He [Tom Klay]'d watched people tend to corpses thousands of times. They straightened eyeglasses, fixed neckties, picked away bits of makeup, adjusted stray hair. They leaned into caskets and kissed the dead on the forehead, the cheeks, the lips. They spoke to them.Klay had seen so many dead he couldn't remember his first, but he didn't understand it. A corpse was not a person. It was a thing--an abandoned thing, no more worthy of sentiment than was a dead person's shoes or toothbrush.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction can be more illuminating.

Desire is opportunity. It creates leverage. It was a basic rule of tradecraft.... A man without desire was invisible... There are no truly invisible men, Klay reminded himself. Every person wants something.