The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  I waved back, as helpless as she was.

  Fifty yards away from me, a Metro train worms itself from the earth, emerging from its tunnel and heading toward the airport. The hags are still crouched at the tree, the only true cover to hide behind while staking out Chaudhry. Beyond them the ground slopes downward, slowly, toward the river, and I’m about twenty yards back. The Potomac at low ebb smells of fuel and the rotten dankness of things that should have stayed buried. I can see Chaudhry in the distance, standing forlorn in the parking lot, lit up by the one streetlight, an actor alone onstage. He’s looking around nervously, afraid some Homeland Security agent is going to ask him why he’s loitering outside an airport at night. Don’t worry, Mr. Chaudhry, I know the schedule of the DHS agents’ routes; they won’t be here until later.

  In my right hand I hold the pistol that the Engineers designed to look, sound, and function like an early-21st-century nine-millimeter automatic. Attached to it is a silencer, though the thing is still too loud. We have more efficient methods in my time, but the Department limits the amount of technological advances I’m allowed to bring back, in case they’re discovered by a contemp. At least I was granted a Stunner, which I clutch with my left hand.

  Each time a plane takes off, the ground vibrates and I inch closer. I keep low so Chaudhry can’t see my outline against the bright backdrop of the city, though I’m probably too far away for him to see me, as he has bad eyesight and is always squinting through his thick glasses. (It’s embarrassing how much I know about him.)

  One of the hags checks the rifle’s stock; the other peers through binoculars. The low rumble of a plane accelerating on the tarmac is my cue. I aim my pistol at the hag with the rifle. He’s still fiddling with it; they probably don’t quite understand how the antique device works, though I’m impressed they found a way to procure one. They’re getting better at this.

  A black car loops off the exit ramp to the parking lot, slowing as it approaches Chaudhry. Then I see the plane, and I almost cower instinctively as it rises up like some predator, shiny steel breast exposed. Chaudhry has turned away from us to face the car, so he won’t see the flash from my gun.

  The jet’s roar is at its peak when I pull the trigger. The hag was facing away from me and I get him in the back of the head—it looks like he simply nods, agreeing with something unspoken, and then he drops.

  I shoot his partner low in the back. That may give me a chance to ask him a few questions afterward. I scramble toward him and tag him with the Stunner, mainly to keep him from screaming. His body is leaning into the tree and I pull him to the ground.

  I lie beside the bodies and watch Chaudhry, now standing in the lot with two other men. One is bald; the other has dark hair with a streak of white above each ear, like he made a wig from a skunk’s pelt. A third is behind the wheel of the black car, whose lights are off. These men are good at what they do—they stand at either side of the shorter, thinner reporter, boxing him in against the car. I’m only surprised they didn’t find some way to break the streetlight before they did this. (The bubble of a security camera is perched beneath that light, but later reports will reveal that the camera malfunctioned on this night.) I hear a raised voice, two disjointed syllables, and then there’s a quick motion and Chaudhry doubles over. One of the men opens the back door, and they push him inside. Again he is surrounded; the doors are closed. They hit him a few more times as the car drives toward the on-ramp.

  Chaudhry’s appearance at this parking lot will not be known for a few days, not until a concerned coworker taps into his e-mail account and finds a message sent from someone—exactly who, no one will know, as the mystery person’s account traversed many complicated networks and domains and secret portals—asking that Chaudhry meet him here tonight. Despite much investigative effort by police, his outraged employer, his stunned colleagues, and his grieving family, this is the farthest Chaudhry’s path in life will ever be traced.

  The car drives onto the highway—heading south, in case any students of history are curious—although even I don’t know where they’re taking him from there.

  I reverse the Stunner on the hag who isn’t quite dead yet. What an awakening, to be revived to this state, a bullet in one of his kidneys. I hate myself for doing this; I should have just shot him in the head, like I did his partner. He gasps, confused, possibly numb from the waist down, and starts to cough blood.

  “Where are the others?” I ask him.

  Cough, cackle, spit.

  “How many did you take with you? Tell me. This is your one chance to make right—you probably have about ten seconds.”

  He bashes me in the side of the head with something that can’t possibly be a fist. My stomach turns and I go dizzy, catching myself with my hands before I hit the ground. He’s about to hit me again—he’s holding a rock—but I manage to block his arm, then roll onto him. I wrestle him for a moment; he has much more life in him than I thought, though he’s losing it fast. Then I hold him down and hit him once, square in the face. I stand up, and as I hover over him, his eyes go wide, and then he’s gone.

  I stare at the mess I’ve made. No, it’s their mess—they’re the ones causing the problems that I need to fix. As if rationalizations can make shooting two people any easier.

  I breathe deeply and try to get my stomach under control. The dizziness is gone already—it was a short, sudden burst—but it’s being replaced by a worse pain, just behind my left ear and radiating out.

  I have about ten minutes before a DHS agent or Coast Guard boat or some other security personnel patrols the area. I reach into the hags’ pockets and remove their wallets, complete with fake IDs—again, I’m impressed. They’re learning. They don’t have any other weapons or hotel keys, nothing that tells me where they’re based. I scrape them for genetic samples so I can record exactly whom I’ve dispatched. The Department prefers it if we dispose of the bodies, and I do have a few Flashers with me. They’d eliminate the corpses, as well as everything else within a radius of a few feet, but they’re too bright and would attract attention. So I grab the hags’ legs and drag them to the riverbank. As the planes continue to scream overhead I toss a body into the river, then another, then their rifle. The confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia should get the bodies far enough from the airport that the police won’t connect them with Mr. Chaudhry, but I’m not really worried about it. Their fingerprints will turn up no matches, their dental health will be meaningless, and their DNA will be rather puzzling to whoever analyzes it. The corpses will constitute quite a mystery, but this is Washington, and the assassination of two nameless men will likely be assumed to be the tip of some iceberg best given a wide berth. Local cops will quietly ask the federal police, who might ask the creepy and suspicious denizens of the clandestine forces’ many branches, none of whom will betray any interest whatsoever with their glazed and nocturnal eyes and all of whom will assume one of the others is to blame. The discovery of the bodies will be shielded from the newspapers and TV reporters, the citizenry will not be alarmed, and my superiors will be impressed once again by my ability to perform complex duties while leaving no trace.

  I try to run another check on the GeneScan, in case more hags are coming late—such incompetence is hardly beyond them. But nothing happens. The GeneScan is supposed to look like a series of dots and images superimposed on what my eyes perceive in front of me or spread out radar-like over my internal GPS. But the GeneScan isn’t working. Hopefully it’s just the headache from that blow with the rock interfering, and this is only temporary.

  I use a towel to clean up the last of the blood from the base of the tree. The towel too I toss in the river, which darkly glitters at me like tinfoil. I must seem like some odd throwback, not to this time but an even earlier one, what they once called prehistory, when strange little cringers offered sacrifices to sea gods they themselves had invented, throwing possessions of varying import into the murky waters. Praying for a calm and fecund world without flood, a
land of everlasting peace.

  There are so many questions I didn’t think to ask when I was offered this job. They knew I was interested from the start, even though their recruitment was so heavy on flattery that I figured there was something they weren’t telling me. It’s hard to pay attention to what isn’t being said, however, when what is being said is so mind-altering. It was an honor, something that could not be refused.

  I’ve been thinking about that lately, about whether I could indeed have refused. About how much free choice there had been, whether my hand had been forced or had moved of its own accord. What is predetermined, what spontaneous? You get to thinking about such things after this long on the job. You start pondering options that most people don’t even realize are there, seeing secret paths and hidden escapes. Or the opposite happens: you see the larger forces that guide you against your will or without your knowledge. If you are what you do, then what does it mean if others make the decisions for you?

  My previous three gigs were in a different beat, back in the 1940s. One of the things I never thought to ask was how long the average Protector stays on the job. Given the amount of training and expertise necessary for a person to navigate a beat, transfers must be rare. But my current assignment wasn’t so much a transfer, they told me, as a response to an unexpected development. The Department of Historical Integrity was created when the Government realized that revolutionary factions had access to the technology and could navigate time themselves, and since its inception the Department has done an excellent job of determining which Events the hags would target. First the hags tried to alter World War II, focusing in particular on the Holocaust. That had been my beat. The hags wanted to prevent the genocide—they were a Jewish extremist group, though I suppose that’s a redundancy. They wanted to save those millions of innocent lives. An admirable goal. But that would have altered history. Meaning, it would have altered our Perfect Present. The Department’s motto, engraved on the crest that every Protector walks across upon admission to headquarters (a headquarters no one else knows exists, for a Department no one else knows exists), is The integrity of history must be preserved.

  I protect Events that no one in my forward-thinking time knows about. We Protectors are the silent warriors, toiling in a vacuum. We stop the hags from removing the pillars of our Perfect Society and tearing it all down. What would have happened if Napoleon had been killed as a little boy? Or if Mao hadn’t unleashed his Cultural Revolution? Or if bin Laden hadn’t hurled airplanes like darts at his global targets? The hags’ argument is that lives would be saved and tragedies averted, and they’re right, in their shortsighted way. They choose to overlook the fact that such changes would destroy our Perfect Present, meaning that the Great Conflagration, or some similar event, would still be happening, and the suffering would never end. All the problems we’ve solved, all the broken aspects of society we’ve fixed, all the efforts we’ve made to eliminate human meanness and frailty—these accomplishments must be protected, no matter the cost.

  After watching the dead hags bob along the river, I drive into the city. My mind is wandering across subjects, across time, thinking of my wife and the home that I will never again visit, when I’m startled by the GeneScan. It turns on suddenly, but it’s not working as it should. I see dots and blips and streaks everywhere, the world before me fractured into a universe of constellations, as unreadable as the stars above.

  I swerve out of my lane, distracted. Some of the dots vanish, but one lingers; the GeneScan seems to be telling me there’s a hag close by. That’s not in my intel, though. I have a detailed agenda of the hags’ targets; I hadn’t expected anything else tonight, and nothing in this particular neighborhood. Perhaps I’ve stumbled upon the hags’ hiding spot—a fortuitous occurrence, as it would give me an opportunity to snuff them all out. I was that lucky in Poland once, finding the distant barn from which they were planning their bombings of Nazi rail lines; I eliminated them with a late-night fire and some well-placed rifle shots, my easiest gig ever.

  I do my best to follow the GeneScan, trying to link it to my internal GPS. It doesn’t work. The geographical info that the Logistics people provided to me was the best they could find, but that doesn’t mean much. The Archives themselves are imperfect, full of errors or taken from the wrong year. Excavators and dump trucks are parked all over this neighborhood, sudden detours rendering my maps useless, the trucks tearing down buildings and creating new ones. It’s sad to watch people so painstakingly build this world.

  Then I see police lights in my rearview. Annoyed at the fried circuits in my brain, I manage to turn off the unhelpful GeneScan as I pull over.

  The cops walk toward my car, one on either side. I’ve been driving with my windows halfway down, and I wonder how badly I smell of alcohol. And gun smoke.

  “License and registration,” says the cop to my left. He is amazingly white. His skin seems to glow, illuminated by the headlights of passing cars. I’ve adjusted during my different gigs, grown more accustomed to how pale the “white” people look and how dark the “black” people, but still, the racial markers are so odd here. It’s like being asked to describe the taste of something cooked with ingredients one has never heard of; there are no touchstones, no points of reference. Just foreignness and wonder.

  I hand him my driver’s license and the rental agreement. Identity theft was a big problem in this beat, and the Logistics people make use of such tricks in constructing covers. They peer through old files and computer systems—whatever survived the Great Conflagration and the many wars afterward and then the long decay of time—to find names that can be lifted, data that can be transferred, lives that can be stolen. They choose people we can “replace” by finding those who vanished or disappeared, those who died mysteriously, those whose records outlived them for a few days.

  The license says my name is Troy Jones and that I hail from Philadelphia. Within the Department, I go by Zed, and I don’t really live anywhere.

  He looks over my information, and I realize: These could be hags.

  Adopting covers as cops would be impressive, something beyond what they’ve done in the past. I turn the GeneScan back on, but it lights up suddenly and then, as if overwhelmed by the pressure, flickers off. I try again but nothing happens; my trusty sidekick has made an early exit from this adventure.

  I notice the cops have unsnapped the holsters on their sidearms. I’m not sure if that’s a routine move in traffic stops here. My own gun is in the glove box and might as well be a mile away.

  The other cop stands to the right of my car. I can’t see his face, only his midsection, a ballooning that suggests the physical requirements for officers in this era aren’t as stringent as in my time. He shines a flashlight into the Corolla, the beam lingering on the lightweight jacket that rests on the seat beside me.

  “Anything under that jacket, sir?” He sounds older than the first cop, tired.

  “No, Officer.”

  “Lift it real slow and show me.”

  I obey. Then he beams the backseat. Without the GeneScan to rely on, I feel momentarily adrift, a traveler dazed after losing his translator in a busy market.

  “Is there something wrong, Officers?”

  “You disobeyed a yield sign, Mr. Jones, and you switched lanes without signaling,” says the cop holding my license.

  “I’m very sorry. I’m a little lost.” I choose a random address a few blocks away and tell him I’ve been trying to find it. “I’m not from around here.”

  “I see that. Interesting accent too, you don’t mind my saying so.” That hurts more than he realizes—I spent days working on the voice, listening to old audio and watching video that the Archives people turned up, studying the contemp cadence and flow.

  “You don’t really look like a Jones to me,” the other one says, leaning down to shine his light in my face.

  I look away from the light, back at cop number one. “I have a complicated family tree.”

  “
What brings you to Washington, Mr. Jones?”

  “I’m a defense contractor in town for some meetings. I’m trying to find the office of one of my colleagues for a strategy session.”

  That cover was chosen for its vague air of mystery and severity, I was told. But the cops do not seem impressed. “A defense contractor? Really.”

  “Pretty late for a strategy session, isn’t it?” the other one asks.

  “Strategy is a twenty-four-hour thing in the defense industry,” I say. “Plus I did get a bit delayed on the drive down.”

  “We take defense strategy awfully seriously here in the District as well.”

  “Exactly what kind of strategy are you and your colleagues hatching, Mr. Jones?”

  I wasn’t expecting this reaction. I think for a moment, wondering what I did wrong.

  “I can’t really go into detail,” I say. “I can say that it’s intelligence related.”

  They wait a beat. “So if you’re going to a business meeting to discuss your strategy, shouldn’t you have some business papers?”

  “They’re in my trunk.”

  “Mind if we take a look?”

  “You can look there if you’d like, Officer, but the papers themselves are classified.”

  The fat cop laughs, an odd thing to witness since I still can’t see his face. I make a note of the name clipped to his dark blue shirt and do the same for his partner, for my Report of Historical Contacts. He says to his partner, “Can’t tell if we’ve pulled over Zawahiri or Colin Powell.”