The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  “What’s going on?” she managed to say without sounding too, too panicked.

  “We’d like to hear about your relationship with Troy Jones.” That was said by the man to her left, who was bald and had a neck that suggested there was plenty of muscle hiding beneath the shapeless blue Metro jumpsuit. The partner flanking him was Asian with graying hair at his temples. Neither of them held anything, no paper or recorder or weapon. But she did notice there was a large duffel bag at the feet of the Asian guy.

  “Who the hell are you?” she asked.

  “Someone who just asked you a question you should start answering.”

  “I’m an attorney. I know my rights. This is kidnapping.”

  They were illuminated only by a dim light that, she hoped, would not fade off in a few seconds now that the doors were shut.

  “You are an anti-government activist, driven to rash decisions by your brother’s recent tragedy, allying yourself with radical domestic elements and doing everything possible to impugn the reputation of our armed services. And now you’re hanging out with a former intelligence officer who recently disappeared with information valuable to the U.S. government. This isn’t kidnapping, Miss Wilson; it’s an example of the unfortunately extreme measures we need to take to protect our country when it’s threatened by its own citizens.”

  “Anything you’d like to ask me, you can do with a lawyer present.”

  He smiled. “But you are a lawyer, as you so pompously pointed out. You’re present and accounted for. So, by all means, let’s do some Q and A.”

  She wondered what would happen if she screamed Rape! But the doors were no doubt thick enough to keep her from being heard. And she wasn’t going to entertain them by lunging for a door handle. The van made a sharp turn, and she crammed her right hand into the seat to keep from leaning over too far.

  “I don’t think you fully appreciate how friendly we’re being,” he said. “We picked you up like this, Miss Wilson, to show you how easy it is. We can do this again, at any time. If you think your law firm connections impress us, they don’t. And you won’t have those connections much longer if you don’t play ball.”

  “Why not, because you’ll accuse me of leaking a certain story? Sorry, but that threat’s already been made.”

  “It doesn’t make the threat less real. We could indeed nail you for GTK, but that’s just a start.”

  “What else do you have?” Another turn, not even a sharp one, but the lack of windows was getting to her. She told herself to breathe slowly, not think about vomiting.

  “How about your connections with fringe writers who are about to launch an online story slandering a vital American contractor?”

  “Which you people blackmailed me into!”

  He looked offended. “Which people? All I know is, you’ve been accessing files from your firm, doctoring them to make them more salacious, and then passing them on to your old squeeze T.J. so he and his hacker nuts can defame the company and cast aspersions on the United States military.”

  “This is complete…” But she shook her head and let the words die.

  “Are you trying to say I don’t know the whole story? If that’s the case, then please enlighten us.”

  “So, what, you’re Leo’s muscle? Someone sent you in because they didn’t think he was being tough enough?”

  “What makes you think we work with a Leo?” The Asian guy finally spoke.

  “What you saw in that briefcase made you pretty angry, didn’t it?” the bald one said.

  “To realize that there are assholes who make it their business to butt into private citizens’ lives? Yes, that made me pretty angry.”

  The van wasn’t turning anymore, but it was driving awfully fast. Like Leo, the men hadn’t flashed any badges, hadn’t identified themselves or their employer. But they knew about her and Troy, and the fact that she’d looked inside his briefcase.

  “When everything is working properly, Miss Wilson, things like this don’t have to happen.”

  “So when that utopia comes, people like you will be out of work, huh? That must mess with your motivations.”

  The van apparently tried to change lanes, and someone honked, and the van veered back to where it had been. Tasha was reminded of the fact that she had no seat belt here. The two men wore such blank expression she imagined they’d been in far more hazardous situations than this.

  The bald one said, “Start telling us about Troy Jones.”

  “You seem to know him better than I do. You said he’s a former intelligence officer?”

  They didn’t answer that, but their expressions—regret on the talkative bald guy’s face, annoyance on the quiet Asian guy’s—suggested they both wished the bald guy hadn’t let that slip.

  I’m not a part of that, she remembered Troy saying. I’m not proud at all. The look in his eyes, and the crushed tone of his voice. It hadn’t made sense at the time; it was as if he were reading the script for the wrong play. But the meaning of the lines was becoming clearer to her.

  “It sounds like you guys need to get your own house in order,” she said, “and stop trying to make it other people’s problem.”

  “I’m afraid this is your problem,” the bald one said, reaching into his pocket for a cell phone. “Start talking, or I’m calling your firm, now.”

  She took a breath and stared at the smug look on his face, and it was as if all those hallmarks of fear—her quickened heart rate and the sweat along her back and the tension in her stomach—were transformed into unmitigated rage. She had been so angry for so long, and when Leo had presented her with a target for this rage, she had mistakenly tried to contain that anger and use it toward other ends. She had been trying to walk a tightrope between Leo and T.J., and suddenly all the stress and dizziness of that performance vanished, and the thought of simply stepping off the tightrope and falling was too intoxicating to deny.

  “No, actually,” she said. “You know what? Fuck you both, and fuck your invisible driver. Tell him to pull over and let me out, now.”

  “I’m not bluffing, Miss Wilson.”

  “I’m not calling your bluff. I’m just saying I don’t fucking care. Call my boss. Tell him. I’m cutting the cord.” T.J. had won, and the credit cards and fifteen-dollar drinks and 401(k)s had lost. She had the feeling she was doing something headstrong and regrettable, but the surprised looks on the men’s faces only made her push harder. “You have nothing on me anymore. Leo told me that the choice was mine, that I could choose either my ideals or my job and money. Well, I’m choosing my ideals. Assholes like you never have to make that kind of choice, do you, because your only ideal is power and money. So don’t sit there judging me, just call my boss and get it over with.”

  They had said her law firm connections didn’t impress them, and maybe that was true. But she didn’t think they wanted someone to go public with their domestic surveillance activities. If they were the types to make more violent threats, then they would have done that already. She hoped.

  “Very well,” the bald one said, looking at his phone’s keypad.

  She recited the phone number for him, and he made the call.

  The three of them and the silent one behind her (who hopefully was not about to put a black bag over her head—Jesus, was she actually thinking this?) sat without speaking for a few seconds. The Asian guy looked at his partner as if unsure what he would do now, as if they hadn’t considered the possibility of such recalcitrance.

  The bald guy listened, then typed someone’s extension into his keypad, and then his eyes went to Tasha again—he seemed to think she was on the verge of reconsidering, of pleading for clemency. Silence again, and they waited as the call went to voice mail. The thug seemed to wait even longer than necessary, all but begging Tasha to beg him to stop, but she wouldn’t. He finally said, “Hello, Mr. Coyle.” He was leaving the message for Tasha’s least favorite partner at the firm. “I’m calling to inform you that one of your firm’s associates, Tasha W
ilson, is the person responsible for leaking the information about GTK Industries’ delayed shipments to the press last month. You’ll receive documentation proving this in a few days. I sincerely hope that you and your partners use that information to take appropriate steps for the good of your firm and your country.”

  She would not grant them the satisfaction of looking angry. “Congratulations. You now have no leverage over me, so pull over.”

  “Not so fast,” he said, making another call that required the press of only two buttons. The steeliness in his eyes suddenly seemed more threatening. The van had slowed down and now it spun a bit, getting on an exit ramp, and she had to put a hand on the windowless wall. They wouldn’t bother to get her fired first if they were going to do something rougher to her afterward, would they?

  “It’s me,” he said into the phone, his voice quieter than before. “She’s refused.” A pause. “Yes, that’s been done.” His eyes on her as he waited. She told herself that these were the bored eyes of a bureaucrat calling his manager to see if an applicant’s paperwork had been processed yet, and not the cold eyes of an assassin. “In my opinion, yes.” Another pause. He glanced at the duffel bag. “For now, okay.”

  He put the phone back in his pocket. The conversation must have been piped into the front seat, because without a word from anyone, the van slowed down again, then made a turn. After a very tense minute, the van came to a stop, and the Asian guy opened the back door and got out. She saw a parking lot, and in the distance a Laundromat.

  And as beautiful a sight as the parking lot was, she nonetheless hadn’t liked that “For now.”

  She stepped out of the van. The bald one even offered his hand so she wouldn’t slip. They were silent, though—they seemed to have decided she was no longer worth speaking to. The Asian guy got back in, put his gloved hand on the door to close it, and the sense of freedom flooding Tasha’s limbs (so taken for granted before, and so cherished now!) hit her brain as well and made her ask something before fully considering it.

  “What did you do to his wife and kid?”

  The Asian guy scowled. “Nothing. They died in an accident, and then he snapped.”

  “Troy is not a well man,” the bald guy said. “He harbors a lot of ill will against our government. Some of which is due to some misguided political opinions his wife passed on to him, and some of which is just his mind deteriorating from… what happened.”

  “Or so we’re told,” the Asian guy said. They were awfully forthcoming now, as if they thought they could elicit information from her this way. “We’re not shrinks. We’re just trying to find him before he causes some real harm.”

  Harm to whom? she thought, but this she knew enough not to ask. She just walked away, holding her breath, a larger part of her than she wanted to admit wondering if she was about to hear a gunshot. But no, the sound that came was quieter: a door closing, the van driving away.

  She was in the lot of a derelict strip mall that she either had never seen before or had driven past many times without noticing it. The Laundromat, a Chinese restaurant, a dollar store, two shuttered storefronts. Northern Virginia, she guessed, which meant they’d taken her on 395 and then exited after the river.

  No one was around, and few cars were in the lot. She walked to a bus stop and sank onto the bench. Suddenly her nervous system collapsed, as if it had used up all its reserves trying to remain calm and now was giving up. Her legs were shaking, as were her hands, so she hugged herself and tried to wait it out. It wasn’t even cold enough to see her breath, yet her teeth clattered as if she’d been dunked in an icy pool.

  When her fingers finally stopped their spasms and she regained control of her jaw, she used her phone’s GPS to figure out where she was, then called a cab.

  * * *

  Tasha had always prided herself on her intelligence, her good judgment. Yet time and again these past few weeks, she found herself confused, her perceptions skewed, the world’s signals not making sense. She didn’t know if this was what it was to be in mourning, if her brainpower was being diverted from basic tasks because she was so consumed by thoughts of her brother; or if she was paying the price for getting involved in matters best avoided; or if she was indeed a tiny victim of forces so large they were beyond any one person’s ability to comprehend. Why was this happening to her?

  She wondered this as she paid her cab fare, looked up and down her reassuringly van-free neighborhood, and turned the key in the door of her ransacked house.

  Pillaged house, destroyed house, trashed house. Inside-out house. Un-house.

  The twelve-hundred-dollar sofa she’d bought from a boutique in Old Town had been gashed and disemboweled. Her shelves were bare, and her books lay on top of one another on the floor, open and upside down like victims of genocide spreading their arms to protect their children from the firing squad. Her refrigerator had been moved several inches away from the wall, her dishes thrown on the unforgiving tile floor. A couple spots in the dining room and living room where floorboards had been worn down and replaced by a previous owner were now torn out entirely; the vandals had apparently suspected those were trick doors. They had torn her fucking floor open.

  She made it to the bathroom in time for the toilet to catch her vomit.

  After she stopped, when she made it back into the totaled dining room—the table upside down, the upholstery of the chairs spewing out—she felt a burning on her cheeks. Like she was being watched. How long had they been in here? How many of them? It was like they were still here, would always be here, no matter how she cleaned and replaced and scrubbed. She would always feel their eyes on her, feel their arms around her waist lifting her away.

  Then she realized that the jarring whiteness of her walls meant that all the decorations had been removed from them. That black rectangle on the floor, sitting in a bed of shattered glass, was Marshall’s army photo, turned backward and broken open. She rushed over to it, picked it up. The print was torn in half, Marshall decapitated.

  She didn’t even want to see the second floor. The torn-out carpeting on the steps told her it would only be more of the same.

  It was worse. Her desk drawers were pulled out and thrown down, attacked by poltergeists; erasers and pens and Post-its spread across the floor. Her computer was gone. Please, not the computer. And where were her notebooks? She looked under the mattress, which was far from its usual spot. She nearly threw out her back moving her bureau into place, hoping the notebooks and files would be revealed, but no. They’d stolen her computer and her disks and her CD-ROMs and her backup hard drive and all of her notebooks and files. In their search for whatever deep, dark secret they feared Troy had left behind, they’d taken every record she had of Marshall. All those e-mails she had painstakingly gathered, and the printouts and scans she’d made of his blog posts. The names and numbers and addresses of the men and women with whom he’d served. She tried to breathe, tried to remember if she had the information anywhere else. Some of it was online, but most of it wasn’t. Marshall was gone, again.

  29.

  Leo had made it back to his house, not noticing any more shadows but assuming they were there. Inside his apartment, all seemed as he had left it, and the knob turned with the key the way it always did. He realized how paranoid he was becoming, to question every little thing like this.

  He tried to stop running through the various bits of information he’d learned in the last twenty-four hours and focus instead on what he needed to do next. He would get an ID for Sari—he’d already placed a call to start that process and would meet with his source in less than two hours. He had researched Amtrak schedules, printing one out from the Georgetown library, just in case his home Internet usage was being monitored, and had stopped at the bank on the way back from his surreptitious visit to Sari and withdrawn thousands of his own hard-earned dollars. He’d handled that much cash before—more, in fact—but never had it been his own money. It made him feel even more vulnerable.

  He was m
icrowaving some leftover Indian takeout and brewing coffee when his phone buzzed with an unfamiliar D.C. number.

  “Leo Hastings?” A man’s voice. Possibly a few years younger than Leo.

  “Speaking. Who’s this?”

  “My name is Special Agent Hale Michaels with the FBI. My partner and I would very much like to speak to you about Enhanced Awareness.”

  “They’re a popular conversational topic lately.”

  “They’ve been popular with me for quite a while.”

  “Look, if this is some turf argument, we can just have it over the phone, because I—”

  “We’re calling because we can help you, Mr. Hastings. You’ve been talking to some people I’ve been watching very carefully, and they’re the type of people you want to steer clear of.”

  “When do you want to meet?”

  “How about in five minutes, at your place?” Michaels didn’t even pause to let Leo process this. “We’re just outside.”

  Leo said, “Sure,” like he wasn’t bothered by the fact that the FBI was watching his apartment. Then he speedily ate his leftovers, trying to predict what they were going to tell him. Less than five minutes later, the doorman buzzed him.

  “Some guests, Mr. Hastings. They say you’re expecting them?”

  At least they hadn’t flashed their badges. Leo okayed them, straightening his tiny living room, organizing magazines on the coffee table as if about to entertain in-laws or something. Why was he nervous? He checked himself in the mirror, wondered how obvious it was that he’d barely slept the night before and had been strung out all day.

  They knocked, and Leo opened the door to the two special agents, the second of whom was introduced as Kent Islington. Leo wasn’t sure if he should be relieved or alarmed to see that these were not the men who’d been tailing him earlier that day.

  Michaels looked even younger than he’d sounded. He was handsome, with brown hair that seemed just shaggy enough to earn comments from his bosses; the red tie of his otherwise standard FBI dark suit was slanted, the top button of his shirt undone, as if he were getting ready for an Esquire photo shoot. He did the talking; Islington, who was in his late forties at least and had thinning gray hair and a slouch, seemed resigned to the fact that he was being displaced by a younger, cooler generation. He nodded a hello but remained silent. Michaels flashed his credentials; his mild embarrassment at the formality showed that he knew Leo was former Agency and wouldn’t be wowed by a federal badge. Islington kept his hands in his pockets.