The intruder thought for a few seconds. “Tell me, Leonard Hastings: Do you believe in God?”
Leo had heard of people feeling cold shivers run down their spines, but he’d never before experienced it. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. In your opinion, how much of what we do is truly up to us? How much of it is predetermined, or at least dictated by larger forces we can’t control? Have you ever wondered that?”
Leo’s voice was a rasp as he said, “Existential thoughts are beyond my pay grade.”
“As is so very much. But it’s been puzzling me. All this activity, all this running around. Whatever intent we might have, not that someone like you seems to have much. But people in general. We try and we try, we work so very hard, we seek to control our own destinies. Isn’t that hilarious? We control nothing. Well, one another, maybe. We enslave one another, conquer one another—that’s the closest any of us get to God. We use the word God to make ourselves feel better about how tiny and insignificant we are.”
Leo was slick with sweat. All the oxygen had been sucked out of the car.
“Maybe you should think about these questions sometime,” the man said. “Like when you’re sitting in a car alone, watching people.”
“Okay.”
The man laughed and leaned back. “You really thought I was going to shoot you, didn’t you?”
“I’m… having some trouble figuring out your motivations.”
“Get used to being confused. I’m going to go now, Leonard. Do your best not to remember this conversation.”
Leo kept staring straight ahead as the man kicked open the passenger door and started to slide out. “Can I have my license back?”
“Call your DMV.”
With that the man left, leaving the door open, which again triggered the internal light. Leo looked at his mirror, but the glare obscured his view. He leaned over and pulled the door shut. The man was gone. Leo sat there, defeated, and gave his nerves a moment to settle before checking his wallet to make sure nothing was missing other than his license.
He started the engine and pulled onto the road, wondering if he was being watched even now. The intruder had moved with such effortless confidence that surely he hadn’t acted alone. They might even be renting one of the houses on this block; they’d no doubt filmed Leo’s recent recycling pickup. He decided not to drive home yet and instead found himself taking Prospect Street over Rock Creek Park and onto Connecticut, scouting for a place to pull over so he could get a drink, figure this out.
It didn’t make sense.
If Leo had accidentally stumbled into the surveillance net of some other agency—CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, Homeland, whoever—they wouldn’t have been so brusque as to point a gun at him. Turf battles were one thing, but death threats were a bit much. Did the man work for a different country or some stateless group? Did he merely want Leo to think that he worked for the U.S.?
He hadn’t been wearing gloves, had he? Leo wasn’t sure. God, what a failure he was, not even to be certain of that most basic fact. It was his job to observe, but add the specter of bodily harm into the mix and his panicked eyes turned inward. Maybe Leo did deserve the Knoweverything assignment; maybe he was no better than a mole sent to kvetch with lefty dreamers. He couldn’t handle the dark side. He replayed the scene in his head: he had told the man everything he’d wanted to know, had ruined his little operation in thirty seconds.
At least he could check for prints on his wallet and glove box, try to identify the stranger. He would sit in his apartment and recollect every step he’d taken to this point, try to figure out where he’d gone wrong.
His fingers weren’t shaking anymore by the time he parked his car. He looked at the passenger seat. Sari’s imprint had been obliterated by that of the mystery man.
Z.
I’ve never been so confused about a mission before. Maybe that bump on the head affected more than I thought; maybe those strange people who claimed to recognize me were warnings. Or maybe it’s simply that I’ve never been in a beat for this long—I’ve let myself get comfortable here, let myself care too much about what happens to the contemps.
After questioning the man on the Metro—not a hag, just a contemp investigator tailing Tasha, although I’m not sure why—I switched lines and took a train up to Mount Pleasant, to case the diplomat’s house. Which was where I found Leonard Hastings, another contemp playing shadow, another man who couldn’t identify his client as he spied on key targets. It made me wonder if that was how life worked in this beat, if everyone spied on everyone else, if parked cars were full of cops and feds and dicks, if on every Metro ride you were subject to the gazes of paid informants.
I pore through my intel again. Scan it backward and forward, look for the pieces I might have missed, extrapolate what the Department itself might have missed or willfully left out.
Then I catch a cab so I can get back to the motel Wills and I have been using as our home base. After hearing the unappealing destination, the cabbie grudgingly takes me there.
Wills’s light isn’t on. I knock on his door loudly. I hear him stumble out of bed, then he opens the door. Like me, he sleeps in his clothes.
Before he can ask me what the trouble is, I walk in and tell him there’s been a development with Tasha. I pace the room, glancing at him quickly to gauge just how unsettled he is.
“I messed up,” I tell him. “They got her.”
“They got—who?”
“The hags took out Tasha Wilson,” I lie. “I was watching her place, like you said, but without a GeneScan I couldn’t tell that another hag had snuck in the back. I heard the shot, and I broke into her house as they were leaving.”
“Oh.” He’s trying to think fast. “That will… definitely create some complications.”
“Yes. But maybe we can fix them. I have one of the hags.”
“What?”
“Tied up, in the trunk of his car. Here in the parking lot. I thought we could interrogate him together.”
“Wow. Good. Has he… said anything yet?”
“Not yet. I stunned him; he’s still out. Want to help me carry him in?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“It’ll be tricky to get him in without being seen,” I say, watching Wills carefully. He’s telling me plenty without saying a thing.
“I need to go to the bathroom first,” he finally says. “Wait a minute.”
I wait for much less than that. After he shuts the bathroom door, I lightly walk up to it, listen for a moment, take out my Stunner, and kick the door open. He’s standing in front of the toilet, loading a gun. He looks up at me and extends an arm, but he isn’t fast enough and I’ve already taken three steps toward him. I hit him with the Stunner, and his head snaps back from the shock. His fingers loosen around the gun barrel, and I take it before he can drop it—I don’t want a round to go off accidentally. For a second his hand stays in the air with mine even as the rest of his heavy body falls to the floor.
When Wills wakes up, he’s naked in the bathtub. I’ve bound his hands and feet, and the base of his head is leaning against the hard lip of the tub, the spigot scraping his temple. I’ve taped his mouth and he breathes loudly through his nose. I run some water on him, and his body tenses from the cold; he turns his head away to keep his nostrils clear. I shut off the water and sit on the toilet, gripping the Stunner, waiting for a moment so he’ll understand.
“You played me very well,” I say. “You weren’t sent here by the Department. The Department would never send two Protectors to the same beat—I knew that, but I was so thrown to see you here that I figured there must be a reason. I overlooked the most obvious one.”
I tear the tape from his mouth. He inhales deeply, then says, “What’s wrong with you, Zed? Think! We’re on the same—”
I hit him in the chest with the Stunner, set relatively weak. His head jolts back and snaps against the tub’s wall behind him. Fortunately the tub’s not po
rcelain, just plastic, otherwise the impact might have knocked him out.
“This will take a very long time if you don’t start admitting things.”
“Zed, I was sent here same as you. I’ve been—”
“You’ve been working for the hags, keeping your eye on me. The hag that I got at the convention center, he looked so shocked to see me. I wondered why. It’s because you were supposed to be stalling me, tricking me into following random people around, telling me they were hags doing recon. You didn’t do it well that first day. But ever since, you’ve been pointing me in the wrong direction while you claimed you were eliminating other hags. The only thing I’m still trying to figure out is why you didn’t just kill me.”
I stun him again.
After a few seconds, he says, between pants, “I know you’re going through a hard time, Zed, but you’ve got to forget about—”
Another shock convinces him, finally, to stop denying it.
“You’ve had me staking out a hotel for nothing; you knew my GeneScan wasn’t working, so you lied about what yours said. You must have gotten a real kick out of playing me like that. Now it’s my turn to get some kicks.”
“I haven’t been the one playing you, Zed,” he says after catching his breath. “The Department’s been playing you—been playing both of us, this whole time.”
“How did the hags get to you? Did they use your family?”
“I don’t have one.” His eyes are cold.
“What, then? They offered you something the Department didn’t?”
“Yes: the truth.”
“Just tell me where the other hags are, Wills, and maybe we can still part friends.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Okay, I’ll give you an easier one: Admit that Tasha has nothing to do with the Great Conflagration. You just had me follow her to distract me.”
He laughs. “You wish she weren’t important—that’s obvious. The job hurts a lot worse when you get to know the people that our bosses have already written off, doesn’t it? History’s losers. But maybe they’re all important, Zed. Ever think of that? Maybe everything’s important, everything matters. What if the Great Man theory is a myth, and everyone can be great, and there’s no way for you to tell which person might one day make history?”
I stun him out of his philosophical reverie.
“Zed,” he says, biting his lips so hard he draws blood, a line of it dripping down his chin, “listen to me. What you and I have done for the Department, it’s all lies. We aren’t preserving the integrity of history, we’re rewriting history, remaking the world in the regime’s image. There was no Great Conflagration, not originally. But they’ve sent so many of us back, and they’ve tinkered, they’ve eliminated the people who opposed them and eliminated the Events that went against their worldview. All the conspiracy theories are true, Zed. This is our opportunity to make it right, and—”
“You’ve lost it. The time travel, adjusting to the beats, avoiding contemps—it’s hard, I know. You couldn’t handle it, and they got to you at the right moment, spun your head around.”
“No one ran me, Zed. No one recruited me. They tried to tell me the truth, plenty of times, when I was the one with the Stunner in my hands. But I followed orders, preserved the integrity of history. I kept lying to myself, just like you are. Still, all those dying words echoed in my head. They sounded eerily true, you know? When I was back home, I started digging around. I noticed the changes, changes that we had made. Entire peoples had disappeared, areas had completely vanished. Society not quite the way I remembered it. That’s why they keep us sequestered on campus, Zed—they don’t want to let us see the world that we’ve helped them remake. You saw how they reacted when we left campus that one night.”
“That was Derringer trying to recruit us. I see that now.”
“Wrong. Back on campus, I looked into the background of our superiors, the ones we’ve been serving so faithfully all these years, and—”
I hit him with the Stunner again, square in the chest. His teeth chatter for a few seconds afterward. I might need to stuff a cloth in his mouth soon.
“This is going to take a very long time,” I say. “But time is the one thing we’ve always had a lot of, isn’t it? Come on, no more of your hag stories. I want facts. I want the exact number of hags who are back here, and where they are right now. And where they’re really coming from, so I can stop them as soon as they appear.”
“There are millions, Zed. They’re everywhere.”
I laugh. “Great. Thanks.”
“Everyone is a hag to the Government, don’t you see? Not just the rebels who send themselves back, but everyone ever born, in any time. Anyone who dares to see the world in a different way than—”
I stun him again.
After recovering, he’s back at it: “We believed we were working for our Perfect Society, Zed, but we weren’t! We’re just doing it to keep a bunch of bastards in power! They use us to turn their fictions into reality—I know you’ve thought this too. They told us we were part of the Disasters Division, right? Well, there is no other division, Zed—it’s all disasters! All we do is ensure disasters for everyone else!”
He’s getting too loud, so I fasten the gag on him and stun him again.
I exhale deeply, lean against the wall. Suddenly feel overcome. Hopefully he’s in too much pain to notice. He’s spinning stories, I tell myself; he’s trying to confuse me. I won’t get anything out of him; I should just kill him now. There was a time I would have done that, quickly and without overthinking. I hate that I can’t do that anymore and hate how horrifically true all of his stories sound so far.
I tear off his gag.
“Zed. Let me ask you something.” He’s speaking through gritted teeth, his voice a thin whisper hammered flat. “If everything is so perfect in our time, then why are you in so much pain?”
“I’m the one in pain?”
“You’re a walking sympathy card.”
“What happened to my family… has nothing to do with our job.”
“Really? Why is it that—”
“It was an accident! Some idiot spun out of control on the thruway, and suddenly my life is different. That has nothing to do with—”
“But it does.” A line of bloody drool hangs from his chin. “What’s the point in going to such trouble to create, to protect, this supposedly perfect order if it isn’t perfect, if it can’t be perfect? Because we ourselves are so damned imperfect. Even if our pasts are erased, even if every group forgets what horrible things it did to every other group, even if all those hatreds and vendettas and grudges are wiped clean, we’ll still make messes. We’ll still have accidents. We’ll still insult each other and irritate each other and sleep with the wrong person and grow to hate each other. We’ll still want what the other one has.”
“You’re talking about two different things.”
“Fine, keep living in their dream world. Be their slave a little longer.” Then he laughs—an impressive feat at this point—and there’s a condescending tone to it. “So, did they make you the promise? And you believed them?”
“What promise?”
“They made me the promise too. That after I fulfilled my quota, after I performed enough missions and the trouble with the hags was over, they’d send me back to her.” His eyelids are drooping from fatigue, but his eyes shine. “And I believed them too.”
“Why don’t you just—”
“Has it occurred to you how odd it is that all of the Protectors are widowers or have lost children? Or maybe you didn’t realize that, because they did their best to prevent us from getting to know each other. That’s one of the ways they recruited us, Zed. Sad men who’d do anything to have their pasts back. They knew we wouldn’t care about the irony. None of that political nonsense matters when it’s your own family.”
I feel heat behind my eyes, spreading down my limbs.
“They’re not going to save your wife and daughter, Zed
! If that’s why you’re doing all of this, if you’re still holding out hope that after you finish your missions they’ll send you back to save them and live happily ever after, then you’re—”
I pull the trigger of the gun I hadn’t even realized I’d picked up and blast the rest of his sentence through the back of his skull.
Trying to breathe, I place the gun on the lip of the bathtub.
He only said that to force me to shoot him, to spare himself what I was planning to do next. He was lying—he didn’t have a dead wife; he must have gained access to my file and learned about my family, then tried to get to me through them. He discovered their promise in my personnel file somewhere.
I tell myself these things as I clean up the mess I’ve made.
Part Three
Green-Tags
20.
Tasha hadn’t expected so many checkpoints at Walter Reed. It was as though the military had brought all the security from the Green Zone back here to northwest D.C., where the biggest danger was being hit by an SUV driven by a texting soccer mom. She wanted to blame the military for this new life of having her bag and purse checked everywhere she went—not just airports but Wizards games, the Smithsonian museums, her own office building—even though she knew the military was hardly to blame. This was America, and for once she didn’t want to be treated like some potential assassin, would appreciate a smile from a stranger, would like people to remember how it felt to live in a city made up of neighbors rather than spies and informers. She knew it was petty to feel this way, knew that some of these guards themselves might have returned from the desert, might battle nightly memories of explosions from queues just like this one. Perhaps she was angry only because all these men in uniform made her miss her brother more.
When she reached the front desk and finally got to a person who did not want to x-ray her or examine her belongings, she told the woman whom she was here to see. Then a call was placed, a pen was tapped against a desk, a message was relayed, and Tasha was asked to wait.
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