“By 1880, four years after Bell conveyed the words ‘Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,’ and three years after the first pair of telephones rented for twenty dollars, more than sixty thousand telephones were in use in the United States. The first customers bought pairs of telephones for communication point to point: […]
“Sokolov pulled the long gun case out of the backseat and laid it across his lap. He opened it up to reveal the weapon. By popping out two pins he was able to break it down into two pieces, neither of which was more than about a foot and a half long, and by collapsing […]
“As for Olivia, he hoped and trusted that she had found her way safely home and was well on her way to forgetting about him. He had been reassured, back on Kinmen, to see a kind of intelligent guardedness on her face. I can’t believe I’m fucking this guy. He’d have been worried, on the […]
“She [Ada Byron] pondered her growing powers of mind. They were not strictly mathematical, as she saw it. She saw mathematics as merely a part of a greater imaginative world. Mathematical transformations reminded her ‘of certain sprites & fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, & then the next […]
“America needs more than a revival of obligation within the family. As business writer Bob Kuttner has commented, it ‘desperately needs an economy based upon notions of mutual obligation and reciprocity.’ People should be able to expect ‘that our home, our church, our kid’s school, our bank, and the place where we work will stay […]
“‘Who’s this?’ ‘Sokolov,’ said the Russian into the phone. ‘We met earlier when I killed half your men. Ten minutes ago I killed the other half. Now there is just you, motherfucker. A fucking piece of shit who uses phone to send better men to die. Then runs away to airport.’ Olivia, watching interestedly from […]
“The concierge gave him another smile and slid the paper across the counter to him. Sokolov accepted it with profuse thanks, walked out the door, climbed into a taxi, and took it to another Western business hotel half a mile up the road. There, he availed himself of a free computer in the lobby, where […]
“Sokolov watched the slow dissolution of the taxi into the crowd with professional admiration. He was a highly trained and experienced warrior, operating completely on his own, free to hide in this building for a while or emerge at a time of his choosing. Even so, he had rated his chances of escaping from this […]
“As easy and as tempting as it was to have some fun at the expense of D-squared and his band of medievalists, Richard had to admit that several of them were as serious and dedicated and competent as anyone he’d ever worked with in twenty-first-century settings; and in some very enjoyable conversations shared over mead […]
“No one could look at Peter, who had become a nearly unbearable sight on grounds of posture alone: shoulders drawn together, body trembling, back of neck brilliant red. Sokolov was favorably impressed by the fact that he had not yet shit his pants. Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, […]