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19250df
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When I had found a payphone in a suitably innocuous location, I inserted a phone card and punched in Tatsu's number. I could have just ignored him, but it was hard to predict what he might do in response to that. Better to know what he wanted, while maintaining the appearance of cooperation.
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Barry Eisler |
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8019d73
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In the last six months," he went on, "there have been two deaths, apparently by suicide. The victims were both high-level banking executives in soon-to-be merged institutions. Each seems to have leaped to his death from the roof of a building." I shrugged. "From what I've been reading about the condition of the banks' balance sheets, I'm surprised only two have jumped. I would have expected more like fifty." "Perhaps twenty years ago, or ev..
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Barry Eisler |
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df279e9
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Your biggest problem would be getting the victim up to the roof with no one seeing it. Unless you had some way of tricking him into meeting you on a rooftop or otherwise knowing in advance that he was going to be there, you'd have to transport him yourself. If he were conscious for that journey, he'd be making a hell of a racket. Also, if he were fighting you, there would be evidence of a struggle. Your skin under his nails. Maybe a clump o..
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Barry Eisler |
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edd3312
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Knowledge has always flowed upwards, to bishops and kings, not down to serfs and slaves. The principle remains the same in the present era . . . governments dare to aspire, through their intelligence agencies, to a god-like knowledge of every one of us. --Julian Assange
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Barry Eisler |
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833ef3d
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No aru taka wa, tsume o kakusu, as the Japanese saying goes. The hawk with talent hides its talons.
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Barry Eisler |
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c8dd2cd
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A survivor reassesses odds continually and doesn't disrespect them.
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Barry Eisler |
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eb534b9
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Preemptive
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Barry Eisler |
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432bce9
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The hawk with talent hides its talons.
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Barry Eisler |
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384d829
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Maybe democracies, maybe all cultures, had life cycles, the same as the humans who comprised them. And maybe there were things cultures could do to extend their lives--the equivalent of exercise and eating right, or, to analogize to what Horton had done, the equivalent of radical surgery--but those things would, in the end, matter only at the margins. Maybe, regardless of the efforts of the exceptional few, the genes hidden and inherent in ..
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Barry Eisler |
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f0d0c8f
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when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
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Barry Eisler |
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d9455aa
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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
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Barry Eisler |
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42ea74b
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When you've known someone only briefly, even if intensely, death comes as a shock, but not a particularly long or deep one. After all, there was no time for the person in question to become woven tightly into the fabric of your life. It's surprising, even a little disillusioning, how quickly you get over it, how quickly the memory of what you might have shared with someone comes to seem distant, improbable, like something that might have ha..
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Barry Eisler |
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d5c4b94
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Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destruct..
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Barry Eisler |
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397c028
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Caligula ne demisti? Oderint dum meduant. Bizden korktuklari surece, birakin bizden nefret etsinler.
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Barry Eisler |
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47f6718
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Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forward. --Kierkegaard
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Barry Eisler |
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43fb2bb
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You have to remember, the history the powers-that-be feed you always excludes what they managed to bury. Or whom.
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Barry Eisler |
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e806cf0
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For some, the distance between who you were and who you have become is unbridgeable, and the dissonance attempted repatriation creates is a constant reminder of the very changes you want so badly to forget. When
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Barry Eisler |
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756cf72
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Why are the most painful memories also the sweetest; why does the sweetness always draw us back no matter how long the pain might have kept us away beforehand? I don't know,
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Barry Eisler |
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439482a
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I didn't know what I wanted. I trained at the Kodokan and reflected at quiet shrines and enjoyed my jazz clubs and coffee houses and whisky bars. I took long, nocturnal walks through the damascene city, and considered what I'd been part of, and what I'd almost caused. I wondered about my son and I missed Delilah. I thought about Horton. I made no decisions. I
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Barry Eisler |
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a7d8915
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I pulled on a pair of shorts and did two hundred and fifty Hindu push-ups, five hundred Hindu squats, several minutes of neck bridges, front and back, and a variety of other bodyweight calisthenics and stretches. What you can get done with nothing more than a floor, your bodyweight, and gravity in thirty minutes of nonstop activity would put the fitness equipment industry out of business if people caught on. When
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Barry Eisler |
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85c1070
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It's like America," he went on. "I mean look at us, we're always telling ourselves how peace-loving we are. 'We're a peace-loving people, we love peace.' I guess that's why we spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined, why we have over seven hundred overseas military bases in a hundred and thirty countries, and why we've been at war pretty much continuously since we were just a bunch of colonies. Shoot, you think if a M..
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Barry Eisler |
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dc2e7d9
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There wasn't any
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Barry Eisler |
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2737c19
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My mother had tried to raise me as a Catholic, but war had deracinated whatever meager plantings her efforts had achieved. No God ever would have stood silent spectator to what I saw in Vietnam. To what I did there. Either there was no God, or there was and he didn't give a damn.
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Barry Eisler |
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29f6900
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I learned a long time ago not to trust, that faith is to life what sticking your chin out is to boxing.
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Barry Eisler |
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1b24724
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People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there's just what you can do, and what you can't. Well, I could. And I was going to.
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Barry Eisler |
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5b11424
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sold to the public on false pretenses, high officials confessing to ordering torture in violation of treaty and domestic law, and an economic meltdown even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledges involved massive fraud--and no one has been prosecuted, no one has gone to prison, and Americans continue to dutifully cast their votes for the Democratic/Republican duopoly responsible for these disasters.
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Barry Eisler |
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33fccb3
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Asian face and local language skills to handle the cash. I had just returned to the States from Vietnam, having left the military under a cloud, the origins of which I was able to understand only years later. My mother, the American half of the marriage, had just died; I had no brothers or sisters;
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Barry Eisler |
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e5b21bd
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It seemed he'd recently learned the value of playing up the difficulty of accomplishing whatever he was tasked with, the better to play the hero when he subsequently pulled it off. He was overusing the technique the way a child overuses a new word.
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Barry Eisler |
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c955d04
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astute
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Barry Eisler |
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3ed514b
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sang-froid
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Barry Eisler |
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3b11618
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traversed
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Barry Eisler |
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5cdee9a
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somnolent
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Barry Eisler |
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5eaf4e9
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insolence
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Barry Eisler |
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3fbf1dc
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provocation.
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Barry Eisler |
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26ba4a9
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She spun and faced me, one hand on her wounded posterior. Her eyes were wide, her nostrils flared with shock and anger. In my peripheral vision, I saw her weight shift to her back leg, and thought she was going to try for a ball shot with her forward foot. Instead, she stepped back. Her arms slipped to her sides and she drew up her shoulders and chin, the picture of suppressed regal rage. She looked at me. "Mo owari, okyakusama?" she asked,..
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Barry Eisler |
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fde84b8
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After about fifteen minutes he walked over to me. "Randori?" he asked, in a tone that was more a challenge than an invitation. I nodded, averting my eyes from his hard stare. In my mind, our contest was already underway, and I prefer my opponents to underestimate me."
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Barry Eisler |
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f2d4348
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It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America's oil addiction is a sickness that's killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work.
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Barry Eisler |
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84528ae
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Music reveals a personal past of which, until then, each of us was unaware, moving us to lament misfortunes we never suffered and wrongs we did not commit. --Jorge Luis Borges
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Barry Eisler |
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3ea9895
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salubrious
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Barry Eisler |
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c307365
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long-ago lifetime.
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Barry Eisler |
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ec6d070
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his pipe.
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Barry Eisler |
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8cf3c9e
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it came to feel more a fortress than a home. A fortress of solitude.
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Barry Eisler |
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af028c6
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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.
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Barry Eisler |
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1f4932a
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because how could something so awful also contain something so impossibly good?
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Barry Eisler |