With each step his desperation grew—maybe every scrap of gossip he had heard, every assumption he had made added up to nothing more than a grand delu… - Terry Hayes

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.

"Twenty-five years ago he was executed."
It shocked me. "Executed?" I said. "For what?"
The director scanned a couple of documents and found the one he was looking for. "The usual—corruption on earth."
"I'm sorry, but what exactly does 'corruption on earth' mean?"
He laughed. "Pretty much whatever we want." Nearly all of his team found it funny too. "In this case," he continued, "it meant that he criticized the royal family and advocated its removal."