Spook Country by William Gibson

say that he had fewer choices?”
    “The head of a large family has duties. And we had already become a different sort of family, a firma, as we are today. He put his family before his desire for a more perfect state. If it had been him, alone, I believe he would have stayed. Perhaps he would be alive today. Your father’s death, of course, strongly affected his decision to bring us here. Sit.” She brought a yellow tray to the small table, with the tostada on a white saucer, and a large white cup of café con leche.
    “This man, he enabled Grandfather to bring us here?”
    “In a sense.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “Too many questions.”
    He smiled up at her. “Is he CIA?”
    She glowered at him from beneath the gray kerchief. The pale tip of her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth, then vanished. “Was your grandfather DGI?”
    Tito dunked and chewed a piece of his tostada, considering. “Yes.”
    “There you are,” said Juana. “Of course he was.” She brushed her wrinkled hands together, as if wishing to be free of the traces of something. “But who did he work for? Think of our saints, Tito. Two faces. Always, two.”

15. SPIV
    I nchmale had always been balding and intense, and Inchmale had always been middle-aged—even when she first met him, when they were both nineteen. People who really liked the Curfew tended to like Inchmale or to like her, but seldom both. Bobby Chombo, she thought, as Alberto drove her back to the Mondrian, was one of the former. But that had been a good thing, really, because it had meant that she’d been able to lay out her best public pieces of Inchmale without revealing herself, then shuffle them, palm them, rearrange them, withdraw them, to help keep him talking. She’d never asked Inchmale, but she took it for granted he did the same with her.
    And it hadn’t hurt that Bobby was himself a musician, though not in the old plays-a-physical-instrument-and/or-sings modality. He took things apart, sampled them, mashed them up. This was fine with her, though like General Bosquet watching the charge of the Light Brigade, she was inclined to think it wasn’t war. Inchmale understood it, though, and indeed had championed it, as soon as it was digitally possible pulling guitar lines out of obscure garage chestnuts and stretching them, like a mad jeweler elongating sturdy Victorian tableware into something insectile, post-functionally fragile, and neurologically dangerous.
    She’d also assumed that she had Bobby’s Marlboro binge on her side, though she’d noticed that she was starting to count his smokes, and to worry, as he neared the bottom of his pack, about having one herself. She’d tried distracting herself with sips of room-temperature Red Bull from a previously unopened can she’d excavated from the table clutter, but it had only made her bug-eyed with caffeine, or perhaps with taurine, the drink’s other famous ingredient, extracted supposedly from the testicles of bulls. Bulls generally looked more placid than she now felt, or perhaps those were cows. She didn’t know cattle.
    Bobby Chombo’s sampling talk had helped her make a kind of sense of him, of his annoying shoes and his tight white pants. He was, basically, a DJ. Or DJ-like, in any case, which was what counted. His day job, troubleshooting navigational systems or whatever it was, made a sort of sense too. It was, often as not, the wonk side of being DJ-like, and often as not the side that paid the rent. Either it was his wonk-hipster thing that had so strongly evoked Inchmale for her, or that he was the sort of jerk that Inchmale had always been able to handle so efficiently. Because, she supposed, Inchmale had been more or less that sort of jerk himself.
    “It went better than I expected it to,” said Alberto, interrupting her thoughts. “He’s a difficult person to get to know.”
    “I went to a gig in Silverlake, a couple of years ago, what they call reggaeton. Sort of reggae-salsa