Sublime

The desk clerk, whose name-plate identified him as G. O. Horner, was a thin, elderly man with protuberant eyes that gave him an expression of intense interest and curiosity. The expression was false. After thirty years in the business, people meant no more to him than individual bees do to a beekeeper. Their differences were lost in a welter of sta

Mr Brooke was evidently in a state of nervous perturbation. When he had something painful to tell, it was usually his way to introduce it among a number of disjointed particulars, as if it were a medicine that would get a milder flavour by mixing.

The black-folder, tip-of-the-spear gang doesn’t come to the meeting themselves. They send representatives I think of as gray folders—spook look, spook jargon, but stuck here at HQS when they’d rather be out in the field. Some of them tried and didn’t make the cut. Others are still training. The worst are the has-beens: former field officers cooling