The Revisionists (26 page)

“I can’t believe they didn’t tell us about each other,” I said. “We’re being strung along by bureaucratic morons. I’d like to see any of
them
try to do what we do.”

“You’re funny, Zed. One minute you’re the burned-out vet drinking on the job, and the next you’re the passionate warrior.”

“Maybe the passion’s faked. Maybe I’m all burned out.”

“Maybe you’re not the only one.” He pulled into a parking space on Connecticut. “Everyone who’s been doing this as long as we have feels the same way. This is my last mission—I’m not supposed to be saying that, but they promised me, and I’m going to hold them to it—so we just need to hang together until this is finished.”

“It’s my last one too.”

“You know what happened to Derringer after his little tirade?”

“I have an idea.”

“Yeah, well, I plan on enjoying my retirement.”

“Me too.” I tried to imagine that.

“That’s the hotel there,” he said, pointing across the street. From here we could just see the grand entrance, the over-uniformed men beckoning taxis and carrying suitcases for the important guests.

I could tell from his suddenly glazed eyes that he was checking his GeneScan—I can’t describe my relief at knowing that I was with someone whose GeneScan functioned properly. “They’re in there—at least four, I think. The fourteenth floor.”

I felt for the gun inside my jacket. “Let’s go in, wipe them out. However many there are. Get this over with and go home.”

“Make a raid on an expensive downtown hotel full of diplomats and politicians and celebrities, kill as many as four hags, and do it without affecting the upcoming Events? If you can think of a way to do it that won’t cause chaos in this city, I’m listening.”

He was right. “What do you suggest?”

“We stake it out, see if they’re planning anything tonight. My intel says no, so does yours, but we wait just in case. When they do leave the building, we take them down, one by one.”

It was a smarter idea than mine, and I resented him for it.

“The sooner we can end this job, the sooner we can get back to”—he shook his head—“whatever the hell it is we left behind.”

We stay in the car all night, one of us at the wheel and the other sleeping. A few times we have to move the car after a cop or security guard or local contemp takes too much notice of our presence—we just drive in a circle and park in a different spot, and that works until sunrise. At six o’clock, when a coffee shop across the street opens, we get out and buy some stimulants.

The fedora Wills leaves in the car after I convince him it’s wrong for the time and only makes us memorable.

“Do you ever wonder,” he asks when we’re well into our second coffees, sitting at a table, “if this job could actually be a punishment?”

“It’s definitely a punishment.”

“I’m serious. They told all of us it was an honor, the most important job anyone could have. But I’ve been running through a few things in my head. You and I both worked in Security for a while, right? We didn’t know each other, different squads, but still. Maybe someone important got tired of us. Maybe we got blamed for something, and they decided this was the best way to get rid of us.”

I try to look at him without letting my eyes stray from the Mayflower for too long. Half the cars that pull up in front of it are Lincoln Town Cars, limousines, or SUVs with tinted windows. Important people with secrets to hide.

He continues, “Because, here’s the thing: Can you really go back and alter history? Can the hags actually do that?” He’s speaking softly, and with the Muzak and the cacophony of customers and espresso grinders, no one can hear him but me. “They think they can, but what if they’re wrong? The Perfect Present—can they really undo that? We have our memories, the basic facts of our lives. These things
exist,
if only in our minds. If the hags manage to do what they’re trying to do, stop the Great Conflagration, then sure, they’ll change the course of history, but it’ll just go down an alternate path. It won’t change the future that you and I are from, and it won’t change what we carry in our memory.”

“So you’re saying that what we do here makes no difference.”

We’re sitting as far back in the coffee shop as we can without losing the view through the window. We know we’ll be spotted by contemps—so many of them that we could never get their names or samples or even images—but we’ve decided we have no other option. We can’t sit in a parked car on this avenue by daylight, not in this age of “orange alerts.” The only other option is staying in our motel until the time of the specific Events that our intel claims the hags are trying to disrupt, but we don’t fully totally trust our conflicting intel anymore.

“I’m just wondering,” he says, as if the coffee-house environment has unleashed his inner philosopher. “I’m opening it up for debate.”

A homeless man staggers past the window, drops a plastic bag on the ground, stares at it for a moment as if wondering where it came from, and walks away.

“But we’ve done other missions. We’ve gone to the past and been recalled again.”

“And didn’t you find it a little suspicious that they kept us on campus between missions? That we weren’t allowed to leave, walk around, see our families?”

I have no family,
I nearly say. But I swallow this down.

“Maybe this is a new kind of prison we’re in,” he continues. “They send us back, we do a mission, and, if we survive, great, they recall us and just send us on another one. Over and over. It will never end, whether we stop the hags or not. We could cause an apocalypse here, spread some horrible disease, kill vital historical figures, and it wouldn’t matter. The ramifications would all occur on alternate paths, and our superiors would still recall us afterward.” He shrugs. “Or maybe this is all some elaborate computer program they’ve plugged our brains into, or a drug trip.”

“We wouldn’t have the same trip. And that back-and-forth idea, that can’t be right either. Because this is our last mission.”

“Sure, they
said
that, but what if we go back and they say, Oops, sorry, some things have come up, the hags have a new plot, we need more help from our loyal soldiers.” He leans closer. “Don’t you find it odd that this time, on what are supposed to be our last missions, they sent us
here
instead of to our usual beats?”

“So this is a purgatory we’re in.”

Odd how natural it is to talk in the contemps’ terms for fate, for afterlife. The beat seeps into you.

“And nothing that we do matters,” I say. “No control over our fate or anyone else’s.”

“It’s just a theory.”

One could say the same thing about life in general, right? That we run around in frantic circles, directed by those more powerful than us, having an effect on nothing. Wills’s existential wonderings are only making me more depressed.

“Let’s just say I hope you’re wrong.”

Three women in long jackets pass on the sidewalk; the one in the middle is pointing with her finger like a conductor as she issues commands.

“Me too. Me too.”

“And you’re giving me a headache. Look, the Engineers can play with the theories. I just want to kill some damned hags and go home.” We’ve each had two coffees by now, and so many pastries I’m tense from sugar and caffeine, not to mention sleeplessness from the night in the car. “Let’s go in, get it over with. I’m tired of waiting, tired of being
back here
.”

“We need to be smart about this. I’m sorry if what I said upset you.”

“What you said didn’t
upset
me. I just think you’re a little crazy.”

“I don’t think anyone expected us to emerge from this many gigs with our heads straight.” Then he sits up, distracted. He’s seeing something on his GeneScan. “They’re moving,” he says. It’s not quite eight in the morning; the sidewalks are manic with activity. “No, only one of them—the others are staying put.”

As the hag descends the elevator, we flip a coin—trusting at least something to fate—and I win. I’ll follow the hag, and Wills can wait for the next one.

I cross the street, hands in my pockets against the morning chill, engulfed in a mass of office workers. I stand outside the tie shop at the Mayflower’s entrance, glancing at the headlines of the
Post
through the glass of a dispenser (“Defense Budget Passes,” “Wizards Blow 4th-Q Lead,” “10 Best Cocktails in D.C.”), and then watching Wills, who’s moved to the front of the coffee shop so I can see him. When he gives me a faint nod, I turn to the door and see a young man emerge from the hotel. He’s wearing a long, charcoal-gray topcoat over a suit with cuffed pants, and I wonder if he visited a tailor here or if they somehow managed to construct a contemp wardrobe back in our own time. I wait a few seconds, then follow him south on Connecticut.

I keep just far enough away, lingering at intersections and waiting for lights. He never talks on a phone or to anyone else.

We walk east for twenty minutes. We’ve apparently reached the outer edge of the city’s commercial core—the crowds are thinning, the buildings shorter, the ground-floor delis and snack shops more rundown. Cranes in the distance are struggling to expand the white-collar reach. The hag turns north. On one side of the street is a long line of row houses in desperate need of paint and gardening and new roofs, or maybe just bulldozers. Looming above them on the other side is a concrete monstrosity that stretches as far as I can see. My GPS informs me that this is the Washington convention center.

I know the convention he’s heading to—it was in my intel. Rather than follow him too closely, I loiter at a street corner and pretend to be very interested in the list of bands that will soon grace the nearby tiny club, at least until the bombs hit.

The hag walks into the entrance and I watch him chat with a man at the front desk. I don’t know how he gets past security, but he manages it. I check and there are no metal detectors, a good thing, since I’m armed. The hag likely is too.

A taxi pulls up to the entrance and a small entourage of businessmen carries briefcases and the leftovers of their conversation into the building. I walk in thirty seconds later. The man at the front desk wears a light brown jacket with the crest of a security firm sewn on the sleeve.

“I’m not on your list, actually,” I say after he asks me for my invitation. I show him, but don’t hand him, one of the extra IDs that the people in Logistics gave me for just such a purpose. It has my cover name, Troy Jones, but it’s not a driver’s license; it’s a badge from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I don’t know how realistic it is, but I assume that this guy doesn’t know what a real one looks like anyway. “I need to hunt around for someone.”

“Oh. Um, who are you looking for?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Sir, um, we have some rather important people here today, and I’d—”

“
I’m
rather important,” I tell him, surprised to be getting such pushback after showing him the badge. Perhaps the authorities aren’t as highly regarded in this time as my training has led me to believe.

“I’m sorry, it’s just… I wasn’t told anyone from the FBI would be coming today.”

“We’re not big on prior announcements. And no one from the FBI
did
come here today, understand?” I wink at him, burn his image into my drive, and walk away.

I stroll down a hallway wide enough for two tanks. In the center, a hundred yards up, a swarm of business-suited middle-aged and elderly men and a few token women buzz around a breakfast buffet like plump bees attracted by the piles of sliced pineapples and strawberries. Name tags dangle from lapels. To make myself less conspicuous—I’m darker-skinned, slightly younger, and less formally dressed than anyone here—I grab a stack of papers and a thick white binder from a kiosk. I skim through the agenda, the lectures with titles like “Investment Opportunities in Newly Opened Nations” and “Putting Advanced Surveillance Technologies to Work for Your Company.” Last night’s keynote speech was delivered by a senator from South Carolina; a congressman from California will close the sessions at six o’clock tonight.

I’ve let the hag lead me to a meeting of key figures indeed, a convention of CEOs and elected officials. This city is a nightmare to operate in.

Placards set up at the doorways tell me which lectures will be occurring inside. I walk into the room for “Beyond Automated Ticketing: The Future of Privatized Police.” It’s crowded, but I don’t see the hag.

At the third room (“Making Your Workforce Kidnap-Proof: Best Practices for Human-Asset Protection”), I see the hag in the third row. I sit in the back just as a portly man in a light gray suit makes an introductory joke about their country’s president then notes that the agenda has a typo and that the demonstration project on disaster evacuations and triage of wounded will be at 11:30, not 11:00. He introduces the speaker to light applause. I check the agenda, and I recognize a name. In less than two hours, one of the hag’s targets will be giving a speech in this very room.

The target’s name is Randolph McAlester. He is a former head of Britain’s MI5 and worked closely with America’s National Security Agency. He now runs a “clandestine training firm,” whatever that means, based in London but with offices in Dubai, Tokyo, and Johannesburg. He’s scheduled to present new findings about digital surveillance technology and its amazing possibilities. He will never finish his speech.

Flight data tells me he will land at Washington National Airport in twenty minutes. He’ll no doubt take one of those tinted-window SUVs to get here. If the hags were smart, they would intercept him at the airport, or they could have tried to get to him in London. Instead, they think they’re going to save him here.

When the session ends, I return to the lobby, then pretend to consult the agenda as I walk into a corner. I place the binder and paperwork on a small table and watch the room’s door as everyone files out, including the hag. I turn around, face the wall, and follow his reflection in an ornate mirror hanging there. McAlester’s plane landed two minutes ago.