mezzanine, like the dress circle of an opera house. Along a corridor snaking off behind the stairs was a blue sign that read TV studio; evidently it was reserved for broadcast journalists to conduct interviews with some of the luminaries in attendance. A sign at another alcove advertised bilateral rooms, presumably reserved for small private discussions. The main flow of traffic on the mezzanine was to the left, toward another gathering spot: an area with wicker chairs and a bar on which were arrayed various small bottles and cans, mainly sodas and fruit juices and beverages that were in-between. A couple of high-mounted television monitors displayed scheduling updates and what looked to be video excerpts from some of the high-profile "briefings." As he got closer, he saw that the beverages came from around the world: Fruksoda, a lemon-lime drink from Sweden; Appletize, a fizzy apple juice from South Africa; Mazaa, a mango-flavored beverage from India; even Titan, a gooseberry-flavored soda from Mexico. It was a model UN of soft drinks, Ambler thought mordantly.
Even more popular was the adjoining computer bay: radial clusters of chairs and intranet-linked computers, decoratively partitioned by thin rectangular tanks of clear liquid through which a slow and steady stream of bubbles rose. Dozens of fingers clicking at dozens of keyboards; visages of boredom, satisfaction, uncertainty, aggression. But nothing to detain him. He peered down from the balcony and saw the much larger space below, a terrarium of power. On a vast brick wall opposite him were enormous African and Polynesian sculptures, which consorted oddly with the array of World Economic Forum flags along the balcony's five-foot inside rim.
Ambler descended the flight of stairs to the babbling crowd beneath him, checked his watch, and pushed through the throngs. A mid-afternoon crowd of people, between sessions, grabbing canapes that were whisked through on silver trays, or crystal glasses of conference-approved beverages. The air was fragrant with expensive colognes, aftershave, and hair pomades, not to mention the trays of Bundnerfleisch on pumpernickel triangles, a regional specialty. Ambler slowed and began to take in his human surroundings.
A youngish, thickset man in an unfashionable but well-tailored suit-its quality evidenced by the fact that his avoirdupois was well concealed at first glance-was surrounded by members of a slightly frumpy entourage; the man's gaze swiveled around him, taking in everyone but those closest to him. Occasionally he murmured something Slavic-sounding to a waist-less black-haired woman nearby. He was probably a new head of state from one of the Baltic republics, on the lookout for foreign investment. The man's gaze paused at one point, and Ambler followed the sight line: a young, curvy blonde across the room, clearly the trophy wife of the small, withered plutocrat beside her. Ambler nodded at the Slav, and the man nodded back, half warmly, half warily: it was a look that said,
Are you somebody?
The look of someone who did not trust himself to know. Ambler sensed, too, that the man's entourage was simultaneously a source of comfort and humiliation to him. He was used to being the most important man in the room. Here, at Davos, he was strictly minor-league-and there was some discomfiture to have his entourage witness the evident fact. A couple of yards away from him, an older, rangy American billionaire-someone whose "enterprise software" was an industry standard across the globe-was surrounded by people seeking a word with him, attempting, like whistling, chirping modems, to establish a connection. He was like a massive planet drawing in satellites. By contrast, few seemed interested in catching the Baltic politician's eye. At Davos, the heads of small states were further down the pecking order than the heads of large multinationals. Globalization, like business-process reengineering, did not "flatten hierarchies," as its boosters proclaimed; it merely established new ones.
As Ambler continued his way, he noticed the pattern continuing: Some figures swelled, inflated by the attention they gathered; some shrank, deflated by the scarcity of it. Yet others seemed jubilant merely to breathe the same air as the giants among them. Tray after tray of canapes disappeared into yearning gullets, though Ambler doubted whether anyone really tasted them. Attention was elsewhere. The "social entrepreneurs"-as the savvier heads of charities and NGOs now styled themselves, effectively conceding that only the vocabulary of business had any traction in the new era-chatted energetically with one another and even more energetically with bona fide entrepreneurs, the sort whose checkbooks could underwrite their programs.
A handsome young Indian man was speaking animatedly to a Western businessman with