He tucked the computers under one arm, grabbed the pillowcase, and carefully descended to the living room.
“There's still some stereo stuff upstairs,” he said, putting the laptops and the pillowcase by Simon.
“Okay, don't worry about that stuff.” Simon had pulled the computer desk from the corner of the living room away from the wall, a web of cables and cords pulled tight behind it. He paused typing on the computer and pointed to the laptops. “Where did those come from?”
“Under the bed.”
He nodded and resumed typing.
“What next?” Willard asked.
“Nothing,” Simon said. “Watch and wait.”
Willard did this for about ten seconds. “What are you doing?”
“Playing fast and loose a little bit,” Simon said. “The precise, scientific way of learning what happened on this computer recently would be to power it off, take out the hard disk, and use signals to dissect it.” Willard nodded, already regretting his question. “That's like studying a slice of a human brain. I think Russia has a slice of Lenin's brain or something.”
“Oh.”
“We don't have time for that. Flannigan is going crazy to get this all figured out. And the easiest way to convince her that Nemo's chats were coming from this computer will be to show her something on this computer screen. I'm trying to pull up a chat window showing that this Nemo kid was logged in on this computer.”
“But there's no kid.”
“Right, kid, adult or whatever he is. I didn't think Nemo was a kid anyway.”
Nemo, Willard repeated to himself. They were wondering if this guy Kenny was Nemo. They must be looking for some sort of criminal. A kid. Chat screens. A cyber-criminal. A specialist in a world that was of absolutely no interest to Willard.
He left Simon and walked out to the front porch. He'd get some cold fresh air and plan his next move.
FLANNIGAN AND KENNY
14 hrs 50 min to Birth
Flannigan sat across from Kenny at his kitchen table, but she was looking through him. She was thinking, If this punk isn't Nemo, then we are running low on time. The market will open soon. And what was it he said about today? Today was the today he was bringing fire to the earth.
She looked at her watch. What did “today” mean? That could be twelve hours, or one hour.
“My name is Sarah Flannigan.”
Flannigan was a rare outside hire in the Agency: she had spent most of her career in the other “Agency,” the CIA. She had joined the CIA after the events of 9/11, leaving her private practice to contribute to the fight against terrorism.
Upon joining the CIA, she made use of her background in psychology to become an expert in indoctrination and normalization techniques, also referred to as “brainwashing.” She became an expert in how terrorists recruited and converted new members. She also trained CIA field operatives in psychological manipulation. After all, the primary business of operatives was befriending potential sources of information abroad and converting them into American sympathetics and ultimately traitors to their own nations.
Lastly, Flannigan also learned and developed the indoctrination techniques used within the Agency itself in the recruitment and training of its workforce. The Agency required a lot from its workforce, including extreme secrecy, comfort with situational and moral ambiguity, and acceptance of the intense cognitive dissonance caused by assuming multiple personalities in daily life. To recruit and mold employees, the Agency used its own indoctrination techniques, appealing to their morality and their egos, putting them through commitment exercises and providing unique character-shaping experiences.
Flannigan left the CIA a few years ago, when the NSA gave her the opportunity to establish a small but influential Social Engineering division in support of its core cryptographic work. A lot of hacking was not about technology, but about people. If you could fool one person in an organization, trick him into helping you, you might be able to sidestep the technology in place to protect that organization. The process of fooling people, preventing it, and hunting down those who engaged in the deception was Flannigan's responsibility in Social Engineering.
She took out her badge and showed it to Kenny. It seemed possible that one of the top buttons of her blouse had become unfastened while she was making the coffee. But she was not coming on too strong. She started interrogations with a neutral cold sexiness, so she could manipulate her subject with either the offer of intimacy or the threat of severity, depending on how the conversation unfolded.
“Are you familiar with the NSA?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you have any idea why I am here to speak with you today?”
“No.”
And so it went. No idea at all? Not even a guess? No. And he seemed to mean it. She liked to make it as easy as possible for people to come clean. And she was barely present, having mostly decided that Kenny, whoever he was, was not Nemo. What do you do for a living? Unemployed. What was the last job that you had? Graduate school. Computer science. MIT. More circumstantial evidence. What did you study? Your specialty? Rule-based systems, whatever that was. Would you consider yourself a hacker, Kenny? No. Shocking. Do you ever associate with hackers, offline or online? Hem and haw. Not really. He associated with other computer programmers; if any of them were hackers, he didn't know about it. Do you invest in the stock market? Surprise: no. He doesn't have money. He lives on an inheritance from his grandfather. No criminal record, never convicted of a crime, never arrested. He looked sloppy. He was evidently lazy. And he seemed sullen. All common traits of hackers — but not Nemo. Nemo was defiant, egomaniacal, psychotic. (Exactly. Kenny shows no signs of psychosis. Nothing but depression.)
“Have you ever written a computer program that would be classified as a virus?”
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?” she asked, laying her hand across the table. “I understand that you have probably written a lot of programs over the years. And we understand that ordinary people do not always have perfect backgrounds.”
He thought over the programs he'd written, reassured a little. “I don't think I have,” he said. “I'm not that interested in viruses.”
“Have you ever written any program pertaining to the stock market or investing?”
He sniffled. “Yes.”
“When did you first create that program?”
“I don't know. Half a year ago?”
“Could you please explain how that program worked.”
“It didn't do much.” He waved his hand. “I was experimenting with rule systems. The program would pick stocks based on different rules, like the price of the stock and whether it had gone up or down recently. Then it would check the performance of the portfolio. I wanted to see if it could discover a good rule for picking stocks.”
“In writing or using this program, did you ever consult with anyone — either in person, on the phone, by email, chat, or in any way — about stocks in general, or specific stocks?”
“No,” he said.
“You're positive about that.”
“I'm positive,” he said, eyes wide. “I don't even know anything about the stock market. The program wasn't even any good. It was worse than the market on average.” He laughed.
“If you don't know anything about the stock market, why did you write the program?”
“Like I said, I'm interested in rules,” he said, cupping a wiry hand thoughtfully. “What I was studying in school was how to give computers rules on how to do things. We try doing it for all kinds of different systems —”
“Who's we?”
“Programmers, people who study rules,” he said. He struggled to explain himself. “We use rules for all kinds of things. I thought I'd try it for the stock market. I just try different stuff. You don't really know if it's going to work until you try it. Plus, if it worked, I'd make some money.” He laughed. Lazy, Flannigan thought.
Simon hollered from the other room: “H
ello! Help!” Time to wrap it up for now. If Kenny was telling the truth, there were an awful lot of questions left unanswered. He's not Nemo...but he might be hiding something, she concluded. But that was a hunch; she wanted to be certain.
“Hello!” Simon hollered again.
“Would you be willing to show this program to one of our people?” Flannigan asked. Simon could take it apart and see what it really did, if he hadn't already found it.
“Sure.”
Sam popped into the kitchen. “We've got something,” she blurted.
Flannigan stood up and walked to the living room.
SAM AND PREETI
14 hrs 50 min to Birth
While Flannigan sat down with Kenny, Sam guided Kenny's girlfriend by the arm back upstairs, with the pretense of getting her dressed in something other than her boyfriend's underwear. The girl was breathing but still appeared to be in shock. Her face was listless and absent.
Upstairs, Sam offered to let her freshen up and change into some real clothes. The girl puttered around, as if not knowing where to start. Finally she headed into the bathroom and splashed some water on her face. She came out and gathered some clothes of hers from a tote bag in the corner. She didn't go into the dresser. Sam supposed that she didn't live there.
She went back into the bathroom to change. Sam formed her strategy. There was virtually no chance that this girl was Nemo or had any knowledge of who Nemo was or what he did. Sam would confirm those facts easily enough. The next step was to explore the nature of the girl's relationship with Kenny. The girl might be able to serve as a pawn in influencing Kenny.
The girl came out of the bathroom, not looking too much different from when she went in. Her brown hair was still tangled, and she still wasn't wearing any makeup. She was still wearing the Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt, though she she had replaced the boxer shorts with black yoga pants. She's pretty, but she's a disaster, Sam thought.
“Come sit down,” Sam said. “Are you okay?”
The girl nodded, sitting on the bed.
“You can call me Sam,” she said. She sat on the corner of the bed, not too close. “Sam is my code name at work. What's your name?”
“Preeti. It's a Sanskrit name,” she explained, and answered the next question that everyone asked: “I'm a yoga teacher.”
“Cool,” Sam said. “What kind of yoga do you teach?”
They talked for a minute about trends in yoga. Preeti taught a traditional form of Hatha Yoga. “I've heard that some of the trendier forms of yoga aren't as good for you,” Sam offered.
That was true, Preeti explained, perking up. As it happened, some of the newer forms of yoga could be dangerous. Preeti related that she had heard many stories of people who had practiced “hot yoga” and overextended themselves due to the limberness created by a heated room.
“As part of my military training we learn mostly martial arts and physical conditioning,” Sam recounted. “But I probably know more about yoga than I do about computers. It's funny, the Agency I work for is mostly about computer security, but I know hardly anything about it.”
“What do you do?”
Sam explained that she provided operational support to the Agency, meaning she knew how to do a lot of military-style activities and she worked on special operations when they happened. “But what I like most about the job is that I work for Flannigan. That's the woman downstairs. She's one of the highest-ranking women at the Agency.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. She is a strong woman.” Sam let that sink in. “So it turns out that I work at a computer agency but I'm not a computer person.” It was easy for her to guess that not being a computer person was a good thing in Preeti's book. “But Kenny is, isn't he?”
Preeti nodded. “My boyfriend is a big geek,” she said, with a rueful smile. She explained that Kenny was obsessed with technology. Like many explanations offered by people about their loved ones, it was delivered with a mixture of affection and mostly concealed disdain.
“How long have you been dating?”
“Two years,” Preeti answered. Sam nodded. Two years and not living together. Two years and “very different,” she said. Flannigan would figure out what to do with that.
She heard a shout. It was Simon, clamoring for some attention downstairs. Hello! Help!
“Excuse me,” Sam said, “I have to see what he wants.”
YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED
14 hrs 50 min to Birth
When Willard first went upstairs to collect electronic gadgetry, Simon pulled the computer desk out from the corner. He tried to get onto what appeared to be the main computer and found that it was password-protected.
Please enter your username: _____________
“No problem at all,” he said lightly, to the empty room.
A leather briefcase was at his side, on the floor. He opened it. In one of the pouches was a neat array of memory sticks. Each of them was loaded with a self-executing computer program. The programs were hacks that exploited security weaknesses in computer software. Simon wrote many of the programs himself, although he got help from his colleagues and could also construct the programs, to some degree, based on publicly known vulnerabilities in the computer software. This computer ran a version of Unix, so he withdrew the memory stick labeled for that operating system.
He inserted the memory stick into Kenny's computer. After a moment, the login screen vanished and Simon found himself inside Kenny's profile on the computer.
He accessed the Internet and navigated to Gmail. He was hoping to find himself logged in to Kenny's account. Inside there, he hoped, there might be some evidence that Kenny and Nemo were the same person — chat records of Nemo and Jared from yesterday, maybe, or of Nemo and Flannigan from this morning.
“Slow,” he said. The page was taking forever to load. “So slow,” he moaned, his head rolling in frustration.
Finally, after what seemed like a full minute, the site at gmail.com loaded. It was logged into a Gmail account — but it wasn't Nemo. It was the wrong chat name.
“Of course. It can't be that easy.”
Maybe Kenny had signed in as Nemo before, under a different account. Simon opened the history of web pages surfed on the computer. He searched the history for “Nemo.” No results, despite the fact that the memory hadn't been cleared. Kenny had not accessed any Gmail account by the name of Nemo. At least, not on that computer. At least, not in any normal way.
But there were always other ways. Simon started to check other programs for evidence that Kenny had logged in under a Nemo profile. Maybe he had done it through some program other than a web page. But even when he sniffed around, he found no trace of activity by a profile with the name of Nemo.
This was more of a puzzle than Simon had expected. He took a moment to reflect. There was no evidence of any instance of a Google account by the name of Nemo on this computer.
It left a couple possibilities. For one thing, Simon figured, Kenny could have a program on this computer that hacked into Google Chat. He'd look around more on this computer. He started executing some searches of a more technical nature, looking for programs or commands with “Nemo” in the name.
He heard a noise on the computer. The Internet window with Kenny's email started flashing. He toggled over to the window. He saw the following message on Kenny's Google chat:
You have a Google Chat request from Nemo.
“What?” he muttered. Did I do that? But he couldn't have done it. He was searching on the computer, not running any of Kenny's custom programs.
Nemo: Kenny, I think someone is trying to hack your computer. If you are Kenny and not some someone else, that is...
“WHOA!” Simon hollered. He was not going to field this one on his own. “Hello!” He typed a response under Kenny's identity.
[Kenny]: 1 sec, brb
“HELLO!” he shouted. “HELP!”
Sam finally appeared. “What is it?”
“I've got Nemo on th
e computer. Nemo is chatting with me on this computer.”
Sam darted off.
Nemo: Are you there, Kenny?
[Kenny]: yeah, I have a question for you, hold on
[Kenny]: just one sec
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