Terry Hayes Quotes

The driver thought I was crazy—but then his religion thinks stoning a woman to death for adultery is reasonable, so I figured we were about even.

He came toward me and I realized I was being given the singular honor denied to so many dictators and mass murderers—I was going to be thrown out of a Swiss bank.

The old Nobel Laureate in Virginia had been right when he had asked if the greatest industrial nation in history actually produced goods and machinery anymore. Millions of jobs, along with most of the country’s manufacturing base, had been exported over the decades and a great deal of the nation’s safety disappeared with them.

I’ve always been pretty much on the outside of any side you can find.

The effectiveness of any operation is in inverse proportion to the number of people used.

I had read about it, of course, but I had never actually seen the machinery of a totalitarian state in full flight. For anyone who values privacy and freedom it’s a terrifying thing to behold.

Not everybody knows this—or cares probably—but the first law of forensic science is Locard’s Exchange Principle, and it says “Every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.”

Several guards and retainers exchanged a glance—Gaza was not somewhere to be taken lightly; it was probably the only place in the world that made Afghanistan look safe.

A few years after the bonfire of the mob came for him and his family. Like he said, it's always the same—they start out burning books and end up burning people. Out of his parents and five kids, he was the only survivor.
"He passed through three camps in five years—all of them death camps, including Auschwitz. Because it was such a miracle he had survived, I asked him what he had learned.
"He laughed. 'Nothing you call original,' he said. Death's terrible, suffering's worse, as usual the assholes made up the majority—on both sides of the wire.
"Then he thought for a moment. There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he'd learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you—just listen to them."
Whisperer turned and looked at me. "So that's what you meant, huh? You've been listening to the Muslim fundamentalists?"
"Yes," I replied. "I've heard bombs going off in our embassies, mobs screaming for blood, mullahs issuing death decrees, so-called leaders yelling for jihad. They've been burning books, Dave—the temperature of hate in parts of the Islamic world has gone out to Pluto. And I've been listening to them."
"And you don't think we have—the people in Washington?" He said it without anger. I was at one time a leading intelligence agent and I think he genuinely wanted to know.
"Maybe in your heads. Not in your gut."

We will never know exactly what the zoologist was accused of or what defense he offered because Saudi judicial proceedings, conducted in secret, aren’t concerned with time consuming niceties like witnesses, lawyers, juries, or even evidence. The system relies entirely on signed confessions obtained by the police. It’s strange how methods of torture are one of the few things that cross all racial, religious, and cultural boundaries—poor militia in Rwanda who worship ghosts use pretty much the same methods as rich Catholics supervising state security in Columbia. As a result, the Muslim cops who took the zoologist into a cell in a Jeddah prison had nothing new to offer—just a heavy-duty truck battery with special clips for the genitals and nipples.

By this stage I had switched my patronage to AA—as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings and I had decided that if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained.

Like the old virologist had said—sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

Edmund Burke said the problem with war is that it usually consumes the very things that you’re fighting for—justice, decency, humanity—and I couldn’t help but think of how many times I had violated our nation’s deepest values in order to protect them.

“Then what happened?” I asked.
“The Russian stopped calling, more important, the bills weren’t paid—I guess he either went broke or another oligarch had him killed.”
Probably the latter, I thought. That was the way most business disputes were settled in Russia.

Set amid rolling acres of lavender, the complex of seven luxurious homes, swimming pools and lavish stables was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall patrolled by what we believed to be Albanians armed with Skorpion machine pistols. This was strange, given that the family was in the wholesale florist business. Maybe flower theft was a bigger problem in northern Greece than most people realized.