Spook Country by William Gibson Page A

fusion.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Chombo. The DJ was a big deal in that scene: El Chombo.”
    “That’s not Bobby.”
    “I’ll say. But why’s our Bobby white-guy a Chombo too?”
    Alberto grinned. “He likes people to wonder about that. But his Chombo’s a kind of software.”
    “Software?”
    “Yes.”
    She decided there wasn’t much to be thought about that, at this point. “He sleeps there?”
    “He doesn’t go out, unless he has to.”
    “You said he won’t sleep twice in the same square of that grid.”
    “Never mention that to him, no matter what, okay?”
    “And he does gigs? DJs?”
    “He podcasts,” Alberto said.
    Her cell rang.
    “Hello?”
    “Reg.”
    “I was just thinking about you.”
    “Why was that?”
    “Another time.”
    “Get my e-mail?”
    “I did.”
    “Angelina asked me to call, re-reiterate. Ree-ree.”
    “I get the message, thanks. I don’t think there’s much I can do about it, though, except do what I’m doing and see what happens.”
    “Are you taking some sort of seminar?” he asked.
    “Why?”
    “You sounded uncharacteristically philosophical, just then.”
    “I saw Heidi, earlier.”
    “Christ,” said Inchmale. “Was she walking on her hind legs?”
    “She drove past me in a very nice-looking car. Headed in the direction of Beverly Hills.”
    “She’s been headed in that direction since the birth canal.”
    “I’m with someone, Reg. Have to go.”
    “Toodles.” He was gone.
    “Was that Reg Inchmale?” Alberto asked.
    “Yes, it was.”
    “You saw Heidi Hyde tonight?”
    “Yes, while you were getting rousted in Virgin. She drove past on Sunset.”
    “Wow,” said Alberto. “How likely is that?”
    “Statistically, who knows? Subjectively, feels to me, not so weird. She lives in Beverly Hills, works in Century City.”
    “Doing what?”
    “Something in her husband’s company. He’s a tax lawyer. With his own production company.”
    “Eek,” said Alberto, after a pause, “there really is a life after rock.”
    “You’d better believe it,” she assured him.

    ODILE’S ROBOT appeared to have died, or to be hibernating. It sat there by the drapes, inert and unfinished-looking. Hollis nudged it with the toe of her Adidas.
    There were no messages on the hotel voice mail.
    She got her PowerBook out of the bag, woke it, and tried holding the back of the open screen against the window. Did she want to rejoin trusted wireless network SpaDeLites47? Yes, please. SpaDeLites47 had treated her right, before. She assumed SpaDeLites47 was in the period apartment building across the street.
    No mail. One-handed, supporting the laptop with her other, she Googled “bigend.”
    First up was a Japanese site for “BIGEND,” but this seemed to be a brand of performance motor oil for dragsters.
    She tried the link for his Wikipedia entry.
    Hubertus Hendrik Bigend, born June 7, 1967, in Antwerp, is the founder of the innovative global advertising agency Blue Ant. He is the only child of Belgian industrialist Benoît Bigend and Belgian sculptor Phaedra Seynhaev. Much has been made, by Bigend’s admirers and detractors alike, of his mother’s early links with the Situationist International (Charles Saatchi was famously but falsely reported to have described him as “a jumped-up Situationist spiv”) but Bigend himself has declared that the success of Blue Ant has entirely to do with his own gifts, one of which, he claims, is the ability to find precisely the right person for a given project. He is very much a hands-on micromanager, in spite of the firm’s remarkable growth in the past five years.
    Her cell began to ring, in her bag, back on the table. If she moved the PowerBook, she’d lose the wifi from across the street, though this page would still be cached. She crossed to the table, put the laptop down on it, and dug her phone out of her bag. “Hello?”
    “Hubertus Bigend, for Hollis Henry.”
    It sounded as though her phone had received some sort of