Headscratchers / Bigend Books

• In Pattern Recognition, Voytek is a boyish young artist in shorts, implied to be in his early twenties. In Zero History, only seven years later, he's a middle-aged man and the owner of a shop called "Biroshak & Son."
  • The Voytek in Zero History isn't actually described as middle-aged, only as balding, and Milgrim estimates that the two of them are close in age. In Spook Country, Milgrim mentions having been employed during Clinton's first term, so he was presumably at least a college graduate by 1996, and therefore at least in his mid-thirties by 2009 (though probably not much older, since Hollis also guesses him to be thirty-something when she meets him). It's not too difficult to imagine that Voytek might be twenty-four or twenty-five in 2002, make a career change with Bigend's help, and lose some hair before hitting age thirty-three.
  • Alternately, is there any chance at all that the cranky man we meet in Zero History is Voytek's father? In Pattern Recognition Voytek says that his father was a civil engineer in Moscow. This could mean that his father has died, but it could also mean that his father is alive but is no longer a civil engineer, or is no longer in Moscow, or both.
• Similarly, Pamela Mainwaring is in her late twenties in Pattern Recognition, but at the end of Zero History has a grown daughter — biologically possible, but implausible for a high-powered workaholic, as she's implied to be.
• In Pattern Recognition, Pamela Mainwaring is implied to be an informant for a Russian oligarch, and fired, but at the end of Zero History is implied to be Bigend's girlfriend, and is clearly in his good graces.
  • In Pattern Recognition, Cayce is told that Pamela Mainwaring is no longer with Blue Ant. We have no confirmation that that's actually true.
  • Also, the two aren't mutually exclusive. Bigend could have terminated her employment on professional grounds but still maintained a personal relationship with her.
• If Milgrim was so far outside mainstream life that he generated no paper trail for ten years, how did Brown find him?
  • Lack of paper trail doesn't make someone impossible to find, especially if you're accustomed to working with law enforcement and in some places outside the law. If you know there's a gifted Russian translator floating around the community of benzo addicts in New York City, and you've already got some contacts among those people, it can't take that long to find someone who knows that weirdo who speaks Russian.