The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  The lights in the houses of the diplomat’s immediate neighbors were off, but across the street a few were on. Crouching in front of their trash barrel, which blocked him from the house’s view, he fidgeted with his laces as if he were retying one of his sneakers. Then he carefully reached into the recycle bin. This was hardly the way the Agency had taught him to do dead drops, but given Sari’s restricted movements, it was the best he could come up with.

  He had told her to put whatever items she had for him in the side of the recycle bin closest to the street, to save him the trouble and the noise of rummaging through the whole thing. He found it on his first try, in an empty can of baby formula: a flash drive. He was impressed.

  He stood up and continued the way he’d been going, taking a meandering route home. Once there, he immediately uploaded the files onto his computer, erased the drive, and walked back to the Shims’. Decorative white stones were laid at the edge of their property; he lifted the second stone from the right and slid the drive beneath it. He nestled the drive into the dirt so the rock wouldn’t crush it.

  The data on the drive had all been in Korean, of course, which Leo didn’t know as well now as he had in his grad-school days. He wasted a couple hours scanning different files before conceding that he needed a translator. The next morning he handed it to Bale, who said he’d get some people to work on it.

  Late the next night, another quick call from Sari: grocery run, tomorrow. Evening this time, as Sari was needed around the house during the afternoon. He gave her new instructions, annoyed by the call. Maybe he hadn’t been clear enough; that last grocery run was supposed to be their last. Once you established the relationship, you weren’t supposed to meet with your spies any more than necessary.

  Of course, he wanted to see her. For not entirely professional reasons. Hell, for totally unprofessional reasons. But she sounded nervous on the phone, so he told himself the meeting would help calm her down; he could reassure her that she was doing a great job.

  Bale’s translators were quick; the following day, Leo was told by his boss that the drive had contained “some useful information,” but, though the translators hadn’t quite finished everything yet, most of the data seemed to be little more than “diplomatic dick-fondling,” as Bale described it—nothing important enough to be important. Try again, he said. And this time get Sang Hee’s computer, not her husband’s.

  At nine thirty that night he met Sari at a small parking lot beside empty fields in the northern finger of Rock Creek Park. The city’s light pollution made the sky above the spindly branches glow movie-screen gray.

  “Thank you for getting that flash drive,” Leo told her after she got in his grocery-laden car. He noticed she was wearing only sweats and had no jacket or gloves and that she was holding her hands together tightly. He turned the heat on full blast for her sake, and unbuttoned his jacket. “But we’re particularly interested in what’s on Sang Hee’s computer.”

  “I’m sorry—I assumed his information was more important.”

  Leo had told her otherwise, hadn’t he? “We’re very interested in Sang Hee. What you did was helpful, but I want to focus on her.”

  “She hurt her ankle again. She’ll be on crutches for a while longer, otherwise I wouldn’t get out like this.”

  “Good. You’re doing an excellent job.”

  “I can’t do this much longer. She suspects something.”

  “Why do you say that?” He tried to sound calm and natural. “Has she said something?”

  “I don’t know. She watches me, all the time.”

  “You said she did that before.”

  “I’m afraid something is… going to happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sari started rambling. She was scared and seemed convinced that Sang Hee could read her mind or something. She told him about some story Sang Hee had spun, about Sang Hee’s being a prisoner in a North Korean work camp, and how she’d murdered her family. That’s probably when the woman became possessed by demons, Sari explained. Leo would pass that on to Bale, not that it made sense.

  “She’s a mean lady, you’re right.” He had to redirect her. “What you’re doing is the best way of getting away from her permanently. You need to remember that.”

  She stared out the windshield. Looking over her shoulder he saw headlights as another car made its way down the curving narrow road. He watched it, then reached forward to adjust his rearview mirror so he could see the car drive away. No one should be on this dead-end road, as the park grounds were closed. Hopefully the driver was just lost in the labyrinth of Rock Creek Park. Or maybe some congressman was looking for a good place to dispose of an intern’s body. The car was getting stuffy but Sari still looked cold.

  “We should get the groceries out of your car,” Sari said.

  “If you focus on the good that will come from this, it will make it easier.”

  “The good. I don’t know what that means anymore.”

  He waited. “Why did you leave Jakarta? Why don’t you want to go back there?”

  She seemed prepared to dodge the question again. He was being too direct with her, overlooking the cultural differences, the power imbalance. He would scare her away if he didn’t change tack.

  To his surprise, she looked up at him. “They burned my mother alive.”

  “Who did?”

  “All of them. All of them.” Some leaves landed silently on the windshield. “I don’t even like to think of myself as Indonesian or Javanese anymore. I’d rather be something else. But I don’t know what. Everything else seems just as bad.”

  “What happened?”

  “When Suharto fell, all the riots. The people in the city hated the Chinese, said they were leeches, they ran all the businesses and loaned all the money and we Javanese were their slaves. So they rampaged through town, attacked Chinese, burned their shops and homes. My family worked at a store owned by a Chinese couple. People chased me and my sisters, but we got away. My mother stayed in the store, and they burned it to the ground.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “We looked for her for days. My sisters didn’t want to admit she’d been killed, thought maybe she was hiding somewhere in the city. But I knew she was gone—she was in my dreams that first night, and she hasn’t left them. After a couple of weeks the police got around to pulling all the bodies out of the rubble.”

  He searched for something to say, in any language.

  “My eldest sister went to Korea first, then the middle one. First I lived with some friends of my mother’s, but eventually they told me I had to leave, they couldn’t afford to keep me. I nearly starved. There were rumors some people in the city refused to hire anyone who’d worked for Chinese, as punishment. As soon as I got my chance to go, I took it.”

  “It was a… a bad time. There are other places, safer ones, where you could start over.”

  “Safer places?” She looked insulted. “That was my home. I grew up there. It felt safe to me, until one day it wasn’t. That’s the funny thing. Everyone knew he was a horrible tyrant—you weren’t supposed to talk about it, but people would say things when they felt they could trust you. But then when the horrible tyrant was finally stepping down, look what we did to each other. Maybe all those students and protesters were wrong. Maybe it was good to live under a dictator.”

  It was so hot, he wanted to turn down the heat but he saw that she was still holding her hands in front of the vents.

  “Well, it seems to me you’re living under one now, in that little house of theirs. And you don’t like it very much.”

  “I’m learning that everywhere is just as bad as everywhere else. Sang Hee hates me just because I’m not Korean. In North Korea they hated her just because her husband said something good about South Korea, or something. And here in America they’ll hate me because I’m not American.”

  “We’re not like that. Some people are, maybe, but most people—”

  “Do you believe tha
t? Or are you just trying to cheer me up?” She’d never been this direct before.

  “I do believe that. I do believe that people can improve. That’s what my country’s all about, finding a better way, a noble experiment.” Jesus, he couldn’t believe he was giving her a civics lecture. But what she’d said made him feel defensive about his country, about his job. “There are bad people in the world, yes, I’m not naive. But when you finish this job for me, when my friends say they have everything they need and they can pay you back, you’ll see that life doesn’t have to be as hard as it’s been for you.”

  She watched him for so long he felt uncomfortable.

  “I don’t know if you really believe that, and you are naive,” she said, “or if you’re just trying to trick me into doing you more favors.”

  “I’m not trying to trick you.”

  “Then why did you tell me you work for a bank?”

  She said it so naturally, in the same blank tone she’d been using, that it took him a second. “I used to work for a bank, in Jakarta, like I said, but—”

  “And now you read the computers of Korean diplomats and have well-connected friends who can help foreigners with no passports.”

  He waited, reassessing her, then said, “If you don’t want to do this anymore, I won’t force you. I can just walk away.”

  “Then I’d have no one to speak Bahasa with.”

  He could feel sweat rolling down the small of his back, it was so goddamned hot in there. The windows were starting to fog, and he feared some park cop might come knocking on their windshield, hoping to get a glimpse of a half-naked Bethesda cheerleader.

  “I’m sorry we can’t talk more,” he said. “I wish there were another way to do this. It would be great if I could take you out and show you the city. Maybe when this is finished…”

  She surprised him with a smile. He hadn’t seen her do that very often. “A date? A date with an American?”

  Oh, Jesus Christ, was he blushing? He hated himself. He reached for the heat, turned it down a bit, as if this action might make her think the redness on his cheeks were something else. He needed to remember that she was not as meek as she sometimes seemed.

  “Is that so hard to believe?” he asked.

  “Not so hard.” She was still smiling, but he found her face inscrutable—yet more evidence that this was not the best line of work for him. There were too many mysteries he couldn’t begin to puzzle out. “What would we do? On our big date?”

  “Well, that depends,” he said. “What kind of food do you like?”

  “Anything but Korean.”

  “There’s a great Thai restaurant not far from my house, near Dupont Circle.” He allowed himself to wander down this fantasy, inviting her along. “We’d have dinner there, then see a movie at my favorite theater, and—”

  “I wouldn’t understand a word.” She laughed.

  “I’d translate.”

  “I don’t think the other people would appreciate that.”

  “Then I’d rent out the entire theater just for us.”

  “This sounds like a very big date.” She raised her eyebrows, impressed. “But I don’t think I’d believe your translation. I’d wonder if you were just telling me the best parts and making up the rest.”

  He didn’t know what to do with that. “And then we’d take a taxi to the Washington Monument and ride the elevator to the top and see the city sparkling below us.” He hoped that wasn’t too phallic a reference.

  “And I would see all the happy Americans, holding hands.” She rolled her eyes. “It sounds very nice, like the fairy tales I tell their daughter every night.”

  Maybe she was right; his translation wasn’t all that believable.

  “I want to help you,” he said, trying to appear earnest. Then he reached out and took one of her hands in his. It was cold, the fingers narrow and hard. He felt her tense up and worried he’d made a mistake again. “Please stay with me a little longer.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze before releasing it.

  “Okay. But we’re running out of time. Can we move the groceries now?”

  After placing the last of the bags inside her SUV, they stood beside each other like a couple at the end of a date. And because he was still living in that little fantasy he had sketched for her, and because they both wanted to believe his translation, he stood closer to her than he otherwise might have. She looked up at him, and it seemed she was leaning toward him, or maybe he was only hoping she was—he wasn’t sure. When he leaned down to kiss her, she did not laugh at him or recoil. Perhaps his translation wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.

  Then he stepped back, and she smiled at him before getting in the SUV. Neither of them said good-bye.

  He should have gone straight home.

  Instead he drove slowly through the park, finally emerging near Chevy Chase, far from not only her house but also his own, to foil any potential watchers. The kiss, and the way she’d looked at him, and their strange, topic-spanning conversation had him too amped up. This was a ridiculous operation—it wasn’t even an operation, strictly speaking, just a blind trolling for anything of interest. He never should have told Bale about her. He should have just driven her to the Indonesian embassy, told her what to say. She would have had to go back to her homeland, which she didn’t seem to want, but surely that would have been better than where she was now. He had told her he’d help her even though he probably couldn’t. The more he thought about her, the worse he felt about the deception, and the more he wanted to deliver on his promise.

  At a red light, he looked at his empty passenger seat. The vinyl still bore the slight imprint of her thighs. He let his finger glide there. He breathed in and thought he could smell her.

  There was no practical reason for him to drive back to the diplomat’s neighborhood. It was counterproductive to risk being seen. Yet after driving into Maryland and coasting through Bethesda, watching the couples strolling to this Lebanese restaurant or that sports bar, and then winding his way back into the city, he pulled into an empty spot a block away from the Shims’. His windshield was just beneath the low bough of an elm tree, and he could barely see the dark windows of the house. He turned off the engine.

  He found himself yearning for another a glance, hoping she’d raise the window shades or maybe step outside. I’m a stalker, he realized. That’s all he’d ever been, really, and at least now he was being honest. He was a low-level errand runner, a pawn of secret machinations he would never fully understand. He knew this, and he hated it. He should be doing something else with his life. This was not the way to make a difference.

  The passenger-side door opened. He’d been lost in thought and was jarred by the sound and by the internal car light and by the way the vehicle sagged with the added weight of this unexpected stranger. He saw a pair of knees entering his car, and then a torso, and then a gun.

  “Keep your hands on the wheel,” the man said. “Look straight ahead. Now.”

  Leo obeyed. The man closed the passenger door and the light slowly faded. Leo could peripherally see the man holding the gun in his lap, aimed at Leo’s midsection. It was a black automatic. He had seen the man for only a second—somewhat dark-skinned, ethnically ambiguous; short hair; dark jacket, maybe leather; and black slacks. He seemed big, but maybe that was just the gun.

  “You can take the car and my money—”

  “Who are you,” the man asked, “and why are you tailing Mr. Shim?” The man opened Leo’s glove box, passed his hand through the stack of oil-change receipts and AAA maps, then closed it. Leo’s mouth went dry.

  “I don’t work for anyone. I’m just sitting here waiting on a friend, and—”

  “Spare me the innocent contemp act. Who do you work for, and where are the rest of them?”

  The man cocked the hammer of his gun. Then he started moving his hands, doing something Leo couldn’t discern from the corner of his eye. Another dark object was in the man’s hand. Leo could hear the sound of metal fitt
ing atop metal.

  “No one ever seems to walk down this block,” the man said. “You would be amazed by the things I can do inside a car. If you don’t give me answers, I’ll start with your kneecaps.”

  Leo tried to swallow.

  “That a wallet in your pants pocket?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take it out very slowly, and place it on the seat between us. Keep facing forward.” Leo complied, and the man flipped it open, removed the driver’s license, and dropped the rest. “All right, Leonard. Tell me about yourself.”

  “Look, I don’t know what I’ve stumbled into here, but—”

  “You don’t need to know. You only need to answer questions. Do you work with Wills?”

  “Will who?”

  “How long have you been back here?”

  “Back where?”

  “Here, now. How long have you been in this beat?”

  Whatever jargon this guy was using, it was new to Leo. “Look, this isn’t an operation. This is… my own thing.”

  The man seemed to consider this for a moment. “I’m asking for the last time: Who do you work for? Try to dodge that and you’ll never walk normally again.”

  Leo breathed. Who was this guy? He talked like he was an insider but he was threatening to shoot him. “Targeted Executive Solutions,” Leo said.

  “And you have no actual client, you just took it upon yourself to tail a random diplomat?”

  “I was… approached by someone with access. Someone I could run. I’m just… following up.”

  “Someone in the house, a maid?”

  He nodded, hating himself.

  “This has been going on how long?”

  Leo lied, shaving the time in half. His hands were sweaty, his fingers so slick on the wheel he had to tighten his grip to guard against their slipping suddenly and causing the man to shoot him.

  “You said them. Who are your targets?”

  “It’s, um, it’s pretty vague.”

  “Clarify it for me.”

  “The diplomat’s wife is a person of interest.”

  “But not the diplomat himself?”

  “Thus far, no.”