“ ‘Gear-queer’?”

Bigend’s teeth showed. “We had a team of cultural anthropologists interview American soldiers returning from Iraq. That’s where we first heard it. It’s not wholly derogatory, mind you. There are actual professionals who genuinely require these things-some of them, anyway. Though they generally seem to be far less fascinated with them. But it’s that fascination that interests us, of course.”

“It is?”

“It’s an obsession with the idea not just of the right stuff, but of the special stuff. Equipment fetishism. The costume and semiotics of achingly elite police and military units. Intense desire to possess same, of course, and in turn to be associated with that world. With its competence, its cocksure exclusivity.”

“Sounds like fashion, to me.”

“Exactly. Pants, but only just the right ones. We could never have engineered so powerful a locus of consumer desire. It’s like sex in a bottle.”

“Not for me.”

“You’re female.”

“They want to be soldiers?”

“Not to be. To self-identify as. However secretly. To imagine they may be mistaken for, or at least associated with. Virtually none of these products will ever be used for anything remotely like what they were designed for. Of course that’s true of most of the contents of your traditional army-navy store. Whole universes of wistful male fantasy in those places. But the level of consumer motivation we’re seeing, the fact that these are often what amount to luxury goods, and priced accordingly. That’s new. I felt like a neurosurgeon, when this was brought to my attention, discovering a patient whose nervous system is congenitally and fully exposed. It’s just so nakedly obvious. Fantastic, really.”

“And it ties into military contracting?”

“Deeply, though not simply. A lot of the same players, where the stuff actually originates. But your civilian buyer, your twenty-first-century Walter Mitty, needs it the way a mod, in this street, in 1965, needed the right depth of vent on a suitcoat.”

“It sounds ridiculous to me.”

“Almost exclusively a boy thing.”

“Almost,” she agreed, remembering Heidi’s IDF bra.

“Milgrim and Sleight were in South Carolina because it seemed someone there might be on the brink of a Department of Defense contract. For pants. Since it’s something we’ve been looking to get into ourselves, quite actively, we decided to have a closer look at their product.”

“ ‘They’ who?”

“We’re still looking into that.”

“It’s not the sort of thing I’d have ever imagined you doing. Military contracts, I mean. I don’t get it.”

“It’s the one garment industry with none of the fantastic dysfunction of fashion. And hugely better profit margins. But at the same time everything that works, in fashion, also works in military contracting.”

“Not everything, surely.”

“More than you imagine. The military, if you think about it, largely invented branding. The whole idea of being ‘in uniform.’ The global fashion industry is based on that. But the people whose prototype we had Milgrim photograph and make rubbings of, in South Carolina, have evidently turned Sleight. And here we are.”

“Where?”

“In a position,” he said, firmly, “of possible danger.”

“Because Sleight’s your personal IT man?”

“Because of who and what they seem to be. I’ve had a more genuinely personal IT man looking out for me, keeping track of Sleight and the various architectures he’s been erecting, both those he’s told me about and those he hasn’t. I did say I’ve been through this before. So in most cases, I wouldn’t be as concerned, and not in this way. But one of these people was here, in London. He followed you and Milgrim to Paris, with Sleight’s help.”

“Foley, Milgrim calls him.”

“We must assume that Foley, so-called, was following you as well. That overlap I mentioned, between the actual elite and the mall ninjas. That can be a problematic segment, in this particular Venn diagram.”

“I saw him,” Hollis said. “He followed me into the basement of the building where I’d gone to-” She hesitated.

“Meet Meredith Overton. I had Milgrim debriefed last night, in Paris. He was particularly unnerved to have run into Rausch.”

“So was I, though Rausch was more rattled to see me, it seemed to me. He thought you were checking up on him. Is he with Sleight?”

“I doubt it,” said Bigend. “He’s not that fast. Do you know who designs Gabriel Hounds yet?”

“No. But either Meredith already does, or she thinks she can find out.”

“And what do you judge it will take to induce her to tell us, or to find out and tell us?”

“She had a shoe line. It failed financially, and somehow the bulk of the final season was misplaced.”

“Yes. We’re looking at her now. That was a good line. She prefigured the best of the back-of-Harajuku tendencies.”

“She thinks they’re in a warehouse in Seattle. Tacoma. Somewhere. She imagines Blue Ant might be able to locate something like that. If they’re found, she believes, she’s in a position to legally claim them.”

“And then?”

“She’d sell them. On eBay, she said. They’re worth more now, evidently.”

“But mainly as a relaunch strategy,” said Bigend. “The eBay sales would attract coolhunters, generate attention in the industry.”

“She didn’t mention that.”

“She wouldn’t. She needs to leverage fresh financing. Either to relaunch the line herself or sell it to the ghostbranders.”

“The what?”

“Ghostbranders. They find brands, sometimes extinct ones, with iconic optics or a viable narrative, buy them, then put out denatured product under the old label. Meredith’s shoes probably have enough cult cachet to warrant that, on an interestingly small scale.”

“Is something like that why you’re after Gabriel Hounds?”

“I’m more interested in their reinvention of exclusivity. Far ahead, say, of the Burberry label you can only buy in one special outlet in Tokyo, but not here, and not on the web. That’s old-school geographical exclusivity. Gabriel Hounds is something else. There’s something spectral about it. What did Overton tell you?”

She saw Ajay slipping the little blade into the base of the Blue Ant figurine, back in Number Four. “She knew someone, in fashion school here, or around it, who knew someone in Chicago. She believes that that person, in Chicago, then, is the Hounds designer.”

“You don’t think she knows?”

“She may not. She says she wound up on an e-mail list announcing Hounds drops.”

“We assumed there must be one,” he said. “We’ve put a fair bit of effort into finding it. Nothing.”

She took one of the books of swatches from where it lay on the shelf nearest her. It was amazingly heavy, its cover plain heavy brown card, marked with a long number in chisel-tipped black felt pen. She opened it. Thick, wholly synthetic materials, strangely buttery to the touch, like samples of the hides of robotic whales. “What is this?”

“They make Zodiacs out of it,” he said. “The inflatable boats.”

She put it back on the shelf, deciding as she did that this was not the time to be bringing up the bug in the figurine, if in fact she was going to.

“Foley himself,” said Bigend, “may not be that dangerous, though we don’t know. A fantasist, designing for fantasist consumers. But the person who’s employing him is another matter. I haven’t been able to find out as much as I’d like. Currently, I’m having to go outside Blue Ant, bypass Sleight and his architecture, for even basic intelligence.”

“How do you mean, dangerous?”

“Not good to know,” said Bigend, “or to be known by. Not good to be seen as being in competition with. That little bit of industrial espionage in South Carolina, as it happened, put Sleight in their camp. Given what I’ve managed to learn so far, we are likely regarded, now, as the enemy.”

“Who are they?”