all one's repressed instincts."

"Even their insistence on educating their children, the last reflex of any exploited group before it sank into submission, marked the end of their resistance."

"Hours on the gymnasium exercycles had equipped them for no more than hours on the gymnasium exercycles."

"'It's a mistake to imagine now we're all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection – obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse.'"

"The degree of vandalism was deliberately excessive, almost as if it served a more important secondary role, disguising the calculated way in which the residents of the high-rise, by ripping out all the phone lines, were cutting themselves off from the outside world."

"[There was a] falling interest in civilized conventions of any kind. None of his neighbors cared what food they ate. Neither Laing nor his friends had prepared a decent meal for weeks, and had reached the point where they opened a can at random when they felt hungry. By the same token no one cared what they drank, interested only in getting drunk as quickly as possible and blunting whatever sensibilities were left to them."