The Revisionists (25 page)

He asked how she was, what she thought of the encroaching winter. He noticed that she sat with her hands pressed together tightly, her thin fingers obviously chilled even though the air felt comfortably crisp to him, football weather.

One of the plastic grocery bags settled behind them, and she turned her head at the sound of the crinkling. She thanked him again for doing her shopping.

“How much did she give you to pay for them?” he asked.

She told him, he did the math, then he handed her some change and told her to keep what the mistress had given her. She looked frightened by the offer.

“I shouldn’t keep that. If they found it…”

He nodded, told her to forget it. She handed him the grocery money.

“I have a question for you,” he said. “You told me you’re working for that couple against your will. I want you to tell me what you’d want if you could have anything. Anything at all. Do you want to be back in Seoul? Do you have family in Indonesia you want to be with? Any family you need to care for?”

She gazed outside. “It’s complicated.”

“Do you want to go back to Jakarta?”

She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

“Do you want to go back to Seoul?”

She waited again. “It’s where my sisters are, but… I don’t really know them anymore. Soon they’ll marry anyway, and I’d be on my own there.”

“Do you want to stay in America?”

“I don’t know anyone here.”

This was going to be harder than he’d thought.

These sorts of barters required clear goals. Even if the other side’s goal was obscured by lies and subterfuge, even if you didn’t truly know what they wanted, you knew they wanted
something.
Something they figured you could provide. Money was the obvious goal with poor agents, but sometimes people could be so poor, so beyond hope, that they didn’t even know what to ask for. It was hard for Leo to trust such people because he didn’t understand them.

“What do you know about your employers?”

“I know what they like to eat, what they wear, how they like their house kept.”

“What does Sang Hee do most days?”

She seemed surprised he knew her name. “She writes on her computer.”

“Is she sending messages or typing a document?”

“She said she’s writing a book. But she doesn’t let me get close enough to see, even though I don’t read Korean very well.”

“What does she do other than type on her computer? Take me through her day.”

“She goes visiting most of the afternoons—other diplomats’ wives, I think.”

“How do you know? Does she use names?”

“No. Or sometimes she does, when speaking to her husband, but they don’t mean anything to me.”

“I need you to start paying attention to the names. What else does she do?”

“She shops a lot. Or she used to, before she broke her ankle. It’s hard for her to get around stores with the cast.”

“What does she buy?”

“Clothes, perfume, electronics. Things to send back home.”

“Does she mail things very often?”

“Once a week, I think. She doesn’t take me with her to the post office; I just see her with packages sometimes.”

“Okay. Her computer, is it a laptop or one that’s on a desk?”

“A laptop.”

“Where does she keep it when she isn’t using it?”

“Her room. Sometimes downstairs, if she writes there at night, when she’s drinking. Sometimes she’s very drunk and she leaves it there. I brought it up to her room once but she said she didn’t want me to touch it. Why are you asking all this?”

“I know some people in the government here, in our Immigration department. I’ve told them about your situation and asked how we could help you. Because your employer is a diplomat, he’s protected from most of our laws.” He paused for a beat. “But I talked to my friends and I said there must be
some
way we can help you. They said there was, but they’d need to get something from you first.”

She looked at her hands for a moment. Leo was used to the reticent, deferential behavior of Indonesian women, but it was hard to tell what effect his words were having on her. “What do they want from me?” she asked.

“They’re very interested in your employers. Especially Sang Hee. Because you work in their house, you can learn certain things.”

“My Korean isn’t perfect. They don’t talk to each other much in my presence, and when they do, I don’t always understand what they’re saying.”

“But even if you don’t understand them, we can.” He turned to reach into the backseat, leaning toward her a bit, and she leaned back, surprised or uncomfortable to have him so close. He took out a small cardboard box. “This is a digital camera, this is a portable copier, and these are flash drives,” he said, opening the box. He explained how to use them.

“I don’t… I don’t understand.”

She wasn’t stupid; she was nervous. Now was the time to press. “They’ve hit you, haven’t they?”

She looked out the window.

“Has Hyun Ki Shim ever touched you?”

Her head snapped back. “No. His wife is the evil one.”

Part of Leo felt disappointed. Sexual abuse would make their leverage on the diplomat all the stronger. But part of him—a much greater part—felt relief, for her sake. And for the sake of his own fantasies.

“Sari, you are in danger. They can do anything they want to you; they can keep beating you like this, can even kill you if they want, and there’s nothing anyone can do. You are their slave, and we can’t protect you from them.
Unless
you help us with this.”

He was trying to keep his voice calm and steady. Here was the key moment, the point at which this would be consummated or not. At the same time, he saw the look in her eyes, the sadness and fear, and he felt the awful knowledge that all he really needed to do to save her was drive her to the Indonesian embassy. He could drop her off and they would likely repatriate her, even without her passport, and protect her from her employers. Hell, she could drive to the embassy herself; all he had to do was tell her where it was, less than ten minutes away. He couldn’t let her know how easy it was. He had to limit her world, limit her possibilities. Luckily she seemed familiar with such constraints.

“I know you’re scared of them. But the longer you stay there, the worse they will treat you. I’ve seen other situations like this. If you do what I’m asking, we can get you someplace else. Maybe to another city in another country, if that’s what you want. Or American citizenship, and some money, and you can start over. People like Hyun Ki and Sang Hee will never be able to hurt you again.”

He had no friends in Immigration and no right to offer her citizenship. Maybe, if this went well, he could ask Bale to talk to someone, inquire if any strings could in fact be pulled. But he doubted it. At the Agency, dangling false promises like this could get him seriously reprimanded, but at TES anything seemed allowable.

“What is this building?” she asked, looking straight ahead.

“A school.”

“What are they doing to it?”

“Fixing it. The roof collapsed.”

She looked horrified. “On top of children?”

“No, it happened over the weekend, when no one was inside.” Actually, he had no idea. It might well have taken out a handful of the District’s seven-year-olds; he didn’t keep up with local news.

“This is what happens to schools here?”

“In this city, we spend most of our time worrying about other places instead of taking care of ourselves.”

“If I had a child in America, would the roof collapse on him?”

He looked at her—at the wide eyes he wanted to see himself reflected in, at those full lips that he wanted to gently take between his teeth—and tried to control his expression. So hard to present yourself correctly when all these cultural cues are different. And when you’ve forgotten who the correct you is.

“I will keep the roofs from falling on you and anyone else, I promise.”

Z.

T
he next morning Wills and I stake out a downtown hotel where he tells me he tracked some hags earlier. They’re relatively safe from us so long as they stay inside. If we tried to storm the place, we’d likely do more harm than good; a firefight in such a sensitive building would cause too many historical disruptions. Our best option is to wait for them to come out, where we can dispose of them more discreetly.

After Wills approached me on the sidewalk the previous night, he led me to his car (a nondescript rented Civic) so we could talk while he drove. He’d tracked me to the restaurant with his GeneScan, but he had as many questions as I did. Why would the Department send two of us here? They’d never done that before. Having a partner would be helpful, sure, but the Department has always figured that doubling the imprint left on the beat was too big a risk. What was going on?

We downloaded files from each other as he drove. Our intel didn’t match; some of the Events he was protecting weren’t rated as important in my files, and vice versa.

“I was afraid of this,” he said. “The hags must have so many plots back here, the Department didn’t think one Protector could handle them all.”

“But why didn’t they warn us about each other? We might have killed each other by mistake.”

I silently processed his intel, then stopped at an image.

“This contemp,” I said, weighing what to explain and what to hold back, “Tasha Wilson. She wasn’t in my intel.”

“That doesn’t quite explain what you were doing having dinner with her, Zed.”

“All right, I had a date. Report me if you want to. But it shouldn’t matter, since she’ll be dead soon anyway.”

“Yes, but not as part of the Conflagration. She goes sooner. And she’s a target, Zed, which means you need to stay away from her.”

I was reeling; Tasha
was
important after all? I downloaded the rest of Wills’s intel, checked the dates against my own. The diplomat, the product, the underground journalists. Pieces of the narrative jibed with my own, but some of the characters seemed rearranged, the causes occurring after effects, the wreckage preceding the accidents. How could the Department get so much wrong?

Missions are simplest when the people in Veracity can provide the Protectors with clear, concise information on what happened historically. But this isn’t always possible. Records are incomplete, inaccessible, or damaged. History as recorded may contain flaws, omissions, and biases. There may be competing versions of history. It’s hard to protect what actually happened when you aren’t entirely sure what happened. Whenever the data is less than complete, or when it’s contradictory, the brains in Veracity are supposed to resolve the discrepancies, fill in the holes, before passing the intel to the Protectors.

I’ve grown used to the process of sifting through competing narratives, but this beat is the muddiest of any I’ve been sent to, the theories most divergent, the passions strongest. The bombs in America started the Great Conflagration, sure, but who set them off? Was it terrorists, and if so, was it international jihadists or domestic anti-government radicals? Was it the calculated act of a rogue state, an attempt by a small nation to cripple the hegemonic U.S.A.? Or was it an isolated move by a deranged individual or a small group that sparked reprisals from so many sides so quickly that the violence overwhelmed any possibility of determining the origins? The counterstrikes came so rapidly and apocalyptically that little was left of a press or news media. Analysis was impossible; guesswork was accepted without evidence. Conspiracy theories were touted as gospel; fact merged with fiction. No one really knew what was happening, survivors whispering in the dark. Then came the long migrations to unscorched earth, the disruptions and dislocations, the new alliances. Which is when it got really messy, each side clinging to its own story of what had happened and why, each side blaming someone else, each narrative of blame taking on the power of a founding myth. They were all zealots digging in their heels and aiming their weapons.

There’s a saying that dates back even before this time:
History is written by the winners.
So what happens when everyone has lost?

“The hags are hedging their bets—I’ve never seen them send so many operatives back,” Wills said as we sat at a red light outside one of D.C.’s many traffic circles. “They’re trying to prevent numerous different Events, cut as many arteries as possible. Maybe Veracity started prepping one of us for the mission, then uncovered more data and realized it was more complicated, and instead of adding all the extra work to one Protector, they prepped a second.”

That would be unfortunate, but believable. Some underling in Veracity could have uncovered a few pieces of data at the last minute—from rediscovered newspaper stories, restored audio records, unearthed diaries. Wills’s information made sense, but it was a lot to absorb. The bottle of wine I’d split with Tasha wasn’t helping.

I thought about the man on Capitol Hill and the blond woman from the restaurant, both of whom approached me and called me Troy, one warning me away and the other acting nice, but maybe only because Tasha was there. I chose not to mention them to Wills.

“If they sent both of us,” I said, “do you think there could be… others too?”

“Maybe. I hope not.”

I’d never considered this possibility before. I’d always thought I was a lone gunman, but maybe I was part of an arsenal. Or part of a scroll, the paper unspooling, more words crossed out and rewritten and revised and recrossed out, paper falling to the floor in an illegible mass.

“The hags are staying in the Mayflower hotel, just south of Dupont Circle,” Wills said as he drove. “They’re learning, doing a better job of insinuating themselves into the era, making it harder for us to take them out so surgically. I’m worried about how many there are this time. Must’ve gotten their hands on more machines than we realized, or maybe they even built some themselves. We’re going to be busy.”

I didn’t bother telling him how unfocused I’d been—the walks to the playground, the drinks at the Anonymous Source. The wine on my breath was probably a good enough hint.