Or maybe I’m just in a frame of mind to cut him slack. There are three armed Secret Service men here in my bedroom-slash-Dogyears-World-Headquarters. They’ve been here for about half an hour. I’m mentally calling them the Boss, the Trainee, and the Muscle. The Boss and the Muscle are wearing Ray-Ban mirror shades—they’re living the dream, true Men in Black. They have guns, and if they want to, they can kill me. I’m polite. The Trainee’s been doing the talking, he’s a guy my age, a fellow U.C. Berkeley graduate, or so he says, not that I ever saw him at any of the places I used to hang, like the Engineering Library, Cloyne Co-op, or Gilman St. His name is Brad. All the SS guys have four-letter, monosyllable names. Dick, John, Mark, Jeff, like that. I’m Wag. My dog made up the name. Brad starts out by asking me questions about my Web sites, and about the FoneFoon cell phone worm, being vaguely threatening but a little jocular at the same time, the way these field-ops always are.
