The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  “Of course not. But he fell into my life right around when you did, and now I find that he’s in the same line of work.”

  “Describe him for me.”

  She did, though a lot less flatteringly than she might have a few hours earlier. Leo was quiet for so long she thought he’d hung up. “Leo?”

  “I think I know who you mean.”

  “What a shock.”

  “He and I do not work together.”

  “You know what? I don’t really care. Whether he’s your partner or your rival or some other spy from another agency or country or company, I do not fucking care. I am tired of being played by boys who think that treating people like pawns makes them kings. No, Leo, it makes you a fucking child playing with toys. Go unleash your imagination on someone else, because we’re through. You even think of using what you had on me, I will visit it back on you tenfold, I promise you that.”

  “Do you still have his briefcase?”

  “I gave it back to him. I don’t want that kind of poison on my hands.”

  “What did you see in the files? What made you think this guy works with me?”

  “He told me he worked in health care and instead he has a briefcase full of memos about spy technology and telecom contracts and computer codes. And detailed bios of journalists and activists, including myself—scary shit, thank you very much. I might not have understood it all, but I’m bright enough.”

  “Did it have the name of his company? A letterhead or anything?”

  He really didn’t seem to know Troy after all. But he was awfully interested.

  “Enhanced Awareness. Somewhere in Maryland.”

  “You have his phone number?”

  She gave it to him, pausing a few seconds for him to write it down before adding, right before hanging up, “Oh, and Leo? Get a real job.”

  25.

  Leo’s cell phone had woken him at seven. He’d left the device in his apartment the previous night so it couldn’t be used to track his movements with Sari. As he reached across the bed for it, his first thought was that it was her calling, that she was disobeying his instructions already. But it wasn’t her—it was his boss.

  He took a sip of water before answering, said his name three times to clear out his throat. “Good morning,” he said into the phone, hoping he didn’t sound as if he’d just woken up.

  “We need to talk, at the office, immediately.”

  “Sure. What about?”

  “Your little side project.”

  “I don’t have a side project.” Not in a smart-ass tone but flatly stated. You told me it was over last night, so it is. Sir.

  “Just come to the office, immediately.”

  He showered quickly, wishing he could draw it out so he could think more. But he’d thought plenty last night and hadn’t had any epiphanies then either.

  Who the hell were Sang Hee and Hyun Ki? That’s what it kept coming back to. His agent had successfully loaded a couple of flash drives from each of their home computers, and the information had turned up nothing (if Leo believed what Bale had told him). Then why had Leo twice been warned away from them by people who refused to identify themselves? People who acted like intelligence officers and dropped just enough signifiers to imply this, but who backed away from anything concrete. Why were they so worried about Leo tailing the couple?

  He’d barely slept. He put some drops in his red eyes to disguise the fact that he’d been running all over the D.C. metro area last night with a fugitive. He took some coffee in a travel mug and zipped along on his reverse commute to the antiseptic Virginia suburbs. Targeted Executive Solutions’ office was barely a mile from the hideous motel at which he had stashed Sari. The motel was also fewer than twenty blocks from the Pentagon, and a short drive from the Agency. Chances were, countless case officers and even military personnel used the motel to stash a variety of agents, witnesses, felons, spies, and prisoners. It had seemed like a good place at the time—he’d needed something fast, something without cameras or credit card scanners, something he could walk the last few blocks to so that no taxi driver would recall bringing him there—but now he was worried. For all he knew, she’d been picked up already.

  The offices were as abandoned as always when he walked in. He proceeded straight to his boss’s door, knocked, and was told to come the hell in already.

  “Anything you’d like to tell me?” Bale asked when Leo sat in the uncomfortable chair.

  Life at the Agency had given Leo an aversion to open-ended questions. “I’m sorry?”

  Bale watched him an extra second. It occurred to Leo that he knew precious little about his boss. Bale acted as if he had Agency experience, but did he really? And if so, what exactly had he done? Analysis, fieldwork, administration? What parts of the world had he worked in, and for how long? Who else worked here?

  “Your little agent snapped,” Bale said. “She attacked Hyun Ki and his wife with a knife last night, sending them both to the hospital. The wife has lacerations on her hands and a few bruises, but he has numerous stab wounds in his chest and back, as well as defensive wounds all up his arms. He called 911 at nine twenty-seven, they were taken to Sibley’s ER, and he was in surgery for two hours. He’ll live, but he isn’t saying anything now. The wife was stitched up and immediately picked up by staff from their embassy. What little info we’re getting from them is that their maid grabbed a steak knife and went samurai.”

  Leo decided not to tell Bale he was mixing up his Asian cultures.

  “I was afraid this might happen.” Leo tried to appear analytical and calm. “She seemed meek enough to me, but they were pushing her awfully hard.”

  “Where is she?”

  Leo looked confused, then surprised. He tried to remember every nonverbal tip-off that showed someone was lying so he could avoid all of them. “Wait, you mean she wasn’t arrested?”

  “Where is she, Leo?”

  “I never contacted her again after your call. Jesus, this was probably happening at the same moment you and I were on the phone.”

  He knew that someone eventually would find the cell phone stashed in her bed and see his number in it—D.C. police, or maybe the CIA; hopefully not the South Korean embassy or some other spy group, but all were possibilities. And there was a strong chance that someone on the American side would look at Leo’s phone records and see the surprising fact that just minutes after Hyun Ki called 911, Leo received a call from his neighborhood Latino grocer. He supposed he could claim the call was to tell him that the empanadas he’d ordered were ready to be picked up, but someone would no doubt interview the Latin American staff, who, after being threatened with deportation or health-code violations, would be happy to talk about the frantic, wounded young Asian woman who’d used their phone that night.

  He had very little time. Waiting until morning like this to see what tack the diplomat and Sang Hee would take had been a mistake.

  “Where do you think she would go?” Bale asked. Leo couldn’t tell if his boss believed what he’d said so far.

  “The only place she ever went was Whole Foods, as far as I know. She doesn’t know anyone in the country and only speaks Bahasa and some Korean.” He shrugged. “How hard could it be to find her?”

  “If the cops or someone else finds her, is there anything that connects her to us? Does she know your real name?”

  “Yes.” When he saw Bale’s expression, he said, “Look, when I met her she was just a pretty girl in a grocery store. I didn’t realize she was going to turn into an asset. When harmless strangers ask me my name, I tell them.”

  “One of your many mistakes. Look, I don’t need to tell you that if the Koreans piece together the fact that you were spying on their diplomat, you are in serious trouble. We had no authority to do anything, and my friends at State will suddenly forget they ever knew me. My company will be eviscerated. I will not allow that to happen. You need to find this girl, immediately, and silence her.”

  Leo crossed his legs.
He hated how easily he showed physical signs of discomfort, but he hadn’t been expecting Bale’s implication. “That’s very far above my pay grade.”

  “Are you listening to me? You could go to jail; I could go to jail. I’m not going to let a fuck-up by a new hire who can’t even successfully tail a bunch of peace activists ruin my career too.”

  Leo was very still. Then he asked, “What are your other operations and relationships, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I do mind.” Bale stared him down for a moment. “It goes without saying, Leo, that you’ll be fired when this is over. But if you want to have any chance of doing even remotely similar work ever again, you will get this taken care of. Immediately.”

  It wasn’t difficult for Leo to figure out he was being followed. He’d noticed the silver Jetta behind him on the Rock Creek Parkway that morning on the way to work, and again ten minutes later as he navigated the tangled highways of Northern Virginia. And there it was again when he drove back into the city a couple of hours after his meeting with Bale.

  The Jetta followed him into the city, finally fading when it became clear that Leo was driving back to his apartment. Which he was until he got the voice mail from a raving Tasha. He pulled into a space on 16th, called her back. She knew the guy, the strange guy with the gun. Had slept with him, apparently. Jesus Christ. Leo tried to calm her down as he worked through what she was telling him. Troy Jones. Enhanced Awareness.

  Where had he heard of Enhanced Awareness before? He opened his shoulder bag, removed the files he’d taken from Hyun Ki’s briefcase. He had skimmed the contents the previous night before collapsing into bed. Mixed in with a number of diplomatic cables and forms that were very illegal for him to possess but nonetheless seemed uninteresting was a memo addressed to Hyun Ki from a James Harrows, director of business development at Enhanced Awareness LLC, based in Laurel. Leo reread it: Harrows was following up on a meeting they’d recently had and was excited about demonstrating some of his company’s new products. Leo wasn’t sure if the vague business-speak was hiding some code or if it really was that boring. No mention was made of the government of South Korea; no proper names at all were given. Harrows looked forward to hearing from Mr. Shim and further discussing how his company could meet his and his colleagues’ needs.

  Finally a connection, though Leo still didn’t understand it. Troy Jones worked for a company that was trying to do business with Shim, and therefore with the government of South Korea. At least, it looked that way. It was very possible that Enhanced Awareness was just a front, that Jones and this Harrows person worked for some government agency (which agency, and which government?) that was trying to ensnare Shim in something. But if they were trying to recruit him as an agent to spy on South Korea, they wouldn’t put anything in writing.

  Leo pulled back onto the road and headed east, trying to make sense of this. The Jetta reappeared somewhere around Foggy Bottom. Two men were inside, both of them white, but he couldn’t see much else. No hats or striking hairdos.

  They were two cars back as he drove down the M Street corridor of clothing chain stores and tourist restaurants. Then he wound his way through Georgetown’s brick row houses, so tiny and tidy they seemed like stratospherically expensive dollhouses for particularly powerful dolls. He found street parking, tried not to look over his shoulder for the Jetta again. Carrying his shoulder bag, he jogged up the tall stone steps to the library at Georgetown University.

  This is what he’d been reduced to: doing intelligence research at a college library. He knew he had better resources at the office, but he didn’t trust Bale anymore. Any Web site he visited or call he made would be monitored, and he still wasn’t sure why or by whom. When he’d returned to America he’d bought himself a guest card for the Georgetown library for emergencies like this. He found an unoccupied computer and surfed the Web, then checked Nexis for articles on Troy Jones and his employer.

  The annoyingly common name led to numerous stories on professional and college athletes, drug dealers, a city councilman in Seattle, and an author of sexually explicit novels for black ladies. Nothing on a Troy Jones who might have been involved in intelligence work. Leo had expected that result, but he’d still needed to check.

  Enhanced Awareness did not have a Web site. He did find a few newspaper articles mentioning the company; it was described as an intelligence contractor in a long and amorphous story about the recent privatization of government work. Then Leo noticed a byline; one of the stories had been written by Karthik Chaudhry. The young journalist who’d gone missing a few days ago.

  He detoured his search, looked up more information on Chaudhry.

  He was confident that his shadows were not in the library—​everyone there looked like either a typical wildly privileged college student or a harried professor. He asked one of the librarians, a cute brunette born when Leo was a college student, if there was a pay phone, and she pointed him to the third floor. Once at the phone, he dialed the number on the otherwise blank card that the men in the SUV had given him yesterday.

  “Yes?”

  Leo recognized the voice.

  “Hello,” he said, raising his voice an octave, “I’m trying to reach James Harrows.”

  “To whom am I speaking?”

  “I represent a client interested in doing business with Enhanced Awareness.”

  “I don’t really handle sales, but if you’d like to talk to—”

  Leo hung up, having gotten the confirmation he was looking for. The men in that car weren’t with the Agency after all but with Enhanced Awareness, meaning they were Troy Jones’s colleagues. Or maybe ex-colleagues. Unless, again, the company was a front for the Agency.

  Outside, crossing the quad, he couldn’t see his tails, though he knew they were out there. Using his cell this time, he called Gail. Her voice was decidedly neutral. Yes, she was still in D.C. He asked if she could do him a favor, quickly.

  “Not if it’s the kind of favor I think you mean.”

  “I just need you to look up information on a company, and one of its employees.” He assured her he wasn’t trying to use her to get classified information (though he was hoping that that might happen). He just needed the basics, and he wasn’t in a position to find them. Could they get a drink tonight to discuss it?

  Gail didn’t sound enthusiastic, but she didn’t say no.

  Leo walked down to M Street and into a sporting goods store, bought some gym socks and running shoes that he didn’t bother trying on. The salesperson, a young guy with a thick Indian accent, seemed personally insulted about this, insisting that Leo try them on first to make sure they fit well, but Leo said he was in a rush. Finally the clerk took his cash—which he viewed warily, as if a customer who didn’t use plastic for an eighty-three-dollar purchase merited suspicion—and rang him up.

  Three doors down, Leo bought a new wardrobe at a Gap. Jeans, a long-sleeved waffle shirt, a lightweight nylon jacket, boxers, socks, and a blue baseball cap with a capital G. The shadow had not followed him into the last store, and Leo didn’t think he was being watched here either—they were most likely outside—but still, he couldn’t risk being seen buying clothes for Sari. She no doubt could use new underwear, but she’d have to put up with that a while longer.

  He paid cash (for a nearly two-hundred-dollar purchase, again earning a surprised look from a clerk) and took the overlarge bag from the young lady at the register. As he walked he carefully kept the bag from brushing against his body.

  Across the street was one of the locations of the Washington Sports Club. It was the kind of overly sleek place that made him feel uncool for not scoring dates at the elliptical machine—dozens of flat-screen monitors pleaded for attention, house music played so loud that bringing one’s own iPod was redundant, and the staff at the front desk were as stylish as the hostesses at the restaurants lining the street. He waved his membership card and headed to the locker room.

  He wasn’t sure if any of his clothes or p
ossessions were bugged, but now seemed an appropriate time for extreme countermeasures. In the empty locker room, he carefully stripped naked and placed all of his clothes in his messenger bag. Then he put on his new, bug-free wardrobe. He smelled like a shopping mall. The shoes were a little too springy, but they fit—he’d asked for a half a size too big, just to guard against getting a blister, as a limp would have been noticeable.

  He placed his wallet and his cell phone, turned off, into the locker and spun the lock’s dial.

  The locker room was at the end of a long hallway in the back of the club. Across the hall was a fire exit, which he opened, guessing it wouldn’t trigger the alarm that its large sign warned people it would. He was right. Then he was outside, in an alley. He jogged to the end, then walked naturally through a parking lot and down to K Street, which in this part of town ran in the shadows beneath the Whitehurst Freeway. No one was watching him. He flagged down a taxi and took a ride across the river.

  * * *

  After quick stops to buy the cheapest digital camera he could find—nearly depleting his supply of cash—and some groceries, he walked twenty minutes to the USA Motel. He gave his coded knock, holding his breath.

  “Yes?” she asked in Bahasa.

  “It’s me. Open, quick.”

  The latches turned and she let him in. He closed the door behind him swiftly, even though he was confident no one had tailed him since he’d shed his outer skin.

  They were alone in a motel room. He hated himself for thinking it, but she looked great. She had showered recently, and her hair was pulled back more tightly than before. The room felt warm to him, but she wore her track coat on top of the rest of the outfit he’d bought her last night. They both looked so ridiculously sporty in their new duds, a yuppie couple ready for their morning jog along the Potomac before they headed out for brunch or maybe just read the Post all afternoon.

  Speaking of which, he wished he had something she could read or entertain herself with, but he didn’t have any books in a language she’d understand, and it wasn’t worth scouring the city for anything. The boredom and stress must be driving her crazy.