The Revisionists (46 page)

A few loiterers south of the station waited for the bus, silhouetted against the neon pizza sign across the street. Some Metro employees were standing just north of the station beside a white Metro van whose back doors were ajar; one of the men, in a blue jumpsuit, peered with a flashlight into a large circuit box.

“Oh, walk this way, miss,” someone said, directing her to the narrow strip of sidewalk between the rear of the van and the cement wall that ran around the perimeter of the station. The street itself was blocked off by traffic cones, though there didn’t appear to be any reason for it. She obeyed, not really thinking, or thinking about Marshall and Troy and the madness of these past weeks, and just as she was passing the van someone grabbed her around the waist. Two someones, because the shocked breath had barely left her body when she was lifted like she weighed nothing, like she
was
nothing, and suddenly she was in the back of the van. Invisible hands propelled her forward and she landed on a seat that had been installed facing backward. She looked up at the rear doors just in time to see the man who’d been crouching outside with the flashlight enter the van. The engine was already on, and the van started moving before he even shut the doors.

She didn’t realize she was screaming until she heard people telling her to stop.

“Calm down, Miss Wilson. There’s nowhere you can go, so let’s have our conversation and get this over with.”

Behind her was another seat on which one of the two men who’d thrown her was now sitting. Before her, two others sat on small benches that were welded to the sides of the van. Two interrogators, with a guard in the rear. Because she was facing backward and there were no windows, every time the van made a turn she felt a sickeningly vertiginous effect. Her stomach tightened, and she pressed her feet to the floor.

“What’s going on?” she managed to say without sounding too, too panicked.

“We’d like to hear about your relationship with Troy Jones.” That was said by the man to her left, who was bald and had a neck that suggested there was plenty of muscle hiding beneath the shapeless blue Metro jumpsuit. The partner flanking him was Asian with graying hair at his temples. Neither of them held anything, no paper or recorder or weapon. But she did notice there was a large duffel bag at the feet of the Asian guy.

“Who the hell are you?” she asked.

“Someone who just asked you a question you should start answering.”

“I’m an attorney. I know my rights. This is kidnapping.”

They were illuminated only by a dim light that, she hoped, would not fade off in a few seconds now that the doors were shut.

“You are an anti-government activist, driven to rash decisions by your brother’s recent tragedy, allying yourself with radical domestic elements and doing everything possible to impugn the reputation of our armed services. And now you’re hanging out with a former intelligence officer who recently disappeared with information valuable to the U.S. government. This isn’t kidnapping, Miss Wilson; it’s an example of the unfortunately extreme measures we need to take to protect our country when it’s threatened by its own citizens.”

“Anything you’d like to ask me, you can do with a lawyer present.”

He smiled. “But you are a lawyer, as you so pompously pointed out. You’re present and accounted for. So, by all means, let’s do some Q and A.”

She wondered what would happen if she screamed
Rape!
But the doors were no doubt thick enough to keep her from being heard. And she wasn’t going to entertain them by lunging for a door handle. The van made a sharp turn, and she crammed her right hand into the seat to keep from leaning over too far.

“I don’t think you fully appreciate how friendly we’re being,” he said. “We picked you up like this, Miss Wilson, to show you how easy it is. We can do this again, at any time. If you think your law firm connections impress us, they don’t. And you won’t have those connections much longer if you don’t play ball.”

“Why not, because you’ll accuse me of leaking a certain story? Sorry, but that threat’s already been made.”

“It doesn’t make the threat less real. We could indeed nail you for GTK, but that’s just a start.”

“What else do you have?” Another turn, not even a sharp one, but the lack of windows was getting to her. She told herself to breathe slowly, not think about vomiting.

“How about your connections with fringe writers who are about to launch an online story slandering a vital American contractor?”

“Which you people blackmailed me into!”

He looked offended. “Which people? All I know is, you’ve been accessing files from your firm, doctoring them to make them more salacious, and then passing them on to your old squeeze T.J. so he and his hacker nuts can defame the company and cast aspersions on the United States military.”

“This is complete…” But she shook her head and let the words die.

“Are you trying to say I don’t know the whole story? If that’s the case, then please enlighten us.”

“So, what, you’re Leo’s muscle? Someone sent you in because they didn’t think he was being tough enough?”

“What makes you think we work with a Leo?” The Asian guy finally spoke.

“What you saw in that briefcase made you pretty angry, didn’t it?” the bald one said.

“To realize that there are assholes who make it their business to butt into private citizens’ lives? Yes, that made me pretty angry.”

The van wasn’t turning anymore, but it was driving awfully fast. Like Leo, the men hadn’t flashed any badges, hadn’t identified themselves or their employer. But they knew about her and Troy, and the fact that she’d looked inside his briefcase.

“When everything is working properly, Miss Wilson, things like this don’t have to happen.”

“So when that utopia comes, people like you will be out of work, huh? That must mess with your motivations.”

The van apparently tried to change lanes, and someone honked, and the van veered back to where it had been. Tasha was reminded of the fact that she had no seat belt here. The two men wore such blank expression she imagined they’d been in far more hazardous situations than this.

The bald one said, “Start telling us about Troy Jones.”

“You seem to know him better than I do. You said he’s a former intelligence officer?”

They didn’t answer that, but their expressions—regret on the talkative bald guy’s face, annoyance on the quiet Asian guy’s—suggested they both wished the bald guy hadn’t let that slip.

I’m not a part of that,
she remembered Troy saying.
I’m not proud at all.
The look in his eyes, and the crushed tone of his voice. It hadn’t made sense at the time; it was as if he were reading the script for the wrong play. But the meaning of the lines was becoming clearer to her.

“It sounds like you guys need to get your own house in order,” she said, “and stop trying to make it other people’s problem.”

“I’m afraid this
is
your problem,” the bald one said, reaching into his pocket for a cell phone. “Start talking, or I’m calling your firm,
now
.”

She took a breath and stared at the smug look on his face, and it was as if all those hallmarks of fear—her quickened heart rate and the sweat along her back and the tension in her stomach—were transformed into unmitigated rage. She had been so angry for so long, and when Leo had presented her with a target for this rage, she had mistakenly tried to contain that anger and use it toward other ends. She had been trying to walk a tightrope between Leo and T.J., and suddenly all the stress and dizziness of that performance vanished, and the thought of simply stepping off the tightrope and falling was too intoxicating to deny.

“No, actually,” she said. “You know what? Fuck you both, and fuck your invisible driver. Tell him to pull over and let me out, now.”

“I’m not bluffing, Miss Wilson.”

“I’m not calling your bluff. I’m just saying
I don’t fucking care
. Call my boss. Tell him. I’m cutting the cord.” T.J. had won, and the credit cards and fifteen-dollar drinks and 401(k)s had lost. She had the feeling she was doing something headstrong and regrettable, but the surprised looks on the men’s faces only made her push harder. “You have nothing on me anymore. Leo told me that the choice was mine, that I could choose either my ideals or my job and money. Well, I’m choosing my ideals. Assholes like you never have to make that kind of choice, do you, because your only ideal
is
power and money. So don’t sit there judging me, just call my boss and get it over with.”

They had said her law firm connections didn’t impress them, and maybe that was true. But she didn’t think they wanted someone to go public with their domestic surveillance activities. If they were the types to make more violent threats, then they would have done that already. She hoped.

“Very well,” the bald one said, looking at his phone’s keypad.

She recited the phone number for him, and he made the call.

The three of them and the silent one behind her (who hopefully was not about to put a black bag over her head—Jesus, was she actually thinking this?) sat without speaking for a few seconds. The Asian guy looked at his partner as if unsure what he would do now, as if they hadn’t considered the possibility of such recalcitrance.

The bald guy listened, then typed someone’s extension into his keypad, and then his eyes went to Tasha again—he seemed to think she was on the verge of reconsidering, of pleading for clemency. Silence again, and they waited as the call went to voice mail. The thug seemed to wait even longer than necessary, all but begging Tasha to beg him to stop, but she wouldn’t. He finally said, “Hello, Mr. Coyle.” He was leaving the message for Tasha’s least favorite partner at the firm. “I’m calling to inform you that one of your firm’s associates, Tasha Wilson, is the person responsible for leaking the information about GTK Industries’ delayed shipments to the press last month. You’ll receive documentation proving this in a few days. I sincerely hope that you and your partners use that information to take appropriate steps for the good of your firm and your country.”

She would not grant them the satisfaction of looking angry. “Congratulations. You now have no leverage over me, so pull over.”

“Not so fast,” he said, making another call that required the press of only two buttons. The steeliness in his eyes suddenly seemed more threatening. The van had slowed down and now it spun a bit, getting on an exit ramp, and she had to put a hand on the windowless wall. They wouldn’t bother to get her fired first if they were going to do something rougher to her afterward, would they?

“It’s me,” he said into the phone, his voice quieter than before. “She’s refused.” A pause. “Yes, that’s been done.” His eyes on her as he waited. She told herself that these were the bored eyes of a bureaucrat calling his manager to see if an applicant’s paperwork had been processed yet, and not the cold eyes of an assassin. “In my opinion, yes.” Another pause. He glanced at the duffel bag. “For now, okay.”

He put the phone back in his pocket. The conversation must have been piped into the front seat, because without a word from anyone, the van slowed down again, then made a turn. After a very tense minute, the van came to a stop, and the Asian guy opened the back door and got out. She saw a parking lot, and in the distance a Laundromat.

And as beautiful a sight as the parking lot was, she nonetheless hadn’t liked that “For now.”

She stepped out of the van. The bald one even offered his hand so she wouldn’t slip. They were silent, though—they seemed to have decided she was no longer worth speaking to. The Asian guy got back in, put his gloved hand on the door to close it, and the sense of freedom flooding Tasha’s limbs (so taken for granted before, and so cherished now!) hit her brain as well and made her ask something before fully considering it.

“What did you do to his wife and kid?”

The Asian guy scowled. “Nothing. They died in an accident, and then he snapped.”

“Troy is not a well man,” the bald guy said. “He harbors a lot of ill will against our government. Some of which is due to some misguided political opinions his wife passed on to him, and some of which is just his mind deteriorating from… what happened.”

“Or so we’re told,” the Asian guy said. They were awfully forthcoming now, as if they thought they could elicit information from her this way. “We’re not shrinks. We’re just trying to find him before he causes some real harm.”

Harm to whom?
she thought, but this she knew enough not to ask. She just walked away, holding her breath, a larger part of her than she wanted to admit wondering if she was about to hear a gunshot. But no, the sound that came was quieter: a door closing, the van driving away.

She was in the lot of a derelict strip mall that she either had never seen before or had driven past many times without noticing it. The Laundromat, a Chinese restaurant, a dollar store, two shuttered storefronts. Northern Virginia, she guessed, which meant they’d taken her on 395 and then exited after the river.

No one was around, and few cars were in the lot. She walked to a bus stop and sank onto the bench. Suddenly her nervous system collapsed, as if it had used up all its reserves trying to remain calm and now was giving up. Her legs were shaking, as were her hands, so she hugged herself and tried to wait it out. It wasn’t even cold enough to see her breath, yet her teeth clattered as if she’d been dunked in an icy pool.

When her fingers finally stopped their spasms and she regained control of her jaw, she used her phone’s GPS to figure out where she was, then called a cab.

* * *

Tasha had always prided herself on her intelligence, her good judgment. Yet time and again these past few weeks, she found herself confused, her perceptions skewed, the world’s signals not making sense. She didn’t know if this was what it was to be in mourning, if her brainpower was being diverted from basic tasks because she was so consumed by thoughts of her brother; or if she was paying the price for getting involved in matters best avoided; or if she was indeed a tiny victim of forces so large they were beyond any one person’s ability to comprehend. Why was this happening to her?