The elements play their part in a dramatic conversation between Tabitha Falkayn and Philippe Rochefort. When he urges her to divulge military intelligence, even saying:
"'If you love me, you will...'" (p. 604)
- we are told that:
"She stood in the middle of the wind." (ibid.)
Where else?
Then, when he agrees to give his parole, his voice briefly breaks as:
"Waves hissed at his back." (ibid.)
Waves can lap or murmur but these hiss. At him? Do they indicate that he will break his parole? Both find their conflicting loyalties stretched to breaking point. Arinnian plans that Rochefort will escape with misleading intelligence fed to him by his lover. She knows this but says it all in one breath anyway. Suddenly, a John le Carre character might feel at home on Avalon.
17 comments:
From Unknown:
Talking of really infamous spies, sleepers, moles and even the fictional Smiley, Bond and Bourne, one day Donald J Trump will eclipse them all. Why? Credible revelations from seven former KGB/FSB officers about Donald J Trump being a KGB agent or asset (codenamed Krasnov) since the 1970s were published recently on TheBurlingtonFiles website at https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2025.03.16.php.
The following KGB/FSB officers and defectors have disclosed (at great personal risk) that Donald Trump was a KGB/FSB agent or asset decades before he first became President of the USA: Yuri Shvets (KGB Major); Oleg Kalugin (KGB General); Alexander Litvinenko (assassinated FSB Officer); Viktor Suvorov (GRU Officer); Boris Karpichkov (KGB Major); Sergei Tretyakov (SVR Officer); and Alnur Mussayev (Kazakhstan's KNB (National Security Committee) Chief). Perhaps things would have been different if Trump had read the enigmatic fact based spy thriller Beyond Enkription in TheBurlingtonFiles.
Thank you, Unknown.
Kaor, Unknown!
Hope this gets uploaded. Having great difficulty lately uploading comments.
Unknown: Except Tsarist, Cheka/KGB, and FSB have ancient reputations for concocting disinformation and spurious documents! So I would be very skeptical about those "sources."
Ad astra! Sean
What more could Trump do as a Russian agent than he has already done?
He is trashing the US economy with the Trump Tariff Travesty.
The TTT is trashing good will toward the US among countries that had been the best allies of the US.
He is helping Putin in his war to conquer Ukraine.
Are these actions due to malice or stupidity?
To restore goodwill toward the US, the US needs to remove the felon-in-chief from the Oval Office & put him in a jail cell where he belongs.
My biggest criticism of the US Democratic party is that they didn't push enough to get Trump in jail.
Kaor, Jim!
I absolutely disagree. And I have no time or patience for weird conspiracy theories. Moreover, like most foreigners, you are overlooking an important point: the rise olf Pres. Trump was not due to silly plots, but to periodic outbreaks of populist nationalism. The turmoil we have now goes back to the Tea Party protests against that bad man, Barack Obama. More and more Americans by Democrat policies they believed aimed against them, the "clingers" and "deplorables" as Barry and Hillary Clinton sneeringly called convinced Christians who happened to be conservative leaning. Many of these populists felt frustrated by a Republican Party which seemed either unable to fight the Democrats or who had become too much a part of the "establishment."
This simmering anger, plus the folly, corruption, arrogance, and hypocrisy of American leftists were to provide the base on which Trump rose to his first term as President in 2016. The hysteria whipped up by leftists was enough to defeat Trump in 2020. But the incredible folly and stupidity of the Democrats and their senile puppet "Josip" reversed their gains. The power grabbing botch they made with Covid, their abandoning of the borders, to let millions of illegals swarm in, the transsexual lunacy, the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, weaponizing of the gov't against Trump and other Republicans, and many other issues, led to the second triumph of Trump in 2024.
One thing that characterizes populist nationalism is bellicosity, when Americans get fed up and demand drastic actions, actions not always wise or carefully thought out. I myself would have preferred Gov. DeSantis of Florida, because he has all of Trump's best ideas and is far more self disciplined.
My chief complaint against the radical leftists who dominate the Democrats is that they are loathsome, vile, disgusting and evil.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Surely your language is fairly extreme!
You leave out Trump denying an election result, trying by every means to overturn it and inciting a riot in which people were killed or injured. I read that some policemen want to take civil action against him.
Jim,
My sense is that Trump is doing what he thinks is beneficial/profitable for himself and for the people that he identifies with: the rich and American supporters of the rich. He would do this with or without Russian links.
Paul.
And pardoned the rioters and said that they were the ones that had been badly treated.
I think it most likely that Trump is not Putin's agent but is rather a 'useful idiot' for Putin. The other most important useful idiots for Putin over the last few decades are the Europeans who opposed nuclear power in their countries, thus making their countries dependent on Russian gas.
Sean: I find your automatic characterization of people you disagree with politically, as evil, tiresome at best. I can consider most of Trump's action to be mistaken at best while bearing in mind the principle that 'even a stopped clock is right twice a day' and recognize that even Trump can get something right once in while.
Generally the positions of a political party will be some that I agree with & some that I disagree with.
You brought up 'transsexual lunacy'. I consider a major recent mistake of the Democrats to be buying into Trans Ideology. My position is that if a man wants to do 'feminine' things or a woman wants to do 'masculine' things that is no skin off anyone else's nose. The situations in which there is some point in even asking 'man or woman' about a person are situations in which the differences in anatomy & physiology between the sexes are relevant. Eg: sporting competitions. The greater average size & strength of men makes allowing men who claim to be women into female change rooms etc. a hazard to women. Unfortunately there are men who will commit rape given such an opportunity.
The other policies of the Democrats you denounced I consider to have at least arguable cases to be made for them. My understanding is that illegal immigrants have not been much more common under Democratic administrations than Republican. The botching of the Afghanistan withdrawal was started under Trump who left Biden with an untenable situation.
COVID: I can't regard such policies as masks in public places to be tyrannical. Their effectiveness has to be evaluated without being used as a club against the party you are not a member of.
Jim,
I do not fully understand the trans issue. We certainly need a society that does not digitally categorize everyone and, even more so, does not condemn people who do not conform to rigid categories. Some older societies have been more open, accepting and inclusive. Whatever else is going on with men wanting to transition to women, I do not think that the issue is men trying to get nearer to women in order to rape them.
Paul.
"I do not think that the issue is men trying to get nearer to women in order to rape them"
But do the ones who just think of themselves as women, unintentionally provide cover for the ones who do want to rape?
Jim,
Again, I don't think so but you would have to find evidence of this happening.
Paul.
Evidence of this happening:
https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/this-never-happens
I only read a few of the many cases listed.
Jim,
OK. If there is evidence, then there is a problem here. I do not understand the issue. I want a society that does not categorize or condemn but not one in which women feel or, even worse, are threatened.
Separatist feminism was around for a while but does not seem to have lasted and how could it? I am hoping that the current "trans" issue will similarly cease to be such a cause of contention after a while.
Paul.
Jim,
I have checked, briefly. It does look horrific.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
You cannot have fake women shoving their way onto women's sports teams, locker rooms, or rest rooms and not have real women feeling threatened---and in too many cases getting raped.
The only standard that matters is how genetics determined one's sex at conception, either male or female. And that determination is for life because it's impossible to reverse one's DNA pattern from XY to XX--or vice versa.
I will never agree to the "transsexual" lunacy!
Testing.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
There is more than lunacy involved but the whole issue is clearly one big mess. I do not know what the answer is and expect it to emerge over time.
Extreme, uncompromising, condemnatory positions are one bad symptom of our present totally polarized society.
Paul.
There are people who have genuine gender identity problems. They need to be understood and helped although not in ways that cause conflict with a lot of other people.
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