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putting money into new products. New services. Anything that helped keep the company afloat.
    Because always it was there, the need to find a way.
    Somehow, Robbie. Somehow. Keep the company alive.
    Whitley called me on my cell phone as I crossed fifteen with two VPs from Japan. “Come up to seventeen,” she said rapidly, her voice bursting with the poorly restrained exuberance of an overachieving child. “Security’s about to bust a rogue section in Marketing.”
    I made my way to seventeen just in time, finding Whitley standing at the edge of a workgroup of almost twenty desks, workstations and shared meeting spaces. The two of us were semihidden from the group, standing behind a steel partition with a manager from Corporate Security. Everything in the group seemed normal—the noise of keyboards, phones and talking coworkers rising and falling beneath the lights all around us. There did not appear to be a security problem, let alone a security action in progress. But then I noticed the odd number of white-shirted messengers and office services assistants who were wandering along various walkways near and within the group.
    Plainclothes security officers, each moving into position, preparing to break up what we called a rogue section.
    What made a group a rogue section was a careful if unexpected mix of creativity, subversion and pointlessness. They were discovered from time to time. The group in front of us, Whitley whispered to me, had spent four months generating elaborate—albeit fake—project plans detailing the creation and marketing of a new translation of the Old Testament. Complete with detailed biblical justifications, historical timelines, annotated budgets, slide shows and legal documentation, the entire group had been working late into the night, week after week.
    It was not at all clear why.
    I’d never seen a rogue section get broken up before. It was a little like watching a shoplifter being arrested. An increasing number of plainclothes store personnel nonchalantly moved into aisle nine of the supermarket, working their way down the stacks of canned soup, seeming to study the relative merit of one brand over another, all the while closing in on a young man with two beers shoved into his pants.
    Except, in this case, the computers of four marketing coordinators near the west side of the group suddenly went dark as the ten or more messengers and office services assistants hovering nearby all pulled security badges from their pockets, quickly moving in on the four workers, asking them to stand, asking them to please cooperate with this investigation.
    â€œThere’s definitely a very Gestapo-like quality to this,” I said to Whitley, watching as security officers escorted the employees away while a specially trained team of tech support reps began to go through desks, file cabinets and the now reactivated computers of the rogue section.
    â€œWhich,” Whitley said, “secretly increases the thrill for me.”
    Whitley was the day-to-day manager of the entire company, the trusted adviser to me and all the senior staff, the implementer of each phase of our expansion. But she was also someone who found an only poorly suppressed pleasure in tracking the activities of our rogue sections. Whitley oversaw the task force investigating the rogue sectionsand—more importantly—other far more serious security threats from industry spies and outside hackers. It was a task force comprised of fifteen security officers, twelve system administrators, two reformed hackers, three industrial psychologists, four financial auditors, three lawyers, four members of the R&D department, a former FBI investigator and Leonard, the head of the company’s Technical Development Group. They shadowed suspect e-mails, tapped problem phone calls, reviewed inexplicable documents and project plans and—when necessary—attempted to infiltrate a rogue section.
    The group was