or be a guide, if needed. Although, to be honest, I would prefer to work from home. I like it here. I could give directions to someone, anywhere in the world, over the phone, even if I was still here.”
“Of course,” Parker said. “So you’re telling me you can remember what all the streets are like in lots of different cities just by looking at them online?”
Thomas nodded.
Parker’s tongue pushed her cheek out. “Okay. You ever been to Georgetown, Thomas?”
“Georgetown, Texas? Or Georgetown, Kentucky? Or Georgetown, Ontario? Or Georgetown, Delaware? Or-”
“Georgetown, in Washington, D.C.”
Thomas nodded, like he should have guessed that in the first place, given that these were FBI people. “No, but actually, I’ve never been to any of them, anyway.”
“So let’s say I’m in Georgetown, and I’d like to buy a book, and-”
Thomas squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and opened them. “There’s a Barnes amp; Noble bookstore, on M Street, NW, at Thomas Jefferson Street. And if you’re hungry, there’s a Vietnamese restaurant right across the street, although I don’t know if it’s any good or not. I’ve never even eaten Vietnamese food. Is it like Chinese food? I like Chinese food.”
Agent Parker, for the first time, looked as though she’d been thrown off her game a second. She glanced at her partner, her eyes saying, What the fuck?
“I know the government is trying to save money these days, so it’s important you know that I’m not looking for any big salary,” my brother said. “Just enough to cover any of my expenses. I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle. I’m offering my services because I think it’s a good thing to do, as a citizen.”
“Thomas, Agent Driscoll and I would like to see where you work.”
“Sure,” he said.
I felt a few more of my internal organs turn to water as I followed everyone else up the stairs. When they got to the second floor, the agents stopped and took in the wall of maps. It didn’t even occur to Thomas to point them out as he opened the door to his bedroom.
“This is my workstation,” he said. “And I sleep here, too.”
“Christ on a cracker,” Driscoll muttered under his breath, taking in the room.
“What’s this?” Parker asked, pointing to the three monitors. One of them showed an office building with the letters CIBC running across the windows. It looked like a financial institution. The second and third were the same street, one looking up, the other down.
“Yonge Street, Toronto,” Thomas said. “It runs north and south, starting at Lake Ontario, at Queen’s Quay Boulevard. I started at the southern end and I’ve gotten up to Bloor. It’s a very long street, so instead of going all the way up, I’ll start wandering the east-west streets.”
“So how much time do you spend doing this?” Parker asked.
“I sleep from around one at night to nine in the morning, and I take meal breaks, and I have a shower every morning, but all the other times I’m working. I had to see my psychiatrist yesterday so I lost some time there, but tell them at the CIA not to worry. I’ll make it up. And I’m losing some time now, but this is work-related so I guess it’s okay.”
I saw the agents exchange looks when Thomas said “psychiatrist.” Parker said, “Show us what you do.”
“Okay.” Thomas sat in his chair and put his right hand on the mouse, then moved the cursor around the street on the center monitor. “I keep clicking and I move up the street, and then I hold the button down and I can move around three hundred and sixty degrees like this and see all the stores and the businesses but you usually can’t see the people clearly and the license plates on the cars and trucks are blurred but everything else is really clear.”
“Can you open up your e-mail program, Thomas?” Parker asked.
“Okay.”
He clicked on the postage stamp at the bottom of the screen and up came his e-mails. His in-box-and I couldn’t recall seeing an in-box like this before-was empty.
“You delete all your mail right away?” Driscoll asked.
“I don’t get any,” Thomas said. “I don’t have any regular friends that write to me. Sometimes, I get junk. Like to”-he craned his neck around and looked at Agent Parker and blushed- “you know, make your, you know, thing bigger or something. I delete those immediately.”
I was thinking maybe I should raise an objection, that if they wanted to snoop around in my brother’s e- mails, they should have a warrant. But then I worried that would raise a red flag for them. It was my hope that once they saw what Thomas was up to, how innocent his pursuit was, whatever it was that worried them about him would evaporate.
“Show us what’s in your deleted file,” Driscoll said. Evidently he needed convincing.
“I always forget to empty this,” Thomas said. “There.”
The folder was, as Thomas had said, filled with junk e-mails of the penis enlargement variety.
“And now the folder with sent messages,” Parker said.
Thomas did a click with the mouse and there it was. The sent file. The messages filled the screen from top to bottom. Hundreds and hundreds of messages. Written by Thomas Kilbride.
All of them-every last one-directed to the same address.
The e-mail address of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“I like to keep everyone apprised of what I’m doing,” Thomas said.
FIFTEEN
I was stunned. Agents Parker and Driscoll, not so much. After all, this was why they were here. Seeing as how these e-mails had been sent to the CIA, I figured they’d seen them already.
But despite that, Driscoll asked, “Why don’t we open a couple of those e-mails at random.”
“How about this one?” Thomas asked, pointing, and Driscoll nodded. He clicked on one that, like all the others, had been directed to the general inquiries e-mail address of the CIA, which I was guessing was available on the Internet to anyone. Thomas had typed “whirl360update” into the subject line.
It read:
Dear Former President Clinton: Today I went through all the streets of Lisbon and tomorrow I am going to start San Diego. Sincerely, Thomas Kilbride.
“Next one,” Driscoll said.
Dear Former President Clinton: Los Angeles is going to take a lot longer than I had anticipated but you have to expect that of cities that are sprawling in nature. San Francisco was easier because it is contained by the mountains. I hope everything is going well with you. Sincerely, Thomas Kilbride.
“Let’s do one more,” Agent Driscoll said.
Thomas clicked and opened this:
Dear Former President Clinton: I’m sure you have lots of connections with all government agencies, not just the CIA, so I would urge you to have them start checking into what this catastrophic event is that is coming. It makes sense to do it now because once it happens, it will be a lot harder to deal with. Because computers will be affected, I want to give you a phone number where you can reach me, and my address. Just call and tell me what you need a map of and I will get right to work on it. Sincerely, Thomas Kilbride.
The contact details followed. I had been wondering, up to now, whether the FBI had tracked the messages to this house through an IP address or something, but clearly that kind of high-tech investigative legwork had not been necessary.
“Thomas,” Agent Parker said, “have you ever been in trouble?”
He poked his tongue into his cheek before answering. “What kind of trouble?”
I wondered if this was what it felt like when your car plunged into the water.
“I don’t know, Thomas. Trouble with the police?”
