Spook Country by William Gibson Page B

corporate upgrade. She froze, out of primeval fear that he’d caught her Googling him, peering into his Wiki.
    “Mr. Bigend,” she said, giving up on the idea of any attempt at the Franco-Belgian pronunciation.
    “Miss Henry. Consider us introduced, shall we? You may have no idea why I’m calling. The Node start-up, you see, is a project of mine.”
    “I’ve only just Googled you.” She opened her mouth wide, wider, in the silent scream that Inchmale had taught her reduces tension.
    “Ahead of the game, then. What we want in a journalist. I’ve just spoken myself with Rausch, in London.”
    If Rausch is in London, she wondered, then where are you? “Where are you?”
    “I’m in the lobby of your hotel. I was wondering if you might like a drink.”

16. KNOWN EXITS
    Milgrim was reading the New York Times, finishing his breakfast coffee in a bakery on Bleecker, while Brown conducted a series of quiet, tense, and extremely pissed-off conversations with whoever was supposed to be in charge of watching the IF’s known exits, when the IF was home sleeping—or whatever the IF did, when he was home. “Known exits” seemed to Milgrim to imply that the IF’s neighborhood might be riddled with gaslit opium tunnels and the odd subterranean divan, a possibility Milgrim found appealing, however unlikely.
    Whoever was on the other end of this particular call was not having a good morning. The IF and another male had left the IF’s building, walked to the Canal Street subway, entered, and vanished. Milgrim knew, from having also overheard Brown’s half of other conversations, that the IF and his family tended to do that, and particularly around subways. Milgrim imagined that the IF and his family had the keys to some special kind of subway-based porosity, a way into the cracks and holes and spaces between things.
    Milgrim himself was having a better morning than he recalled having had in some time, and this in spite of Brown’s having shaken him awake to translate Volapuk. Then he’d fallen back into some dream he could no longer remember, not a pleasant one, something about blue light coming from his skin, or beneath it. But all in all very pleasant to be here in the Village this early in the day, having coffee and a pastry and enjoying the Times someone had left.
    Brown didn’t like the New York Times. Brown actually didn’t like news media of any kind, Milgrim had come to understand, because the news conveyed did not issue from any reliable, that was to say, governmental, source. Nor could it, really, under present conditions of war, as any genuine news, news of any strategic import whatever, was by definition precious, and not to be wasted on the nation’s mere citizenry.
    Milgrim certainly wasn’t going to argue with any of that. If Brown had declared the Queen of England to be a shape-shifting alien reptile, craving the warm flesh of human infants, Milgrim would not have argued.
    But midway through a third-page piece on the NSA and data mining, something occurred to Milgrim. “Say,” he said to Brown, who’d just ended a call and was looking at his phone as if he wished he knew a way to torture it, “this NSA data-mining thing…”
    It hung there, between them, somewhere above the table. He wasn’t in the habit of initiating conversations with Brown, and for good reason. Brown looked from the phone to Milgrim, his expression unchanged.
    “I was thinking,” Milgrim heard himself say, “about your IF. About the Volapuk. If the NSA can do what it says they can, here, then it should be pretty easy to fold a logarithm into the mix that would grab your Volapuk and nothing else. You wouldn’t even need much of a sample of their family dialect. You could just find half a dozen dialectal examples of the form and shoot for a kind of average. Anything that went through the phone system, after that, that had that tag, bingo. You wouldn’t need to be changing any more batteries on the IF’s