“And what is it you want from the CIA, Thomas?” Parker asked.
Thomas sat up a little straighter. “I don’t want anything from them. It’s what I have to give. I’m offering my services. You should already know this if you’ve seen the e-mails. When all the computer maps crash, I’ll be able to assist the government.”
“And just how will you be able to do that?” she asked.
Thomas looked at me, as if to say, Are these people thick or what?
He sighed. “Because I have them in my head. All the maps. All the streets. What everything looks like.” He made a tsk noise with his tongue to signal his irritation. “When all the computers fail I’ll be able to draw the maps, 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 & 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.