My lawyers will fricassee your testicles for breakfast. And if you dare board my plane without a warrant, your spleen will follow.

I'm fascinated by power, especially veiled power. Shadow power. The National Security Agency. The National Reconnaissance Office. Opus Dei. The idea that everything happens for reasons we're not quite seeing.

It's not about what you tell the reader, it's about what you conceal.

When they face desperation... human beings become animals.

Although I studied Dante's Inferno as a student, it wasn't until recently, while researching in Florence, that I came to appreciate the enduring influence of Dante's work on the modern world.

As you know, this little grain of sand has mass. A very small mass, but mass nonetheless." And because this grain of sand has mass, it therefore exerts gravity. Again, too small to feel, but there." Now," Katherine said, "if we take trilions of these sand grains and let them attract one another to form... say, the moon, then their combined gravtiy is enough to move entire ocreans and drag the tides back and forth across our planet.

Writing an informative yet compact thriller is a lot like making maple sugar candy. You have to tap hundreds of trees - boil vats and vats of raw sap - evaporate the water - and keep boiling until you've distilled a tiny nugget that encapsulates the essence.