"Okay, yeah, but think about it this way," he says, warming to the topic of discussion as though Ned's challenging him to find a rebuttal somehow. He likes that Ned goes along with the bizarre twists and turns of his mind instead of treating him like he's somehow odd and shutting down the conversation entirely.

"That guy," he continues, nodding at the guy who's trying to hail a cab, "is too average. Maybe the suspicious guy knows that someone like you is going to think he's too suspicious to be a spy, and dismiss him entirely. The suspicious-looking guy is hiding by being suspicious. He knows that he's too obvious to ever be considered a real possibility. You can hide in plain sight easily enough just by being over the top and obvious. Anyone who walks down the street yelling about how they're a spy probably isn't, but it'd be a great way to disguise it if you really were."

Not that he has any experience in the matter of being over the top and obvious about being very strange.