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those he once made by constructing a coral reef or the Trooping of the Colour from awkward little pieces of dusty cardboard. Now the connections have everything to do with people and the ordinary, day-to-day world, because people and events are the pieces that make up his puzzles now—and now everything is different, because the problems are abstract. There's nothing to hold in your hand, there's no starting point of a number sequence or an anagrammatized word to work with. What he works with now is people, and when you ignore what people feel and want, when you see them as objects in the fullest sense of the word, they become the most interesting pieces in the most compelling and elegant puzzle of all.
    And the rules of the game are much the same as before. There is only one acceptable solution to any puzzle and Brian Smith's job, pure and simple, is to discover what it is. Join all the dots. Fit all the pieces together. Everything is connected to everything else, so anything is possible. If what you are looking for is pain, you find the patterns that make pain possible; if all you need is love, then love is what you are bound to find, even in the most unlikely or dangerous places. What Brian Smith looks for, what he can see where others see nothing, are the patterns that lead to money. In fact, it is Brian Smith's gift to see, where others do not, that everything leads to money. Another man's disaster, another man's hell—in any situation, no matter how terrible, a man can make money, if he will only discover the connections between one thing and another. The proof is there for all to see in the newspapers and on the television every day. War. Terrorist atrocities. Natural disasters. Thousands of people die, or lose their homes, cities are washed away or reduced to ashes, and the cameras fix on that human-interest story, that tragedy, these people stumbling out of the smoke and ashes and into the cameras, that woman sitting alone on her roof in the midst of the flood. Devastated, the newsman says. They always say devastated, because devastated makes good television. Behind the scenes, though, away from the cameras and the lights, somebody is making money. Somebody who sees the connections while everyone else is distracted by the devastation. Brian Smith finds it fascinating, how the rest of the world seems to miss this obvious fact. Sometimes, in his lighter moments, he talks to his man Jenner about it.
    “What do you see?” he'll say, looking up from his paper or his computer screen. “What comes into your mind when you hear the word ‘Africa'?”
    Jenner ponders a moment, then shakes his head. He doesn't see much, which is his greatest virtue. Big, quiet, totally serious, he is a man of action, a type that is easier to use than almost any other.
    “In your mind's eye,” Smith says. “What pictures do you see?”
    Jenner tries. He looks into his tidy, rather spartan memory and scrapes some old news footage together. “Kids,” he says. “Kids and flies. Barren desert. Refugee camps.”
    Smith nods. “Exactly,” he says. This is what everybody sees when they think of Africa. This, or some jolly, smiling, infinitely malleable native in a brightly colored print dress. But what Smith sees is money. Every disaster, every civil war, every famine makes somebody rich. You can be one of those smiling, malleable natives, or a stick-thin AIDS-infected refugee lying on a bed of flies in a transit camp. Or you can be rich. As long as one exists, the other is possible for whoever can see the logic. Which is obvious to everyone, of course, even to a man like Jenner. This isn't some special knowledge or insight that Smith alone possesses. The only difference is that he alone, or he alone among his immediate circle of acquaintance, is prepared to place his trust in that logic, because for him, money is an entirely abstract entity. For Brian Smith, only the logic of money exists; everything else is invisible.
    Yet it had taken