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prove to be a somewhat new way to transmit brand vision.”
    “You sound guarded in your appreciation.”
    “A certain genuinely provocative use of negative space,” he said, sounding still less pleased.
    “Who?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find out. I feel that someone has read and understood my playbook. And may possibly be extending it.”
    “Then send Pamela,” she said. “She understands all that. Or someone else. You have a small army of people who understand all that. You must.”
    “But that’s exactly it. Because they ‘understand all that,’ they won’t find the edge. They won’t find the new. And worse, they’ll trample on it, inadvertently crush it, beneath a certain mediocrity inherent in professional competence.” He dabbed his lips with the folded napkin, though they didn’t seem to need it. “I need a wild card. I need you.”
    He sat back, then, and regarded her in exactly the way he’d regarded the tidy and receding ass of the Italian girl, though in this case, she knew, it had nothing at all to do with sex.
    “Dear God,” she said, entirely without expecting to, and simultaneously wishing she were very small. Small enough to curl up in the slut’s wool that crowned the steampunk lift, between those few cork-colored filter tips.
    “Does ‘The Gabriel Hounds’ mean anything to you?” he asked.
    “No,” she said.
    He smiled, obviously pleased.

4. PARADOXICAL ANTAGONIST

    W ith the red cardboard tube tucked carefully in beside him, under the thin British Midlands blanket, Milgrim lay awake in the darkened cabin of his flight to Heathrow.
    He’d taken his pills about fifteen minutes earlier, after some calculations on the back cover of the in-flight magazine. Time-zone transitions could be tricky, in terms of dosing schedules, particularly when you weren’t allowed to know exactly what it was you were taking. Whatever the doctors in Basel provided, he never saw it in its original factory form, so had no way of figuring out what it might be. This was intentional, they had explained to him, and necessary to his treatment. Everything was repackaged, in variously sized featureless white gelatin capsules, which he was forbidden to open.
    He’d pushed the empty white bubble-pack, with its tiny, precisely handwritten notations of date and hour, in purple ink, far down into the seatback pocket. It would remain on the plane, at Heathrow. Nothing to be carried through customs.
    His passport lay against his chest, beneath his shirt, in a Faraday pouch protecting the information on its resident RFID tag. RFID snooping was an obsession of Sleight’s. Radio-frequency identification tags. They were in lots of things, evidently, and definitely in every recent U.S. passport. Sleight himself was quite fond of RFID snooping, which Milgrim supposed was one reason he worried about it. You could sit in a hotel lobby and remotely collect information from the passports of American businessmen. The Faraday pouch, which blocked all radio signals, made this impossible.
    Milgrim’s Neo phone was another example of Sleight’s obsession with security or, as Milgrim supposed, control. It had an almost unimaginably tiny on-screen keyboard, one that could only be operated with a stylus. Milgrim’s hand-eye coordination was quite good, according to the clinic, but he still had to concentrate like a jeweler when he needed to send a message. More annoyingly, Sleight had set it to lock its screen after thirty seconds of idle, requiring Milgrim to enter his password if he stopped to think for longer than twenty-nine seconds. When he’d complained about this, Sleight explained that it gave potential attackers only a thirty-second window to get in and read the phone, and that admin privileges were in any case out of the question.
    The Neo, Milgrim gathered, was less a phone than a sort of tabula rasa, one which Sleight could field-update, without Milgrim’s knowledge or consent,