"Yeah," Miles agrees. "I mean, I could imagine myself playing pranks on somebody who was following me—God, could I—but nothing that... I don't know, psychological? Maybe that's not the right word. Maybe there isn't a right word. Dried beans."

"Why, what would you do instead?"

"I'm not sure. Little opportunistic things, it'd depend what I had to work with. I also don't think I'd be crazy enough to try breaking into his hotel room, unless—this guy was decently competent, wasn't he?"

"More than. And yet, he could find no trace of how Mark got in or out. Not so much as a single dropped bean."

"Maybe you should be offering Mark a job."

"Ha."

"Has it been readily doable to keep Mark on radar, or does he keep losing them?"

"He loses them fairly regularly, but they pick him up again."

"And then there are little presents."

"Yes. I restrained myself from suggesting that he make bean stew."

Miles snickers.

Linya chuckles. "I did recommend that you not have him followed, but at least he's expressing his displeasure gently."

"You did make that suggestion."

"But you were too paranoid to seriously consider it."

"Just so."

"I am a little worried that the beans are not necessarily the extent of his modus operandi. If he escalates in the hope that it will get him left alone... or possibly in the hope that it will get him killed..."

"The beans seem calibrated to imply an... eccentric kind of harmlessness. He at least would not like me to think the scenario you describe is likely."

"I think... hmm, how do I put this," says Miles. "He seemed to exhibit a certain very specialized kind of honesty, during that escapade on Earth. I mean, yes, he tried to impersonate me - pulled it off unsettlingly well, too - but he apologized before he shot Linya, he practically begged me to psychoanalyze him while he had me tied to a chair, when we met up with Linya under the seawall he pointed at me and said 'that one's your husband', and when he picked my pocket for the money I was going to give him he gave me back my grandfather's knife. I'd interpret the beans incident in the same vein. He's telling us 'no hard feelings, but kindly fuck off'. I don't think he'll escalate quickly after a message like that."

"Yet he does seem inclined to communicate that if things did escalate, he has the sort of people following him thoroughly outclassed."

"True. I don't know, though."

"What do you think, Cordelia?"

"I think Mark sounds like a deeply confused individual," she says. "But one who possesses... call it a sense of fairness. If he outclasses these agents so badly, all the more reason he won't try to harm them."

"Which would be an argument against sending a variety of agent he's less likely to shake."

"What a conundrum," Simon says dryly.

"I suppose ceasing to follow him is totally out of the question."