Bigend and his James Bond villain’s car, his half-built headquarters to match, his too much money, his big sharp curiosity and his bland willingness to go poking it wherever he wanted. That was potentially dangerous. Had to be. In some way she’d never really imagined before. If he wasn’t lying, he’d been paying people to tell him about secret government programs. The war on terror. Were they still calling it that? She’d caught some, she decided: terror. Right here in her hand, in Starbucks, afraid to trust her own phone and the net stretching out from it, strung through those creepy fake trees you saw from highways here, the cellular towers disguised with grotesque faux foliage, Cubist fronds, Art Deco conifers, a thin forest supporting an invisible grid, not unlike the one spread on Bobby’s factory floor in flour, chalk, anthrax, baby laxative, whatever it was. The trees Bobby triangulated on. The net of telephony, all digitized, and all, she had to suppose, listened to. By whoever, whatever, made the sort of things Bigend was poking at its business. Somewhere, she had to believe, such things were all too real.