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: "Hello! 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.