“God might be like a wave front, moving into an unknowable future; human souls might be like neurons, cells of God’s own intelligence. . . Whatever God was, Virgil seriously doubted that he worried too much about profanity, sex, or even death.”
— Rough Country (John Sandford)
“He was used to the disappearance of large parts of his life. Sometimes, he passed out at ten o’clock in the morning, and when he woke up, it was nine o’clock in the morning — some other morning. At first, the time changes were disorienting, but over the course of a couple of years, he got used to it. He simply gave up on time — now life was daytime and nighttime, strung along like beads on a string, and the minute, hour, and date were irrelevant.”
— Wicked Prey (John Sandford)
Fans of the Virgil Flowers novels by John Sanford know and respect Virgil’s fondness for rock band t-shirts. I was afraid I would have to reread the novels to make a list but that won’t be necessary.
“Dark of the Moon”
Sheryl Crow (carp)
Modest Mouse
Flaming Lips
Decemberists
Arcade Fire
AC/DC
Franz Ferdinand
“Heat Lightning”
Bif Naked
WWTDD
Hole
KMFDM (Money)
Pogues
Interpol
Death Cab for Cutie
“Rough Country”
Sebadoh
Nine Inch Nails
Breeders
Rolling Stones (Paris, 1975, tongue)
Gourds
Blood Red Shoes
Appleseed Cast
“Bad Blood”
Virgins
“Shock Wave”
Freelance Whales
My Chemical Romance
Slobberbone
“Mad River”
Wolfmother
I’ve been reading John Sandford novels since he started writing them. Every Lucas Davenport, Virgil Flowers, Kidd book he’s written. And the handful of other characters and co-authored novels. In all of these books I don’t recall finding a continuity error. Every plot seamless. But I came across the following while re-reading Dark of the Moon (Virgil Flowers)
“Knock at the door. Bad news. Bad news always knocks quietly. He thought of his son in Minneapolis, this daughters in Alberta Lea and Santa Fe.’
— Page 111, Dark of the Moon
And just six pages later…
“This is brutal, Virgil said, standing with his hands in his jeans pockets. “The family hear yet?”
“Not much family, not that we k now of — maybe she has cousins. They never had children.”
— Page 117, Dark of the Moon
I checked and double checked and the reference is to the same minor character. I guess this could be explained by the speaker (a deputy) in the first quote not knowing the dead couple (locals) had children, but that’s a stretch.
The Devil’s Code by John Sanford was published in 2000. Fourteen years ago.
Clipper II was an Orwellian nightmare come true, a practical impossibility, or a huge joke at the taxpayers’ expense—take your pick. It was designed in response to a fear of the U.S. government that unbreakable codes would make intercept-intelligence impractical. And really, they had a point, but their solution was so draconian that it was doomed to failure from the start.
The Clipper II chip—like the original Clipper chip before it was a chip designed to handle strong encryption. If it was made mandatory (which the government wanted), everyone would have to use it. And the encryption was guaranteed secure. Absolutely unbreakable.
Except that the chip contained a set of keys just for the government, just in case. If they needed to, they could look up the key for a particular chip, get a wiretap permit, and decrypt any messages that were sent using the chip. They would thereby bring to justice (they said) all kinds of Mafiosos, drug dealers, money launderers, and other lowlifes.
For those too young to remember, the Clipper chip was a real thing. The NSA was a real thing as well.
Word got around, and the word was that the NSA was rapidly becoming obsolete. Once upon a time, agency operatives could tap any phone call or radio transmission in the world; they could put Mao Tse-tung’s private words on the president’s desk an hour after the Maximum Leader spoke them into his office phone; they could provide real-time intercepts to the special ops people in the military.
No more. The world was rife with unbreakable codes—any good university math department could whip one up in a matter of days. Just as bad, the most critical diplomatic and military traffic had come out of the air and gone underground, into fiber-optic cable. Even if a special forces team managed to get at a cable, messages were routinely encoded with ultrastrong encryption routines.
The NSA was going deaf. And the word was, they didn’t know what to do about it. They’d become a bin full of aging bureaucrats worried about their jobs, and spinning further and further out ot the Washington intelligence center.
And if the NSA was becoming obsolete, might their solution look something like what we have today?