The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  “Hey, Tasha,” T.J. said, his voice quieter and calmer than usual. He was wearing a slim brown leather jacket, blue jeans, and running shoes whose intense whiteness was not as conducive to hiding at night. She had no idea if he’d come from inside the house or if this was a vacant place he’d chosen as a random rendezvous spot.

  She made a point of looking around at the quiet, empty block. “What’s going on?”

  “You first,” he said. “What is it you needed to tell me this late, in person?”

  Her thoughts had been so muddled that she hadn’t even planned this part out yet. “I need to apologize.” Looking into his green eyes, though it was so dark out they could have been any color. “I got myself caught in a bind. The information that I’ve been giving you, about Consolidated Forces… It’s not true.”

  He watched her for a moment. “How so?”

  “I leaked the GTK story. I… I wanted to do it, I knew it was right. But someone found out about it, and they threatened to tell my firm. I would have been disbarred, gone bankrupt. So—”

  “So the girl who’s made compromises all her life decided to make one more.”

  She had busted her ass for years so she wouldn’t wind up in a neighborhood just like this one, yet to the raised-in-Berkeley rebel standing before her, it was all “compromise.”

  “I was stalling them, T.J. Someone tried to play me, so I played them right back. I was never going to let you run with those stories; I just needed to string them along until I could get something out of them about Marshall.”

  “So if you were to write a column about this in that arts weekly of yours, the hypothetical letter would say, ‘Dear Tasha, I’m being blackmailed into betraying a friend who’s dedicated his life to tearing down the walls of power, and I feel kind of bad about this.’ And your advice to yourself would be ‘The hell with him, girl, do whatever you need to keep that corporate lawyer gig.’”

  She wasn’t sure if he hadn’t heard her explanation or if it had just sounded like so much equivocal bullshit.

  “That corporate-law gig is effectively over. And I’m probably going to be disbarred, so don’t ask me to defend you next time you’re arrested for trespassing. But I’m sure I’ll still seem oh-so-bourgeois to you and the true believers.”

  A familiar bass line vibrated up her feet as someone’s car’s subwoofer inched closer. She and T.J. both turned their heads as a black SUV cruised down the street, slowly. She realized she’d been holding her breath when it reached the end of the block and proceeded north. The beats faded and she exhaled.

  He looked across the street at a row of houses identical to the ones on his side; it was as if a mirror had been lowered into the center of the asphalt, reflecting everything but themselves.

  “You know, I’m not as against the mainstream media as you think I am,” he said. “I do know some good folks who are reporters. But I know one fewer than I used to. This buddy of mine, Karthik. He worked for Reuters. Was real interested in all these private intelligence contractors running around D.C., acting like they’re the CIA only they don’t have to report to anyone. He wrote some eye-opening stories, and he was working on a new one that was going to shine a light on a couple of companies in particular, on work they were doing for other countries, and how some people in U.S. intelligence even helped out so long as they got paid their share. So they killed him.”

  She’d seen a file about the reporter in Troy’s briefcase. She thought about voicing this but didn’t see the point. She was still trying to figure out T.J.’s point.

  “The files you were giving me, Tasha, they were interesting. But I guess whoever was giving them to you thought we were dumber than we are, that we wouldn’t double-check anything. Some of the names in there are real—just enough to get us in trouble for libel—but plenty of them aren’t. And the companies too—some of the ones in those memos are real, others aren’t. I don’t know who it was that gave them to you, but he didn’t cover his tracks as well as he thought.”

  “So… you’ve known all along?”

  “Not all along, no. I believed you at first. Believed you really were taking a chance on me, taking a chance on yourself, to do some good.”

  “Is that why we’re talking on some strange porch in a dead part of town?”

  “I’ve been followed the last few days, and so have some other folks. I don’t think it’s the same people that have been trying to frame us, but it could be. Doesn’t matter. I’ve never lacked for enemies—if I ever do, it’ll mean I’m not doing a very good job. So me and my folks are leaving town. Some of the other projects we’ve been working on will have to fall through, but that’s okay. The Knoweverything story is more important, and we can do that from anywhere.”

  “But… the stories are fake.”

  “That is the story. We aren’t going online with ‘Consolidated Forces’ Internal Documents Show That’ blah blah blah, we’re going with ‘Privatized Intelligence Industry Spreading Disinformation, Tailing Activists, Killing Reporters.’ Those fake docs you gave me, those are part of the story, definitely. But not in the way your blackmailers thought.”

  She tried to straighten this out. “So I’m in the story?”

  “We won’t use your name. But we will have to say ‘an unnamed attorney at a Washington law firm who leaked the GTK story and was blackmailed for it,’ et cetera, et cetera. Kind of an important point.”

  The way he said that, she could tell he’d already known she was the leak even before her admission tonight. He must have read the e-mails she’d sent to the Times reporter after all. “Jesus, might as well use my name then!”

  “Are you expecting me to apologize?”

  “T.J., I was going to tell you in time. I was.”

  He gave her a patronizing look. “I’m sure that’s what you told yourself.”

  Leave it to T.J. to make her regret the fact that she’d warned him, or even apologized to him. She folded her arms. “If thinking that people like me are part of the problem makes it easier for you to fight your battles,” she said, “then fine, go ahead and demonize me too. See how many people you wind up with on your side.”

  Then she realized she was almost overlooking the most disturbing thing he’d said. “The reporter you mentioned,” she asked. “You’re really sure that he—”

  “Was killed? Yeah. By people who worked for one of the companies he was reporting on? Yeah. If you thought these were just well-intentioned government employees who don’t really do anything wrong beyond trying to frame people at progressive Web sites and spying on activists, then, Jesus, open your eyes. You know how many billions of dollars the government throws at these companies? Companies that can just hide behind the flag and do whatever the hell they want? Those GTK executives who pissed you off so much, they let a bunch of soldiers die just to save a few mil on shipping costs. Tell me, if your private spook firm stood to lose millions because some journalist was going to write a story about the sketchy shit your firm was up to, what would you be willing to do about it?”

  “I just…” She was shaking her head. “I find it hard to believe—”

  “You’ve been suspending your disbelief a little too long, girl.”

  She thought of Leo and then Troy insinuating themselves into her life. The men in the white van. The destruction of her house. This would have been a good time to tell him about her van interrogation, and about Troy Jones, but she didn’t want any of that making its way into his online diatribe. Not all of her life experiences would become fodder for a political battle. She was alarmed by what he’d told her, but she wasn’t going to cross over to T.J.’s radical worldview every time one game in the grand geopolitical contest happened to go down differently than she wished it had.

  “Look at what’s happening in the world today,” he said, “in this country today. They want to rewrite the rules for what a government can and can’t do—no, forget rewriting, they just want to do whatever they can and make up the rules later. Hell, half the
people responsible for Watergate got back in positions of power a few terms later; same with Iran-contra, and it’ll be the same with Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Someone gets nailed for whatever scandal, and he just disappears for eight or twelve years and then comes back again, rewriting the history books every time. People never learn, or they just don’t care.”

  We’re all predisposed toward certain stories and plots, Tasha thought, as T.J. went on for another minute or two about his group’s role in the vital struggle for the nation’s soul. Some people are more inclined to believe that the government or amoral corporations are out to get them, that nefarious watchers are everywhere, and that they are mere pawns in games they’ll never understand. Others think that’s a fool’s explanation for the world’s entirely understandable and blameless discrepancies in power. Some believe they can do anything, that they have power vested in them by something divine or by writ of law, that even the smallest individual can change history. Others would call that a delusion of grandeur. Everyone wanted to believe he’d discovered the truth, that it had been covered up by some top-secret agency or bought and sold by a backdoor agreement between politicos and billionaires. Whatever the story, there’s always evidence somewhere, there’s an adherent to the cause shouting at you, directing you to certain Web sites, to books produced by small publishers; they’re out there if you look in the right place, there are statistics, facts that they don’t want you to know. Open your eyes. Believe the story, the truth. My truth, not the other guy’s. The other guy’s a tool of the system, or a kook, or an oppressor, or a loser in search of something to blame.

  How cynical was she prepared to be? How idealistic? How much effort did she want to put into understanding the plot twists and intersecting story lines? What’s more believable, unreliable narrators or noble heroes? Maybe T.J. was right and Tasha’s credit cards and e-mails and ideas were being tracked by men who would crush her for the fun of it. But she’d met such men, just a few hours ago, and they hadn’t crushed her. They’d trashed her place, yes, they’d scared and enraged her, but she was still here. Maybe that counted for something. Or maybe if it had happened to T.J., they would have beaten him to nothingness and left him on an off-ramp.

  “So what’s next?” she asked.

  “We’re getting out of town, but first we need to finish uploading a few things. And checking a couple more facts. You can help us if you want, or if you want to just come in and warm up and call for a cab, that’s cool too.” He walked toward the front door. It was so dark inside, she was amazed there was anyone in there. They must be huddled in back rooms behind light-blocking shades.

  “And then? What happens to you?”

  He would no doubt toss his cell phone. He had no credit cards, maybe not even a driver’s license. He would disappear. “I’ll be in a safe place, and we’ll tell our story.”

  Z.

  The worst part is the guilt. That and knowing I’ve been deceived, that I was on the wrong side all along.

  That, of course, was what my wife was saying to me during those final days. The scorn in her voice, the hatred in her eyes; she had discovered that her loving husband’s work for our government had put her father’s life in danger. It was impossible for her to view it in any other terms. Maybe her emotions would have cooled over time. Or maybe not—maybe more time would have calcified her anger, hardened it like a new backbone that would never bend to the forces she saw conspiring against her.

  Had her father really been guilty? Had he in fact been behind the Revisions plot; was he a forerunner of the hags, gathering information about history so they could go back and disrupt it? I had no choice but to accept the intel. What else could I have done? Believe that my life’s work was being used against my own family?

  What have I wasted my life on?

  I wish I could talk to her about this. There are so many conversations we can’t have. I think of all the silent evenings, the times we had more important things to do. The wasted time.

  I’m sorry, Cemby. I’m sorry if I was on the wrong side. Please believe that it wasn’t my fault. Please believe that I wasn’t responsible for what happened to your father, or to you. Believe instead that I was tricked, that I was a dupe, that I was a just another misguided idealist, that I had enough love in my heart that I dared to imagine a better world, something closer to perfect. At the very least, believe that I did the wrong things for the right reasons.

  What now?

  What does a Protector do when he’s decided not to protect the Events anymore? When he’s decided that the disasters are best averted, not facilitated? If there really are any hags out here, if they aren’t all figments of my damaged cerebral cortex or parts of some fantastical plot put in place by Wills or other enemies, I’m going to let them be. They are free to remake the world in their image. I can only hope it turns out better than the one I’ve decided to let rot, or disappear, or whatever it is that happens when choices are not made. Things that are left to others’ imaginations.

  I want to see Tasha again—it seems a bad idea, since all I’ve ever done is put her in danger. And as I sit in the cab thinking, I realize that I’m letting myself off too easy. All I’ve actually done is refuse to protect the final Event, and I’ve assumed that it was enough. But maybe it isn’t—the Great Conflagration could still happen, the Events could still find a way of falling into place, give or take an hour or two, the transposition of some people and locations. There’s a certain entropic force that might hold sway. I haven’t done enough.

  The cabbie drops me off near where I parked my car, and I get in and check my internal GPS. I’d slipped a Tracker on Leo, just in case, and I’m glad I did. He’s moving north, and I head that way too. Ten minutes later I park outside a car-rental service where Leo is signing some papers; before long he’s driving out of their back lot in a gray sedan.

  With everything he’s gone through tonight, he’s likely checking for a tail, so I give him a five-minute head start, content to let the Tracker and GPS guide me. He drives into northeast D.C., first along the main avenues and then the side streets. Remembering my last experience tailing someone in the city, I mind the street signs and traffic lights so I won’t have another awkward conversation with D.C.’s finest.

  I’m driving through a maze of row houses when the Tracker tells me that Leo has pulled over one block away, where the residential neighborhood abruptly ends at the edge of a vast train yard north of Union Station.

  Was I wrong to trust Leo? Was I crazy when I thought that I saw in him so many aspects of myself? We are, after all, only a block or two away from the safe house where T.J. is furiously uploading information into his computers before fleeing D.C. Is this mere coincidence? Has Leo come here to meet someone who will only facilitate the start of the Conflagration?

  I park two blocks south of him. I quietly close my door and walk, trying without success to avoid the fallen leaves and acorn caps. I did some tracking in the woods of Poland, but not in autumn, and everywhere my foot falls, there’s noise. So I walk on the road itself, and I’m almost there when I hear another vehicle approaching. I hurry off the road and crouch behind parked cars. A white van emblazoned with the Metro’s logo passes, though there isn’t a Metro station anywhere near here.

  This is very familiar. They aren’t using the parking lot by the airport this time; they must fear that the authorities have pieced together that much of the Chaudhry disappearance. This location—within the city yet remote, devoid of witnesses but booming with background noise from passing trains—is even better for their purposes. A journalist would have been too suspicious or scared to meet somewhere like this, but Leo, a former intelligence officer himself, no doubt appreciates the clandestine gesture. They’re appealing to his ego, and he’s falling for it.

  I take the gun from my pocket and walk as quickly as I can without giving myself away. I round the corner and see, thirty yards away, Leo standing with his back against a fence, facing the neighborhood. Behind the fence
is a twenty-foot-tall mound of compacted dirt and then at least a dozen tracks and dormant trains. There are some streetlights but they’re all aimed at the train yard; the effect is to darken the area where Leo now stands.

  The van has parked in front of Leo. A thin, younger man gets out of the driver’s side—he’s the one Leo described to his doorman, I now see. Then the familiar two men emerge from the back and stand flanking their prey.

  Either the hags don’t know about this little meeting because it is something of my own creation and not in their files, or they simply have better things to do right now. Or possibly there never were any hags, and I’m alone.

  “Thanks, Leo,” the younger one says as he takes the briefcase. I can only hear him because of my internal mike—I’m still too far away, and a passenger train is rolling north on one of the tracks. “I can’t tell you how much this helps.”

  The van blocks me from their view now; I cross the street in a crouch. Leo had backed up a half step when the two big guys approached, as if he sensed what was coming but had too much pride, didn’t want to risk looking scared if there was no reason. But there is a reason.

  Because now the younger one is brandishing a gun, and one of the big men steps behind Leo and pins his arms back. The other one slugs him in the stomach, doubling him over. The gunman opens the van’s back door so his partners can cram Leo inside.

  “Stop,” I say. “Drop the gun.”

  Four faces in various states of distress look my way. The gunman’s hand, which had been held low, instinctively rises a few inches. I yell, “Drop it, now!”

  “Holy shit,” the gunman says. Trying to seem calm and in control, but his face looks even whiter than the contemps’ faces usually do. “It’s you.”

  I step closer, slowly, so as not to goad him into firing. A few feet behind and just to his left the others stand in a cluster. Leo’s arms are still pinned back. I’m aiming at the head of the only person I can see holding a gun.