"And I'm safer with you than I am with these guys you say are mercs?" "I think so, yes," the man said… — William Gibson

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. But as he spent more time cruising the aspects of the flow that were concerned with Harwood, and with the activities of his firm, Harwood Levine, it had begun to become apparent that this was a locus of nodal points, a sort of meta-node, and that, in some way he had been unable to define, something very large was happening here.

San Francisco and Los Angeles seemed more like different planets than different cities.

That other country, waiting.

He is by trade a keeper of the door to that country.

Drawn, the black blade becomes a key. When he holds it, he holds the wind in his hand.

The door swings gently open.

But he does not draw it now, and the traders see only a gray-haired man, wolfishly professorial…raises his hand to halt a passing cab. Though somehow they do not, as they easily might, rush to claim it as their own.