The Lies of Spies
Authors: Tim TignerNarrator: Dick Hill
Duration: 13H 51M
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Tags: action - thriller - military
Interesting concept of book.
Russian Actress + Spy helps Achilles to solve plot against USA and kill Russian president.
Luckily no Ex Machinas moments in a book, but I don’t think that CIA operative would act in that way in some situations.
Quotes:
Brock Sparkman, on the other hand, was a behind-the-scenes bulldog of a guy. The Washington Beltway equivalent of a 4-star general. Lots of bark, lots of bite, and a reputation for sacrificing political correctness in favor of expediency. Having Sparkman prep the battlefields allowed Silver to drive hard bargains without sacrificing affability.
(Russian President): Korovin maintained a poker face throughout, but Ignaty wasn’t fooled. He knew his boss felt each revelation like a lash from a cane. It was a side of the great man to which only his closest aides were privy. Behind all the posturing and poise, the collapse of the Soviet Union still weighed heavily on Korovin’s broad shoulders. He woke with the pain of disgrace each morning, and he went to bed limping from fatigue each night. In between, he smiled publicly for the cameras while privately vowing to set things right.
Most people can sense another presence in a room — if they’re paying attention. They don’t know how they sense it, they just do. In fact, their lizard brain is registering a sympathetic energy field. Another biological grouping of bellowing lungs, pulsing arteries, and firing neurons. Another soul. It’s an ability spies are wise to hone.
He could retreat. He could call 9-1-1. Or he could attempt to intercept Collins on her way home. None of those felt right. There were a hundred million able-bodied patriots in the fifty United States, and from all of them the President had selected him. It wasn’t for his ability to retreat or pick up a phone.
(SPY games) They’d been dating for four years exactly, yet their love still grew day-by-day. Max remained amazed that Zoya had fallen for him. One wouldn’t expect an actress to find much in common with a spy. He sought shadows while she required bright lights. He eyed promotion, while she pursued fame. But at the end of the day, they were both actors. He just didn’t get retakes. Confident that their flamboyant display of affection would generate plenty of witnesses with supporting photographs should this exit become a disappearance, Max took Zoya’s arm and followed the lead of their escorts.
Max loved museums. He found poetry in the idea that you could achieve immortality by pouring years of your life into a spread of canvas or a chunk of stone. But today his appreciation of the beauty surrounding him was lost to other emotions. Relief primarily.
(Russia’s President) Technically, Russia hadn’t been ruled by a tsar since Nicholas II, who was deposed at the start of the Russian Revolution. Effectively, it had fallen back under a monarch’s rule some seventeen years ago. Heredity aside, the main difference between a president and a king was a parliamentary system of checks and balances. Although his title was president, Korovin hadn’t been checked or balanced for years. Anyone who tried, ended up in jail or dead.
(USA vs Russian president) What’s modern America’s greatest weakness ? Why is Korovin more powerful than Silver, despite the relative size of both his army and his economy?” … “Korovin can do whatever he wants. Silver is hamstrung by legislative and judicial branches. He needs Congressional approval for most things. In other words, he can’t act without the permission of his political rivals.”
During the extended backpacking trip that Achilles had taken immediately after leaving the CIA, he had learned to appreciate the efficiency of limiting his base wardrobe to under ten pounds. A pair of loose blue jeans, a set of khaki cargo shorts, a couple of soft white Tees, and some cotton undergarments were all he really needed. His feet only had one home: approach shoes — the special soft-soled sneakers that were an efficient hybrid of a hiking boot and a climbing shoe. Buy them in black, and they were one-size-fits-all as far as most occasions were concerned. Rounding off his wardrobe was a single luxury item, a quality black leather jacket.
Free solo climbing isn’t as reckless as it sounds. You don’t just walk — or in this case swim — up to a class 5 cliff face and start climbing without a rope. Not if you hope to survive. First you plan your route and prep the rock. Before working your way up from the bottom with nothing but a sure grip between you and the Almighty, you work your way down from the top — on a rope. You prepare for the insanity by brushing away grit and growth and removing any rock that’s not firmly fixed. That way every hold you lunge or leap or strain for will be solid and sure and clean. Only when the prep is done, do free solo climbers tackle the tough climbs aided only by bravado and a bag of chalk.
Spies develop the espionage equivalent of gaydar. They can detect their own. A few minutes with Jas was enough to know that she hadn’t joined the club. She was neither acutely aware of her physical environment nor constantly contingency planning. She wasn’t thinking about escape routes or counterattacks or defensive positions — habits that quickly became second nature to undercover agents. At least the ones who managed to keep a step ahead of the reaper’s scythe.
Max hated supplying management with detail. Espionage assignments weren’t like military maneuvers. Covert operations were best left fluid, leaving operatives free to adapt to opportunities, rather than feeling funneled into preconceived plans based on outdated intel.
But Achilles had been training his whole life to control the beat of his heart and bend the focus of his mind. In biathlons, he trained to shoot straight in the midst of extreme cardiovascular challenges — with the world watching and national pride on the line. On climbs, he had no choice but to maintain a relentless focus on his action rather than his position — for hours on end, with his life on the line. To have allowed his heart or mind to wander whether braced behind a gun or a thousand feet up a cliff would have meant losing — and losing was the one thing Achilles refused to do.
(Spy Work) The more he thought about it, the less comfortable he became with the historical role Korovin had thrust on him. As a spy, his job was to bring tactical advantages to his motherland. Despite the stigma, espionage was meaningful, time-honored work. Dangerous, but universal.
(Big corporations) And an abhorrence of bureaucracy, a lack of accountability, and the managed chaos that defines life in large organizations. In the lean-manufacturing climate, people are way too busy and scorecard oriented to care about anything that’s not formally identified as a problem
Best practice for home defense was to have a handgun in every living space, preferably secreted with the grip properly positioned for a hasty grab.
But combat didn’t work like contact sports. Games are rigged to oppose equivalent forces, and designed to accommodate repeat performances. Sportsmen seek playoffs and tournaments and season-ticket sales, while rallying fans and courting huge contracts. Battle, by comparison, is a single-serving proposition dished out to mismatched forces. Combatants seek quick and decisive resolutions through disproportionate advantages.
No woman enjoyed aging, but the process was particularly distressing for actresses. Although actors benefitted from increasing opportunities until age 46, the numbers were depressingly different for their female counterparts. Actresses’ careers peaked at 30, and it was almost always downhill from there.
ESPIONAGE was hardly routine work, but it routinely involved repetitive work. Mind-numbing jobs as far from the glamor of James Bond as suburban Seattle was from MI6. Jobs the campus recruiters never mentioned when they came calling.
THE SWISS, like the Germans, are a people in love with rules. Not legalities — the technicalities that American tort and defense attorneys are so fond of — but rather codes of conduct. Civility permeates the Swiss psyche, and so order pervades Switzerland. Swiss streets are immaculate not because they have more people cleaning them, but because nobody litters. That wouldn’t be proper.
Trust but verify.
(Masking as someone else) Can you make me look like this guy? Enough to fool people who haven’t seen him for years? … If the eyes match a person’s memory, their mind tends to fill in the rest.
We’ll start with your hands. There’s a famous example of a young Asian man flying from Hong Kong to Vancouver wearing a rubber mask that disguised him as an old Caucasian. He got caught not because of his face, but rather his hands. They were too young. We’ll be painting liver spots, wrinkles, and veins onto yours with dyes.
It was easy to tell the cars of Russian officials. They had special license plates with flags and three numbers, and the lower the number, the higher the rank. Grachev, a bull of a man who resembled a Siberian wrestler more than a politician, was technically the second most powerful man in parliament after the unpopular prime minister. But as a relative newcomer to the stage, his license plate was only 008.
Switzerland was exceptionally well-suited for making private travel arrangements. As one of the world’s most established and grand headquarters for clandestine banking, the neutral nation in the heart of Europe was geared to cater to the world’s wealthiest citizens and their many privacy peccadilloes.
Men are better at compartmentalizing their emotions. And at breaking things down into binary constituencies. Us or them. Live or die.” She gestured back and forth with her chopsticks like a metronome. “Women tend to feel situations from all angles, along with the connections in between.”
Only those who took the greatest risks could reap the grandest rewards.
he sight reminded Achilles of an observation he’d made many times in the field: courage wasn’t linked to rank. Back in Switzerland, Glick’s wealth and position made him as much a demigod as the Greek statues they were passing. And no doubt, given his financial acumen, some of that was deserved. But here at Seaside, the successful Swiss banker clearly realized he was but a flea on the big dog’s back. Easily rubbed out, if Korovin wanted to scratch.
When you’re faced with the possibility of an early death, it’s only natural to spend time thinking about life. The prospect of losing everything gave Katya the ability to strip away all the meaningless fluff that cluttered her mind on a typical day — the objects and events and awards ostensibly related to self-worth but genuinely meaningless — and instead focus on what truly mattered. She realized that what she did was not nearly as important as who she did it with, so long as she felt safe and free to grow. The fact that Achilles would always keep her safe, no matter what, meant more than any job ever could.