I am Pilgrim
今日打算好好看本kindle。幸运的是，我选择了I am pilgrim. 和其他我看了开头就没有追下去而死命逼自己要看下去的书不同，这本书不会让人有种在看英语的感觉，是真的为了看内容而认真阅读的，这样的书，不好找。
我要做个剧透。这是本非常合适拍成电影的书，如同上一本我看的雪人，那本更是给我一种为了拍成电影而写的剧本。
主角是个富豪二代，有理想有追求，在哈佛获得医学博士之后被政府招募成了间谍。……，做了几年感觉累了，就按正常途径退役了。政府当然就给了一个新的身份，他也成功地在巴黎以一个对冲基金经理人的身份驻扎下来。闲暇之余，以迈阿密一名已死FBI探员身份写了一本无趣的类似于施公断案的小说。很无趣，但是放到高手眼里就是震惊地下巴要掉下的那种。
有这么一个二逼警察，因为一件案子破不了，人生突然陷入低谷，直到有一天他看到这本书，说这个人就是我找到的军师，有他在，我肯定能破案，于是他进行了如下的动作，还真给他找到了。
- 书里提及了一种贵族的棋类运动，他搜到全国只有125家学校提供训练，于是拿到大名单。
- 每个人都对过去，发现有一个很有意思，在读完哈佛后就消失了，没有留下任何痕迹。于是去查他读哈佛时候的ssn，竟然说号码不存在，没找了，就是他。
- 至于是如何找到在法国的作者，这个思维就更恐怖了。每一年，美国都会公布一些驻外特派的人员细节，这里有一小部分会是外派的间谍，当然名字肯定都改头换面，但是人有个心理，就是会留下一些和过去历史吻合的细节，比如外派的人选择同一个生日，或是同一个zip code。他搜罗出20个细节，一查就知道了是谁。
- 侦察过程中了解到作者会说德语和法语，于是去查入境记录，然后找到居留申请，然后找到作者。
嗯，我也觉得有些变态。
发现我无法专注，每看几节就要停下来翻翻手机。呃，好无奈，好尴尬。
20160814 update
书中提了很多桥段，在2016年看来居然都成为了现实，考虑一下吧，这是一本2013年7月的出版的书，真实写作的日子还会更早。
我看到了一位商人当上了美国总统，总统竞选中也有一位女性。
提到了欧洲的绿化，也提到了如何漂洋过海来欧洲做一个难民，天哪。
难怪GUARDIAN声称这是一本你今年唯一需要的thriller。
update 20160822
看到最后我都快哭了。这是我看得写得最好的小说。
唯一出乎我意料的是 BRADLEY居然是黑人，真的有必要做这样政治正确的设定吗？毕竟大家心里总是觉得纽约的侦探还是白人扮得好些，嗯，不排除七宗罪的MORGAN FREEMAN.
今天总算把它收尾，看完了。破了个记录，我相信这是我读的最快的一本小说，也是最有兴趣从头看到尾浑然不知道是用另一种语言书写的小说。
只能说，太好看了，男主太装逼了，作者完全就是做电影改编的方式来写文章。我会很奇怪，这部如果不拿去拍电影。实际上，这部如果去拍，应该会是又一部谍影重重的潜质和评分。
He is risen.
--Gospel of St Mark, chapter 16, verse 6.
‘It’s eight o’clock at night in Hong Kong,’ I said, without shifting in my chair, ready to break his arm if he tried to touch me. ‘What?!’ he snapped back, not really comprehending. ‘In Hong Kong,’ I said more slowly, ‘it’s already late.’
just a lonely woman with a baby in her arms and her other two children holding tight to her skirt. Stoic, unwavering, supporting their tiny lives – helping them as best as any mother could – she walked them towards the gas chamber.
I knew with all my heart that, if I didn’t leave the secret world now, I never would. To turn your back on everything you know is hard, among the most difficult things you’ll ever do, but I kept telling myself one thing. If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.
这个对我有现实的指导意义。
it was a brilliant piece of work by Bradley and his wife but – like I said – it was their discovery today, somebody else’s tomorrow.
高超的写作
I don’t know you,’ the Saracen told him, ‘so it’s nothing personal.’ But of course the Saracen did know him – he knew him in the way that he was always imagining the men who had led his father into a cell in Jeddah so many years ago. Nothing personal?! Tlass yelled inside his head.
The tribesmen – halfway down the mountain and pausing to water their ponies – looked back and saw the tiny glow of a hurricane lantern. That was all they saw of the person who, very soon, would become the most hunted man on earth.
这个状语不错。
While the staff officers back at base spun into a whirlwind of activity, what none of them realized was that, if the captain hadn’t been shot, if Keating had grown up somewhere other than in the Australian west, had he not known the look and use of quicklime – if it hadn’t been for these things and a whole lot more – the team of men in spacesuits equipped with their inflatable silver dome and towers of Klieg lights would never have arrived in time.
Peering at the screen of his electron microscope, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Heart racing, sweating hard inside the bio-safety suit, he checked it three times – even changing out the microscope and going back to his work station and consulting the relevant literature and the institute’s classified manuals – before he was convinced.
He was damned if he was going to give any of the A&Ks a place in the institute’s history – that celebrityhood – that he knew the discovery of weaponized smallpox would entail. I mean, he told himself, the whole place still talks about the guys who found the Ebola virus in a damn monkey.
THE SURPRISING THING about James Grosvenor was that he was highly intelligent, personable and modest – in other words, a man far removed from the typical politician. Nobody had intended, least of all himself, that he would ever become the President of the United States. He had been a businessman for nearly all his working life, the major part of it spent taking over distressed manufacturing companies and turning them around.
The development scared Whisperer deeply. He didn’t tell the president or the others, but the one thing which no intelligence agency in the world could deal with was a cleanskin. Where did you start with a person who had no history, no form, no record? Whisperer had never met one in his life – not a genuine one – and he had never wanted to.
‘I want you to find a man,’ Whisperer told him. ‘I don’t know what name he uses now, but for a long time he called himself Scott Murdoch.’ The special assistant looked at the photo Whisperer pushed across the desk, the face in the background carefully circled. ‘Who is he?’ he asked. ‘Years back he was known as the Rider of the Blue. He was probably the best intelligence agent there’s ever been.’ The special assistant smiled. ‘I thought that was you.’ ‘So did I,’ Whisperer replied, ‘until I met him.’
淡淡的装逼
‘Anyway, one day I asked him why he swept the square. He said he was seventy years old, it was hard to find a job, a man had to earn an honest living – and then he saw the look on my face and didn’t bother lying any more. ‘He sat down, rolled up his sleeve and showed me seven faded numbers tattooed on his wrist. He was Jewish, and he pointed at groups of old men of his generation, dressed in their Sunday suits, taking the sun on nearby seats. ‘He told me they were Germans – but like a lot of Germans they hadn’t changed, they’d just lost. In their hearts, he said, they still sang the old songs. ‘He told me he swept the square so that they would see him and know: a Jew had survived, the race lived on, their people had endured. The square was his revenge.
种族的对抗。nb
I swept the room with the muzzle of the Beretta and saw the eyes first – green – looking straight at me. Their owner was sitting on the bed. Licking its paws.
真爱掉书包
Let me tell you something else I read – “evidence is a list of the material you’ve got. What about the things you haven’t found? What do you call that?” ’ It was my turn to smile. ‘Good quote – a fine piece of writing,’ I said. I knew then it was she who had killed the woman in New York and dumped her in a bath of acid. ‘The quote comes from a book called Principles of Modern Investigative Technique by a man called Jude Garrett,’ I continued. ‘And I know where you got that book – you borrowed it from the New York Public Library on a fake Florida driver’s licence. You took it back to Room 89 at the Eastside Inn, where you were living, and used it as a manual to kill someone. How’s that for evidence?’ She looked at me expressionless – my God, it was a triumph of self-control on her part. But her silence told me it had rocked her world, ripped the canvas of her meticulous crime from top to bottom.
这个画面感太强了，nb死了
‘Human nature, I guess – if he wasn’t, we would have heard something. People always talk; everybody gets sold out. Not far from here, there was a revolutionary guy – not a bomb-thrower but a fanatic, a lot of people said. He had a dozen followers who worshipped him, and they went through hell together. Even so, one of them sold him out. You know the story – Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss.’ Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘It was two thousand years ago,’
没有历史知识还看不了这个
‘Anyway, call him,’ I continued. ‘I’m sure you have a number. Ask him for permission to read the letter. Tell him it concerns a young man and a terrible event in Red Square – I’m sure he’ll remember.’ The former secretary had no response, and Finbar filled the silence. ‘We should stop here,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve stumbled into an area concerning national security—’
I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty.
I knew that, no matter how much agony I had gone through, the really difficult part lay ahead: I had to get him to tell me the truth and not defeat me with lies and disinformation. ‘My name is Scott Murdoch,’ I said, through the pain of my injuries. ‘I am an American intelligence agent. I am going to ask you some questions.’
靠一个小孩把真个画面扭转，看来是真爱
‘I … am … Pilgrim,’ I said. The signalman heard it. At the start of every shift for the past month, one order had been drummed into the heads of every marine more than any other. If they heard a word, a certain code name, it had to be given priority over every other communication.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains And go to your god like a soldier.
the song for muj
‘Listen!’ I yelled. ‘When they come, tell them that you knew nothing. Say that in the end you saved my life, tell them about the man you shot. Say that you set me free, that you betrayed your brother. Tell them anything! I’m the only one who knows – and I won’t be here.’ She looked at me, confused. ‘Why are you doing it?’ she demanded. ‘Why would you do this for a Muslim woman?’
‘The president delivered high praise to the staff of the Food and Drug Administration who uncovered the problem and alerted the White House in a 4 a.m. phone call—’ ‘Ready?’ The doctor asked, and I nodded, letting him help me up the stairs. I wasn’t surprised by the story Washington was relating. What was it somebody once said? In war, the first casualty is truth.
He heard tell of a man tied to a plank drowning in an endless ocean, a father beheaded in the blistering sun, a city littered with people bleeding out from an incurable virus, a child with Down’s syndrome hanged by the neck. He said, smiling, that the mind was a strange thing – how, under the onslaught of a fever and high doses of medication, it could invent such terrible fantasies. If only he had known.
I always knew that Whisperer and his legions would find me – people talk, Echelon listens, somebody would have gone into the archives and found the account of Mack’s death all those years ago. I didn’t fear the strangers, though, I knew they had been sent to help me in case I needed it – and yet I had no intention of talking to them. I was a ruin of a man, but I had done my duty, nobody could ask any more than that, and how I stumbled my way through the wreckage that remained was entirely my business.
‘Naturally, I had to discount everything supposedly discovered by the man calling himself Brodie David Wilson. He wasn’t even a member of the FBI and had entered the country under false pretences. As we know, he had his own agenda in complicating and prolonging the case. ‘My own review showed that the work of the Turkish detectives was outstanding, as usual. It was clear that their initial finding was correct – Mr Dodge had died by misadventure. His fall was a tragic accident.’ Ben stared at him in disbelief, but the big Turk didn’t seem to notice. He smiled, lit another cigarette and spread his hands wide.
腐败产生的如此自然。没有监管。
‘By the time I finished reading it I was pretty close to crying. It was a presidential pardon. “For services in defence of your country,” it said. ‘God knows who you are, but you said you would do everything possible to help me, and you did.’
Battleboi的情感如此自然, 这是真爱
All my experience – all my intuition – told me that the moment they had left Berlin as a married couple, Cameron’s life was effectively over.
他真的不知道half of it
Yes, things were dying, and it had certainly been a vision of death that I had seen, but it wasn’t mine – it was another kind of death. I was bidding all the ghosts of my past goodbye. Just like the Buddhist priest had told me on the road to Khun Yuam all those years ago: if you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.
The apartment door would open and, inside, I would see a table set for three, because I knew that the man who lived there would always keep his word. As Rachel watched, Battleboi would laugh and reach out his huge arms towards me. After a moment we would look at each other and he would ask me why I had come. I would smile and say nothing, but in my heart I would know the answer, I would know exactly what I had put behind me: it was what was written in the Gospel of St Mark, chapter sixteen, verse six.