“But that vetting would have occurred before 9/11.”
“So maybe the uncle was involved in the wrong things, perhaps he did have unsavory contacts. Perhaps even he was unsavory. But Jones didn’t know.”
“And so one day the Agency took the uncle,” Leo said, “in Europe somewhere, rounding him up based on intel from tools you’d helped develop. And that was hard for you to live with.”
“Like it was hard for you to live with knowing you’d delivered innocent men and women to be tortured by your Agency. Only harder, because none of those people were related to your wife.” Jones held the stare for an uncomfortable amount of time. “But, as I said, Jones’s family is not relevant to the events you need to be dealing with here.”
Again he was hiding behind his coded language and mannerisms. The real Troy Jones was deeply buried.
After Jones caught a cab headed west on Columbia, Leo ordered a sandwich and a Coke at the fried-chicken joint, then carefully balanced the tray in his free hand as he walked to a table in the back. He wished he didn’t have to be here right now, but this was when his contact for Sari’s ID said he’d meet him.
He sat staring at the wall for a while. How the hell did Jones know that Leo had leaked the black-sites story? Leo had covered his tracks, left no trace. He knew they suspected him, sure—everyone did. He hadn’t reckoned on the fact that their suspicion alone would ostracize him. He’d been removed from his post immediately after the hotel bombing. First they’d stuck him in a Bangkok office with no responsibility pending an investigation into his motives for the prisoner release. Then they’d fired him—because of the bombing, he had assumed, and not the leaked story. Perhaps he’d been wrong. Maybe that’s why Gail had looked sorry for him that night, for being the only person who thought he’d gotten away with it.
Maybe even Bale knew Leo had leaked the story. Hell, it was probably why Bale hired him. Use a leaker to catch a leaker. This had been so obvious all along, and Leo hadn’t figured it out until now.
Leo ignored the food and slowly swallowed his anger. Then he opened the briefcase and started reading through Jones’s files. He’d been wearing his leather gloves outside, and he kept them on so as not to leave any prints. If some of the customers up front were suspicious about the white dude in back reading paperwork with gloved hands, they were good enough not to say so out loud.
There was a laptop and some flash drives in the briefcase, and there was no order whatsoever to the papers—certain spreadsheets had been stapled to unrelated memos, and later Leo would find the rest of the spreadsheet paper-clipped to a different letter. This was clearly the work of a disheveled mind. Jones was just one of those madmen who babbled at street corners, talking to God and transcribing the conversations into tiny notebooks in invented languages. Why had Leo believed him?
But as Leo read on, certain dots became connected. Cause and effect were established. He reorganized the papers as he went. The files from Hyun Ki Shim had demonstrated that he, or someone Shim represented, was a prospective client of Enhanced Awareness; in most instances they identified Shim by a code name, but the real one popped up often enough. Some of the internal Enhanced Awareness memos in Jones’s briefcase seemed to imply that the company knew that Shim represented government buyers in North Korea and China. Leo did find one e-mail exchange between aghast employees (“I just can’t believe we’re thinking of selling to NK regardless of how we paper it over”), but these were countered with a number of memos championing the sales coup this would be (“Prosp client represents key foothold into new market, one that has demonstrated strong loyalty and is forecast to have signif growth”).
There was much discussion about Chaudhry’s investigative reporting into the company’s business practices, and, as Jones had said, e-mails sent to the reporter from a clearly pseudonymous e-mail account at EA ([email protected], likely Jones’s own doing) spilled some juicy secrets. Leo also found a few e-mails between EA principals debating what they should do about Mr. McAlester, a former board member who was threatening to go public with the company’s plan to pursue “clients that the public might construe as undesirable.”
Buried in the briefcase was information about T.J., Tasha, and several of T.J.’s coconspirators. Some of the memos Leo himself had written and handed to Bale. Others contained details Leo hadn’t been privy to, such as the location of a safe house T.J.’s group was using in Northeast D.C. There was nothing here stating that anyone planned on killing T.J., but, in light of what Jones had said, the level of detail about the activists’ comings and goings became very ominous indeed. Leo felt sick to his stomach at knowing that his own work was being used this way. It was a familiar feeling.
So while Leo had been monitoring T.J. and his crowd for a client who turned out to be Enhanced Awareness, Leo had also—completely by accident—bumped into the servant of a diplomat with whom EA was negotiating a key transaction. Bale himself must not have known the connection between EA and Shim, otherwise he never would have allowed Leo to recruit Sari. Only after Leo had told the EA men in the SUV that he’d met Jones outside a Korean diplomat’s house did they make the connection—and then they’d had Bale tell him to back off. This just reminded Leo how damned messy it was to do intelligence work in this city, where all the spots were taken and you never knew which extraneous plotlines you might stumble into.
There was more in the briefcase than Leo could possibly absorb in even a full day of reading, and Lord only knew what was on the laptop and in the flash drives—he wasn’t going to boot up here. A group of teenagers burst out laughing and Leo felt anew the absurdity of reading such material in a fast-food joint, grease in the air and bad hip-hop thumping on the house speakers.
Leo should be calling the FBI now, not sitting here waiting on a guy who could get an ID for Sari. Maybe he could call T.J. himself, to warn him? No, he didn’t know T.J.’s number, but surely there were other ways to get the message to him.
Afraid of being tracked via his phone, he walked back to the counter and asked the thirteen-year-old Latina in the unflattering yellow uniform if he could use their phone for a local call. She gave him a look like he’d asked her where to score drugs.
“Please, it’s a local call and my phone is dead. Just a one-minute call.”
She finally shrugged, reached into her pocket, and handed him her cell. Even better.
He dialed Tasha’s number, thankful for his good memory (and training) in this age where people never remembered numbers anymore. Her voice mail picked up immediately, which he didn’t like. He hoped it meant only that she was on another call.
“Tasha, it’s me.” He turned away from the girl. “You need to tell your friend that his place in Northeast is not safe. He needs to leave, immediately. Trust me and tell him to get out of there the moment you get this.”
He handed the phone back to the girl just as Edwin walked in the door, a full thirty minutes late.
Leo had met Edwin while doing a bit of opposition research for TES, his first assignment for the company. The firm had been asked by a prominent Raleigh businessman to research David Franklin, three-term Republican congressman from the state of North Carolina who was expected to announce his Senate candidacy the following year (and whom the businessman despised). Before the Knoweverything project began ramping up, Leo spent countless hours studying Congressman Franklin’s votes, financial disclosure statements, driving history, real estate transactions, vehicle ownership records, academic transcripts, and public comments, looking for dirt. Finally, he drove to Franklin’s house one day and noticed that Mrs. Franklin had hired some contractors to redo their one-and-a-half-million-dollar Palisades colonial. Leo cased the house for a week; all of the workers were Central American. Franklin was a strict opponent of illegal immigration. Leo wondered how diligently the congressman’s wife checked the legal status of her contractors.
Not very, it turned out. One day Leo approached the head contractor, a mestizo-looking man from Honduras
or maybe El Salvador, sweaty and wearing a tourist T-shirt, his broad chest emblazoned with a U.S. flag, yellow fireworks, and the word ANTIETAM. Leo pretended to be in the market for a new kitchen and bathroom, chatting the guy up about fixtures and grout while trying to get a sense of what kind of help the man used. Leo eventually had the contractor over to his house to give an estimate, and while the contractor was in the bathroom, Leo asked one of the other workers if the guy could do some painting for him on the side. The worker nodded and quietly slipped Leo his own card.
Leo never followed through with the contractor, but he did call the other guy, Edwin, for an estimate on painting a couple of rooms. He befriended Edwin during the next week, handing him a beer and watching ESPN with him after each workday, paint fumes thick in the air. He learned that Edwin, a pretty cool guy with not quite as good a grasp of English as Leo had of Spanish, was an illegal from Nicaragua who was sending remittances home for his wife and two kids and hoping the Marxists wouldn’t take over and the gangs wouldn’t get too out of control before he found a way to get his family up here.
Just before TES handed its client evidence that the fervently anti-illegal-immigrants congressman was in fact benefiting from the cheap labor they provided to renovate his Washington mansion, Leo called Edwin to warn him. Leo told him that Edwin’s boss, the contractor, was soon going to get in a lot of trouble and that Edwin might want to dissociate himself from the guy immediately if he planned to stay in the country.
They shook hands now and Leo took him to the back, where Edwin glanced oddly at Leo’s tray of cold, untouched food.
“No hungry?”
“My stomach’s not doing too well.” Leo pushed the tray of food away and reached into his pocket for the memory card from the digital camera he’d used to take Sari’s photo. He handed it to Edwin.
The painter/handyman—who had been a bank teller in Managua before he was framed for a bank heist committed by a group of former Sandinistas who’d needed funds to bankroll an election; Edwin had fled before the police could arrest him, he’d told Leo—watched the former spy for a moment.
“Tell me again why you need this.”
“I have a friend who’s in trouble. She needs an ID and a Social Security number, and I need it in a few hours.”
Edwin raised his eyebrows at the time constraint, which Leo hadn’t mentioned during their brief call.
“Guy I know, he can do this, but I don’t know about that fast.”
Leo figured the guy operated in this very neighborhood; there had been a few police busts for identity theft and the selling of fake passports and SSNs at some of the local restaurants and ethnic shops.
“I can pay more if he wants.”
Edwin mulled this over. “Why a guy like you need this?”
“My friend needs it.”
Edwin looked at the photo again. “This is for love?”
“She needs help. I don’t know where else to turn.”
“How I know this ain’t a trap?”
“If I hadn’t called to warn you that time, you’d be back in Managua. In jail.”
Edwin thought about this. “Yeah. But you’re the one set those guys up. How I know you didn’t just warn me that one time so you could set me up again later, use me to bust more guys?”
“I didn’t bust anyone. I just gathered information for someone who…” Leo’s voice trailed off as he realized that his rationalizations meant nothing.
“I don’t really know you, Leo.”
Who did? “Look, you can take my money right now and just run off with it. If you do, sure, you screw me, but nothing’s really going to happen to me—I’ll be fine. But a very good woman will get deported, or worse. I’d like to stop that from happening to her, just like I stopped it from happening to you.”
It was borderline humiliating that Leo, whose former employer could have provided him with false identification papers in mere hours, was reduced to groveling before a Nicaraguan immigrant in a fast-food joint. He tried not to focus on this latest evidence of how far he had fallen.
“She really your girl?”
He shook his head. “I’m not good enough for her.”
Edwin grinned. “Okay, you wait. I check with my man.”
Leo sat with his cold food and hot briefcase as Edwin disappeared to consult with his source, who Leo now knew for certain was in the area. Leo took the time to pore over Jones’s files and connect more dots.
Ten minutes later, Edwin was back.
“Okay,” he said. “Pay now. He says he leave it for you in envelope at mailbox for house at 1009 Kenyon Street Northwest. Is vacant. Someone’ll put it there in two hours.”
Leo opened his wallet below the table, fished out the cash plus extra for the rush charge. Then he slid it into an envelope and passed it to Edwin.
Leo left the fried-chicken place and walked three blocks—checking for surveillance the whole way—to the only pay phone left in this neighborhood. He found Special Agent Michaels’s card and dropped some coins into the slot.
“Yes?”
“We spoke at my place earlier tonight.”
If Michaels was annoyed or confused by Leo’s cryptic greeting, he didn’t show it. “Yes, of course.”
“I have something you’re going to want to look at.”
“Already? This time I’m the one who’s impressed with how fast you are.”
“He came by, not long after you did. And he led me to believe that time is of the essence here. What do you know about a reporter named Chaudhry?”
There was a brief pause. “A good amount.”
“I’m told someone is going to meet a similar fate very soon, at 702 R Street Northeast. How quickly can you meet me?”
32.
It was rather too fitting that Tasha again found herself in the back of a van. At least this one had windows, and no one had thrown her into it. She’d opened the door herself, boarded of her own free will. Or had she? How free had she been, in any of this?
After sifting through the wreckage that was her home for longer than she could stand, she’d washed her face so she wouldn’t look like she’d been crying, then walked over to the house of one of her friendlier neighbors, a fortysomething gay man who liked to brag about being the first person to gentrify this neighborhood. He always brought up the time he’d seen a man chase his girlfriend/lover/prostitute down the street while wielding a bloody steak knife, a week after he’d moved into the house. Tasha was never sure how she was supposed to take these stories of the neighborhood’s wayward past, and she noticed at parties and sidewalk chats how her race threw complications into the cozy narrative of white gentrifiers saving a bad neighborhood. But the neighbor was friendly, and he had a phone. (She didn’t trust hers anymore, and had turned it off.) She’d lied to him that her phones were out, and she called T.J. and said there was something she needed to tell him in person. He told her to meet her at a certain street corner east of Shaw, his words unusually terse.
She’d called for a cab, not wanting to walk anywhere near the Metro station from which she’d been abducted; she was already too freaked out by whatever was happening. Who was following her, and why? She assumed that whoever had trashed her house worked for the same people as the men who’d driven her around in the van; perhaps the interrogation itself was less important than the fact that it kept her out of her house so someone could search it.
And the more she thought about it, the more she wondered about Troy. He’d tried to say something to her about “not being a part of this,” whatever that meant, and he’d looked legitimately ashamed of what she found in his briefcase. She’d thought it was just more of his act. But maybe he’d been telling the truth? Had Troy’s relationship with her been less of a con than she’d assumed? Had it been genuine, and had he been trying to figure out his new role in this maddening world just as she was?
The cab dropped her off at the intersection where T.J. said he’d meet her, but there was no T.J. There was no anyone, a
nd this didn’t feel like a good place to be killing time. It was cold and windy that night; acorns popped off parked car roofs like tiny firecrackers. She was still in her heels and business suit, and she felt she must look like a big wallet to someone.
A blue van pulled up. Jesus, another van. The window rolled down and she recognized the driver, a white kid with bad skin and worse facial hair, from one of T.J.’s meetings.
“T.J. says sorry for the subterfuge. Hop in back.”
She hesitated, but he looked too unthreatening for this to be a dangerous proposition. She got in the back, and he asked her to keep her head low so she wouldn’t be spotted. He apologized again in a hipster monotone, as if telling a housemate he was sorry for smoking all her weed. T.J., he explained, was a bit “wigged” due to a few “developments,” and they were taking precautions.
“I don’t remember your name,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s cool, actually. Probably better not to.”
His radio was playing whatever fuzzy style of rock had supplanted grunge in the white kids’ world. The singer was screaming, “I won’t waste it / I won’t waste it / I won’t waste my love on a nation!”
Even with her head low (why exactly did she need to hide?) she could look up and see the tops of buildings. He drove them a few blocks north of Rhode Island Avenue, a part of town unreached by the Metro lines and therefore on the dark side of the moon as far as young professionals and college kids were concerned. She’d had a friend who lived around here once, maybe in second or third grade, but Tasha hadn’t been in the neighborhood since.
“It’s a good spot,” he said, as if hearing her thoughts. “You know, off the beaten path but close enough to New York Ave. and the B-W Parkway to be useful for getaways.”
A minute later, he pulled up in front of a row house whose lights weren’t on. “He’s on the porch.”
Even when she sat up, she couldn’t see what he was pointing to, but she got out anyway. Only after he’d pulled away did she see a form sitting in a chair on the porch. She climbed the steps slowly, and then the form stood.
The Revisionists Page 40