The present tense made him nervous. — William Gibson

Smith had a visitor, unannounced…A small man, Japanese, enormously polite, who bore all the marks of a vat-grown ninja assassin. Smith sat very still, staring into the calm brown eyes of death across a polished table of Vietnamese rosewood. Gently, almost apologetically, the cloned killer explained that it was his duty to find and return a certain artwork, a mechanism of great beauty, which had been taken from the house of his master.

"I got a little story for you about them…Haven't ever told anybody this one," the Finn began.

The story he told Case and Molly began with another man's story, a man he called Smith. Smith had come to the Finn with a request for help, a fraternal request, one businessman to another.

He was less than a block from Deane's office when it hit, the sudden cellular awareness that someone was on his ass, and very close. The cultivation of a certain tame paranoia was something Case took for granted.