Spook Country

Tito guessed he chose to allow it to overwhelm him, invited it, used it to make things the fault of others, attempted to control them with it.

America had developed Stockholm syndrome toward its own government, post 9/ 11.

The houses themselves seemed to belong less to another time than to another country; Belfast perhaps, after some sectarian biological attack. The shells of Japanese cars in the streets, belly down on bare rims.

She studied the pattern of potato grease on her empty paper plate. If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word.

‘If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That’s why they call him "terrorist." He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.’ Brown opened his mouth. Closed it. ‘It’s based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen.’

‘A nation,’ he heard himself say, ‘consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual’s morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation’s laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn’t a nation.’

Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt.

Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

‘" Referencing." Laurence says he’s referencing Hitchcock.’ She made it sound sexually transmissible.

She wore what Hollis took to be Girbaud, a sort of Bladerunner soccer-mom look, probably less out of place in this lobby than many things would be.

‘Hubertus wants you to have anything you might need. That’s rather literally anything, by the way, since you’re working on one of his special projects.’ ‘" Special"?’ ‘No explanations, no goals cited, no budgetary cap, absolute priority in whatever queue. He describes it as a species of dreaming, the company’s equivalent of REM sleep. He believes it’s essential.’

‘Intelligence, Hollis, is advertising turned inside out.’ ‘Which means?’ ‘Secrets,’ said Bigend, gesturing toward the screen, ‘are cool.’ On the screen appeared their images, standing beside the table, Bigend not yet seated, captured by a camera somewhere above. The Bigend on the screen took a pale blue cloth from his pocket, pulled out a chair, and began to dust its arms and back and seat. ‘Secrets,’ said the Bigend beside her, ‘are the very root of cool.’

The pop star, as we knew her’–and here he bowed slightly, in her direction–‘was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.’ ‘Of–?’ ‘Of a state in which "mass" media existed, if you will, within the world.’ ‘As opposed to?’ ‘Comprising it.’

The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness.

They passed a Brobdingnagian futon, in whose squishy depths a covey of vicious, asshole-chewing, hyena-like, and exceptionally pretty young people reclined with their drinks.

‘She drove past me in a very nice-looking car. Headed in the direction of Beverly Hills.’ ‘She’s been headed in that direction since the birth canal.’

And it hadn’t hurt that Bobby was himself a musician, though not in the old plays-a-physical-instrument-and/ or-sings modality. He took things apart, sampled them, mashed them up. This was fine with her, though like General Bosquet watching the charge of the Light Brigade, she was inclined to think it wasn’t war. Inchmale understood it, though, and indeed had championed it, as soon as it was digitally possible, pulling guitar lines out of obscure garage chestnuts and stretching them, like a mad jeweler elongating sturdy Victorian tableware into something insectile, post-functionally fragile, and neurologically dangerous.

Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.’

she walked back to the Mondrian through that weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning in West Hollywood, when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in.

It was like shoes and accessories, Milgrim thought; someone does alligator, the next week they’re all doing it.

Odile was the least chic Frenchwoman Hollis could recall having met, though in a kind of haute-nerd Euro way that only made her more annoyingly adorable.

Fifteen minutes later, having done the best she could with all that had never been quite right, she descended to the lobby in a Philippe Starck elevator, determined to pay its particulars as little attention as possible. She’d once read an article about Starck that said the designer owned an oyster farm where only perfectly square oysters were grown, in specially fabricated steel frames. The doors slid open on an expanse of pale wood. The Platonic ideal of a small oriental carpet was projected across part of this from somewhere overhead, stylized squiggles of light recalling slightly less stylized squiggles of dyed wool.