“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 & 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?”
“No, I’ve never been in any trouble with the police.”
“What about in 1997?” Driscoll asked.
Oh, no.
“What about 1997?” Thomas asked.
“There wasn’t an incident then? Something that involved the police?”
Thomas looked at me. I spoke up. “That was nothing. I can’t believe you’re dredging that up. The police never laid a charge.”
“Would you like to tell us about it, Thomas?” Parker asked.
“Ray,” Thomas said softly, “could you tell them? Some of it, I don’t remember.”
“When we…when Thomas and my parents lived downtown—I’d just moved away around that time—there was a misunderstanding with the neighbors.”
Parker and Driscoll waited.
“Thomas had found the original survey maps for our house, you know, the kind you get when you buy or sell a property. The maps show exactly where the house is situated on the property. And the maps showed the houses on either side of us, and across the street.”
“They were wrong,” Thomas said.
I looked at him and smiled. “Yeah, Thomas didn’t think the survey maps were accurate, so he wanted to check them, make a map of our property and the neighbors’. So he got a fifty-foot tape measure and—”
“I still have it,” Thomas said. “Do you want to see it?”
Parker said, “No, that’s okay.”
“He got this tape measure and started measuring everything. How far the houses were from the sidewalk, from one another, how big they were. He didn’t tell anyone he was going to do this. He just started doing it. And the thing is, he was right. Some of the survey measurements were off, ever so slightly. Which would have been kind of satisfying, if Thomas hadn’t ended up being discovered outside the first-floor bedroom window of our neighbors to the south—”
“The Hitchens,” Thomas offered.
“That’s right. This was at the time that Mrs. Hitchens was getting dressed.”
“Hmm,” said Parker.
“She was naked,” Thomas said matter-of-factly. “That window was exactly twenty-eight feet, nine inches from the sidewalk. The survey had it as twenty-eight feet, eleven inches.”
“Mrs. Hitchens got pretty upset, called the police. My parents managed to persuade her, and the police, that Thomas’s actions were entirely innocent, but after that, the neighbors were never quite the same with my brother. It became very awkward for my parents. That was when they decided to move out here.”
“The survey for this property is dead on,” Thomas said.
Parker and Driscoll exchanged looks again. I’d lost count of how many times they’d done this. Parker said to Thomas, “Why don’t you get back to work and we’ll let your brother show us out.”
“Okay,” he said, turning back to his mouse and keyboard.
When the three of us got back downstairs, I asked Parker, “What now?”
She said, “We’ll make our report. This visit was a threat assessment, Mr. Kilbride. I don’t believe Agent Driscoll sees one, and I would have to concur. The U.S. government hears, on a daily basis, from a great many,” and here she paused to choose her words carefully, “individuals whose interpretations of the world around them are somewhat unique. Ninety-nine percent of them present no discernible threat—they’re harmless—but we spend a lot of time tracking down the one percent that do.”
I felt I’d been holding my breath for an hour. I took what she had to say as good news, but my stress level was off the scale. On top of that, I was furious with Thomas. I knew I had to make certain allowances for him, but bringing the FBI to our door? The blood coursing through my veins was electrically charged.
Parker continued, “Your brother needs to find some other hobbies. If he keeps communicating with government agencies with his tales of a computer infrastructure meltdown, you’re going to be visited again. If not by us, then someone else.”
“I hear you.”
“It’s a different world than twenty years ago,” she said. “No one takes these things lightly. Look at what happened in Tucson. Thomas mentioned a psychiatrist. He sees someone regularly?”
“Yes.”
She had out her notebook again. “Name?”
I didn’t want to give it to her, but how long would it have taken her to find out on her own? Five minutes? Ten, tops? I had to put my faith in Laura Grigorin to either paint Thomas in a good light, or simply tell these two to get lost.
I gave Parker the name.
“Good day, Mr. Kilbride,” she said.
Driscoll nodded but said nothing. I watched the two of them go down the porch steps and get back into their government-issued wheels.
I wasn’t proud of what I did next.
SIXTEEN
HOWARD Talliman understands why Bridget Sawchuck wanted to tell him the details of her dilemma in a public place. Not only did it keep his reaction in check; there was nothing at all suspicious about the two of them being seen together. It’s perfectly natural for Howard to meet his best friend’s wife for lunch. He is as much an adviser to her as he is to Morris.
But Howard does not want to meet Allison Fitch where they can be seen together. He does not want anyone to know about this meeting.
So he books a suite for the day at the Roosevelt at Madison and Forty-fifth. He wants a room with a separate living area, thinking Allison might find it slightly unnerving being in a small space with a man she’s never met before, a king-sized bed the most dominant piece of furniture in the room. As though beckoning them. He instructs Bridget to contact Allison and invite her to the hotel for two in the afternoon to discuss the woman’s proposal. What Allison does not know is that Howard will be taking the meeting.
He orders coffee for two from room service with instructions that it be delivered ten minutes before Allison’s scheduled arrival. He doesn’t know whether she is inclined to punctuality, but is guessing that when one hundred thousand dollars is at stake, that’s a pretty good reason to be on time.
The china cups and saucers are set out on the coffee table, the silver spoons and white linen napkins in place next to them, when there is a soft rapping at the door at one minute before two. Howard gets up from the couch where he has been sitting casually with one leg over his knee. He opens the door a foot.
Allison’s mouth drops open. “I’m sorry. I’ve knocked on the wrong—”
“Ms. Fitch, a pleasure to meet you,” he says, opening the door wide and sweeping his arm inward. “You’re right on time.”
She hesitates, then steps into the room.
“Where’s Bridget?” she asks.
“I will be representing Bridget’s interests here today,” he says.
“Who the hell are you?”
“My name is Howard Talliman.” He doesn’t see the point in using some sort of alias. If this woman has been researching Bridget and Morris online—as he is sure she has—then she will certainly have come across his name and photo at some point. “I am a friend of the family.”
“Oh yeah, I know who you are,” she says. “You’re like…you’re his campaign manager or something like that.”
“Won’t you sit down? I’ve ordered coffee.”
Allison’s eyes take in the room as she moves toward the couch. “Where’s the bed?” she asked. “I mean, not that—I’ve never seen a hotel room that didn’t have a bed in it.”
Howard points to a closed door. “The bedroom is in there.”
Allison is impressed. “A hotel room where the bedroom is separate?”
“Yes.”
“May I see?” She tips her head at the closed bedroom door.
“Be my guest.”
She opens the bedroom door and whistles. “Wow.” She comes back to the couch and sits down. “What’s a room like this run you for the day?”
“That’s not really what we’re here to discuss, is it?” he says.
“I’m just saying, if Bridget can afford a room like this just so you and me can have a chat, maybe I’m aiming too low.”
Howard has already thought her demand for one hundred thousand dollars lacks ambition, but he chooses not to say that. He picks up the silver coffeepot by the handle and says, “May I pour you a cup?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Steam rises from the coffee as it streams into the cups. Allison adds cream and sugar to hers, while Howard takes his black. He leans back comfortably in his chair, saucer in one hand and cup in the other.
“So, Ms. Fitch, you’ve certainly stirred things up, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know what exactly Bridget has told you.”
“She’s told me enough. That you two became friends, very special friends, that you spent some time away together in Barbados, and that you subsequently learned that she is married to Morris Sawchuck.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it.” She sips the coffee, makes a face, spoons in more sugar, and stirs.
“And once having learned this, you saw an opportunity.”
Allison Fitch blushes. “I don’t know if you’d call it that.”
“What would you call it?”
“I guess…I guess I would call it doing Bridget a favor.”
Howard’s bushy eyebrows soar briefly. “Explain that to me.”
“Well, I figured she wouldn’t want it getting out that the two of us, you know, that we had had a thing, and I was offering her a way to make sure that didn’t happen.”
Howard nods. “I see. You’re a very kindhearted person, aren’t you? Just how were you hoping to ensure that this information did not become public?”
Her eyes narrow. “You’re a pretty smug son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“I am many things, Ms. Fitch.”
“Look, you already know the answer. I told her I’ve been having kind of a cash flow problem lately, and that if she could help me out, I’d make sure nothing came out about her, something that could ruin her husband’s chances of being governor or president or head of the glee club or whatever it is he wants to be when he grows up. I mean, news of his wife sleeping with someone other than him would be bad enough, but with another woman? All those supporters of his who when they aren’t spending five hundred bucks a plate at some fund-raising dinner for him are spending millions to fight same-sex marriage, they’re going to just love that. I mean, come on, what’s a hundred grand for her and her husband? That’s like, what? Lunch money? A little trip to Gucci or Louis Vuitton? That’s nothing for them. I could have asked for a lot more.”
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