“There she is,” Rob said.
Jared spotted her, holding a large Starbucks cup and making her way toward them. Nice work, he thought. She is hot. As he watched her approach, Jared could see why Rob had thought of her for the job: she looked like she meant business. She looks like she knows what she's doing, he figured.
She stopped in front of them.
“Hello,” Rob said, a twinkle in his eye.
“Hello, Rob.” She turned to Jared and shook his hand. “Sarah Flannigan.”
“Jared Keller.”
“Let's get moving,” Rob declared.
The redhead driver led the way outside and toward short-term parking, where their car was waiting.
“You have the address?” the redhead asked. Jared pulled an index card from his jacket pocket and handed it to her.
They crossed the road in front of the terminal. Sarah Connolly Flannigan was striking. She sported shoulder-length hair and a professional skirt suit with above-average exposure in the neck and chest area. Thin lips and piercing eyes. Jared scanned her up and down as they walked. Nice calves, he remarked to himself.
“Sarah Flannigan,” Rob said, as they walked. “Psychologist. Sarah, Jared here will tell you the story.”
Jared opened his mouth to speak, but Flannigan was already speaking. “Before we get into the finer points,” she said. “There are a few questions that will help my assessment. Jared, in your professional opinion, is there any doubt that the kid has real expertise in the stock market?”
Jared looked at Rob. He didn't know what Rob had told her already. Rob was looking at them both, frowning.
“Can you confirm the boy's expertise?” Flannigan repeated.
“Yes,” Jared said, more than a little confused. “I can't think of any way he could have faked it.”
“Good.” She smiled thinly. “How certain are you that the kid is, in fact, a child, and not an adult?”
He shrugged. “He sounded like a kid.”
“Did he use any language that showed malicious or antagonistic sentiments?”
That's a strange question. “No.”
“And did he reveal or mention expertise in any technical field, perhaps involving computers?”
“No,” he replied, surprised.
They were at the car. Actually two cars. And they were limos, not the usual Lincoln Town Cars.
“Would you have any reason to think he is a computer hacker?” Flannigan asked.
Rob interjected with a fleshy palm. “We're getting off track here. We don't have too much time. So let me direct this, ok, Sarah?” He looked at the limos. Why are there are two cars?
When he looked back at Flannigan, she was holding a badge at him.
“I'm with the National Security Agency,” she said. “That's where I practice my psychology.”
Both men turned pale.
“I'm sorry to say,” she continued, “that this issue is no longer your concern. We've identified the kid as a possible threat to national security. He may be talented with the market, but he is also quite talented with computers.”
Rob opened his mouth, but she waved it shut with a small gesture.
“You two are going on vacation,” she said, “until this situation is cleared up.”
“Do you know who I am?” Rob asked in a low voice. He was fuming with anger.
“This is bigger than you,” she replied. “This kid is more intelligent than anyone you have ever met. He is already much more dangerous, more powerful, than you are or ever will be.” They were silent. “Sorry to break it to you.”
Both men gave a hop: the doors of the first limo opened. Two enormous men in black suits emerged from the vehicle.
Floating light as a feather, Jared found himself guided off his feet, away from the fuzzy light of the dawn, into the dark vehicle. Rob ended up next to him. One of the enormous men got behind the wheel of the car, while the other sat in the back seat next to Rob.
“You can flirt with me now,” he quipped. The limo crawled away.
The spikey-haired redhead opened the driver's door of the other limo while Flannigan let herself into the back and sat down next to Simon Chan.
Simon looked much the same as he had a few hours ago: calm and alert in a black turtleneck, eyes with a permanent, skeptical squint behind his round spectacles.
“The Stone Cold Fox,” he announced dramatically. With a gesture behind him he remarked, “Maybe they should call you the Black Widow Spider instead.”
“That sounds too old,” she said. Flannigan opened her beautiful hand forward. “Simon, this is my driver. Her codename is Sam.”
“Hi, Sam. My real name is Simon.”
“Don't you get a codename?” Sam laughed.
“I have more codenames than you could possibly imagine,” he said.
Sam smiled in the rearview mirror. Men.
KENNY
Cambridge, MA
15 hrs 6 min to Birth
Things are about to get a lot better or a lot worse, Willard observed.
A limo had stopped next to his truck, in the middle of the road. It contained either his client with a payoff, or someone else entirely — maybe more Special Friends of the President.
One of the back doors opened. A pair of dazzling legs fanned out of the opening, and they were followed by a blonde woman in a suit. She looked around impatiently. Then she spotted Willard. This is it, he thought.
He popped open the truck door, and got down carefully, trying not to use his right hand. He opted to leave his gun in the truck.
By the time he was on the pavement and had shut the door, she had walked up next to him.
“Do you have some form of identification?” she snapped.
Identification. That meant he was not talking to his client or any friend of his bookie. It meant he was talking to the government people.
She was quite beautiful, he saw. She had to be almost his age. She had a severe manner, like she could chew up a human carcass for breakfast. But he was too tired and sore to be intimidated.
He reached into his back pocket for the I'm the President's Best Friend papers. He handed them to her and let her unfold them, which she did hastily.
She spent a minute looking over the document and handed it back to him.
“And you?” he asked.
“Yes, of course.” She reached inside her black trenchcoat to produce a wallet, not taking her eyes off him. She looked like a Washington type, with a trenchcoat and no purse. As she opened her coat, his eyes drew naturally to her bosom.
Her badge: Sarah Connolly Flannigan, National Security Agency. He felt an oppressive force over his shoulder as he looked, as if men in suits were going to materialize around him and blow him away.
She was studying him and his clothes with her eyebrows raised.
“I've been undercover,” he growled, looking at the house. “They pulled me off another project to come here.”
She joined him in looking at the house. “Have you made contact? Do you think he's dangerous?”
“No contact. No positive I.D.,” he answered tautly.
The driver door of the limo opened and from it emerged another woman, with spikey red hair. She looks like she kicks people's asses for a living,Willard wagered. He could respect that, but did not want to be on the ass-kicking list.
“We're missing one team member,” Flannigan noted, referring to Gene. “But let's move in. You lead the way, and Sam will take care of the perimeter.”
“Right,” he said. He reached into the truck for his Glock. It still had the silencer on. He started unscrewing the silencer, wincing in pain. The look on her face said, This guy is so deep undercover you can hardly tell he is a professional of any kind. And he agreed.
He shoved the Glock in his back pocket and they crossed the street. Flannigan waited on the curb while he went up the stairs to the front door.
He tried the front door. It was locked. The first-floor windows were shut. He thought about what he had
seen on cop shows. They kicked the door down. But this wasn't a drug bust. And he was pretty sure that if he kicked the door he would achieve nothing and look like a huge idiot.
So he rang the bell. He saw the redhead in the corner of his eye, watching the perimeter of the building.
He rang again, praying someone would answer. And, in fact, the door opened, but only to the length of a chain, which remained fastened.
Through the crack in the door, Willard saw a scrawny guy in an undershirt, with tangled hair. He was probably in his late twenties. Is that supposed to be a kid? Willard thought.
“I'm with the U.S. government,” Willard said. “We need to ask you a few questions.”
Willard held up his Friends with the President papers as if they were a badge.
The geek looked at him with wide eyes and cautiously snaked a bony hand through the crack of the door. He sniffled. “Can I see that?” the geek said, pointing at the papers.
“You have to open the door first, sir.”
“Who are you with?”
“The White House, sir.”
Willard was ready to kick the door and pop that chain open. But the kid mumbled agreement and fiddled with the chain and opened the door.
Willard stepped inside, grabbed the geek's arm, and dragged him away from the door into the house. The geek garbled some protest.
“Move it,” Willard barked.
They were in a little hallway. A living room opened on the right and straight back a small kitchen was visible.
He pushed the geek into the living room. It was so cluttered with clothes, books and junk that the floor was scarcely visible. He sat the geek in a chair.
“Is there anyone else in the house?” Willard boomed.
“My girlfriend,” the kid said.
“Do you have any kids?”
“What the hell is going on?” the geek said, his voice cracking.
“Answer the question,” he demanded. “Do you have any kids?” He pulled the Glock out of his back pocket and the geek jumped at the sight out it.
“No, I don't have any kids.”
“Where's your girlfriend?”
“Upstairs in the bedroom.”
“Listen. I'm going to go upstairs and get her and bring her down here with you. Don't move a muscle. This house is surrounded and you don't want to move.”
The geek stared at him but seemed to understand.
Willard remembered Flannigan's warning. There could be danger. He held his gun up with both hands, as he had learned from TV and movies, and went back to the kitchen.
The kitchen was empty, except for dirty dishes, newspapers, mail. There were stairs in the corner of the kitchen. It was a funny little house, an old house.
He started up the stairs quickly, ready to use the gun.
At the top was the door to the bedroom. It was ajar. This is it, he thought. There weren't any other rooms in the little townhouse.
He kicked open the door and turned in the room, lowering his gun partly.
In the corner was the girlfriend, wearing a sweatshirt and her boyfriend's boxers. She was petrified, waiting for whoever had made all the noise downstairs. He could see her shaking, staring at him, her arms rigid at her sides. Of course there was no danger. There wasn't any kid either. What was Flannigan talking about?
The girlfriend was frozen like an animal terrified by some foreign human appearance. Seeing her made him feel sad. She doesn't belong here, he thought.
He shoved the gun in his pocket and walked over to her. “He's okay,” he grumbled. “You'll be fine. Come on downstairs.”
She was quivering, maybe not breathing. Maybe a panic attack.
“Breathe,” he growled. He grabbed her arm through the sweatshirt and guided her downstairs.
Flannigan's practiced eyes could tell at a glance around Kenny's living room that there was no child living in that house. The room was littered with a broad assortment of junk: books (paperback literature and large volumes on technical subjects), clothes (T-shirts and socks mostly, with a stray pair of boxer shorts), and, above all, an overwhelming sea of technical gadgets and cables and connectors. The floor of the room was like a coral reef, in which the diversity of shapes and colors was made up of intertwined ethernet cables, USB hubs, routers, computers, telephones, and gaming equipment, all of various colors and with an occasional flashing light. But there was not a child's toy or clothes item or book in the whole mess. Nor was there any sign of parenthood, or marriage, or even adulthood, for that matter.
Is this him? Flannigan asked herself, looking at the technological junk. Is THIS Nemo? She scanned the books and equipment for signs of Nemo's genius. It was the room of an inventor; there was no doubt about that. But her professional hunch was that she saw a degree of laziness in that room. Maybe hints at depression. Qualities that she would not have expected of the intense, egomaniacal personality they had seen so far.
The circumstantial evidence was respectable. The individual who lived here clearly had a passion for technology. She picked up a fat softcover book from the pile: Perl Cookbook. It was filled with computer programming instructions. Circumstantial evidence was promising indeed.
But they could do better. They had chatted long enough with Nemo to learn a thing or two about him. Was this the kind of book he'd read, the Perl Cookbook? Sure. Maybe. But what kind of book would he definitely read? What was his favorite book, the one he read over and over again on rainy days and late nights?
The Bible. The book he quoted from.
Now that was a book Flannigan wouldn't have expected otherwise to find in this house. This guy seemed more likely to have a “Darwin rendered God extinct” T-shirt.
She knelt down in her skirt suit, rifling through the mess in search of a Bible. Finding a Bible wouldn't prove much (unless it had written notes or markers), but not finding a Bible would make it seem pretty unlikely that this was the home of Nemo.
At a glance, she made a guess: no Bible. Not here, at least. They would check it thoroughly, but she was pretty sure there would be no Bible. Was it possible that Nemo didn't own a Bible, after everything he'd said? It was definitely possible, but Flannigan thought it unlikely. She had a motto: People are not that complicated. The motto had served her well in her work. Maybe super-geniuses were a little more complicated than everyone else — but not much. If Nemo quoted the Bible all day, he probably owned a Bible. And if this guy didn't have a Bible, he was probably not Nemo.
So maybe Nemo is a kid... and he's not here. But in that case, what does this guy have to do with it?
Flannigan faced Willard. “This is Simon,” Flannigan said, gesturing to the pudgy Asian-American, who was at the edge of the room, wrinkling his nose at the mess. The two men nodded acquaintance. “He's our computer expert.” Flannigan's spikey-haired sidekick had already come inside and taken the geek and his girlfriend into the kitchen. “Help him find every computer or computing device in here.” She scanned the room. “There may be a lot of them.”
Computers? Willard thought. He didn't like computers. One of the few things sacred in Willard's life was his disavowal of computers. Staying off computers was a key element of his plan to stay off gambling. And he was afraid that any contact with computers could be the start of slipping into his old bad habits.
Flannigan was gone. Willard turned to Simon. “I'm not that good with computers,” he confessed.
“That's okay,” Simon replied. He was looking hungrily at the corner of the room, where at least two computers resided. “Go up to the bedroom. Get everything that has a battery or an on/off switch and bring it down here.”
Willard marched back up the stairs. This time he saw the bedroom as a messy minefield of technology: little devices that he disliked and which apparently posed a threat.
The alarm clock stared out at him, 8:15. Did the clock count? Everything with a battery or an on/off switch, Simon had said. Willard didn't think the clock had an on/off switch. He didn't know if it had a battery. T
his sucks, he thought. He grabbed a pillow from the bed and pulled off the pillowcase. He unplugged the clock and put it inside.
He scoured the room, grabbing watches, phones, what looked like a small computer, a camera, countless cords and chargers, some with devices on the end and some that were disembodied, some battery chargers with and without batteries in them. There was a stereo and another set of speakers; he'd come back for those. He looked under the bed and found several boxes, which he pushed out into the tangle of clothes on the floor. Most of the boxes had books, though one had two dusty laptops in it, which he set on the bed next to the bulging pillowcase. Then he went in the bathroom and found an electric toothbrush, an electric razor, and hair clippers. There was so much technology, it seemed impossible to think of everything.
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