"She stood beneath Archie's tail, enjoying the flood of images rushing from the arrowhead fluke toward the tips of the two long hunting tentacles."
He remembered her apartment in San Isidro, near the big train station.
Chapter summaries (may contain plot and character teaser / "spoiler" information):
Chapter 13. BOXES
Accidentally hitting a button on the locative interface, Hollis sees what appears to be a huge shipping container, "translucent rectangular solid of silvery wireframe, crisp but insubstantial."Bobby muses about his work with advanced GPS technologies ("the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery") while suggesting that his interests lie beyond war and art where one day we "internalize the interface" and walk around in a shifting reality of personalized channels.
Nearby are white legos and the "origami-beautiful packaging from someone's new iPod" while an e-mail from Inchmale suggests that there may be less than meets the eye re: Node which "no-shows where any mag should show, even if it were being kept under relative wraps." [767 characters]
The Node Magazine meme is already a bit stronger than that.
Chapter 14. JUANA
While visiting his santero aunt Juana in Spanish Harlem, Tito learns that his grandfather was a Communist idealist who "put his family before his desire for a more perfect state." The death of Tito's father, a man of greater choices, was a catalyst for Tito's grandfather to seek the help of a CIA operative (the old man in the park) to move the firma (family) to the United States. [382 characters]
The idea of Spooks in Parks leads to a train of thought about "trade craft" - especially "dead letter drops" and "brush pass" meetings conducted under the Cold War "Moscow Rules".
There are quite a few examples of these, both fact e.g. the FBI double agent Robert Hanssen who used dead drops at locations including Nottoway Park, Foxstone Park, Cantabury Park etc in, Virginia .
In fiction, for example, Harry Palmer's bosses had a penchant for meeting with colleagues and opponents on park benches or at bandstands in St. James' Park etc. in London, in the film The Ipcress File