The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  “Smells good,” Michaels said, presumably meaning the coffee. “Planning a late night?”

  “Just a caffeine junkie.”

  “Well, as addictions go, that one’s not so bad.”

  Leo offered them some but they declined. He invited them to sit on his couch, and he took the one chair, sitting opposite them. Neither was carrying a briefcase, and they both glanced around the room and down the hall, as if wondering whether Leo had any other guests. He told them he didn’t.

  “I’m going to start things off as agreeably as possible,” Michaels said. “You’re ex-Agency, which means we’re supposed to hate you and you’re supposed to hate us and all that. But I’m one of the rare feds who hasn’t yet been screwed by the Agency and therefore holds no grudge against you guys—”

  “Though it’ll probably happen eventually,” Islington interrupted in a flat tone.

  “—and as far as I know, I’ve never pissed off anyone at Langley. So hopefully you can hear us out without any premature judgments.”

  “Like I tried to say before, I couldn’t care less about that sort of thing.”

  “Excellent.” Michaels seemed legitimately thrilled to hear this. “We came here so quickly because we’ve been following the good people of Enhanced Awareness for quite some time.” Though, judging from his unlined face, how long could that have been? “And we’ve been listening to Terry Sentrick’s calls, so we heard your conversation with him this afternoon.”

  “That was quick.”

  “Which should show you how seriously we take this. As you probably noticed, Sentrick and his friends are desperately trying to find Troy Jones, and they were hoping you’d do that for them. Sounds like they met with you earlier and tried to con you into thinking they were with the Agency, and that you should tell them if Jones approached you?”

  Leo tried to remember what he’d told Sentrick and figured that yes, a savvy listener would have been able to divine that much. He didn’t nod, but he didn’t contradict them either.

  “Well, I was glad to hear you tell Sentrick that you’d call the police if you saw Jones. Which is exactly what you should do. Specifically, us.” On cue, Islington reached forward and handed Leo two cards, the FBI crest emblazoned on each. “We believe that Jones, though erratic and possibly crazy, as Sentrick suggested, is indeed trying to sabotage their company, and that he ran off with information that could prove rather painful to them. Information that would help us nail down our case. I don’t know why he doesn’t come directly to us—we’ve tried to reach him ever since he went AWOL from the company, and we even approached him beforehand, thinking he might play ball—but, again, the man is erratic.”

  “Tell me about your case.”

  There was a two-second pause, during which the feds exchanged a glance. Michaels said, “We’ve been working on this for a very long time. The political mood has not always been conducive to our pursuing this company. As Sentrick mentioned to you, he has powerful connections. But I think Jones has evidence that’s too large for anyone to overlook.”

  Leo hated how vague they were being. “Why do you think Jones will approach me?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea what the man will do. But we’re covering our bases, and we wanted to make sure we spoke to you right away, just in case. I could tell from your tone in that call that you don’t like Sentrick, that you think maybe he’s involved in something dirty. I wanted to let you know that your hunch is correct.”

  “You told Sentrick that Jones pulled a gun on you,” Islington said. “Tell us about it.”

  Leo did, omitting a few details but giving away most of it. Despite the animosity that Agency people had for the Bureau, he believed the two feds. He didn’t like the fact that they wouldn’t tell him everything, but he understood their perspective, and frankly he was flattered that they’d come by to tell him this much.

  “What do you know about this Korean diplomat?” Leo asked them. “I was near his house when Jones approached me and told me to keep away from them.”

  “We don’t know much,” Michaels said, “but I imagine the government of South Korea is one of Enhanced Awareness’s clients, or potential clients. Why Jones warned you away, again, I don’t know.”

  “You know about Jones’s family?”

  “We do. Honestly, that’s why we thought we could turn him. Figured he was getting disgruntled with the work, would be happy to pass us some information. But he was with NSA for years, so maybe it’s an honor thing—they don’t like us any more than the CIA does.”

  Leo wanted to ask them much more, for details on Troy’s family, to fill the holes in Gail’s story. Who had Mrs. Jones’s uncle really been, and had he indeed been rendered, and was he rotting in some Egyptian prison somewhere? Had the uncle—or even Jones’s wife—been in any way connected to some Islamist extremist group, justifying his placement on those lists? Justifying all that would come later? And did the feds know something about Hyun Ki Shim that they weren’t saying? Did they know he was in the hospital right now? And what about Sari? Had her residence in that house gotten her involved in something that would trail her for the rest of her life?

  But he didn’t want to insult his own intelligence by asking questions he knew they’d ignore. So he told them what they wanted to hear. “I honestly hope I never see Troy Jones again. But if I do, I will let you know immediately.”

  Handshakes all around, and the two feds left. Leo poured himself some coffee and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be Troy Jones.

  30.

  It did not take long for Sari to conclude that being trapped alone in a motel room was only a minor improvement over being trapped in a maniacal household with screaming infants.

  Leo’s sudden visit that afternoon, to deliver food, take her photograph, and tell her his plan, was the only time she had spoken in hours. After he’d brought her there the previous night, she’d spent a long time trying to sleep before finally turning on the light, plugging in the television, and staring uncomprehendingly at grainy police dramas before sleep rescued her from their nonsense. She awoke to smiling newscasters telling her important snippets about the previous night and the upcoming day, which again she could not understand but which apparently had a lot to do with fatal shootings, a fire, predawn traffic congestion, and the possibility of rain.

  She turned the TV off as well as the lights (it was still dark out) and tried to fall back to sleep, but all she could see was Sang Hee, her mouth agape with rage—those tiny yellow teeth and the undulating tongue—and her knife raised. She remembered again the sound of Sang Hee stabbing her husband, just a quiet ppp, ppp, like a fist against a pillow. Knives are muted. It had been so horrifying when she’d understood what was happening, so confusing and wrong, as if the knife didn’t realize it was supposed to be loud, was supposed to announce itself. She closed her eyes and suffered through waking dreams of silent violence before making herself get up and shower.

  For so many days she hadn’t been afforded any time to put on makeup, and now she had plenty of time but no cosmetics to work with. The motel didn’t even have a bar of soap, just a dispenser of pink slime that she had to pump many times before some spooged through the clump that had agglutinated around the spout. She re-donned the track clothes Leo had bought her and which she’d slept in, and had no choice but to put on yesterday’s underwear.

  She made herself watch more television because it was better than staring at the ceiling and thinking about the ppp, ppp. More morning news, then talk shows: chipper women with their legs crossed so tightly and their lips pursed so emphatically that they appeared perpetually on the verge of exploding. Whatever they were talking about seemed extremely interesting to them. She turned the TV off.

  What was she doing here? Were people really looking for her? Would the Shims blame her for what had happened? Would American police cart her off to jail? In which case, would that be any worse than working for the Shims? Would she serve time here, or in Korea, or back i
n Indonesia? How had her life reached the point where she was sitting in a strange motel room pondering the existence of extradition treaties? Was Leo really trying to help her, walking the halls of American justice, pleading her case with unknown magistrates?

  He had tried to kiss her last night. There had been a time she would have liked that, but no longer. While she’d been trapped in that house, the illusion of romance was something to hold fast to, the possibility of it, the escape. Now she craved a more tangible escape.

  She turned the TV back on. It was an American soap opera, weirdly similar to the Korean ones Sang Hee watched. Different races, different language, same obvious problems of sleeping with the wrong people. Did Leo only want to sleep with her? Was he only playing the hero to get her to spread her legs?

  No, she wasn’t thinking straight. He had been cold as a machine the previous night, giving her quick, sharp orders and guiding her by her forearm, but he’d steered her to safety. Or to whatever this motel was. Clearly he had done things like this before; he didn’t seem nearly as overwhelmed by the situation as she was, those three punches against his steering wheel notwithstanding.

  But that didn’t make sitting in this motel room any easier.

  One of the soap operas seamlessly blended into another—she didn’t even realize she was watching a new show until the opening credits scrolled by following a shocking revelation that left a pert blond woman speechless, her mouth wide open. Then there was a knock on Sari’s door.

  It wasn’t Leo’s coded knock. Just two knocks, hard.

  She slowly stood up from the bed. Considered turning the TV off, but decided against it. Any change in volume would reveal her presence. The two knocks, again. She was holding her breath. The curtains were drawn—she’d checked many times to make sure there were no cracks through which prying eyes might discover her.

  The knob wiggled. It was locked, so it didn’t wiggle much, but the existence of a hand on the other side was inescapable.

  She backed up silently, thinking, The bathroom. She remembered that there was a narrow window there, shoulder-high, opaque, and set in the wall opposite the showerhead. Did she have something to shatter it with? Where did it lead? Her room was on the second floor—how far down could she safely jump?

  While bracing herself for the imminent appearance of some large body tearing the door from its hinges, she heard a gentler sound. Footsteps, scuffling a bit at the dirty floor of the outer hallway. The person was walking away.

  Then she heard two more knocks, on a different door.

  She crept forward this time, making her way to the curtained window. After a few more seconds, she heard the knocks on the other door again. She pulled the curtain just the tiniest fraction of a centimeter so she could peer outside. There was a man in the hallway, standing outside the next room. He was tall and white, with dark hair and sunglasses. He was wearing a suit; would men in suits come to a place like this? Maybe they would. Maybe he was not looking for her.

  She stepped back, waiting. Television voices giggled with postcoital bliss.

  Thirty more minutes passed as she stood there, then sat on her bed, not even watching the television anymore but afraid to turn it off.

  This is insane, she thought. If people really were looking for her, she was not safe here. So there was no reason not to take a walk.

  She’d been in such a fugue the night before, and he’d taken her on such a deliberately circuitous route, that she had no idea which way to go. She set off walking to the right, in what seemed to be the direction the sun was setting, based on the relative brightness of the overcast sky, but she soon reached a highway that lacked a pedestrian bridge. So she doubled back, hoping she wasn’t surrounded by such roads, wasn’t completely marooned here.

  No one was watching her, because no one was out. This wasn’t an area for wanderers. She walked in the shadows of overpasses, skirting stretches that lacked sidewalks, walking on the road itself, stepping around a few puddles and hoping drivers would pay her enough heed. The wind was picking up and she was cold in her thin track jacket, but at least she was out of her latest prison. If there was another one waiting for her, so be it, but she wasn’t going to sit around waiting for it to show up.

  Finally she reached a commercial district. To her left were towering buildings that, based on the familiar logos, she knew to be hotels. She imagined the top floors offered fabulous views of Washington, of the famous monuments and the government buildings decked out in their formal whites. The city looked very different from her plebeian perspective. At least no car had splashed her with a puddle of rainwater.

  To her right were some shops, and she gazed into the windows with a sort of longing, not for the goods themselves but for the normalcy of a life that included idle shopping. She had done things like that, once. She’d had very little money when she worked in Korea, but she had survived. She’d cared about how she looked, she’d bargain-hunted and managed to dress well, or well enough. She’d bought CDs from street vendors and seen movies, she’d been a practicing member of the real world.

  She dared to enter a bookstore, an odd choice given that she couldn’t read the language. But it seemed the kind of store least likely to have pushy salesclerks chatting her up. She picked up some books, pressed her nose between the pages, and inhaled. She watched the other shoppers, some alone and others on dates, holding hands, killing time before dinner or a movie.

  Farther on she passed health-food stores, a bank, what she guessed might be a Mexican restaurant, and a shop selling kitchen knickknacks. Young professionals passed by clutching glossy bags, talking on their phones, laughing. Just another night in the capital of the free world.

  This was the amazing thing about Americans: they had no idea how easy it would be for this entire facade to be torn down, for madness to take hold. She wondered whether, if she stayed here long enough, if she herself became American, she would forget what she knew about society’s frailty, about the things that lurked beneath the facade. She wondered if she would become so blissfully free of worry, or if she would always retain that fear, that awful knowledge, and if it would keep her from becoming one of these carefree strivers, running to and fro on the sidewalk, off to this business opportunity or that party, always perfectly confident that the conference room or the full bar would be waiting for them as scheduled.

  She wished for the millionth time that she spoke even a little English. She’d been very young when she left Indonesia, but even before then she’d run across kids her age who knew English well. Private-school kids, children of the wealthy, who happened to be in her neighborhood for some random reason, stopping in the store to buy candy or a soda. She’d hear them talking to one another, joking and teasing with words she didn’t know. Even the poorer kids sometimes picked up a word or two from a TV show or a pirated movie they’d seen. Sari had not been hip to that trend, however, and then the riots had hit, and whether you knew English words or Bahasa ones didn’t matter, words themselves didn’t matter, only bricks and rocks and fire did.

  So, on to Korea, another new language to master. It had taken a while—she’d lived with other Indonesians and worked with them as circumstances allowed, making her ignorance of the country’s native tongue less of a hindrance—but eventually she learned enough Korean to get by. After a few years she found herself speaking in Korean more than in Bahasa. She was a foreigner there, sure, but she was trying to learn the rules. She wasn’t exactly blending in—they didn’t quite want that in Korea—but she wasn’t making herself a target either. The riots back home had taught her that you could never predict where the next danger would come from, a surging sea or a blackening sky or your own customers or friends. She was wary. People commented on this, in the rare instances that they got to know her well enough. You hold back, they would say. You’re very suspicious. Usually these were Indonesians who’d managed to leave before the riots, or native Koreans. People who didn’t know what it was like to see a crowd of people running toward
you. All of them looking at you. Collaborator! Patsy! Stooge! The rioters had known she worked for the Mings, that her family’s rent and food had been paid for by their labor for the hated Chinese, which, in the eyes of the maddened, bloodthirsty rioters, made her family no better than the Chinese themselves. It made them worse. Traitor! Backstabber! She and one of her older sisters, Lastri, had been chased for blocks; they’d finally turned into an alley whose brick-walled dead end, they knew from more innocent childhood games, had a small tunnel at the bottom that emerged on the other side of the wall. They crawled through the narrow tunnel—not before some rocks or cans of food struck Sari in the back—their breath bouncing off the walls, tears streaking their vision. Some of the rioters probably had been thin and short enough to follow them through, but no one had pursued the girls into the tunnel. It was a crowd, acting as a crowd does. Together it was all-powerful, but none had dared be the first to crawl after them. None had wanted to separate themselves like that, to become individualized. The spell would have been broken. The sisters had crawled through, emerging in an alley on the other side of the brick wall, hugging themselves. The rioters threw more rocks and cans over the wall, so the girls pressed their backs to it, where the trajectories of the thrown objects couldn’t quite reach them. Until some enterprising or drunk (or both) rioters started throwing glass bottles, which exploded when they landed, sending shards in every direction, biting at the girls like wasps. No, not like wasps—like shattered glass bottles. There was no greater metaphor than the thing itself. There was nothing worse than a mob of insane, violent, hateful human beings—that’s what Sari learned that day.