The List

INFORMATION IS A TART—INFORMATION is anybody’s. It reveals as much about those who impart it as it teaches those who hear. Because information, ever the slut, swings both ways. False information—if you know it’s false—tells you half as much again as the real thing, because it tells you what the other feller thinks you don’t know, while real information, the copper-bottomed truth, is worth its weight in fairy-dust. When you have a source of real information, you ought to forsake all others and snuggle down with it for good. Even though it’ll never work out, because information, first, last and always, is a tart.

Those young-man dreams of living each day as if it were your last, they wore off; showed up, in the cold light of after-fifty, for the magpie treasures they were.

sometimes depressed him, that he worked for the secret service in an era where half the population aired its private life on the web. He wasn’t sure the Cold War had been preferable, but it had been more dignified.

So no, no harm done. Unless somebody does something stupid, Lamb thought, but really; what were the chances?

Standing on the tube, Coe was studying his fellow passengers, gauging their identities, There was a checklist he'd memorized, a crib sheet on how to spot a terrorist; and there was another checklist, allowing for the possibility that terrorists might have got hold of the first checklist and adapted their behavior accordingly, and Coe had memorized this too. And he was mentally running through them, scoring his fellow travelers, when it struck him there was conceivably a checklist for spotting members of the security services, and he was doubtless ticking all the right boxes himself...The thought made him want to giggle, which itself was on one of the checklists.

When a spy passes, his cupboards need clearing out.

Those who knew him said it was how he'd have wanted to go. Dieter Hess died in his armchair, surrounded by his books, a half-glass of 2008 Burgundy at his elbow, a half-smoked Montecristo in the ashtray on the floor. In his lap, Yeats's Collected - the yellow-jacketed Macmillan edition - and in the CD tray Pärt's Für Alina, long hushed by the time Bachelor found the body, but its lingering silences implicit in the air, settling like dust on faded surfaces.

drunk more wine, read a little longer, and finished his cigar. Dieter had been sick, but he hadn’t been tired of life.