scared so much anymore. I just resented the old bastard for making me feel like that.
He reached into his jacket pocket, withdrew a flat black plastic thing that he handed over to me. I took it, suspiciously, and gingerly explored the seam my fingertips found on the long side. A catch snicked, and it unfolded into a clamshell-style handheld computer.
“That’s yours,” the chief of staff said as it hissed into life in my hand, its long screen flaring clean white. “It contains all the leads we currently have, and is fitted for wireless Internet access. It goes into a secure system at Treasury, which pushes continuing updates into your machine.”
“You’re just sending me into the wild with half a mil and this?”
“Oh, I will come to see you from time to time, when I have new information. Or perhaps just to see how you’re doing and where you are. Consider me Virgil to your Dante.” This notion amused him no end. His laugh was a dry, raspy, high thing, the sound of skeletons giggling.
He stood up, arranging his baggy suit on his pointy frame. “Smile, son. You are engaged in a great work. Everything is different now. You have the most glorious of goals. You are going to help us save America.”
His eyes glittered like new coins.
“From itself.”
I realized the chief of staff was preparing to leave. I surged out of the chair. “Hold on. I don’t accept commissions just like this. I need, I need, some way to contact you, a longer briefing, something…”
“It’s all in the machine. In a few minutes, you’ll have all the expense money you could want. You contact me through a secure email system, I contact you when I deem it appropriate. Let’s be men here: you know I’ll be watching.”
He extended one long tough hand. “Good hunting, Mr. McGill.” I shook it. I could feel the little bones of his hand moving under my grip, like he was nothing but thin leather and sticks.
He did that curt nod again, spun on his heel, and left.
I looked at the closed door for about a minute. Then sat down again, heavily, and looked out the window. The men in black were melting away. I watched the street a while longer. The chief of staff and his security team came out of my building. He stopped. Looked up at me. His face split open in an awful grin. His team gathered him into his car, and they were off, gone, disappeared, like they were never there.
Except I had a brand-new handheld computer on my desk.
I had a thought. Opened the thing up again, tapped the icon for Internet access with my fingernail, and put a Web site address into it with the QWERTY thumbpad. My bank has an online service that I use in preference to the bank tellers laughing at my balance in front of me. I thumbed in the security number and waited.
I had half a million dollars in my bank account. In fact, I had five hundred thousand and three dollars and forty-one cents. The three forty-one was the sum total of my worldly wealth when I woke up that day.
The handheld thumped down on the desk, next to the cooling mug of rat piss. That was it. I had the biggest single-job expense account I’d ever seen, and the most insane job I’d ever heard of. Finding a book that had been lost for fifty years. If it had ever existed. A secret Constitution of the United States. Invisible Amendments. Hell, I couldn’t tell you how many
I had half a million dollars. For a complete wild-goose chase. Half a million dollars that were mine and never to be spent on anything remotely useful.
Chapter 2
I sat there for at least half an hour, just thinking. Trying to think, anyway. Sort of a fugue state, where lots of words were flying around my head without assembling into sentences. The walls started closing in. Shifting in my chair, I found that my joints were locking up and my muscles were bunching into hard knots of stress. I fought my way into my jacket, feeling like a stick insect trying to put on a life vest, and went out for a walk.
There was a girl with blue hair sitting cross-legged on the corner of the street. Her hair fell down her back in thick, fuzzy dreadlocks, like someone had nailed a dozen baby aliens to her head. She was dressed in what I assumed to be an artful arrangement of fabric swatches intended to resemble rags, rather than actual shambling homeless/nutcase out-and-out rags. Tartan, paisley, plaid, things that looked like they belonged as wallpaper in a kid’s room, things that looked like they’d been ripped off clowns at knifepoint. She had her back to me, and, as I approached, I expected to see a hat in front of her, or a little cardboard sign with the hand-scrawled message NEED MONEY FOR FOOD/DRUGS/CLOWN-STABBING. As I walked around her, I saw that she was just sitting there, eyes closed, hands on her knees, perfectly still and calm.
She had…well, I thought it was Sharpie or makeup around her eye, at first. A wobbly circle, with stitch marks crossing it, drawn like the sort of roundish patch you’d see sewn into teddy bears or old denim jeans. She sort of came to as I walked around her, smiled as if she’d just woken up, and rubbed her face. The marking didn’t smear. It was tattooed on.
She rubbed her eyes, and then looked up at me, giving me the gentlest smile. “Hello,” she said softly.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’re sitting asleep on the corner of the street.”
“I wasn’t asleep. I was listening.”
“To what?”
She nodded at the street, still with that serene smile. “The traffic. Sit with me.” She patted the sidewalk next to her. Calculating that, after this, the day just couldn’t get any weirder, I said the hell with it and sat down next to her.
She nodded toward the street. “The traffic. I’m listening to the traffic.”
“What’s so interesting about the sound of cars? Is this one of those art things I never get?”
