The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  I look at the kids again, staring at a world that has no place for me. The woman’s eyes stay on mine.

  “I’ve made you uncomfortable,” I say. “I’ll go.”

  I don’t look back at her as I walk away. I bend to unlatch the childproof fence, swinging it closed behind me to lock the children in and keep them safe.

  4.

  Leo Hastings’s employer, Targeted Executive Solutions, was not terribly executive, and it did not always offer solutions. But the work did involve targets.

  TES occupied a building in one of the many nondescript office parks that sprouted from the Northern Virginia asphalt thanks to heavy watering from the government’s defense budget. Also in the building were the offices of a dentist, an accountant, and a real estate firm. Across the pedestrian-unfriendly street was a Chick-fil-A, and faintly in the background was I-395’s constant arterial hum of personnel and dollars into and out of the capital. TES’s office had no windows. Anyone curious enough to Google it discovered a slick though merely three-page Web site offering bland assurances about the company’s commitment to its clients’ success. The listed phone number led to a voice-mail box that an employee checked once a week. Clients used a different number.

  This was where Leo had beached himself after being thrown from the Agency’s boat, a mere half a mile away. Some of his ex-colleagues had encouraged him to think of it as a sort of promotion. Plenty of people were leaving the Agency, which was still being blamed for 9/11, for failing to predict the future, for not having a crystal ball, for not being perfect. And being blamed for everything it was doing to prevent another one. Talent was leaching from the government side to the contractor side, but it wasn’t really going anywhere, his ex-colleagues explained. Hell, you’ll get to do basically the same thing, and for more money. Spooks and analysts were trading in their blue government ID tags for green contractor ID tags, patrolling the same halls at Langley, only this time as consultants in better suits.

  But Leo was hardly doing the same thing for TES that he’d done for the Agency. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to do the same thing anymore.

  How he had become involved in this sort of work was a complicated tale, one he himself didn’t always understand. Part of the problem was that he couldn’t tell anyone. And isn’t that how we learn things, how we commit them to memory and make them a part of ourselves, by telling other people, wrapping our experiences into tidy stories? Sitting at a bar having drinks with old friends: Hey, let me tell you how I was recruited by the Agency. Or lying in bed with a woman: Have I ever told you about the time I helped track a cell of Islamist terrorists in Jakarta? Or on the phone with his father: There’s this time I fucked up and a bunch of people died. Anything like that ever happen to you? These were stories and questions he was not allowed to voice. So they silently caromed in his head like echoes of words that hadn’t been spoken, soundless reverberations, ghosts of stories. They took on a spectral power, haunting him.

  Leo had always been a thinker, a quiet one, studiously independent. He’d grown up in Bethesda, the son of an energy executive and an intellectual property attorney who had heroically managed to have a child despite their hectic schedules and who seemed disappointed that they weren’t congratulated for this more. Leo read a lot. He scored a spot at Harvard, majoring in history with a focus on modern Asia; took a semester in Kyoto; and spent his first two years after college teaching English in Indonesia, living in a borderline-prehistoric village three hours from Jakarta. Why there? Mainly because he didn’t know what else to do with himself, partly because he wanted something unique, and, yes, partly because he was intrigued by hints from an acquaintance about how even normal-looking white guys could easily score with hot Asian chicks (which turned out to be woefully untrue at the Muslim village where he was stationed). He spent another year backpacking the continent, and then it was back to Harvard for grad work.

  He somewhat perplexed his parents by choosing neither law nor business but political history as his field. They reminded him often of how paltry a salary professors earned. The brilliance of their son was never in question, only the best way to make use of that brilliance.

  Leo spent years crafting an unwieldy dissertation on Asian dictators, paying particular attention to the Kims in North Korea and Suharto in Indonesia. Despots fascinated him. The cults of personality, the secret police, the godlike ability to not only rule but also define reality for their subjects, the various and unbelievably creative ways to kill dissidents—how could anyone not find this interesting? The thing that uncomprehending citizens of free countries often missed was how charismatic tyrants were, how frighteningly likable these guys could be when they weren’t torturing you or murdering your family. Kim Jong Il was beloved for the way he’d fought off the Japanese invaders, appreciated for his backslapping bonhomie. Suharto had a magnetic smile, a way with women, and was cheered for cracking down on Communists and convincing the islands’ hundreds of ethnic groups to play nice. That sort of charm was a mystery to Leo. He learned to speak Bahasa while in Indonesia, he taught himself rudimentary Korean and Cantonese while studying the Kims and Mao, but that certain something that the great leaders possessed, that it quality, was utterly beyond him. Which made it all the more fascinating.

  Leo was preparing to defend his dissertation when the Twin Towers fell. He was in Logan airport that very morning, awaiting a flight to Washington to visit his parents. Maybe he was even sitting in the same chair one of the hijackers had occupied a few hours earlier. The burning tower had been on the TV for a few minutes before Leo realized it; he only noticed when he found himself staring at a young coed, maybe ten years his junior—God, he was getting old—and finally he heard what the announcer was saying, saw the screen. He stood, walked closer. By the time the second plane hit, there was a crowd. First everyone so quiet, then one by one the gasps, the cell phones materializing in shaky hands, the airport staff running in both directions. People watched the planes on the tarmac with a sort of helplessness, as if those flights too were doomed but the passengers inside them didn’t know it yet. Then the planes stopped lifting off, the constant rumbling on the other side of the glass was silenced, and unhelpful announcements droned in the static as lines formed everywhere, as if people still believed that order would be restored if they were patient and found the right person to complain to.

  When the second tower fell, he stood motionless, surrounded by an equally frozen group in front of the TV. And then this one man at a nearby bar who had been sitting the whole time, like a sort of sacrilege, like some apostate churchgoer who refused to kneel at the appropriate moments, this man started laughing. Again there were gasps. Was the guy crazy? He wore a suit, had short hair, an athletic build. He was ethnically interesting, darker skin without actually being dark-skinned, and he was fucking laughing. Finally an equally imposing, Irish-looking guy—a construction worker or off-duty fireman—yelled at the laugher. The laugher took that as his cue to leave; he stood and dropped some bills on the table beside his empty martini glass (who drank martinis at that hour?). The fireman said something. Words were exchanged. Then the fireman punched the guy in the face. There were more gasps and a few claps of applause. Then the laugher, who wasn’t laughing anymore and wasn’t even smiling but still somehow seemed to be smiling, like with his eyes maybe, shook off the blow and walked away. Only later did Leo think to himself, Jesus, that could have been one of the terrorists, he could have been left behind for some reason. He wasn’t really drinking, the martini glass was just a cover. And we let him escape.

  In a weird way, in a way that Leo knew didn’t make sense and was due to the shock, he felt that his own proximity to the mysterious laughing man implicated him in the day’s horrors. He should have punched the man himself—he’d thought about doing it, he’d wanted to do it, but he’d stayed motionless and impotent until this burly fireman or longshoreman or cop had stepped in to play the hero. Leo never did anything; despite all his academic laurels and achievement
s, when he was honest with himself, he knew he had done nothing. People who did things were guys like that cop or fireman (his brethren who minutes earlier had perished by the dozens in Manhattan) and the young soldiers from rural and ghetto America who would be sent to pay those bastards back. Leo was a lucky representative of the creative class, except he didn’t really create anything, and over the following weeks he began to feel like a complete, utter asshole. God or good fortune or luck or the Constitution of the United States or his white skin and Y chromosome had given him so much, and what had he ever given back?

  One month later he defended a dissertation that suddenly seemed less relevant to the world. His own words sounded stale—he almost wanted to revise the whole text, but it was too late. Afterward, one of his advisers took him out for celebratory drinks that Leo didn’t feel he deserved. Like a confused foreign correspondent, Leo tried to describe the conflict roiling in his mind, tried to analyze the two warring camps and explain their historical grievances to his audience. Is this what I’m supposed to be doing with my life? The professor said he understood, that he felt the same way sometimes. And then he told Leo that it was interesting he’d brought this up, as the professor knew of a certain job opportunity. What did Leo think about working for the government? There were people who would like to talk to Leo, who were impressed by the arguments elucidated in his papers, a few of which had landed in policy journals and on the desks of important think tanks. His recent experience living in the world’s most populous Muslim nation and his fluency in Bahasa certainly didn’t hurt. Leo’s adviser gave him a name and a number, which Leo saved into his phone but was afraid to call.

  The number stayed unused in his phone for two months.

  In December he rode Amtrak to Manhattan to attend the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, where all the young PhDs begged and groveled for teaching positions in the safe ivory tower, like escapees of police states pleading for asylum. He had a few interviews the first morning and heard himself trying to convince not only his interlocutors but also himself that this was what he wanted. Yes, put me somewhere safe. Surrounded by books. Where all I have to do is read and teach and think. And not do anything. He felt the shame burning in his stomach, rising up to consume him. He blew off his afternoon interviews so he could walk to Ground Zero. He stared into the gaping hole, and the gaping hole stared into him.

  He walked a few blocks west, found a relatively quiet corner, and called the number his adviser had given him. He was routed from person to person and then had a long conversation with a man who did not introduce himself. When an ambulance drove by in the middle of one of Leo’s answers, the man asked Leo where he was.

  “Um, honestly, I’m standing in what would have been the shadow of tower number two.”

  There was a pause, and then the man asked him if he could take a cab to Penn Station and buy a ticket to Washington so they could talk in person.

  “Right now?”

  “Unless you have something better to do.”

  Leo caught the train.

  A few years later (and a few misadventures later and a few politically motivated, territorial clusterfucks later) here he was, walking the postapocalyptically deserted hallways of TES.

  He was still fuzzy on how the company’s organizational flow chart was structured. There was no watercooler gossip, as the operatives were discouraged from fraternizing—he’d only met a few of his coworkers, and they were not friendly. The walls were soundproofed, and employees were told to keep their doors shut at all times, so he could never tell if he was the only one at work or if dozens of other drones were typing and collecting within the hive. Leo didn’t know if his accomplishments would be noticed by anyone important, or if this sanatorium-like space would be his prison, a solitary confinement lasting the rest of his professional life.

  More irritating was the fact that he hadn’t yet met his client. All he knew was what was expected of him: he was to keep tabs on various D.C.-based domestic activists, learn what they were planning and when, find out where their funding came from (particularly if any of it was from abroad), and, specifically, determine the sources of some distressingly accurate muckraking stories on new Web sites such as knoweverything.org. It was an extreme Left site, the typical rants and diatribes, but a handful of its articles were unusually sound journalistically, suggesting that these people knew what they were doing. But which people? There were no bylines on the stories, no masthead listed. A search of the ISP had yielded only an obscure holding company in Sweden, which meant that a lot of work had gone into covering the authors’ tracks. They had written exposés on military contractors’ financial excesses and uncomfortably accurate stories on the activities of government intelligence agencies overseas and at home; they’d reported rumors of illegal wiretapping, and even posted a sensitive (and, actually, pretty funny) transcript of a drunken conversation between an anonymous reporter and a nameless administration official in which the official had spilled some rather delicate secrets. Some of the site’s stories were filtering out to the mainstream media, causing problems.

  There were various foreign organizations and persons with vested interests in dampening the American public’s appetite for the wars, and Leo needed to learn which of them were funding the activists. Some of the stories on the Web site could only have been written by people with access to classified intelligence, meaning that the publishing of those stories was a crime. Also, it was wise to stay informed of such groups’ activities and learn their recruiting strategies, study the ways in which they conned impressionable young people into joining in their dissent. It felt light-years away from the counterterrorism work he’d been doing in Jakarta, but his new boss had argued that there were many parallels indeed, and that Leo’s experience infiltrating groups of youthful malcontents was invaluable.

  Two months earlier, after readjusting to life in America, he’d started the assignment by showing up at a multiorganizational meeting to discuss an upcoming antiwar rally, and he had barely gotten comfortable in the hard plastic chair when an aging hippie with a bad case of the touchy-feelies had started blathering to him about the importance of what they were doing (“I just want to get involved, you know, have an effect on something,” she’d explained in a quick but monotone voice, a prophet crossed with a zombie). He’d already known what was in store: unbelievably long meetings, torturous portions of which would be dedicated to deciding arcane matters of nomenclature and semantics; motions in favor of or against items whose importance he could not fathom; spirited debates between people whose opinions were so closely aligned that their minute philosophical differences would drive them into apoplexies of conscience. He had been sure to have a strong cup of coffee beforehand. And there he had sat, fidgeting from caffeine and boredom, hoping he might stumble upon some information that could possibly interest his client. He entertained himself by mentally composing sections of his report. How many d ’s were in pedantic? Did pathetically have a hidden a in the penultimate syllable? If he made the report as boring as possible, would that be a sly way of spurring his boss into granting him a new assignment, or would institutional inertia maroon him on this desert island?

  He’d had enough in the bank that he could have taken time off, traveled, maybe tried to write some political essays or even a spy novel. Yet still he felt the calling, so he’d put out feelers for any kind of opening. Which had brought him to Targeted Executive Solutions, but he saw immediately that the job was beneath him: it could have been handled by any rent-a-spook who looked young enough to fit in with a roomful of angry twentysomethings.

  He filed his reports with his boss, Mr. Bale, who passed them on to the unknown client. Leo was unclear if this extra layer of insulation was at the client’s request or if it was TES’s way of controlling how the company’s image was presented to its cash-laden government handlers.

  He knocked on his boss’s door at ten exactly.

  “Morning,” Bale said as Leo sat down. Bale pre
tended to smile, and Leo tried too. On the wall behind the desk were four framed nature photographs Bale had supposedly taken while hunting in Michigan, images of a wolverine devouring a deer carcass.

  Bale had some follow-up questions from Leo’s report from the previous week: what meetings Leo had attended, what Web sites he’d trolled, what contacts he’d made.

  “Still no closer to the source of those stories?” Bale asked.

  “I get pushback from certain people whenever I try to get too close, which tells me something. But I’m worried I’m making myself too present—this overeager guy who shows up at every meeting of every group in the city? I’m making myself too visible.”

  “I suppose.” Bale always spoke in bland tones, whether he was talking about the Hoya game or ethnic cleansing. He was like a minor character actor whose name you never learned even though you’d seen him in twenty films. Bale could be an accountant, a market researcher, a soccer dad, an Internet porn addict, a failed novelist, a quiet neighbor, just another suddenly middle-aged guy who’d been left behind. Which made him good at what he did. Leo feared that in another ten or fifteen years, he’d look just like Bale. At least Leo was taller. “What are you getting at?” Bale asked.

  “I wonder if it might be better for me to stand down for a little while, do something else.”

  “I know you aren’t thrilled with the assignment. But we need someone on it, and you seem right for it. Unless you have a way of getting an agent or two to do the work for you—which I’d be okay with depending on the circumstances—we need you out there.”

  Leo had thought of this too. He’d tried to identify conflicts within or between the various groups, leadership rivalries, unappreciated members whose divided loyalties could be exploited. There were many such rifts, but the right situation had yet to present itself.

  The tone of Bale’s comments—“you seem right for it,” the remark about Leo’s inability to turn an agent—annoyed him. He was about to be dismissed when he found himself saying, “There’s something else, unrelated. Something that could be interesting for the firm.”