“Holy shit, I know this dude,” he said.
“Who?”
He told her there was a story about a reporter who’d recently gone missing. Allegations were made that he’d been kidnapped, or worse, to silence an investigation he’d been reporting on, something to do with intelligence matters. Tasha couldn’t tell how much of that was in the story and how much of it was T.J.’s conspiracy-minded editorializing.
“How well do you know him?” she asked.
“No, I just meant”—and he looked up—“like, I’ve read his stuff. Jesus.”
Was that what he’d meant? At the office, when she was working on a GTK-related matter, she found herself overanalyzing comments her coworkers made. She obsessed over anything any of the partners said about the Times story, wondering if the remark had been made for her benefit, to goad her into a confession. When someone voiced a criticism of U.S. foreign policy, Tasha held her tongue, worried that a similar comment coming from her would mark her as a dissident, a disgruntled American who might have leaked documents.
What if someone at the firm was still investigating, checking computer records to see who had accessed which files when? What if she played along with Leo (or pretended to play along with Leo) only to have the firm nab her anyway? She was battling on two opposite fronts: pretending to be innocent at work and pretending to act with deceit for her spymaster.
As if reading her mind, T.J. asked what kind of law she practiced. He’d never shown any interest in her work before, had been happy to let his activism dominate the conversations.
“Corporate law. I admit it’s not very edifying. But I have so much school debt, I have to do this for a few years until I can move on to something more… worthwhile.”
“That’s it right there. They rope us in with our debts and our 401(k)s and our property values. Make us vested participants in shit we don’t like. Because we’re American, we deserve all this. Everything done in our name, for our own good, and we’re supposed to smile and thank them with our votes.”
“Not that you vote.”
He made a distasteful face. “I try not to do things that can be stolen. Democrats and Republicans are pursuing the same agenda.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Seriously. Republicans believe that the scariest thing in the world is an all-powerful, unfettered government crushing their freedom. Right? And Democrats believe that the scariest thing in the world is a group of all-powerful, unfettered corporations crushing their rights. What they don’t want to admit is that the corporations and our government are completely intertwined: the modern corporatist state.”
“Is corporatist really a word?”
He shrugged. “If it ain’t, you can file a petition for me with the relevant office.”
Then he glanced at the cover photo on the newspaper between them, the president smiling while making some doubtless important announcement from the Rose Garden.
“You know what a president actually is?” he asked. “An unreliable narrator.”
“Really.” She sensed a speech coming.
“He’s the one who tells us how it is, right? And we fall for it, we read along with his story and let him construct the reality around us. We want to be entertained, soothed. Until one day, we hit that certain chapter, right, and suddenly we see the light and realize, Holy shit, we’ve been lied to the whole time. Reality ain’t like that at all. His story was bullshit. But by then, it’s too late. We’ve all been suckered, and we just have to follow along with his little plot.”
“You really believe that?”
“You don’t?”
“Look, I have friends who are journalists, and they’re hardworking, level-headed people. They do their best to sublimate their opinions and tell a story objectively. I don’t think that makes them ‘tools of the Man’ or whatever you want to call them.”
He watched her for a second. “So why are you here talking to a freak like me?”
A damn good question. Was she here for Leo or for herself? For Marshall or for T.J.?
This was the best segue she was going to get. She told herself she wasn’t actually doing what Leo wanted, she was only pretending she was. She would simply gauge T.J.’s interest. Stringing T.J. along now was practice for deceiving Leo later.
“Sometimes the freaks like you are right about some things,” she said, “but no one’ll listen to you unless you have someone like me to lay it out for them.”
“Well put.”
“Speaking of which. You know that GTK scandal that hit a few weeks ago?”
T.J. nodded. His eyes, she thought, suddenly seemed more professional than friendly. Leo had told her that T.J. himself was the hacker who’d created the e-mail address for her, which meant he had most likely read her correspondence with the Times. Or had he kept his word and stopped himself from e-eavesdropping?
She leaned closer, and he seemed happy to do the same. “Someone at GTK or my law firm must have leaked it. We still don’t know who did it. But it got me to thinking. I mean, do you know who some of my firm’s clients are?”
“I don’t keep up too well with legal rosters.”
“Well, one of the firm’s clients is Consolidated Forces, a private police group, like Hellwater but smaller, and worse.”
“I know who they are.”
“Break into their training camp to shoot any documentaries?”
“Not yet, but I’d love to try. They’re way out in the middle of the Nevada, so they’re hard to get to. Some groups based in San Francisco have tried it, but they have guards at the outer perimeter.”
She had rehearsed this, telling herself it wasn’t wrong, that she wasn’t setting up a snare for someone she considered a friend because she would in fact free him just in time. Legally speaking, it might seem that she was entrapping T.J., but ultimately she wouldn’t let that happen. She was doing this in the name of finding out the truth about Marshall. T.J. had his cause, and she had hers. He’d understand.
“Charges have been brought against Consolidated for some shootings last March,” she said, “when their guards, who are just supposed to provide protection for diplomats, opened fire at a market. There weren’t any diplomats nearby, so they had no reason to even be there. It was a vendetta or something; they killed the relatives of a woman the guards had raped.”
“I’ve seen a few stories.”
“The other night I had some drinks with a couple of the associates who are working on the case. That company is crooked, T.J., and the guards are guilty as hell. They’ll never get punished, though. The U.S. is pressuring the local government to drop the charges, tying it in with aid packages. But what if the public learned more about what really happened?”
Leo had told her to be vague, sketch things out slowly. She was only supposed to have talked to people over drinks; her knowledge should have holes in it. Leo’s story, more or less, was that her law firm’s defense of Consolidated had turned up troves of files relating to other, as-yet-unreported crimes. Shootings, kidnappings, rapes. All perpetrated by the company’s mercenaries, and all pretty much sanctioned by the U.S. government.
These crimes were fictional, Leo had explained. The files that he and his nameless colleagues would soon give to her, and that she was to pass on to T.J., contained detailed information about imaginary events and nonexistent people. A real news organization would discover this when it tried to corroborate the story, but an enraged, politically motivated Web site would rush online without doing its homework. Once readers learned it was all a hoax, the site would be discredited, Consolidated would have all it needed for a libel suit, and Leo and his associates would know for certain that T.J. was behind the Web site.
She would have to hope she could bleed information about Marshall out of Leo before T.J. did anything with the fake story.
“So you’re thinking of leaking it to a reporter?” T.J. asked after taking a moment to digest what she’d said.
He still wasn’t tipping his hand about GTK. M
aybe he was wondering why she wasn’t.
“No. And I’m surprised to hear that from you, Mr. ‘The Mainstream Media Is in Cahoots with Washington.’ You saw what happened with that GTK story—whoever leaked it sent it to the Times, mainstream media outlet number one, and it was instantly absorbed into the Establishment’s story line before vanishing again. The only way to truly influence things is to go outside the system. I’m thinking something edgier, maybe a Web site.”
She felt dirty to be borrowing his own language and ideology like this. If he noticed her appropriation, he didn’t show it.
“Would those associates who told you about this be willing to dig up some more?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, they’re disgusted by it, but it’s the kind of disgust people just suck up and live with.”
“As so many millions do.”
“But I could dig around.”
“It would be a hell of a story. How long would it take you?”
“I don’t know. It’s not my client, so I’d have to find a way into the files. Pull some later-than-usual nights, tap into someone else’s PC.” In truth she could never do something like that in an office like hers, but she was using T.J.’s ignorance of standard office culture against him. “Even if I got some kind of smoking-gun document, what would I do with it?”
“Give it to me.”
She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Why you? I came to you for advice, not to get you—”
“I know some people, all right? If you got this to me, we would find a way to use it in the most effective way possible.”
She paused. “I’ll look into it. I can’t even promise I’ll be able to access anything. This is my career we’re talking about, remember.”
He said that he understood. “Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with.”
She wished she could tell him just how far outside her comfort zone she already was.
16.
Sari kept thinking of the word slave. Leo had said she was their slave, but that wasn’t right. The diplomat was still sending money to her sisters in Korea, wasn’t he? He claimed he was, though there was no proof yet. She wanted to write to her sisters, tell them of her plight and confirm they were getting the money, but she wasn’t sure if there was a way to mail it—if the Shims weren’t sending the payments, then they would certainly intercept the letters. And they never let her online. Maybe she could give a letter to Leo. If she ever found time to write one.
Had she been a slave back in Seoul, a new arrival from Jakarta, scared of a new country that seemed so different, so mechanistic, so cold? Had she been a slave when she’d been a night janitor in those offices, or when she’d worked in that plant assembling toys for children she would never meet, and her fingers were slashed by the machines and her back ached from stooping for hours? Had she been a slave as a girl, helping her mother work in the Mings’ store? The Mings had worked them hard, had not been terribly kind, but surely her family hadn’t been slaves. They had been paid for their labor, had managed the rent for their apartment. Part of her hated Leo for using that word, hated the way it made her look back at her own life, and her mother’s. Perhaps someone like Leo was simply so free that anyone else’s life looked like slavery.
She hid the cell phone he’d given her beneath her mattress, and every third night she left it plugged in under the bed so it would have power if she needed it. He had asked her what days she took the garbage and recycling out (which she did twice a week, a former annoyance that now would come in handy). He told her how to leave notes for him and what signals to put in the windows, the sash here or the sash there, a lamp moved to this side or that. But her employers were sticklers for order, and she interrupted Leo many times—No, they would never let me move the lamp there, they would suspect something—before they finally found a manageable solution.
It all seemed so bizarre. Was this how newcomers became Americans, by betraying others?
She couldn’t figure Leo out. She’d never known an American, so maybe this was how they acted. That kiss at the grocery store, delivered stiffly and quickly, not so much a formality as something stolen. He’d left the store immediately, as if worried the shoplifter alarm would go off. The next time they’d met, in the parking lot of that destroyed school, she wondered if he would try for another one.
She wanted him to. He was nothing at all like the boys she’d spent time with—schoolboys in Jakarta and coworkers in Seoul, jokers who tried to impress her with their silliness, by acting as if they didn’t care whether they impressed her or not, which fooled no one. She had never imagined herself with a white man—at least, not until the past few days.
Her own motivations were confusing to her. She wanted out of this house, yes, absolutely, but she hadn’t been sure it was truly possible. So when she’d called him that first time, all she’d dared hope for was someone to talk to. That kiss in the grocery store, as hurried and surprising as it had been, had been the best gift she’d received since coming to America. She craved another kiss, a real one this time. Not stolen but given, freely and slowly.
But when they met at the parking lot, instead of getting a caress, she’d gotten an assignment—a potentially dangerous one. All day and night she did other people’s bidding, and now she had to add another layer to that. But he was offering her an escape, and this was exactly what she’d wanted, what she’d been too afraid to even hope for. Wasn’t it? Maybe she was confusing the need to touch someone with the need to be released. They could be so similar.
First she would have to find the information he needed. The devices had to be hidden somewhere; Sang Hee seldom entered Sari’s room, but how could Sari be sure she wouldn’t decide to? She left Leo’s electronics in the garage at first, stuffed in the bottom of a box of gardening tools. Late that night, after the twins’ feeding, she snuck out to retrieve them and stashed them in her closet. At least they were small.
Maybe she never should have called him. What had she been hoping for, that they would fall in love and he’d carry her away to some perfect American existence? She was ridiculous.
Then again, wasn’t that exactly what he was offering? This handsome American, living in their capital, surely with an important job—he was taking a risk by helping her like this. Why? Maybe her hopes weren’t so ridiculous. Maybe he did want to carry her away. Or maybe they were both ridiculous. Which made them either perfect for each other or a dangerous pair indeed.
Sari altered the timing of her chores, dusting or tidying the living room when Sang Hee was typing on her computer on the off chance the mistress would receive an interesting call. If one of the Shims were in their bedroom with the door open, she would clean Hana’s adjoining room, lingering by the doorway. But Hyun Ki received few calls, and Sang Hee almost none. She was oddly reclusive. Before her injury she ventured out occasionally, and she still managed to go out for lunch now and then, but Sari noticed that she never made plans with anyone by phone. Either she went to lunch alone or she communicated with her lunch dates through other means. Maybe Sari should mention that to Leo.
Hyun Ki rarely took calls at home, in part because he was seldom there. If the phone rang at night, he would take it upstairs. Sari was usually busy with the twins then, but even if she hadn’t been, picking up the downstairs line to eavesdrop was too frightening.
The couple didn’t even seem to talk to each other much. There was precious little to overhear. Surely they spoke at night, in their bedroom—but even so, it must have been done in whispers, because Sari never even caught any mumbling. She didn’t think they really loved each other. She seldom saw them kiss or embrace; Hyun Ki administered the occasional peck on the cheek with ambassadorial formality. The more she forced herself to watch them, the odder they seemed. The only conversations she overheard were trivial—a doctor’s appointment for Hana, a restaurant recommendation he’d received from a colleague.
Very late one night, Sari walked out of the twins’ room after consoling them and not
iced that the kitchen light was on. Hyun Ki was talking on the phone.
“She’s making things difficult,” he said. “I’m not sure what to do.”
Sari made it as far as her bedroom doorway and then stood there, leaning against the wall. Hyun Ki was not a loud talker even in the daytime. His voice seemed sad, or frustrated, and given the hour, she assumed he was talking to someone in Korea.
“She wasn’t like this before. I knew she had a short temper, but still… It’s different now.”
Sari could see the kitchen from there but not the table at which he was sitting.
“No, it’s not Washington. If she’s lived in North Korea, she can live anywhere. That’s not it—it’s the twins. They’ve changed her.”
The kitchen floor creaked, and the sound frightened her into her room. Had he heard her in the hallway, or was he just standing to get a glass of water? She crept back into her bed, lay down, and pulled the covers up. She couldn’t hear him from here, not even any mumbling. Eventually she fell asleep.
And the next evening, after tucking Hana in, she entered the hallway and heard the Shims talking in their bedroom. They’d been out for dinner and must have returned while Sari was reading Hana stories. The diplomat was scolding his wife.
“You need to stop hitting the servant. I know you don’t like her, but it doesn’t look good for us.”
Sari was stunned, never having expected Hyun Ki to defend her. It was true that he’d never raised a hand against her like his wife had, but he’d never treated her with respect either.
“She’s lazy and stupid and she keeps ruining our things,” Sang Hee said. “And one of the twins still isn’t growing as fast as the other.”
“Then we can fire her and get someone else.”
Sari hadn’t thought of this possibility. Being fired implied a more normal work arrangement than what she currently had. Could she really get herself fired? That would be perfect! But how? What could she do wrong that would merit firing, not just more abuse?
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