Howdo you knowif it’s love or pain?
I still had Jay’s “Housewife” playing in my head, but this time, the closing verse: “We haven’t met yet.” It reminded me that, even in song, the housewife fantasy isn’t always meant to be.
Had I not met my soul mate yet, either? Would things never be right for Tony and me?
Fuck it,I thought.Regrets are for losers.I’d figure out Tony’s Big Lie later.
Now, I had a job to do. I had someone else to be. It was show time.
29
New York State of Mind Not only was John Locke’s campaign headquarters in New York, but it was in Times Square, the dark heart of the city’s carnal excesses. Despite various attempts to clean it up, Times Square still felt seedy and wild. I lived off Eighth Avenue, and on my thirtyblock walk uptown to Locke’s office, I passed about twenty-five adult boutiques, X-rated video stores, and peep shows.
I guess the efforts to neuter Times Square were as successful as every other attempt to suppress human sexuality, which is to say, a total bust.
My nice-boy Oxfords weren’t the greatest walking shoes, but I hoped the long hike would take my mind off Tony.
To further distract myself, I played The Pedestrian Game, in which I pick a person walking twenty feet ahead of me and hurry to catch up. Once I pull alongside him, I pick another target and chase her, and so on, constantly challenging myself to reach the next goal.
Because the streets of New York are always so crowded, it’s not just a matter of walking fast—you have to weave in and out of the foot traffic, dodging, sidestepping, and slipping between wherever possible. Speed isn’t enough; you have to be crafty.
It takes a lot of concentration to play The Pedestrian Game. It’s a good workout, too. By the time I reached the storefront that served as Locke Central, I was a little sweaty, had put Tony out of my mind, and was looking forward to not being Kevin Connor for a while.
The former retail space occupied by Locke for President wasn’t fancy, but it was festive. Everywhere you looked hung red, white, and blue posters with the phrase, “For our country, for our families, for our future—Locke now!”
Desks with phones and computers were somewhat haphazardly placed wherever an electrical outlet or phone jack allowed. A large map on one wall was dotted with pushpins. Another wall had an oversized calendar with events penciled in. Omnipresent were photos of Locke himself, sometimes kindly, sometimes stern, always looking at you with the direct gaze of a particularly earnest salesman.
I wouldn’t describe the place as busy. More than half the desks were empty. While every other campaign office I ever visited was filled with ringing phones and young people, Locke’s space was quiet and staffed mostly by senior citizens. I noticed a few people dressed in clerical garb collating papers and stuffing envelopes. At the far end of the room, outside a closed office door, a guy who looked to be in his forties, young for the room, typed furiously. The whole scene was a little depressing.
“Can I help you?” asked a woman at the bridge table that had been set up by the door. She put down the book she’d been reading and smiled at me. Fifty-something, I guessed, with a round face and pale smooth skin that spoke of a lifetime of avoiding cigarettes, alcohol, and the sun. She wore a dark blue cashmere turtleneck with a string of simple pearls. I noticed the book she put aside wasThe Holy Spirit: Activating God’s Power in Your Life,by Billy Graham. She wore a nametag: Lucille.
“Hi,” I answered, giving her my best Sunday school smile. “I’m here to volunteer on the campaign.”
“Well, bless your heart,” she answered, her voice musical. “We can certainly use more young folk around here. Come along.” I thought I detected a bit of a Southern accent in her lilt and I wondered if she came to New York just to work on the campaign.
She led me to a long folding table against the wall facing her desk. She selected some papers from a hanging rack, like the kind that hold magazines at a dental office, and handed them to me. “Now, why don’t you fill these out and bring them back to me. Someone from the campaign will go over them, see where you’d do the most good, and get back to you in a couple of days.”
“OK,” I said. “Although I really am anxious to start.”
“Well, you know what they say. ‘Those who are patient inherit what has been promised,’ ” she trilled.
Actually, I didn’t know anyone who ever said anything remotely like that.
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered equally cheerily. “Good things come to those who wait!”
Lucille beamed.
“Oh!” she said sharply, a sudden frown crossing her face. Had I already done something to blow my cover? “I didn’t give you a pen! Let me fetch you one.”
I reached into my jacket and pulled out an expensive Montblanc that had been given to me by my late friend Allen Harrington. “I brought my own.”
“Handsomeandclever,” Lucille chirped. “I bet the girls are all over you.”
Not exactly. What would the proper Christian response be? “I’m saving myself for marriage”? Probably too much. I decided to just smile.
Lucille smiled back.
Now, we were both smiling at each other. I waited for her to say something, or leave, but she just kept smiling. Is this what nice people did? I guessed she reallywasn’tfrom New York.
“OK,” I said, trying to sound even more chipper than before, “I better get to work!” I waved my pen to remind her what I was supposed to be doing.
“You just give me a shout if you need anything, honey.”
I waited till Lucille’s happy ass was seated back at her desk and surreptitiously slipped my iPhone from my pocket. I crooked my arm to hide it from view.
I opened up the e-mail Marc sent me earlier today and copied the information from it onto the volunteer application. As I wrote, I looked around. Not too much, though—the pace of the geezers who were working there was pretty glacial, and I didn’t want to startle them with any quick movements. I saw Lucille talking to the guy I noticed earlier in the back, then watched as she drifted back to her desk.
“All finished,” I announced, as I handed her my forms. “I hope I hear from you soon.”
Lucille (shocker alert!) smiled even more broadly than she had earlier. “You’re a lucky boy today”—she looked at my sheet—“Kevin Johnson!”
Marc had suggested I not use my real last name.
“I am?”
“Why, yes, you are! Remember how I told you it takes a few days for us to get back to you? Usually, newcomers have to wait until our volunteer coordinators review their applications. But today, Mr. Jason Carter, our very own chief of staff, the man closest to the man himself, has offered to meet with you.” Her awed voice and wide-open eyes let me know his was an honor far beyond anything I could have imagined.
“Wow,” I said. “Lucky me.” I wasn’t particularly looking forward to meeting whatever creep would serve as Locke’s right-hand man.
“Come on then.” She grabbed my hand. “You don’t keep a man like Jason Carter waiting!”
Maybe you don’t keep Jason Carter waiting, but the reverse isn’t true. At least it wasn’t that day, as Lucille and I stood by his desk for five minutes while he talked on the phone and ignored us. His head was down as he listened and spoke intently into the handset.
“No, no . . . we’ll have to see. Right. Uh-huh. We can do it on the ninth, but only if Locke gets to speak before the senator. Right,before.Uh-huh, uh-huh, I know, I know, but he has to go first. Why? Because I want the audienceawakefor him, Roger. You know as well as I that Senator Franklin puts a crowd to sleep faster than a stallion takes to a mare. Uh-huh, yeah, well, I’ve seen the senator’s polling and I think we do him more good than he does us at this stage, so that’s the way it has to be. I surely would appreciate if you could make that happen. You can? That’s great. We’ll see you on the ninth then, Roger. Good job.”
As Jason talked, I studied his work area. Messy, but in a way that looked product
ive, as if he didn’t have time to be fastidious. On the credenza behind him, a photo of his wife and two children, a family so perfect they looked like the picture you get when you buy the frame.
Jason hung up the phone and shook his head, chuckling to himself. Lucille cleared her throat. “Mr. Carter?”
Jason looked up. My first impression was surprise —he looked even younger than from across the room. I’d put him at around thirty-five. He had bright red hair in a military buzz and a redhead’s fair complexion. Blue eyes and freckles made him look even younger. He had a medium build, neither heavy nor particularly slim. It certainly wasn’t a gym body, but he looked healthy and in good proportion.
His poly-cotton white shirt was wrinkled, with a coffee stain on the left sleeve. A red tie was loosely knotted around his neck. I couldn’t see his slacks behind the desk, but I’d bet even money they were Dockers. I noticed the wedding ring on his left hand.
Jason wasn’t traditionally handsome, but he had an appeal, and when he saw us and smiled to reveal white even teeth and an unexpected dimple, he went up a grade or two. His slight Southern accent was also pretty charming.
“Miss Lucille,” he chided, “I’ve done told you, ‘Mr. Carter’ is my Pa. You can call me Jason.” “Now, you’re in charge around these here parts, Mr. Carter, and you don’t go around calling the boss by his first name. It ain’t proper.”
For a quick second, I had the surreal feeling that I was watching Aunt Bee lecture Opie onThe Andy Griffith Show.
“Fine, fine,” Jason relented. “Thank you very much, Miss Lucille. I’ll take it from here.”
Lucille squeezed my arm. “Good luck, honey.” She handed Jason my volunteer forms and floated away.
Jason gestured to a chair facing his desk. “All right, chief, take a load off. Kevin, right?”
“That’s right,” I said, extending my hand. “Kevin Johnson. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Carter.”
“Tell you what,” he said, leaning forward and resting his hand on his chin. “I’ll make ya a deal. You call me ‘Jason’ and you’re hired.”
“OK, Jason,” I answered.
Jason grinned and let out a sigh of release. “My Lord, I do miss hearing my first name around here. I’ll be frank with you, Kevin, the average age of the person who walks through those doors”—he pointed to the front of the room—“is somewhere between fifty and death. When Miss Lucille told me you were here to help out, I figured I better grab ya before you leave, thinking you wandered into one of them senior citizen homes by mistake.”
I grinned, too. I kind of expected to hate everyone here, but Jason didn’t seem too bad. “Well,” I said, “I left my walker and colostomy bag at home today.”
Jason threw back his head and roared with laughter. You could see he didn’t get much chance to cut loose much around here. A few heads turned toward us, their attention drawn by the unusual outburst.
Jason leaned back toward me. “That was a good one, chief. I needed that.” He darted his eyes around the room. “Some of the folks around here,” he whispered, “seem to think they’re in church. That’s why it’s so darned quiet around here all the time. My Lord, I’ve been to funerals more lively than this place.”
It was my turn to laugh.
Jason looked down at my volunteer form. “Now, let’s see, Kevin Johnson. I know you can make me laugh. But who are you, really?”
30
Don’t Believe Everything You Read Watching Jason read over my application was a little like listening to his phone call. “Uh-huh,” he mused to himself. “OK. Well, well. Look at that. You don’t say . . . huh.”
None of the comments were directed toward me, but they were about me. Well, not aboutme,exactly. Kevin Johnson may have had my face and my first name, but after that, the similarities ended. Kevin Johnson was the brainchild of my friend and former client, Marc Wilgus, who created him out of imagination, technology, and a strong desire to discover the truth about Jacob Locke.
“You know I’m a hacker,” Marc had explained to me earlier that day at the coffee shop, “so you probably think what I do has a lot to do with computers, right?”
I nodded. “And it does. But you know what the most vulnerable part of any system is, Kevin?”
“The Internet connection?” I guessed.
“The people. A big part of my job isn’t finding the holes in the software, it’s finding the vulnerabilities and desires of the people who operate it.”
Huh,I thought.Kind of like my job.
“Have you ever heard of ‘social engineering’?” Marc asked.
“Nope.”
“Social engineering is the act, well, the art really, of manipulating people into doing things that divulge personal or sensitive information about themselves or the companies they work for. It’s a kind of con game, a way of establishing confidence with your target and exploiting his weaknesses for personal gain.
“Computer programs have bugs, right? So do people. In the biz, we call them ‘cognitive biases.’ People are programmed to respond to certain things in certain ways.
“Let me give you an example. Let’s say you take a group of people and put them in an art gallery. You show them a canvas of some red splotches of paint and ask them to rate it. Most would say it’s terrible, that it looks like something a child would do.
“But what if, just before you ask them for their opinions, you arrange for them to ‘accidently’ overhear an art critic describe it as a work of great value. Now, the same people who dismissed the painting as a piece of junk rate it much higher. That’s called the ‘authority bias.’ People unconsciously allow their own common sense and perception of the world to be altered by a perceived authority on a topic.
“Here’s another example of cognitive bias. Let’s say I flip a coin five times and it comes up heads. What are the odds that the next flip will turn up tails?”
“Math isn’t really my strong suit. Do you have any questions about fellatio?”
Marc gave me a stern look.
“OK,” I said, “well, since the last five times were heads, let’s say six to one you’ll get tails.”
“Nope.” Marc smirked. “It’s still fifty-fifty. You’re assuming that future probabilities are altered by past events, but they’re not. The coin doesn’t know it’s ‘due’ to be tails. You just exhibited what we call ‘the gambler’s fallacy.’ ”
“Told you I wasn’t good at math.” I pouted.
“OK, so we know that people have flaws, right? Well, social engineering exploits those flaws. For example, let’s say I want to get into the computer systems at a local bank, OK?”
I nodded.
“So, I get a phone directory and start calling people randomly. Whenever I get someone on the line, I tell them that I’m calling from technical support about the ticket they sent in. Ninety-nine percent are going to say they didn’t submit anything, right? But eventually, I’ll find someone who says, ‘Oh yeah, thanks for calling back.’ The game is on.
“I ask them to tell me what the trouble is, and then tell them to connect to a Web site I’ve set up with a file that will fix their machine. Of course, the file they download and install isn’t a fix at all—it’s really a keystroke capturer that records everything they do on their computers and sends it to me. Or, it’s a virus or malware or some other destructive program. In any case, it’s the person who was to blame, not the software. Make sense?”
“Perfect.”
“So, we’re going to social engineer the Locke campaign. We know what they want, right? A bright young guy with solid conservative experience and credentials. That’s going to be you.”
“How?”
“I do this kind of thing all the time, Kevin. Just give me some information, send me a picture or two of yourself, and I’ll e-mail you your new identity in a few hours.”
After a few more minutes reviewing my paperwork, Jason looked at me with love in his eyes. Not the kind of love I’m used to getting from a man
, mind you, which usually involves a desire to get me naked as quickly as possible, but with genuine respect, curiosity, and admiration for my intellectual achievements.
It was a nice to be looked at that way for a change. “Wow, you certainly are an impressive young man. President of the Student Republican Club at your college? An article in thePhiladelphia Beeon ‘The Tyranny of Political Correctness’?”
I tried to look humble.
“It says here you started a Facebook group called Generation Sane: Young People to Protect the Sanctity of Marriage. Do you really have over one thousand five hundred followers signed up there?”
“Check it out,” I said.
“I think I will,” Jason said, setting his fingers on the keyboard. A minute later, he was on what looked like an official Facebook page, complete with friends, comments, and events. My picture was in the corner, along with a biography that conformed to the information I’d put on my application. If he clicked on something, it would take him to a similarly realistic link that made the whole thing appear on the up-andup.
Similarly, if he Googled Kevin Johnson’s article on political correctness, it would lead to a reprint of an article Marc had found somewhere, replacing the real byline with Kevin Johnson’s.
In his note to me, Marc explained that he created fake identities for himself all the time. He had completely convincing Web sites for schools that didn’t exist (like the one where I was the leader of budding conservatives), newspapers that were never printed (thePhiladelphia Bee?), and pages on social networking sites for all kinds of people who existed only in cyberspace. He just plugged “Kevin Johnson’s” information into one of his dummy sites and, all of a sudden, I had a virtual identity that was every bit as convincing as a real one.
Social engineering. Find out what someone wants and give it to him. Play into his insecurities and biases. Be endorsed by authorities—if Kevin Johnson was good enough to be published by the Philadelphia Bee and had one thousand five hundred followers on Facebook, he must be a pretty smart kid, right?
Second You Sin - Sherman, Scott Page 21