Trust Your Eyes

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.