And it had been toward the end of this that Cody Harwood, shy and smiling and gently elusive, someone Laney had never felt the least interest in, had begun to obsess him. Harwood, most often depicted as a twenty-first-century synthesis of Bill Gates and Woody Allen, had never previously been any more to Laney than a vague source of irritation, one of those familiar icons who loom regularly on the horizons of media, only to drop away until they next appear. Laney had had no opinion of Harwood, other than that he felt he had been glimpsing him all his life, and didn't quite know why, and was vaguely tired of it.