The Revisionists (51 page)

Leo shook his head. “Christ, you too?”

“You were the leak to the newspapers about the CIA’s black sites—one of the leaks, actually. There were three. You probably didn’t know that. You called the
Washington Post,
and the others called—”

“That is
bullshit
.” Leo’s hands were fists.

“First you reported your misgivings internally, following protocol. But when nothing was done about it, you leaked the story to the press. I saw all this in my files when I researched you.”

“If there were any files, I would be in
jail
now, and—”

“A decision was made from very high up, Mr. Hastings, that such a prosecution would be detrimental to the Agency and to America’s sense of its national security. So they chose to weed you out based on some other misdeed and let the black-sites story play itself out in the media. Which it did. I assure you, though, they know you were the leak. And of course
you
do, so why are you lying to yourself about it?”

Leo looked away.
Breathe, Leo. Breathe, and take what he’s saying.

“Why are you so angry about this?” Jones asked. “As best as I can determine the morals in this beat, it was the right thing to do. They were torturing people without evidence of their wrongdoing. Based on shoddy investigative work, even guesswork. Sometimes they had the right people, sometimes they didn’t. They were operating in what they considered a lawless realm and decided they could play God. It’s a familiar paradigm from what I’ve seen. As I said, it’s one of the reasons I chose you.”

Leo and Jones were motionless on the sidewalk as others passed them.

Leo said, “I only wanted to weed out the people who—”

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me. What you need to do is take this.” Jones held the briefcase out to Leo.

“There a tracking device in it?”

“If there were, do you think I’d still be alive?”

Leo took it from him, hoping he would not deeply regret this.

“Where are you going next?” Leo asked. “They’ll be here soon.” He started walking again, Jones alongside step by step.

“I don’t know. Up to this point, I’ve always known what was going to happen next. And suddenly I don’t.”

They were standing in front of a fried-chicken joint that probably wouldn’t be there a year from now, with the winds of gentrification blowing eastward. The city was changing around them.

“I’ll look into this, and if it says what you claim it does, I’ll get it to the right people.”

“Quickly,”
Jones said. “Mr. Trenton and his friends will be dead in less than two hours.”

Leo ran down a list of possible explanations for Jones’s behavior: that Jones had been a spy for another country while working at NSA and now was trying to take down a valuable intelligence contractor in order to weaken America’s defenses; that this was all an elaborate test, perhaps by the Agency itself, to see if Leo truly was the whistle-blowing type; that Jones was just a disgruntled ex-employee of Enhanced Awareness who wanted to ruin the company out of spite; that Jones was insane. Of all of them, only the last seemed free of contradiction.

“First, tell me about your wife’s uncle.”

“That’s not relevant to this.”

Leo stepped closer and lowered his voice. “I say it is. Tell me about him. What he was into. What your wife was into. What you did about it.”

Jones did not break eye contact as Leo stood too close. For a moment something passed over Jones’s face, and Leo feared that the man was going to throw a punch.

The flash of anger passed, and Jones spoke in his detached, third-person manner. “Troy Jones knew almost nothing about the uncle. She had a very large family, uncles and aunts living all over the globe. He could never keep their names straight. Some of her relatives were politically active, but they’d all been vetted, otherwise Jones never would have received such clearance at NSA.”

“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.