Howard said, “Hmm.” He went back through the curtain and returned with another chair. He sat it in front of Thomas and me. He looked first at me.
“Ray, I have a number of questions I need straight answers to. I suppose you understand what will happen if you don’t provide them.”
“I have a pretty good idea,” I said.
He nodded slowly, like we were on the same wavelength. “We’ll get back to the Clinton thing. But it makes sense to start from the beginning. Who do you work for?”
“I’m self-employed. I’m an illustrator. I work freelance.”
“I see. You don’t do any freelance work that’s not related to illustration?”
“No.”
“And how about you?” he asked Thomas. “For whom do you work?”
“I’m sort of self-employed, too,” he said. “But I work for the CIA.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “Thomas-”
Howard held up a hand to shush me. “Thomas, tell me what you do for the CIA.”
“I shouldn’t be telling you,” he said. “It’s black ops.”
Howard’s eyebrows shot up. “Black ops?”
“That’s what President Clinton said. But that’s just part of it.”
“If you don’t tell me, Thomas, I’m going to have them start by breaking one of your brother’s fingers.”
“Don’t hurt him,” Thomas said. But I could see him struggling with whether to sacrifice me to protect the mission.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Tell them. I’m not saying this because I don’t want them to hurt me, Thomas.” I decided to play into his worldview. “I would imagine they already know most of it, anyway.”
He nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure whether he actually believed me, or was relieved to have found a way to tell Howard what he wanted to know without feeling too guilty about it.
“Well,” Thomas said, “I’m helping them for when all the online maps disappear, because that’s going to happen sooner or later, and also I’m going to be on call, if there’s an agent in trouble. Like, if he’s on the run in Mumbai or something and doesn’t know which way to go, he’ll call me and I can tell him.” He said this all very matter-of-factly, like a kid discussing his paper route.
“Explain that a little more,” Howard said.
“Which part?”
“Any of it.”
“I memorize maps. I memorize cities. I memorize the streets. So when all the maps disappear, I can help.”
Lewis said, “The computer history’s all Whirl360.”
“You memorize streets on Whirl360?” Howard asked.
Thomas nodded. “That’s right.”
Howard smiled and tapped his own head with an index finger. “And you keep it all up here?”
Again: “That’s right.”
“So how does this work? If I give you an address, you can describe it for me?”
Thomas nodded.
Howard gave him a skeptical look. “Okay,” he said, playing along. “My mother lives on Atlantic Avenue, in Boston. She has an apartment there.”
Thomas closed his eyes. “Near Beach Street? That’s nice along there. Is she in that building with the real estate office on the first floor? All the sidewalks there are made of red brick. They look really nice.” He opened his eyes.
Howard appeared slightly unnerved. He looked my way and I said, “He’s never been to Boston.”
“Okay, I got one,” Lewis said. “The twenty-seven-hundred block of California Street in Denver. Between Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth.” He said to Howard, “I grew up there.”
Thomas closed his eyes again. “Was it in one of the one-story blue houses, or the six-story apartment building across the street with the walls that are kind of white, then go to brick color, then back to white, and-”
“Jesus Christ,” Lewis said. “It’s like he’s got a fucking computer in his head.”
Howard said, “Which was it, Lewis? One of the little blue houses, or the apartment?”
“The apartment,” he said quietly.
Howard took a very long breath, laced his fingers together, and rested his forearms on his thighs. “How many cities are you memorizing, Thomas?”
“All of them,” he said.
Howard’s head retreated a little in surprise. “All of them in the United States?”
“In the world,” Thomas said. “I’m not done. The world’s very big. If you asked me about, say, Gomez Palacio, in Mexico, I haven’t gotten there yet. There’s probably more places I haven’t gotten to than I have gotten to, like smaller cities and towns, because I’m trying to finish the big cities first.”
“Okay,” Howard said, glancing over at Nicole, who hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d last spoken to her. “So, Thomas, let’s say we’ve established that you really do have some kind of gift. I have to admit, I am impressed.”
“Thank you,” Thomas said. Despite our current situation, the praise pleased him.
“So this is what you do, you memorize these streets,” Howard said, a statement, not a question. “And what are all those e-mails about?”
“Updates,” Thomas said, with a tone that suggested that was a pretty dumb question. Like, What the hell else would they be?
“Updates on?”
“On how the project is going. When I memorize new cities, or parts of them, I let the president know.”
“And what’s this other thing you mentioned, about all the online maps disappearing?”
Thomas gave Howard a wary look. “I bet you know all about that.”
“Well, if I do, then it won’t hurt if you tell me.”
“There’s going to be some kind of catastrophic event that destroys all the online maps. A virus or something. Maybe caused by some enemy of the United States. This will happen after everyone’s gotten rid of their paper maps, because we all rely on the computer now. It’s kind of like photos. Everyone used to have their pictures developed on paper, but now they post them online. When everything crashes, everyone will lose all their photos. It’ll be like that with maps.”
Now Howard looked at me. “Is he for real?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Does this freakish ability of his have something to do with why you showed up at Allison Fitch’s apartment on Orchard Street?”
I nodded. “Thomas was memorizing that street, and he saw the woman in the window. With the bag over her head.” My mouth was dry, and I licked my lips. “He wanted me to check it out.”
“How did he know to look for it?”
“He didn’t. He just found it.”
“No,” Howard said. “I don’t believe that. The odds of that, they’re a billion to one.”
“No,” Thomas said. “The odds are that eventually I will see everything.”
Howard turned to Lewis. “What do you think?”
“I don’t know. Seems kind of unlikely to me. Maybe someone asked him to look for it.”
“Is that what happened, Thomas? Someone asked you to look for it?”
“No,” he said. “Nobody did.”
“Not even Bill Clinton?” Howard followed the question with a nervous laugh.
“No, I just send him the progress reports. He’s my liaison with the agency.”
“But he never e-mails you back. There aren’t any e-mails in your in-box, or in the trash.”
“He communicates with me, but not through e-mail.”
“Communicates how?”
“He talks to me. Lately, he’s been using the phone.”
