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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Originally there had been just two projects, which he had codenamed Bluebird and Artichoke; the bird and vegetable were among his favorites. Later had come Naomi, the name of a distant cousin. But soon there were so many projects that he had resorted to simply numbering them. By now the total number of projects stood at over 100 (they would eventually reach 149). MK-Project 94 was to investigate “remote directional control of activities in specific brain centers.” MK-Project 142 was to “study electrical brain stimulation.” In his never-ending search for information that could prove useful for the biological warfare program, Dr. Gottlieb had enlisted the support of the CIA archivists. They had turned up a box of documents which U.S. Army intelligence officers had recovered in Munich in 1945. The box was labeled: “German War Office Experiments 1934-39.” The documents still bore the German classification “Secret.” Among the experiments were those which had tracked air currents through the subway systems of Paris and London. “The tunnels would be prime targets in a future war when Londoners and Parisians sheltered in the tunnels during air raids. Using bacteria which were excellent biological tracers, the tunnels would be transformed into places for mass epidemics.” The memo had been written in July 1934, after the Nazis had come to power. Two months later on a hot summer’s day, according to another document, German agents had sprayed “billions of microbes into the Paris Metro system from cars they had driven past the subway entrances. Exhaust gasses provided a satisfactory disguise for the release of the microbes from tanks linked to the car exhausts.” A third document claimed that “six hours later, at the Place de la République Metro station, a mile and a half from the dispersal point, our agents discovered thousands of colonies of the germs.” In Berlin the findings had been eagerly studied. A memo sent to Herman Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe, from the German War Office read: “It was possible to drop a suitable biological bomb and be highly certain that the bacteria would enter the subway system.” Similar tests in London had been carried out by the Germans with “the same satisfying results.

In "Tracer Shells," 2002, forty-six cats with bright-white fluron-tipped tails, leap over upturned chairs and tables (depicting social chaos) in response to rapid bursts of recorded machine-gun fire. In the darkened space the effect is startling, the message disturbing, and the method ethically challenging.

We load all tracers for when we hit the ground. Tends to keep heads down until we can get some cover.

Don't watch the tracers.

...the feel and smell of the dirt, the chest thump from the explosions, the aerial displays of the flares with their ghostly afterglow, and the continuous rhythm of the tracers weaving each element of the performance into a visual and sonic tapestry of war.

The role of endorphins in human feelings was illustrated by an imaging study of fourteen healthy women volunteers. Their brains were scanned while they were in a neutral emotional state and then again when they were asked to think of an unhappy event in their lives. Ten of them recalled the death of a loved one, three remembered breakups with boyfriends and one focused on a recent argument with a close friend. Using a special tracer chemical, the scan highlighted the activity of opioid receptors in the emotional centres of each participant’s brain. While the women were under the spell of sad memories, these receptors were much less active.6 On the other hand, positive expectations turn on the endorphin system. Scientists have observed, for example, that when people expect relief from pain, the activity of opioid receptors will increase. Even the administration of inert medications—substances that do not have direct physical activity—will light up opioid receptors, leading to decreased pain perception.7 This is the so-called “placebo effect,” which, far from being imaginary, is a genuine physiological event. The medication may be inert, but the brain is soothed by its own painkillers, the endorphins.

Hear what?” “Ric’s at the hospital. Mia’s having the baby.” “What? He didn’t call me!” “He didn’t call anyone. The man ran out of here like his hair was on fire.

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

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

You agreed not to bug me.” “That’s not why I’m calling. This is something else.” Silence. “Work related,” he added. “I’m at a crime scene and I could really use a hand.” “Let me guess. It’s related to your all-important murder case? And I need to drop everything I’m doing and get there right now, this minute, and it can’t wait till morning?” “You guessed right.” •

It was wounded pride. The only thing worse than throwing herself at him was clinging to him afterward and pressuring him to feel things he didn’t. Dani

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

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

I’m crazy, stupid, out of my mind in love with you,

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

You look skeptical,” she said. “I was born skeptical.” “You

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

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?

Tracer bullets show what you’re hitting. This may not always be the target. You then adjust your aim until they’re on target. That’s the point. It’s the same with tracer code.

in plain sight for years. When Alford pointed this out to colleagues, they struggled to believe that Google alone could unveil the world’s most mysterious digital drug lord. It had taken more than a month for the FBI, DEA, and DOJ staff assigned to the investigation to even take the IRS agent’s lead seriously. Ultimately, his discovery had cracked the case.

Americans don’t know how good they have it,” Gambaryan says. “You let it slip, it turns into the chaos that I saw.

one-page article about Bitcoin in an April 2011 issue of Forbes, perhaps the most high-profile press the budding cryptocurrency had gotten up to that point.

Far from being untraceable, they wrote, the blockchain was an open book that could identify vast swaths of transactions between people, many of whom thought they were acting anonymously.

colleague had laughed at him. “Oh, so we’re going to bring in Satoshi Nakamoto to introduce the blockchain as evidence in court?” the agent had joked.

Those branching and converging money flows, he thought, looked familiar: They struck Gambaryan as the typical, contrived complexity of someone splitting up and reassembling their illicit funds in the hopes of throwing an auditor off their trail.

For a moment, Gambaryan and Der-Yeghiayan sat on the phone in silence. Gambaryan had just, for the very first time in a U.S. criminal investigation, traced cryptocurrency payments to prove someone’s guilt. “Oh, shit,” Gambaryan remembers thinking. “We broke Bitcoin.

The two men, like the Dread Pirate Roberts they were hunting, had been seduced by the same siren song: the false promise of untraceable money.

That is the date,” Weaver says, “that you can state unequivocally that law enforcement learned that the blockchain is forever.

any use of Bitcoin as a tool for cryptoanarchy or crime was a misguided sideshow

With a tracer bullet approach, you can implement very small bits of functionality very quickly, and get immediate feedback on how well your team communicates and delivers.

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.

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.

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

Pragmatic Programmers, however, tend to prefer using tracer bullets.

the rush of adrenaline overcame indecision, fear and nervousness. The paralysing cold seeping into his bones was replaced by the heat of blood coursing through his veins. As the tracer bullet came flying past, lighting the place with a deadly cocktail of shrapnel and fire, Manoj stood up, tall and brave, his slight frame coiled like spring, his face a mask. Through the scream of the wind, he roared at those of his men that were fit to fight, ordering them to follow him through the hail of bullets. Like a colossal god with invincible powers he walked into the curtain of shells and bullets. He didn’t look back even once to see who had followed his final command but if he had he would have been a satisfied man. All his Gorkha jawans who could pick themselves up and walk were right behind him, their khukris gripped firmly in their hands.

We're coming up on Ritadaria," he told Syn. "Bet you never thought you'd be back here." "Not alive, anyway. What about you?" "As a tracer and tracker, I bill them, but it doesn't mean I like it here any more than you do. I try to avoid coming here to the planet as much as I can." Shahara frowned. "Aren't you afraid they'll arrest you?" Nero snorted. "I wasn't a convict, Dagan. I was an illegally purchased slave. My owner"-he sneered the term-"has no legal claim on me. And I'm no longer a kid learning my powers. I'm a full-grown man with an ax I want to bury in the forehead of anyone dumb enough to come at me. I defy the bastards to try something now." - Nero, Syn, & Shahara

Note that I avoid most “modern features” of C++, but inheritance and operator overloading are too useful for ray tracers to pass on.

She’d envisioned her next meeting with him countless times, and every vision was the same: Alex would be somewhere—preferably at a bar surrounded by men—looking sexy, but uninterested. Troy would be there, too, looking tortured and desperate to win her back.

She thought of everything she knew about Louisiana. Swamps. Alligators. Mardi Gras. Nathan Devereaux. She

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

If ever a night called for Ben & Jerry’s, it was tonight. For

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

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

She was well aware that some people—particularly the older guys—thought she’d only been promoted to detective because she was a woman. It was possible they were right. But she’d worked her ass off, too.

My nerves still spark like ricocheting tracer bullets.

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

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.

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.

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

he was amazingly tight-lipped, even for a guy. He was guarded, taciturn, which was probably hell on anyone in a relationship with him.

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

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.

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

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

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,

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

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