"Inchmale had always been balding and intense, and Inchmale had always been middle-aged-even when she first met him, when they were both nineteen."
"Milgrim was reading the New York Times, finishing his breakfast coffee in a bakery on Bleecker, while Brown conducted a series of quiet, tense and extremely pissed-off conversations with whomever was supposed to be in charge of watching the IF’s known exits, when the IF was home sleeping - or whatever the IF did, when he as home."[...]
"If Brown had declared that the Queen of England to be a shape-shifting alien reptile, craving the warm flesh of human infants, Milgrim would not have argued."
Chapter summaries (may contain plot and character teaser / "spoiler" information):
Chapter 15. SPIV
After meeting with DJ-like Bobby Chombo, Hollis and Alberto talk about Bobby's tangential interests in digital music and podcasting. An "uncharacteristically philosophical" Reg Inchmale calls Hollis to re-reemphasize his wife's warning about Hubertus Bigend.Back at the Mondrian, Hollis reads Bigend's Wikipedia entry to learn his mother’s connections to Situationist International and of Hubertus' "gifts" including "the ability to find precisely the right person for a given project" and is interrupted by a call from Bigend himself who is waiting in the hotel lobby. [569 characters]
The actual Wikipedia entry for Hubertus Bigend does not really exist, at the present time, although the search engine pulls up a reference to the Pattern Recognition
entry.
Chapter 16. KNOWN EXITS
As Brown is reading one of his flunkies the riot act over the phone, Milgrim reads an article in the New York Times about NSA wiretapping. Milgrim wonders aloud to Brown why the NSA couldn't spy on the IF’s operations and translate the Volapuk instead of him. Despite Brown's assertion that NSA wiretaps are only approved for international calls, Milgrim begins to wonder if Brown is a government agent or "just an asshole with a gun." [434 characters]
Good question about the NSA, if this were actually an official US Government surveillance operation.
The National Security Agency (NSA), of course, has for years got around this by getting the equivalent United Kingdom Government Communications HeadQuarters (GCHQ) or other Australian, Canadian , New Zealand etc. intelligence sharing treaty signatories, to do this sort of thing on their behalf, and vice versa. - see Cryptome on the Echelon system.