by the Federal Reserve under a U.N. mandatesent by the United States to Iraq between March, 2003, and June, 2004, intended to aid in the reconstruction of the country but much of it subsequently unaccounted for.

Whoever planned this heistand that is never specified, beyond the clear implication that some government functionaries, “no one you would have heard of,” were involvedhas had unexpected difficulty finding a place to launder the cash. Moreover, they have learned that someone else is trying to track the container in its passage on the seas. Brown is employed by these shadowy conspirators as a “contractor,” and he has Tito under surveillance because Tito is acting as a courier for information concerning the shipping container.

Hollis, meanwhile, stumbles on the story in what seems entirely an accident in the course of her research on locative art, but she does not begin to understand what she has discovered until she meets Hubertus Bigend, a fabulously wealthy and secretive Belgian magnate who is the money behind Node. Indeed, as they talk, and it becomes clear how much he knows about Hollis, she begins to wonder if she was hired for this assignment specifically because he believes that through her he will learn more about the container and the machinations surrounding it. (It is the knowledgethe “intelligence”that interests him.)

In the climax of the action, Hollis, Tito, Milgrim (brought by Brown), and Bigend are all drawn to Vancouver, British Columbia, where the container finally comes to port. Thereand again by an accident that is not quite an accidentHollis meets an enigmatic figure described as “the old man,” whom the reader has met earlier in conjunction with Tito. The old man is a retired specialist in national security who, Hollis is told, went off the edge after September 11, 2001. He hates the direction the country has taken since thenthe abuse of law, the torture, the corruptionand he has responded by calling on old friends in the trade to help him in a quixotic personal crusade.

In this respect, Spook Country resembles a wide variety of novels published in the shadow of the war in Iraq and the “war on terror,” in which a plot of byzantine complexity leads in the end to the White House or somewhere in that neighborhood, and where the heart of darkness often reveals an embrace between shadowy government conspirators and Evangelical Christians. Examples include Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) and Peter Abrahams’s Nerve Damage (2007). As for Spook Country, the money from the shipping container is supposed to end up at a megachurch in Idaho“with its own television station with an adjacent gated community.” That $100 million has to be laundered somewhere.

This trope hardly begins to encompass what Gibson is up to in the novel, which has to be read in conjunction with Pattern Recognition. The title of that novel introduces what seems to be the overarching concern of the trilogy in the making. Human beings are inveterate pattern recognizers. The protagonist of Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard, makes her living doing just that. She is a “coolhunter,” anticipating trends in style and fashion and consumption: “What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does.”

Cayce remembers her father, Win Pollard, a security consultant, warning against “apophenia,” the “perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.” Gibson has frequently zeroed in on what he regards as instances of this human weakness, and he does so again in Spook Countryas when, for example, a character says that the effectiveness of terrorism depends on the same human flaw that permits people to imagine that they will win the lottery. In both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, this vigilance against “an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition,” is balanced by an awareness of an opposite error: a stubborn refusal to acknowledge patterns, connections, meaningsperhaps because they violate preconceptions.

In both novels, the odd word “steganography” turns up at a crucial juncture. Steganography is a way of transmitting a message by hiding it in a larger message. Such a “carrier” message does not appear to be hiding anything. It could beas in Spook Countrya digital music file, in which the secret message has been very thinly spread (and perhaps encrypted to boot). Reading a novel in some ways resembles reading a “stego file” with an alert eye for the hidden message (and a healthy respect for the power of apophenia to seduce the mind).

In Pattern Recognition, Win Pollardwho was in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001is missing and presumed dead, though on several occasions he seems to be speaking to Cayce. She recalls putting posters of him up after the attacks, hoping someone will recognize him: “Win, deeply and perhaps professionally camera-shy, had left remarkably few full-face images, and the best she’d been able to do had been one that her friends had sometimes mistaken for the younger William S. Burroughs.” In Spook Country, meeting the nameless “old man,” Hollis thinks “he looked a little like William Burroughs, minus the bohemian substrate (or perhaps the methadone).” Are Win Pollard and the old man one and the same, or is this merely a coincidence? Gibson makes us think about the way in which we seek patterns, recognize them, evaluate them, find meaning in them.

Gibson is also a superb observer of the everyday. Hollis may be speaking for him when she thinks about the appeal of writing: “She had always, she’d reluctantly come to know, wanted to write . She was fascinated by how things worked in the world, and why people did them.” Gibson seems to share that fascination, and he looks at all manner of things with the gaze of a visitor to a distant world. Hollywood, New York, Washington, D.C., Vancouver: All are at once familiar and passing strange, via the virtual reality of ink on a page.