The way the FBI agent was smiling, Gerald Marshall knew that it was a fake smile. Gerald always had to be aware of how he acted in social situations because he didn't understand them. But Gerald had a lot of practice at work and Gerald knew that this smile had no sincerity behind it, like the smiles from his CEO, Kyle Sadler. Gerald was always on the lookout of being sincere when it wasn't wanted. People didn't like that.

The FBI agent set a manilla folder down on the faux wood grain table that was one of the only pieces of furniture in the Sheraton's small conference room.

Gerald smiled. He hoped it wasn't too late to smile.

"Thank you for agreeing to meet with us, Mr. Marshall." The FBI agent stuck out his hand to Gerald. "I'm FBI agent Marcus Fritz."

Gerald took his hand and shook it. You were supposed to try and hurt the other person in a handshake by squeezing too tight and shifting knuckles out of place. Gerald didn't understand why. But there were a lot of things in social interactions that Gerald didn't understand.

Gerald pulled away and sat back in his seat. "They showed me a badge and said they wanted to speak to me, Marcus Fritz."

Marcus Fritz wrinkled the skin between his eyebrows and squinted his eyes at him. Gerald knew this meant that he had done something wrong socially. Gerald didn't know what it was.

"You can call me Marcus, if you like."

"Okay."

Marcus smiled. So Gerald smiled.

Marcus reached over and opened the manilla folder in front of him. It had trouble staying open. It must have been newly bought. "You work at Tellersoft Direct, correct?"

"Yes. I like my job." It was important to let people know that you liked your job because so many people complained about their jobs.

"Good, good. You manage all the computers at the company?"

"Yes."

The wrinkled eyebrow bridge was back. Gerald realized he had given too short an answer. People always wanted you to talk more, but Gerald never knew what to talk about since they had a very simple question that didn't need any elaboration. And what if Gerald said something he didn't want to say? No, better to wait for more questions.

"There's no reason to be nervous, Mr. Marshall."

Gerald wondered if he was nervous. There was a small tightness in his back and that was sometimes a sign that he was nervous, but it also happened whenever he shoveled the driveway in winter or if he had been working on his computer too much. He had been on his computer a lot lately. There were a lot of things to do.

"I've never talked to the FBI before," he said. Which was true. Gerald never lied.

Marcus smiled. "Of course, of course. I would be nervous too, a bunch of badges hassling you. We brought you here because we believe your CEO, Mr. Kyle Sadler, is laundering money through the company. And we think that you are the best person to help us stop him."

"You want me to help you stop him?"

"Yes. Laundering money is a terrible crime. Did you know that terrorists use money laundering to support their activities within the borders of the United States? We're just asking you to do your part in helping the country."

Gerald knew what money laundering was. It was when you moved money from one financial asset to another, like from US dollars to Bitcoin, so that people couldn't track where the money came from or where it was going or who had it. It was also helpful to move the money between multiple locations, like bank accounts or Bitcoin addresses, because then no one could find it except the person that was moving it. But he didn't want to tell Marcus all of that. So he said, "I wouldn't want anyone to get hurt," which was true.

Marcus sat back and put up his hands. "No one's going to get hurt, Gerald. If you help us out."

"What do you want me to do?"

Marcus smiled and slid a paper from the manilla folder over to Gerald. It had instructions for installing a program called Overseer on a computer. Gerald had read about Overseer, a trojan horse program that the government used to spy on targets of interest and lock down computers for evidence gathering. "You have access to every computer at the company, correct?"

"Yes."

"Well, we just want you to install a program on the computer of Kyle Sadler."

"Okay."

Marcus waited. Gerald wasn't sure what he was waiting for. He looked back down at the paper in front of him.

Marcus tilted his head. "Okay? So you'll do it?"

"I don't want the trojan to spread. What is its replication method?"

"I'm sorry?"

"I can keep the port open for communication, so you can get the data you need, but I don't want it to replicate to other computers."

"Ah!" Marcus smiled. "Don't worry about that. It won't 'replicate'." Marcus used his fingers to put quotes around the word 'replicate' even though that was the correct term for a trojan horse program installing itself on other computers.

"Yes it will," Gerald said. "I've read about Overseer and it replicates by exploiting a memory overflow exploit in an unpatched Windows computer. I just don't know what port it's communicating on to cause the memory overflow."

Marcus tapped his hands on the table. "I honestly don't know much about the program..."

Gerald unzipped his backpack and put his laptop on the table. "I could also sandbox the program into its own virtual machine, but I don't think Docker is installed on the CEO's computer." Gerald smiled, to signal to Marcus that this was a joke. It would be wildly outside the parameters of the CEO's job to have a program like Docker running on his computer. "He wouldn't know what to do with it if he did."

Gerald liked jokes that had true punchlines. Most jokes didn't. Most jokes ended with lies or words that, within context, meant one thing but were meant to mean another thing and thus be surprising or vulgar. Jokes that were true were jokes that Gerald could understand sometimes.

Marcus looked at him, his eyes a little wider than unusual. "Look, that's all Greek to me. We just want it installed as is," he said.

This was a joke that Gerald didn't like. It wasn't Greek at all and Gerald felt that it was probably meant as disrespectful to people from Greece. He didn't smile at the joke.

"Do you want me to install it now?" Gerald asked.

Marcus worked his jaw. "Um, is that a yes?"

"No. It was a question."

Marcus laughed and muttered "Jesus Christ" under his breath. "Why do I get all the special cases?" Gerald could tell he said this to himself. Why did people speak out loud when they were talking to themselves?

Marcus walked around to stand behind Gerald. "Yeah, go ahead and install it now."

Gerald generally hated when people stood behind him, but this was a circumstance that Gerald felt that he should not say anything about it. Gerald also felt that Marcus wouldn't know what was going on anyway.

Gerald connected to the hotel WiFi and then Tellersoft Direct's corporate VPN which gave him full access to every computer at the company. In a few commands, Gerald had locked down most of the ports on his CEO's computer, downloaded the Trojan, and started its install process.

Gerald liked computers. They never lied. They were always correct and predictable. But computers were only as good as the program it was running and a program was only as good as the person that programmed it. Gerald was very good at programming because he understood computers. A computer couldn't understand irony either. It was straightforward, just like Gerald.

Gerald finished his command and pressed the enter key. "It's installing now," Gerald said.

Marcus clapped his hands once. He walked to the door and opened it, leaning out and talking to one of the other FBI agents.

Gerald liked making people happy. It told him that he had done a good thing, a thing that he hadn't messed up. It was like playing a video game and Gerald liked video games because the things you needed to do were so straightforward and understandable, unlike most things involving people.

Money was like that too. Money was like a point system where if you did things people liked, you could get more of it and then you could give it to others so they would do things for you. But Gerald had also come to learn that money wouldn't just come to you for doing good things, sometimes you had to go and get it.

He had been in his job for a long time and knew how to talk to computers but Kyle Sadler was not a computer. He didn't act rationally, like how he paid Gerald so little even though he said he was "valuable to the company". Luckily, there were a lot of people that wanted to talk to computers and couldn't and wanted to give money to Gerald to do it for them. Like Dmitriy Kozlov.

Marcus would be happy with all the information on money laundering he would find on the CEO's computer. The CEO didn't use his computer much because you didn't need a computer for meetings or golfing. So Gerald had run the program he wrote to transfer Dmitriy Kozlov's Russian money into Bitcoin and then shuffle that between different addresses on Kyle Sadler's computer. Eighty million dollars was a lot of money and Dmitriy Kozlov was very happy to know it was safe.

Marcus walked back to the little table. "We would like to make sure that we are getting something before we let you go. Is that okay, Gerald?"

"I was going to plan a trip during lunch time. My lunch time is almost over."

Marcus held up his hands. "Understood, buddy. It shouldn't take too long." Marcus drummed his fingers on the table. "Where are you thinking of going, Gerald?"

"Brunei. Or maybe Ecuador."

"Strange choices, Jer."

Gerald tilted his head. He tried to think of a true thing to say. "They have good internet," he said.

Marcus shrugged. "Sure," he said. He kept staring at the door to the room. Gerald assumed that it was because he was waiting to find out if Overseer was working on the other computer. Gerald had installed it correctly, so soon it should be sending data and locking down the computer so no one else could access it.

Gerald rarely made mistakes with computers. He made mistakes with people all the time though and often Gerald wouldn't know he had made a mistake with someone until it was too late to fix. You could almost always fix a mistake with a computer, but rarely with a person.

He wondered if he had made a mistake with Marcus or if he was making a mistake with Dmitriy Kozlov. Dmitriy Kozlov said he would hurt Gerald if he tried to steal his money, but that was a threat. A threat is like a lie that might turn out to be true but might also not be true at all. But Dmitriy Kozlov talked about people disappearing from him before and getting away and "falling off the grid", which Gerald didn't think had anything to do with falling or a grid. That meant that plenty of people had gotten away before and Dmitriy Kozlov didn't find them, people not as smart as Gerald.

An FBI agent with the red hair that looked like wine opened the door and stuck her thumb up. Marcus clapped his hands and smiled. "Excellent work, Gerald! This will be a big boon in our investigation."

Marcus stood up and held his hand out toward the door. Gerald put his laptop back in his bag and zipped it up. When he stood, Marcus grabbed his hand again and shook it and slapped Gerald on the back. Gerald felt his knuckles shift. "Well done, sir. Well done. I have to admit, I didn't think it would be that easy."

"It wasn't easy. A lot of work went into making those programs."

Marcus snorted and shook his head. "Whatever, my guy." Marcus held out a business card to Gerald. "If you have any questions for us."

Gerald took the card as Marcus led him out the door and back down the hall towards the hotel entrance. The other FBI agents were nodding and smiling at him and sticking their thumbs up. "You've done your country a great service today. Have a good time on your vacation."

Gerald stopped and turned. Had he lied to Marcus? "I'm not going on vacation. I never go on vacation."

Marcus laughed. "But you said you were going to Brunei. Isn't that a vacation?"

Gerald wasn't good with context. He didn't know he was back on this conversation topic.

Another thing computers are good at that people aren't is keeping secrets. Computers can limit who has access to information or keep information encrypted so it can't be read. And computers could do things like transferring Bitcoin from one address in Russia to addresses that Gerald owned without knowing that Gerald owned them and therefore be unable to tell the FBI about it. Or it could lock down a CEO's computer so that Dmitriy Kozlov wouldn't be able to access it to find out what had happened.

Gerald realized he had given information that he didn't mean to give. Gerald was moving to Brunei or Ecuador, not going on vacation there because they had access to Bitcoin dealers that could pay in cash and had good internet and nice weather and didn't have extradition treaties that would send him back to America if he had made a mistake.

"You okay, Jerry?"

Gerald blinked. He had fallen into his "inner space" again. He smiled. He hoped it wasn't too late to smile.

Marcus waved his hands. "You know what, never mind." Marcus shook his head and laughed. "Gerald Marshall, you are one strange bird. Your brain looks pretty cooked, Brainiac. Get out of here and we'll let you know if we need anything else."

Gerald nodded and smiled. It was a real smile because it wasn't every day you made people happy and made a lot of money without anyone being able to figure out what had happened.