Many thanks are due:
As always, my brilliant agent, Alexandra Machinist; my peerless editor, Rachel Kahan; Alexander Maldutis, who explained algorithmic trading and quantitative analysis in terms so simple that even I understood them; Laura Hiler, who served as my long-distance tour guide to Dubai; Jonathan Sander, strategy officer at STEALTHBits, who helped me figure out how to steal data from a secure server network; Dan Chmielewski, who continues to teach me about security, as well as friendship; the legendary Beau Smith, my personal armaments consultant; Phil Roosevelt, who served as a first reader and gave valuable feedback; Levi Preston (no relation), who gave me information on the military as well as notes on the story; Britt McCombs, who gave me great advice and ideas for Kelsey Foster.
And to Jean and Caroline and Daphne, for being the reason why.
The quote from Allen Dulles about mind warfare is from Jon Ronson’s brilliant and invaluable The Men Who Stare at Goats, about the American military’s and the CIA’s real-life efforts to harness psychic powers. I also relied on my friends John Whalen and Jonathan Vankin’s massive and massively useful The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time. (Again. It’s a really great book.) I used Will Storr’s ridiculously smart The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science as a reference for all the ways our brains work and the ways they don’t. The stories about Wolf Messing originated from several sources—I first read about him in my junior high library, in a book I have never been able to track down since. But you can learn more about him in the biography Wolf Messing: The True Story of Russia’s Greatest Psychic by Tatiana Lungin. I also quoted reporting from Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele’s article on American cash in Iraq (“Billions over Baghdad,” Vanity Fair, October 2007).
Any mistakes are mine, despite the best efforts of everyone listed here.