Tracer Quotes

Yes, well”—he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose delicately—“the burner phone we had accidentally fell out of the car, and someone accidentally backed over it. Because someone was in a rush after she accidentally alerted some skip tracers we were nearby when she accidentally used her abilities to move a light pole out of the road after she had accidentally backed into it.” “Someone better shut their mouth before I accidentally slam my fist into their teeth.” She punched his shoulder, and it was almost...playful. “Shut his mouth, fist into his teeth.” “Really? A grammar lesson?

Tracer lighting up the sky. It's another families' turn to die. A child afraid to even cry out says, He has been here. And I see no bravery, No bravery in your eyes anymore. Only sadness.

Vietnam, me love you long time. All day, all night, me love you long time. (...) Dropping acid on the Mekong Delta, smoking grass through a rifle barrel, flying on a helicopter with opera blasting out of loudspeakers, tracer-fire and paddy-field scenery, the smell of napalm in the morning. Long time.

The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow. The white cat is "the cleaner" or "the animal that cleans itself," described by the Sanskrit word Margaras, which means "the hunter who follows the track; the investigator; the skip tracer." The white cat is the hunter and the killer, his path lighted by the silvery moon. All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can't shake your white cat because your white cat is you. You can't hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you.

Joseph Lister?" Liam said suddenly, cutting through the silence. "Really? Him?" Chubs stiffened beside me. "That man was a hero. He pioneered research on the origins of infections and sterilization." Liam stared hard at the faux leather cover of just Chubs's skip-tracer ID, carefully choosing his next words. "You couldn't have chosen something cooler? Someone who is maybe not an old dead white guy?" "His work led to the reduction of post operative infections and safer surgical practices," Chubs insisted. "Who would you have picked? Captain America?" "Steve Rogers is a perfectly legit name." Liam pass the ID back to him. " This is all...very Boba Fett of you. I'm not sure what to say, Chubsie.

People give out information all the time. You just have to know who to ask.

Look at what it’s done to us. Zu’s crying face the other night floated to the forefront of my mind, only to be replaced by the memory of Chubs’s confession about the requirements of becoming a skip tracer; him being shot; Liam’s battered face—all of these were linked in my mind now. They’d never fade, not even in the afterlight of all of this.

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife. And all this through a lens of oleaginous Belfast rain.

I wanted to be a part of it. But I couldn't ask, and I needed to stop lying to myself. Because every second I stayed with them was another chance for them to discover the skip tracers and PSFs weren't the real monsters of the world. No. One of the real ones was sitting in their back seat.

These largely empty volumes of space—the far-rural regions of each galaxy—contain too little visible matter to explain the anomalously high orbital speeds of the tracers.

The faint tracer of scars on his face was barely visible, like the ghost of a map. •chapter 2, page 34

Tracer was a good guy, but Ruthie didn’t understand how one individual could smoke the amount of pot he did and still function.

SEALs, like the name said, were trained to operate in all conditions - SEa, Air, Land. But Stuffy Victorian Hotel Lobby hadn't made the list.

Mais comme mes regards tombaient sur le bloc de feuilles blanches, je fus saisi par son aspect et je restai, la plume en l'air, à contempler ce papier éblouissant : comme il était dur et voyant, comme il était présent. Il n'y avait rien en lui que du présent. Les lettres que je venais d'y tracer n'étaient pas encore sèches et déjà elles ne m'appartenaient plus.

The red tears of tracers shrieked through the thoroughfares and stray bullets cratered the faces of banks, churches, condos, and franchises, every place of worship a city has to offer.

Hmm? It's sort of a hunch... I just knew when I saw your eyes... I can't come up with cool words to describe it. Well. To put it simply...' After deliberating, he finally said the words that are likely to come from the wizards in a fairy-tale. 'I can do anything.

I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my retinas even after the light that sparked them has gone. I emerge from the mango grove into a field. In the distance unseen trucks pass with a sound like the ocean licking the sand. A tracery of darkness curls into a starry sky, a solitary pipal tree making itself known by an absence of light, like a flame caught in a photographer's negative, frozen, calling me.

She had an incredible amount of admiration for these talented men who dedicated themselves to training and practicing and honing their skills in order to be part of one of the most elite fighting forces in the world.

The top has no limits. We can keep on climbing. That's what people do. No-- That's what I do.

The HSI agent wasn’t caught in the Welcome to Video dragnet because IRS agents had violated his privacy. He was caught, the judges concluded, because he had mistakenly believed his Bitcoin transactions to have ever been private in the first place.

We shall need all the wisdom from above that God can give us in this AI age in order to fulfil Christ’s directive that we should be salt and light in our society.9 We have often referred to the fact that we live in a surveillance society. Let us therefore live with the myriad cameras and tracers on our lives in such a way that even the monitors can see that we have been with Jesus.

Harper saw a dark young guy, trying to stop from laughing so much. By some trick of perspective the tracers illuminated Sam's profile with a halo of fireflies. Something about him touched Harper, so that long after the gunship had swung low and away Sam's image remained on his retina.

Theodora had an impressive vocabulary, which can be charming if it is used at a convenient time. But if you are in a great hurry and someone uses something like “skip tracer,” which you are unlikely to understand, then an impressive vocabulary is quite irritating. Another way of saying this is that it is vexing. Another way of saying this is that it is annoying. Another way of saying this is that it is bothersome. Another way of saying this is that it is exasperating. Another way of saying this is that it is troublesome. Another way of saying this is that it is chafing. Another way of saying this is that it is nettling. Another way of saying this is that it is ruffling. Another way of saying this is that it is infuriating or enraging or aggravating or embittering or envenoming, or that it gets one’s goat or raises one’s dander or makes one’s blood boil or gets one hot under the collar or blue in the face or mad as a wet hen or on the warpath or in a huff or up in arms or in high dudgeon, and as you can see, it also wastes time when there isn’t any time to waste.

How many software developers does it take to change a lightbulb? None, it's a hardware problem.

An arsenic compound is still used to treat promyelocytic leukemia, and the isotope arsenic-74 is used as a radioactive tracer to find tumors.

The site’s handling of cryptocurrency seemed to be designed by someone who still held the antiquated belief that Bitcoin was magically untraceable—when, in fact, the opposite was often true.

What would the army tell you to do?" "Fire armor-piercing rounds in sufficient quantity to subdue resistance. And then fire tracer rounds at the gas tank in sufficient quantity to subdue evidence.

In an instant, the end would come with the most minute of gestures—the flick of the Zero pilot’s finger on his cannon trigger—and Super Man would carry ten men into the Pacific. Pillsbury could see the pilot who would end his life, the tropical sun illuminating his face, a white scarf coiled about his neck. Pillsbury thought: I have to kill this man. Pillsbury sucked in a sharp breath and fired. He watched the tracers skim away from his gun’s muzzle and punch through the cockpit of the Zero. The windshield blew apart and the pilot pitched forward. The fatal blow never came to Super Man. The Zero pilot, surely seeing the top turret smashed and the waist windows vacant, had probably assumed that the gunners were all dead. He had waited too long.

There was no abstraction that couldn’t be tracer fire, or the smoke of black powder, or a hollow-point’s flowering. The body was worldlike in the repleteness of its possibilities, and just as no part of this little world was safe from a bullet’s penetration, no form in the big world had no echo in a gun.

On a clear night in blacked-out countryside, in between bomber runs, when the tracer fire ceased and the searchlights went dark, the stars did not fill the sky so much as coat it like hoarfrost on a windowpane. You looked up and saw The Starry Night, he told me; you realized that Van Gogh was a realist painter.

But the soldier sitting next to her laughed at her when she asked if it was a national holiday. “Yeah, you could call it that, I guess. They call this a war. That’s artillery … those are tracer bullets going off … oh … I’d say somewhere in the vicinity of Bien Hoa.… Lady, you’re gonna love it here. We got fireworks

Plenty of people on the street but all glued to their phones. Everyone was perpetually connected, but to what? She

Gratitude was a big one. He hadn’t realized how much he took people for granted in his life until they showed up to help him without even being asked. It was humbling as hell.

Even the crowded movie theater trick, it turns out, breaks down when the robber is carrying a large enough sack of loot and the cops are watching every exit.

As the Berkeley researcher Nick Weaver had warned, and as cryptocurrency users around the world were finally learning, “The blockchain is forever.

M.J. looked at her. "What's the difference between God and a federal judge?" "I don't know." "God doesn't think he's a federal judge." Tara smiled, for what seemed like the first time in days.

She was flushed, panting, and pissed off at him. The Holy Trinity of turn-ons, and he couldn’t resist grabbing her hand and pulling her in for a kiss, but before his mouth connected, he got a sharp shove to the solar plexus.

Le triomphe de la philosophie serait de jeter du jour sur l’ obscurité des voies dont la providence se sert pour parvenir aux fins qu’ elle se propose sur l’homme, et de tracer d’ après cela quelque plan de conduite qui pût faire connaître à ce malheureux individu bipède, perpétuellement ballotté par les caprices de cet être qui dit-on le dirige aussi despotiquement, la manière dont il faut qu’il interprète les décrets de cette providence sur lui. De Sade, Les Infortunes de la Vertu

On August 10, 1984, my plane landed in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. There were no skyscrapers here. The blue domes of the mosques and the faded mountains were the only things rising above the adobe duvals (the houses). The mosques came alive in the evening with multivoiced wailing: the mullahs were calling the faithful to evening prayer. It was such an unusual spectacle that, in the beginning, I used to leave the barracks to listen – the same way that, in Russia, on spring nights, people go outside to listen to the nightingales sing. For me, a nineteen-year-old boy who had lived his whole life in Leningrad, everything about Kabul was exotic: enormous skies – uncommonly starry – occasionally punctured by the blazing lines of tracers. And spread out before you, the mysterious Asian capital where strange people were bustling about like ants on an anthill: bearded men, faces darkend by the sun, in solid-colored wide cotton trousers and long shirts. Their modern jackets, worn over those outfits, looked completely unnatural. And women, hidden under plain dull garments that covered them from head to toe: only their hands visible, holding bulging shopping bags, and their feet, in worn-out shoes or sneakers, sticking out from under the hems. And somewhere between this odd city and the deep black southern sky, the wailing, beautifully incomprehensible songs of the mullahs. The sounds didn't contradict each other, but rather, in a polyphonic echo, melted away among the narrow streets. The only thing missing was Scheherazade with her tales of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights ... A few days later I saw my first missile attack on Kabul. This country was at war.

Certes, le beau visage de ma mère brillait encore de jeunesse ce soir-là où elle me tenait si doucement les mains et cherchait à arrêter mes larmes ; mais justement il me semblait que cela n’aurait pas dû être, sa colère eût été moins triste pour moi que cette douceur nouvelle que n’avait pas connue mon enfance ; il me semblait que je venais d’une main impie et secrète de tracer dans son âme une première ride et d’y faire apparaître un premier cheveu blanc. Cette pensée redoubla mes sanglots, et alors je vis maman, qui jamais ne se laissait aller à aucun attendrissement avec moi, être tout d’un coup gagnée par le mien et essayer de retenir une envie de pleurer.

I cleaned my gun every day, and it was now paying off. The whole time my platoon sergeant made sure I stayed on target and helped direct me. I recall the sensation of him grabbing my leg to get my attention and pointing towards more targets. I remember walking my tracers into a bad guy’s gun, as he was doing the same to me, the rounds were so close I could feel the heat of the bullets on my neck, but I got him first. Some of the guys who saw it thought I was hit and were grabbing me trying to dress my non-existent wounds when we made it out of the kill zone. I also recall shooting a structure down along with the men inside it not more than 20 feet from me. The close proximity of their muzzle flashes startled me.

Yossarian went to bed early for safety and soon dreamed that he was fleeing almost headlong down an endless wooden staircase, making a loud, staccato clatter with his heels. Then he woke up a little and realized someone was shooting at him with a machine gun. A tortured, terrified sob rose in his throat. His first thought was that Milo was attacking the squadron again, and he rolled off his cot to the floor and lay underneath in a trembling, praying ball, his heart thumping like a drop forge, his body bathed in a cold sweat. There was no noise of planes. A drunken, happy laugh sounded from afar. 'Happy New Year, Happy New Year!' a triumphant familiar voice shouted hilariously from high above between the short, sharp bursts of machine gun fire, and Yossarian understood that some men had gone as a prank to one of the sandbagged machine-gun emplacements Milo had installed in the hills after his raid on the squadron and staffed with his own men. Yossarian blazed with hatred and wrath when he saw he was the victim of an irresponsible joke that had destroyed his sleep and reduced him to a whimpering hulk. He wanted to kill, he wanted to murder. He was angrier than he had ever been before, angrier even than when he had slid his hands around McWatt's neck to strangle him. The gun opened fire again. Voices cried 'Happy New Year!' and gloating laughter rolled down from the hills through the darkness like a witch's glee. In moccasins and coveralls, Yossarian charged out of his tent for revenge with his .45, ramming a clip of cartridges up into the grip and slamming the bolt of the gun back to load it. He snapped off the safety catch and was ready to shoot. He heard Nately running after him to restrain him, calling his name. The machine gun opened fire once more from a black rise above the motor pool, and orange tracer bullets skimmed like low-gliding dashes over the tops of the shadowy tents, almost clipping the peaks. Roars of rough laughter rang out again between the short bursts. Yossarian felt resentment boil like acid inside him; they were endangering his life, the bastards!

In Diyala, east of Baghdad, in the early days of the war, I came upon a group of American marines standing next to a shot-up bus and a line of six Iraqi corpses. Omar, a fifteen-year-old boy, sat on the roadside weeping, drenched in the blood of his father, who had been shot dead by American marines when he ran a roadblock. “What could we have done?” one of the marines muttered. It had been dark, there were suicide bombers about and that same night the marines had found a cache of weapons stowed on a truck. They were under orders to stop every car. The minibus, they said, kept coming anyway. They fired four warning shots, tracer rounds, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding. Omar’s family, ten in all, were driving together to get out of the fighting in Baghdad. They claimed they had stopped in time, just as the marines had asked them to. In the confusion, the truth was elusive, but it seemed possible that Omar’s family had not understood. “We yelled at them to stop,” Corporal Eric Jewell told me. “Everybody knows the word ‘stop.’ It’s universal.” In all, six members of Omar’s family were dead, covered by blankets on the roadside. Among them were Omar’s father, mother, brother and sister. A two-year-old boy, Ali, had been shot in the face. “My whole family is dead,” muttered Aleya, one of the survivors, careening between hysteria and grief. “How can I grieve for so many people?” The marines had been keeping up a strong front when I arrived, trying to stay business-like about the incident. “Better them than us,” one of them said. The marines volunteered to help lift the bodies onto a flatbed truck. One of the dead had already been partially buried, so the young marines helped dig up the corpse and lift it onto the vehicle. Then one of the marines began to cry.   I

After nightfall, when most of the American planes had been taken aboard, a new formation of planes arrived over the task force. First, the drone of their engines could be heard above the cloud cover; then they slipped into view, at about the height of the Lexington’s masts. “These planes were in very good formation,” recalled Lieutenant Commander Stroop. They had their navigation lights on, indicating that they intended to land. But many observers on both carriers and several of the screening vessels noted that something was awry. Captain Sherman of the Lexington counted nine planes, more than could be accounted for among the American planes that were still aloft. They were flying down the Yorktown’s port side, a counterclockwise approach, the reverse of the American landing routine. They were flashing their blinker lights, but none of the Americans could decipher the signal. Electrician’s mate Peter Newberg, stationed on the Yorktown’s flight deck, noticed that the aircraft exhausts were a strange shape and color, and Stroop noted that the running lights were a peculiar shade of red and blue. The TBS (short-range radio circuit) came alive with chatter. One of the nearby destroyers asked, “Have any of our planes got rounded wingtips?” Another voice said, “Damned if those are our planes.” When the first of the strangers made his final turn, he was too low, and the Yorktown’s landing signal officer frantically signaled him to throttle up. “In the last few seconds,” Newberg recalled, “when the pilot was about to plow into the stern under the flight deck, he poured the coal to his engine and pulled up and off to port. The signal light flicked briefly on red circles painted on his wings.” One of the screening destroyers opened fire, and red tracers reached up toward the leading plane. A voice on the Lexington radioed to all ships in the task force, ordering them to hold fire, but the captain of the destroyer replied, “I know Japanese planes when I see them.” Antiaircraft gunners on ships throughout the task force opened fire, and suddenly the night sky lit up as if it was the Fourth of July. But there were friendly planes in the air as well; one of the Yorktown fighter pilots complained: “What are you shooting at me for? What have I done now?” On the Yorktown, SBD pilot Harold Buell scrambled out to the port-side catwalk to see what was happening. “In the frenzy of the moment, with gunners firing at both friend and foe, some of us got caught up in the excitement and drew our .45 Colt automatics to join in, blasting away at the red meatballs as they flew past the ship—an offensive gesture about as effective as throwing rocks.” The intruders and the Americans all doused their lights and zoomed back into the cloud cover; none was shot down. It was not the last time in the war that confused Japanese pilots would attempt to land on an American carrier.

for pub meals and never forgot either of their birthdays. The truth was, if he could ask Cadi if she minded, she’d probably stare at him with big brown eyes, curled up on the sofa next to her Golden Lab pal Bouncer, and likely say, ‘And your point is?’ Molly, on the other hand, was a different kettle of herring. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before,’ she said when he explained that he was unlikely to be home at anything like a reasonable time and so had okayed it with the Dawes for Cadi to stay with them overnight. That way, he was certain she’d get a walk. ‘I could have done that,’ Molly said, piqued. ‘Yes, I realise that, but the weather is, for want of a better word, shite. And you’re still at Gwen’s, right?’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘You told me this morning.’ ‘Did I? For a minute there I thought you had a GPS tracer on my car.’ ‘That can be arranged. I’m well aware you can look after yourself, Molly, but the whole point of you staying at mine is that I’m there.’ ‘As a minder?

Singapore Health Department in April, for example, I was astonished to learn that they employed five thousand contact tracers in a population of about five million people. One person per thousand in their whole nation was employed for this purpose alone. At the time, Singapore had accumulated just 9,125 cases. In our country, this would translate into having 330,000 people engaged in this work.

Lastly, be strong and courageous men for Christ. Put on God’s uniform so as to be able to withstand all the Devil’s tricks. For we’re not fighting against ordinary human beings, but against the leaders, politicians and heads of state of this dark world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. So, put on God’s uniform so you’ll be able to put up a fight on the day of battle and, having tended to every detail, to make your stand. Therefore, take your position when you have put on the pants of truth, the shirt of righteousness, and the shoes of the good news of peace. Above all, take the bulletproof vest of faith, with which you’ll be able to stop the tracer bullets of the evil one. Also, wear the helmet of salvation, and the pistol of the Spirit, which is God’s word. 18. When you offer a prayer or a petition on any occasion, let it be truly spiritual. Along this same line, be on your toes as you encourage and pray for all the members. Pray especially for me, that when I speak, the right words will be put in my mouth, and that I may boldly expound the gospel’s secret, for which I am now a delegate in the clink. Pray too that I may lay it on the line whenever I have a chance to speak.

For weeks on end, Meiklejohn combed through those transactions while simultaneously tagging the vendors, services, markets, and other recipients on the other end of her hundreds of test transactions.

So, as Meiklejohn’s first step, she simply tried the technique Satoshi had inadvertently suggested—across every Bitcoin payment ever carried out. She scanned her blockchain database for every multi-input transaction, linking all of those double, triple, or even hundredfold inputs to single identities. The result immediately reduced the number of potential Bitcoin users from twelve million to date to around five million, slicing away more than half of the problem.

Gronager broke down the times when the burglars’ coins were manually moved out of the wallets that held the stolen Mt. Gox funds, plotting the money movements across a twenty-four-hour cycle. All of them seemed to fall from morning to night in a certain time zone, one that lay a couple of hours east of Greenwich mean time and nowhere near the waking hours of the average person in Japan, where Mark Karpelès lived.

Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you. If the enemy is in range, so are you. Don't look conspicuous -- it draws fire. There is always a way. Try to look unimportant -- they may be low on ammo. Professionals are predictable -- it's the amateurs that are dangerous. The enemy invariably attacks on one of two occasions: 1. When you're ready for them. 2. When you're not ready for them. Teamwork is essential; it gives the enemy someone else to shoot at. Radios will fail as soon as you desperately need fire support. If you can't remember, the claymore is pointed at you. If your attack is going well, you have walked into an ambush. When you are short of everything but enemy, you're in contact. Don't draw fire. It irritates the people around you. The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire. Incoming fire has the right of way. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not your friend. When in doubt, empty the magazine. Tracers work both ways. Recoilless rifles aren't. Suppressive fires won't. Friendly fire isn't. Anything you do can get you shot -- including doing nothing. Make it too tough for the enemy to get in, and you can't get out. Mines are equal opportunity weapons. The easy way is always mined. Don't ever be the first, don't ever be the last, and don't ever volunteer to do anything. The quartermaster has only two sizes: too large and too small. Five-second fuses only last three seconds. The enemy diversion you have been ignoring will be the main attack. A "sucking chest wound" is nature's way of telling you to slow down. When you have secured an area, don't forget to tell the enemy. Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder. No OPLAN ever survives the first contact. A Purple Heart just proves that you were smart enough to think of a plan, stupid enough to try it, and lucky enough to survive. If it's stupid but works, it isn't stupid.

The little green light next to Rawmeo’s name wasn’t merely a reminder that they were seeing into Cazes’s thoughts in real time. It might also serve as an indicator of when his laptop was open—and when Alpha02 was vulnerable.

Someone going by the name “altoid” had posted to a site called the Shroomery in January 2011 recommending the Silk Road’s just-launched dark web market as a source for drugs.

Around the same time, a user with the same handle had also asked for programming help on a coding forum. On that page, altoid had listed his email address: rossulbricht@gmail.com.

By the end of 2016, Chainalysis had labeled more than 2.5 million addresses as part of AlphaBay’s wallet.

The two prosecutors could hardly believe it. The man they had come to Bangkok to arrest had, entirely by chance, arrived at a meeting at the exact hotel where they were staying and sat down at the table next to them. He still had no idea they were on his trail.

Dark night lay on my eyes, like a veil of black cloves - dust on my feet, at the beginning of the path of knowledge. Tracer from an invisible hand, a rainbow, fell in my thoughts - I encountered the truth; and truth shall be my light until the end of days.

Even now, when I imagine Einstein’s dendrites and neurons firing as his brain lit upon relativity, I picture Baghdad, with its minarets and modern-antennaed buildings sparkling beneath thousands of phantasmagorical tracers, under Allied attack on a very dark night.

He didn’t want to believe that her broken engagement had anything to do with his good mood. And he damn sure didn’t want to think it had anything to do with his recently rediscovered ability to do his job well.

That’s a dangerous highway and I don’t want you driving around alone, especially at night.” She crossed her arms. “What happened to ‘hand me a shovel and pretend I’m not here’?

What’s the difference between God and a federal judge?” “I don’t know.” “God doesn’t think he’s a federal judge.” Tara

It’s barely sprinkling.” He smiled. “Don’t be a wuss.” “I’m absolutely a wuss. I need coffee.

It was the sort of corruption Alex expected to hear about happening south of the border, not in her own backyard.

It’s just . . . You never think it can happen to you. And then when it does, you know anything can happen to you.” She

Because as good a cop as he was, as good a man as he was, he could be infuriating. And controlling. And arrogant.

Allison hoped like hell this really was the act of a lone gunman. Any accomplice would have no trouble disappearing into the mob. •

He leaned closer. “Don’t lie to me, Caramia. I don’t like it.

Sophie gazed wistfully at their cutoff shorts and tank tops. Once upon a time she, too, had lived in grunge wear. She didn’t miss the clothes so much as that time in her life, when she’d had nothing more to do than go to keg parties on weekends and cut class to hang out with her boyfriend. Now both those pursuits seemed worse than trivial—they seemed wasteful. How could a few short years make such a difference in her outlook? She

The sad fact was, most police departments didn’t have the money to make use of all the fancy technology available now. Even when DNA was available from a bloody murder weapon, a rape kit, it typically gathered dust in some evidence room until the case was headed to trial, if it ever went. But

what he really disliked were people who thought they were above the law. The law was the law, and no one was exempt.

One shot, one kill,” Jonah said. “That’s the sniper motto.

I showered, shaved my legs, put on makeup, and returned two text messages in the time it took you to snoop around my kitchen. I’d say that’s pretty good.” He

The truth is, she’s my worst nightmare. I mean, here’s this strong, determined woman. She’s tall. She’s in excellent shape—or at least she was. She was a freaking marathoner. And now she seems so . . . lost, I guess.

And he made her a lot of things but not uncomfortable. Nervous, maybe. Lustful, yes. Sometimes even a little stupid. But not uncomfortable.

For a man who claimed he didn’t have much patience, he’d given her oceans of it. He

The odds were stacked against them, but Derek knew that every last one of his teammates relished this mission. They’d trained together, fought together, lived, breathed, and bled together for six long months of deployment. On this tour alone, they’d racked up more successful tactical operations than anyone cared to count. But it wasn’t every day they got the chance to rescue a civilian from the country they’d sworn their lives to protect and defend. At

He was tough as hell, and he’d always reminded me of my dad. Then one day, he was just gone, no warning. And I realized you can’t take people for granted. Life’s too short.” She

I understand fear better than anybody. Part I don’t understand is giving in without a fight.

Then why’d you bring me along?” He smiled. “You look good in my truck.” She

Look, this isn’t personal, all right? It’s business.” “Business? It’s called treason, motherfucker. It’s called murdering innocent people.” Suddenly,

My nerves still spark like ricocheting tracer bullets.

Maybe she hired Black.” Dani tried

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. When

Children from violent households made great lie detectors because their ability to read people and situations wasn’t just a hobby—it was a survival skill. The

Rumor has it you and Gage caught up with your team. I’m not sure where you’re going, but—” A lump rose up in her throat. She cleared it away. “Wherever it is, be careful.” And please, please don’t get hurt. The world needs more men like you. But

A smile spread across her face. “Score one for the rookie detective.” Her

Sex isn’t the only thing you need, Wolfe. I’ve never met anyone in such dire need of a friend.” Kelsey

That’s the key, you know. If you think about the pain to come, you’ll just give up. So you take it hour by hour, minute by minute, and the only thing you have through all of it is your team.” Elizabeth

One room, two beds, babe. That’s the best I can do.

I almost always wear a helmet.” “Brian!” She slapped the table. “Do you have any idea what the fatality rate is for motorcycle riders? And that’s with proper headgear. I should bring you to the ME’s office sometime. If you saw what I saw—” “I’m sure it’s bad.” She

We’re going to Houston?” “California. Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, to be precise.” He crossed the room and reached for the door. “We need to interview some SEALs.

Word is you guys have one of the best cyber-crime units in the country.” “The best. It’s headed up by Mark Wolfe. He’s a legend in law-enforcement circles.

I don’t work for you. I work for the American taxpayers, who have spent years training me to protect and defend this country.

Dear Lord.” She looked at Dani. “Did you see that six-pack? I think it was an eight-pack.” Jasper scowled. “Jeez, Christine.” “What? I’m married but I’m not dead.” Dani

He wouldn’t move an inch to eat or sleep or even take a piss as he looked out over a road or a valley, the invisible guardian angel to dozens of young troops. Protection was a waiting game, and even some highly skilled marksmen weren’t cut out for it. Beside

You ever think about unpacking anything?” “I’ve got a system. One room at a time.” He

I don’t know what this is!” “I do. This is me being framed for murder.

Hey, Reed, you have a knack for pissing me off, but when I hear your voice, I get all melty inside. Right.

Reed imagined that having your child murdered was about the only thing worse than having to exhume your child’s remains to bring the killer to justice.

She hated the powerlessness. The feeling of weakness always lurking beneath the surface, making her confidence seem phony, making her feel like a fraud. Other people in her profession went about the whir of life so nonchalantly, and their ease had always felt alien to her. It made her feel estranged from everyone else. How could people see what they saw—especially social workers and beat cops who saw everything—and not be consumed with anger all the time? How did they do it? Tara