The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  Jesus, this man was strange. He was talking like an android, someone phonetically producing lines in a language he’d never spoken before.

  “But why are you telling me instead of someone who has authority over this?”

  Jones laughed. It sounded unnatural coming from him, and he seemed to do it without smiling. “What authority are you referring to, Mr. Hastings? Someone or something that has authority over Enhanced Awareness? There is no authority like that, not how you mean. Your governments allowed businesses to take control of every task, and eventually that included military, defense, police work, and intelligence. There is no authority over stateless groups like this. Or maybe there is—I’m still having trouble with this. Either there is no authority anywhere, or there’s authority everywhere, vested in everyone.”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “I don’t really have expectations. When you’ve known what was going to happen in advance for so long, life just starts to seem…” He shook his head. “I could talk to your door for the rest of my life and not explain myself right. I just… want to make something good come of this.”

  With that he placed his briefcase by the door. Then he backed up until he was leaning, almost slumping, against the wall. Leo was afraid the guy was going to faint, or fall asleep, and then he’d have to go the rest of the night knowing there was an armed madman just outside his door.

  “Are you all right?”

  “This time is very tiring. You people are under such stresses. And the unpredictability, the not knowing. You can’t comprehend what I’ve just done. Leaving a trace like this. Maybe it won’t matter, maybe you’ll go to bed and ignore everything I’ve said. Maybe there is such a thing as fate, and I can’t avoid it. There’s this little girl I saw a few days ago, this cute little girl, black, in a pink sweater. I just wanted…” He laughed again and shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand. But, please, do something with the information I just gave you. There’s plenty more in the briefcase.”

  “You need to get help, Troy. More help than me, I mean.”

  Jones laughed again. “Troy Jones is dead.”

  “Not according to some files I looked at recently.”

  “Oh, that’s right. He disappeared after he burned his house down and is listed in your records only as missing. His body isn’t found for a few more days.”

  Listening to the matter-of-fact way in which this man seemed to predict his own suicide sent a chill up Leo’s spine. He was glancing at the goose bumps on his arm when the doorman’s buzzer rang.

  “Hang on, Troy,” Leo said, then dared to take his eyes from the door so he could lean against the opposite wall and press the intercom’s button. “Yes?”

  “Everything all right up there, Mr. Hastings?” The doorman was a reticent but cheerful older man from Southeast. They’d spoken about the Wizards and Skins from time to time, but that was it.

  “Everything’s fine, Gus. The guy you sent up is an old friend, that’s all.”

  “Well, uh… You didn’t hear me say this, but I just sent up two more of your friends.”

  Leo asked Gus for descriptions of the two men. Maybe they were the FBI agents, Michaels and Islington, coming up to gather Jones’s mysterious evidence.

  “One was bald and one had short dark hair with a little gray,” the doorman said. “Big as linebackers.”

  Not the FBI. Shit. Leo caught his breath, then returned to the door. Jones was still standing against the opposite wall.

  “I’m being watched, Troy. I think they’ve been waiting for you, and they’re following you up now.”

  Jones’s right hand smoothly slid into his open jacket. It emerged with a gun. “You’re in danger, Mr. Hastings. They’re faster than I thought.”

  Leo still didn’t know what to believe. Jones’s experience at NSA and then Enhanced Awareness meant that yes, it was possible he knew all those things. What he’d told Leo about the company’s unethical and flat-out illegal dealings with Syria and North Korea did not surprise him, given his own impressions of Sentrick and based on what the FBI had elliptically mentioned. If Jones had any actual evidence, that would make the information very dangerous indeed.

  “You need to act quickly,” Jones said.

  “No, they’re coming up here for you. You stole their trade secrets and they want them back.”

  “In which case, they should call the police, not come in themselves.”

  “How do I know it isn’t the police coming now?”

  “It’s the men from Enhanced Awareness. They’re on their way to eliminate Mr. Trenton and are taking a detour to do the same thing to both of us, because our meeting like this only confirms their suspicion that you know too much. You have less than a minute to decide. I can protect myself from them. Can you?”

  Leo was sweating, his palm slick against the door. “Put the gun away, now.”

  Jones placed the gun in his jacket pocket and presented his palms. “You need to learn to trust me.”

  Hoping he was not making the latest in a long line of mistakes, Leo opened the door.

  “We can get out from the roof,” Leo said. He quickly walked to the end of the hallway and opened the door to the stairs. He listened a moment, but no one was coming. Then he hurried up, popping the battery out of his phone so he couldn’t be traced.

  One of the many things Leo liked about this building was its relatively easy escape route. The real estate agent had found his questions odd, but Leo didn’t care. A back stairwell led up two more flights to the roof deck, which was accessed by a door whose key code each of the residents knew. Leo punched it in, and he and Jones emerged onto the roof deck, which surrounded a small, empty pool. The breeze was strong from atop the six-story building, and a few drops of rain hit Leo’s face.

  Inside an unlocked custodian’s closet was an extension ladder. He carried it out to the edge of the building, Jones watching him impassively. The neighboring building, identical except for the lack of a pool on its roof deck, was separated by an unusually narrow alley, fewer than ten feet wide. In the middle was a six-story drop.

  Leo and Jones quickly unfolded the ladder, its metal springs and gears clicking as it grew in length. Jones figured out the plan without needing to be told, and together they stood the ladder up just in front of the four-foot-high wall that lined the perimeter of the building. Carefully they lowered it. They tried to go slowly, but the last few degrees came at a rush, and the ladder clanged loudly as it slammed into the edge of the other building.

  “You’ve done this before?” Jones asked.

  “I measured it, but I never actually got out there, no.”

  He was distracted by the sound of a siren, then a quick flash of red as an ambulance speeding down 16th was visible for the briefest of instants at the edge of the alley. The rain wasn’t intensifying, fortunately, but still the metal ladder was getting wet. Another gust of wind came and Leo began to realize how risky this plan was. The fire escape was in the rear of the building, but he figured someone would be watching there.

  Jones held the ladder in place, then Leo got on his knees and started crawling. He told himself that’s all it was, just crawling. At first he tried to look forward, not down, but he missed once with a knee and realized he actually did need to look down to see where he was putting his hands and legs. He was thankful it was dark out; he almost couldn’t see the ground.

  At the end, he rolled off onto the other building’s roof, then stood and held the ladder for Jones, who tossed his briefcase over to Leo before slowly making his way across.

  They tried to lift the ladder up so they could stash it on their side, but they couldn’t get enough leverage to lift it, and when they pulled it from its perch on the original building, it slipped down and nearly smashed the window of one of the top-floor units. Leo and Jones held on, struggling, regained control of it, then slowly walked backward and pulled it onto the roof deck. Leo slid it up against the wall, where it wouldn’t be visible to any
one on the other side.

  As they ran down the stairs, Leo tried to recap what Jones had told him. “You used to work for them, but you ran off with their proprietary info, and you’ve been tailing some of them while they try to close deals with North Korea and God knows who else. So they want to shut you up.”

  “That’s the story.”

  Leo stopped at a landing between floors. “What do you mean, the story?”

  “No, it’s just… It’s the truth. If you want to think I’m Troy Jones, then, yes, that’s the truth.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I know you’re Troy Jones. I know about your wife and your daughter, and the NSA and her uncle. I know all about you.”

  Jones’s face grew harder. “It’s reassuring to know you’ve done your homework.”

  “But why did you say it was a story?”

  Jones sighed, glancing up and down the stairs in search of pursuers. “Let me put it another way. Imagine we’re in the future, maybe ten years down the line, maybe more. Countries like North Korea and Syria and Iran—as well as the dozens of other dictatorships you’re so used to tolerating—control their populations more thoroughly than ever, using technology they bought from companies made up of former intelligence agents from America, Britain, Israel. These are autocratic regimes that your country claims to oppose, but you’re strengthening them with these tools, however unintentionally. Time passes, such autocracies proliferate, and even democracies begin to take on those characteristics. Governments everywhere strengthen as the chasm between the watchers and the watched grows. To the people on top, this is the very essence of stability. Control, even peace. But what would happen, Leo Hastings, if, in a world like this, some rebel group actually managed to set off a few well-placed bombs? Or if the worst of the regimes, feeling more secure than ever, decided to take the next step and attack one of its enemies using nuclear weapons?”

  Leo couldn’t tell how serious the guy was. He certainly looked serious. But he was talking about this as if it had already happened.

  “You honestly think that by stopping this company from doing business, you can stop a war from breaking out?”

  “And now try to imagine that it was your job to ensure that everything I just explained did indeed occur. That anyone who tried to prevent it, no matter how well intentioned, needed to be stopped. That would be… very difficult to take, wouldn’t it?”

  Leo had heard about paranoid schizophrenics who were convinced that only they could avert a coming apocalypse but had never before spoken to one.

  “I’m really not sure what I’m running from right now. I think you and your ex-colleagues are having a spat, and I never should have gotten in the middle of it. I think I should let you all settle your differences however you see fit.”

  “And Karthik Chaudhry, the dead reporter? I just invented him?”

  “Anything could have happened to him.”

  “I can show you e-mails that Troy Jones sent him before his colleagues at Enhanced Awareness discovered that he was the leak. And what about the poisoning of Randolph McAlester, another former colleague at Enhanced Awareness who learned too much about their newest plans?”

  Leo knew who McAlester was and had read the obit in the Post. “What’s in your briefcase?”

  “All the evidence you could possibly need.”

  Leo wasn’t convinced, but he was getting there. He just wished that his one source for this story weren’t so goddamned strange. If any of this was true, the FBI could build a case. But first Leo needed to read it and make sense of it. And there was still Sari to deal with.

  “Why are they going after T.J.?”

  “Because his network of underground journalists managed to uncover some files belonging to Chaudhry, files that Enhanced Awareness failed to track down and delete after they eliminated him last week. So now they need to stop Mr. Trenton and his friends from posting about the company’s alarming business practices.”

  “Then you should know that I’m working for a company that’s trying to nail T.J. too.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t realize that they were trying to kill him.”

  Leo waited. “My company isn’t trying to—”

  “Your mystery client is Enhanced Awareness. They’ve led your boss, Mr. Bale, to believe that the plan is merely to entrap Mr. Trenton, but now that you’ve succeeded in proving that he is the mastermind behind that Web site, they’re not going to settle for entrapment.”

  Leo hated having to stand there and be watched as he took a moment to absorb the information, but he had no choice. He couldn’t move.

  “I don’t… I don’t believe—”

  “You don’t want to believe it.” Jones looked at him almost pityingly. “But you believe it.”

  They resumed their race down the stairs, exiting at the second floor. He took Jones down a hallway to a different staircase that led to an exit on the south side, out of view of Leo’s building. Then they walked west, eventually intersecting with Columbia and merging with those who were getting a head start on the nightlife in Adams Morgan. Twentysomethings pivoting from work to pleasure, teens standing on corners with baggy jackets and too much free time, buses impatiently exhaling as they sat in traffic. Leo checked for a tail but didn’t find one. His pursuers would likely be canvassing the area within minutes if they weren’t doing so already.

  “I still don’t understand why you don’t take your evidence to the FBI or someone who could officially investigate,” Leo said.

  “They would of course ask who I am and what else I’ve done. I don’t feel comfortable divulging that.”

  “Because even you don’t know who the hell you are?”

  Jones stopped and eyed him.

  “There are three reasons I chose you. One is that I knew you were working to entrap Mr. Trenton but that you had no idea how… malevolent your role actually was; I figured that once you learned that, you wouldn’t like how you’d been used. Two is that I knew that because of your former work, you had a certain skill set that would help you deal with this. And three is that I knew you’d once come into possession of evidence that damned a powerful organization you worked for, and you knew what to do with it: you leaked it.”

  Leo shook his head. “Christ, you too?”

  “You were the leak to the newspapers about the CIA’s black sites—one of the leaks, actually. There were three. You probably didn’t know that. You called the Washington Post, and the others called—”

  “That is bullshit.” Leo’s hands were fists.

  “First you reported your misgivings internally, following protocol. But when nothing was done about it, you leaked the story to the press. I saw all this in my files when I researched you.”

  “If there were any files, I would be in jail now, and—”

  “A decision was made from very high up, Mr. Hastings, that such a prosecution would be detrimental to the Agency and to America’s sense of its national security. So they chose to weed you out based on some other misdeed and let the black-sites story play itself out in the media. Which it did. I assure you, though, they know you were the leak. And of course you do, so why are you lying to yourself about it?”

  Leo looked away. Breathe, Leo. Breathe, and take what he’s saying.

  “Why are you so angry about this?” Jones asked. “As best as I can determine the morals in this beat, it was the right thing to do. They were torturing people without evidence of their wrongdoing. Based on shoddy investigative work, even guesswork. Sometimes they had the right people, sometimes they didn’t. They were operating in what they considered a lawless realm and decided they could play God. It’s a familiar paradigm from what I’ve seen. As I said, it’s one of the reasons I chose you.”

  Leo and Jones were motionless on the sidewalk as others passed them.

  Leo said, “I only wanted to weed out the people who—”

  “You don’t need to explain yourself to me. What you need to do is take this.” Jones held the briefcase ou
t to Leo.

  “There a tracking device in it?”

  “If there were, do you think I’d still be alive?”

  Leo took it from him, hoping he would not deeply regret this.

  “Where are you going next?” Leo asked. “They’ll be here soon.” He started walking again, Jones alongside step by step.

  “I don’t know. Up to this point, I’ve always known what was going to happen next. And suddenly I don’t.”

  They were standing in front of a fried-chicken joint that probably wouldn’t be there a year from now, with the winds of gentrification blowing eastward. The city was changing around them.

  “I’ll look into this, and if it says what you claim it does, I’ll get it to the right people.”

  “Quickly,” Jones said. “Mr. Trenton and his friends will be dead in less than two hours.”

  Leo ran down a list of possible explanations for Jones’s behavior: that Jones had been a spy for another country while working at NSA and now was trying to take down a valuable intelligence contractor in order to weaken America’s defenses; that this was all an elaborate test, perhaps by the Agency itself, to see if Leo truly was the whistle-blowing type; that Jones was just a disgruntled ex-employee of Enhanced Awareness who wanted to ruin the company out of spite; that Jones was insane. Of all of them, only the last seemed free of contradiction.

  “First, tell me about your wife’s uncle.”

  “That’s not relevant to this.”

  Leo stepped closer and lowered his voice. “I say it is. Tell me about him. What he was into. What your wife was into. What you did about it.”

  Jones did not break eye contact as Leo stood too close. For a moment something passed over Jones’s face, and Leo feared that the man was going to throw a punch.

  The flash of anger passed, and Jones spoke in his detached, third-person manner. “Troy Jones knew almost nothing about the uncle. She had a very large family, uncles and aunts living all over the globe. He could never keep their names straight. Some of her relatives were politically active, but they’d all been vetted, otherwise Jones never would have received such clearance at NSA.”