Quotes by John D. Barry

“Maybe I would ask Dox what he made of it. I’d been reluctant to before, fearful of the accuracy of his insights. But accurate insights might have helped me. Medicine isn’t supposed to taste good”

“Reloader was a term he’d picked up from Dox. It meant someone so formidable you’d empty the whole magazine into him, eject, reload, and empty the second magazine, too, just to be sure.””

“Donohue’s family operated a funeral home: “We had caskets stacked up outside the funeral home. We had to have guards kept on them because people were stealing the caskets. . . . You’d equate that to grave robbing.” There were soon no caskets left to steal. Louise Apuchase remembered most vividly the lack of coffins: “A neighbor boy about seven or eight died and they used to just pick you up and wrap you up in a sheet and put you in a patrol wagon.””

“He shrugged. “You know I was in the dark about all that as much as you were. This time it’s straightforward. And sanctioned.” “Sanctioned by whom?” He looked at me. “By the proper authorities.” “All right,” I said, taking a sip from the porcelain demitasse. “Tell me.” He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “After nine-eleven, Congress took the shackles off the Agency. There’s a new spirit in the place. We’re pushing the envelope again, going after the bad guys”

“Sure,” I said, my tone neutral to the point of sarcasm. There was a pause. “You’re not going to leave it on,” he said, sounding half-resigned, half-bemused. I laughed. “We’d have a better chance of success if we could work together,” he said, earnest as ever. I laughed again. “All right, do it your way,” he said. “I know you will anyway.” “Anything else?” “Yeah. It would really be nice if you could account for some of those disbursements.””

“Unless I’m talking on it,” I said, “I leave this thing turned off.” “Saving the battery?” “Guarding my privacy.” “You’re the poster boy for paranoia,” he said, and I could see him shaking his head on the other end. I smiled again. In some ways I liked the kid in spite of his choice of employer. I’d been impressed by the countermeasures he’d taken against his boss after my warning, and some part of me enjoyed being able to watch his development from naïve idealist to increasingly seasoned player.””

“We were quiet for a moment. Then I said, “Look, I’ve got an idea of what you feel for this woman, okay? I saw her. She’s a head-turner.” “She’s more than that,” he said softly. The dumb, sappy bastard. His only hope with that ice bitch would be that she’d recognize how helpless he was and have some scruples about whatever it was she was up to. I wouldn’t count on it, though. “The point is,” I said, “it doesn’t give me any pleasure to give you reason to doubt. But I’m telling you, there’s something wrong here, Harry. You need to be careful. And nothing makes you less careful than the kind of feelings that have taken hold of you right now.” After a while he said, “I’ll think about what you’ve said. Okay?” He didn’t look like he’d think about it, though. He looked like he wanted to jam his hands over his ears. Stick his newly coiffed head in the sand. Hit the Delete key on everything I’d told him. “Look, I’m going to see her tonight,” he said. “I’ll watch more closely. I’ll keep in mind what you’ve said.” I realized I’d been wasting my time. “I thought you were smarter than this,” I said, shaking my head. “I really did.” I stood and dropped a few bills on the table. I left without even looking at him.””

“I came to the first floor and looked out at the entranceway of the building. For a second I pictured the way she had hugged me here. It already seemed like a long time ago. I felt an unpleasant mixture of gratitude and longing, streaked with guilt and regret. And in a flash of insight, cutting with cold clarity through the fog of my fatigue, I realized what I hadn’t been able to articulate earlier, not even to myself, when she’d asked me what I was afraid of. It had been this, the moment after, when I would come face to face with knowing that it would all end badly, if not this morning, then the next one. Or the one after that. I used the rear entrance, where there was no camera. It was still raining when I got outside. The day’s first light was gray and feeble. I walked in my wet shoes until I found a cab, then made my way back to the hotel.””

“Why? If I’d run into her in the street, the first thing she would have said would have been, “What are you doing back in Tokyo?” If I had used a different name, surely she would have commented on that. And if she heard me speaking in unaccented, native Japanese, of course she would have said, “I thought you said you were more comfortable with English?” So her reticence was situation-specific. I thought of the fear I had detected when her eyes had first alighted on Murakami. It was him. She was afraid of saying or doing something that would draw his attention.””

“What makes me a hard target is that I have no fixed points in my life”

“I watched her, a tall girl with long hair so black that under the stage lighting it coruscated like moonlit liquid. It cascaded in waves around the smooth contours of her shoulders, past the alluring shadows of her waist, around the upturned curve of her ass. She was tall and fine-boned, with delicate white skin, high cheekbones, and small, high breasts. Put the hair up, add a little couture, and you’d have the world’s classiest courtesan.””

“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 Martian visited Earth and tried to identify the most peace-loving culture, he’d pick the U.S. of A.? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, mind you. We’re a warlike people, it’s obvious, we’re good at war and we like it. I just don’t know why we can’t admit it to ourselves. I bet sales of Prozac would go down if we could.””

“By the time George Bush’s re-election campaign got under way in 2004, there was little doubt he’d make terrorism the focal point of all of his speeches and press conferences. His surrogates went farther still, overtly portraying a vote for his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, as an invitation to annihilation. “If we make the wrong choice,” Vice President Dick Cheney warned a Des Moines audience, “the danger is that we’ll get hit again”

“Scientifically speaking, a rainbow is light being reflected and refracted off water droplets. This is some of the most beautiful imagery in the Bible since it comes after the destruction of the earth by water. Yet the rainbow itself can be revealed only through water. The rainbow also reveals the reality of light itself. Light is not white; it’s composed of colors. And just like light, God is not simplistic but multifaceted. God reflects his very image off of humanity”