“Yup,” he said.
Then the man’s eyes landed on Nicole. She’d put away the doll and was leaning against one of the shelves stuffed with books, her arms crossed over her breasts.
“You,” he said contemptuously. “You’re the one who fucked this up.”
“Nice to meet you at last, too, Howard,” she said, meeting his gaze, staring him down.
Thomas and I gave Howard an excuse to break eye contact with her. He said to me, “Which one are you?”
“Ray Kilbride. That’s Thomas. My brother.”
Thomas said, “Tell that man—Lewis—tell him to leave my computer alone.”
Howard turned to Lewis and said, “You have it hooked up?”
“Yeah. There’s some weird shit on here. All these e-mails.”
Howard reached into his jacket for a slender case, from which he extracted a pair of reading glasses. “Open a few.”
Lewis did some clicking. Howard read quickly through the e-mails. “Are they all like this?”
“Yup.”
“All addressed to Bill Clinton, care of the CIA?”
“Yeah.”
Howard looked at us, then back at Lewis. “Tell me about the phone call again.”
“Someone called the house, asked for that one, said it was Bill Clinton. Like I said.”
“But you also said it didn’t sound like him.”
Lewis shrugged. “I mean, I’ve never talked to the man, but no, I don’t think it sounded like him.”
“People sound different on the phone,” Thomas said.
Howard was still looking at the screen. “These e-mails, they’re all in the sent file?”
“That’s right,” Lewis said.
“What about in the in-box, or the deleted messages. Are there actually any messages from Bill Clinton or anyone at the CIA?”
Lewis did some clicking. “Nothing.”
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.