Neal Stephenson

In Spetsnaz, it was a fixed doctrine that you should be in continual motion and most of that movement should take place at an altitude of considerably less than a meter. Standing there like an asshole looked good in cowboy movies but was not a viable tactic in a world filled with fully automatic weapons.

It came to him then that he was overthinking this. This was a shoot-out. Nothing could be simpler. But he was making it too complicated by trying to use his wits to work the angles.

“It’s nothing more than a great bloody cat!”

This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.

When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows.

It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it.

The sales force didn’t need to get involved.

“This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.’”

“The American national security apparatus is very large and unfathomably complex,” was all that Uncle Meng would say. “It has many departments and subunits that, one supposes, would not survive a top-to-bottom overhaul. This feeds on itself as individual actors, despairing of ever being able to make sense of it all, create their own little ad hoc bits that become institutionalized as money flows toward them. Those who are good at playing the political game are drawn inward to Washington. Those who are not end up sitting in hotel lobbies in places like Manila, waiting for people like you.”

This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was.

“Why do they believe that?”

“Because we are hackers,” Csongor said, “and they have seen movies.”

“Welcome to the GWOJ.”

“GWOJ?”

“Global War on Jones.”

Except for the part about his niece being held hostage and he himself being the captive of murderous jihadists, this was the best vacation Richard had had in ten years. The only vacation, in truth. … He was seriously thinking that, if he survived this, he might try to launch a new venture: a vacation services provider for wealthy, hardworking people that would work by showing up at their homes without warning and abducting them.

Men always made crude jokes about people pissing their pants with fear, but in Sokolov’s experience, shitting the pants was more common. Pants pissing suggested a total breakdown of elemental control. Pants shitting, on the other hand, voided the bowels and thereby made blood available to the brain and the large muscle groups that otherwise would have gone to the lower-priority activity of digestion.

“Before California, we have to get into trouble. Then out of it.”

Marlon shrugged. “But that is what we do.”

Csongor nodded. “That is what we do.”