There are four men in the life raft: Hiro Protagonist, self-employed stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation, whose practice used to be limited to so-called "dry" operations, meaning that he sat around and soaked up information and then later spat it back into the Library, the CIC database, without ever actually doing anything. Now his practice has become formidably wet. Hiro is armed with two swords and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, known colloquially as a nine, with two ammunition clips, each carrying eleven rounds.