- I've been keeping things basically tight third-person on Moone? But Le Carre hops into different characters heads a lot. That's another thing I've been trying to do, but now I should do it more deliberately.
- He describes characters' physical appearances. Also a lot of his characters are European. So he describes a lot of them speaking Europeanese.
- People say their inner turmoil out loud, or point out other people's, but it's mostly external. I've got lengthy musings on character motivation and stuff, but it's mostly internal. We can fix that in post if we want.
- Le Carre doesn't have action scenes. He has violence scenes.
- That being said he's still got a good hand for suspense
So there was a probe, in 1992!, the FBI investigating the CIA for the Iran-Contra affair, which is just like perfect for how Moone and Unwin like get together, or get set at each other's throats, or something. Some supernatural equivalent of the Iran-Contra probe. There's this book, Wedge: The Secret war between the FBI and CIA, by Mark Riebling, that has more information specifically on that, and it's all about the history of why the FBI and CIA hate each other even though there's no constitutional basis for their separation of jurisdictions. Need to check that out. It was a coincidence that Moone and Unwin's history is even vaguely mid-80s and Middle-Eastern; I implied that Moone entered the djinn world in Pakistan, but tying it in to Iran-Contra wouldn't be difficult, just move that sucker to Persia instead. Although that does make the Urdu thing a bit of a stretch to talk about.
a few character descriptions
Unwin was a short, ugly man in a tan trenchcoat that reeked at the sleeves of coffee and tobacco stains. His friends joked that he was so ugly, that even if they made a movie of his life they wouldn't hire a handsome well-known actor to play him, but just keep him ugly. That tells you a lot about his friends, for joking like that, and joking like that with him; him, for letting them joke like that about him, and even joining along; but mostly it tells you about how hideously horrendously ugly he was.
MacBeth was an older man, grizzled and weathered, though it was impossible to say how old he was for sure. Could have been hundreds of years. Moone had known him since the early 80s, at least, and he had already been as leathery at that point, beaten-up and worn in like an old shoe. His skin was dusty and swarthy, and his nose, though possessing an aquiline bridge, was somewhat snubbed at the bottom; it was believed in his family that he had partially Haitian blood somewhere down the line
Gef was a remarkably yellow animal, all save for the black-and-white speckles on his long tail, bushy like a spattered paintbrush. His paws were unusually large for a mongoose, long and thin and as agile as the fingers of a master pianist. His body, too, was also of unnatural dimensions; rail thin, he had the ability to compress himself even thinner, should the need arise. Moone had seen footage of cephalopods squeeze their way through impossibly tight cracks, and Moone got the feeling that however well they could squish Gef could squish even more agiley.
anyone is my new favorite character
The assassin and cyclops-slayer known as Anyone jumped down from the edge of the platform she'd been sitting on, to the vertical edge of the wall of the gothic chapel below, sliding down the wall gingerly, using the facade's !architecture~! as support to bounce inward instead of outward, before finally landing and perching at the sill to the glassless open window overlooking the narthex of the chapel, glowing stained-glass kaleidoscope glows in the late afternoon sun.
Realistically, she knew she could have aimed right and jumped straight to the window, or even through it to the room below (which was open save for the baptismal font in the center, which she probably would have been able to splash down in had she aimed extra right,) but the position here, unnoticed at the windowsill overlooking everything, was exactly where she wanted to be. (Why would the front of a chapel be directly across the street from another building? It was a floating platform. Supported by balloons. Big bell-shaped balloons. You just assumed she was jumping from another building.)
The bell balloon platform took off again, as Anyone flipped around so as to lie on her back, supporting herself in place pressing her legs against the north edge of the fenestration and resting her back against the south edge, looking east into the chapel. The window sill was a foot or so across, the perfect space to rest a typewriter or something, but just a little too small to remain effectively hidden if anyone in the chapel were to turn their gaze westward, or if anyone outside the building were to look up. If anyone outside the building were to look up, their gaze probably would have been caught by the flying bell shape floating off though. Blamed it on aliens.
She opened her coat, unfolding stiffly like the rusty iron hinges of a birdcage, and the ~flap~ stayed in place at the angle she'd opened it to so she could use it as a little shelf as she worked, hunched over herself like that small. Pulling various vials out of various pockets, kept small and discrete not through any tricks of magic, but exceptional tailoring. Presently she arranged the bottles and tubes before her, arranged in rows and columns like a periodic table, and assembled some magic thing.
[the pontifex comes. possibly The Pontifex, that makes sense. This is a flashback!]
Instead of firing below at the pontifex, she set her sights upwards... and fired at the bell.
but i legit had to do like a solid hour of research for this part
It was far below freezing up here, but Anyone, bare skin exposed to the Mesosphere, didn't so much as get goose pimples. Anyone was far above what a balloon should have been able to float to-- the highest high-altitude balloons usually got was 100,000 feet above sea level-- but Anyone's balloon was twice above that. The atmospheric density at this height would have been around point one millibar; 99.9% of the gas that makes up the atmosphere was beneath her right now.
Anyone exhaled, watching her breath solidify and enjoying herself for a moment. It was as though the rules of physics were completely different up here, stranger even than the way things worked at the bottom of the ocean. The external temperature was around -200 degrees celsius, but the altitude so high and the air pressure so low that human body temperature was well above the boiling point of water, and her blood would have vaporized instantly if that kind of thing affected her. Her skin would have burned as well; ultraviolet radiation from space was almost entirely unfiltered by what little atmosphere there was above her, leaving things easily irradiated. The clouds at this height were entirely solid, delicate strands of shimmering ice crystals suspended in space, visible to the world below only during the twilight hours when the sun struck against them just right. All of that, and mesosphere still only meant middle atmosphere; she wasn't that high up past the stratopause between mesosphere and stratosphere, and the thermosphere would extended hundreds of miles into space above the mesopause.
Looking to her left and right, she could see the edge of the horizon, outer space her neighbors directly on either side. Looking up, a dizzying array of still, untwinkling stars, and an invisible layer of suspended sodium atoms which had been stripped away from passing meteors.
Making a kill from 61 kilometers away required impossibly precise aiming. The longest confirmed sniper kill in the mundane world at this point was performed a quarter-century ago during the Vietnam war, at a distance of 2,286 meters; Anyone now hoped to make a kill at 30 times that length. The rotation of the earth had to be taken into account at this distance, and of course the random shifting of the winds could throw everything off, which is why Anyone required the atmospheric conditions to be exactly right; the air needed to be exactly still, such as the air would sometimes get in the doldrums at the latitudes of the equator... or the air in the eye of a hurricane.
This was what Anyone looked down at now, sweeping across sea and land, this massive force of nature one hundred miles across, which nonetheless appeared so small at this distance. Rather than keep pace with the eye of the storm, she'd parked her balloon
Her target was an operative by the name of Finnegan Michael Moone
***
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