The Revisionists (53 page)

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.

T
he 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.

“Hands up, all of you,” I say.

“Walk away now,” the gunman says, “and feel fortunate you made it this far.”

One of the bigger men disagrees. “We’re not letting him go, Hale.”

Three targets, one of them holding. I’ll take him first, then the other two. I need to be careful not to hit Leo. I can probably do this. I don’t make eye contact with Leo—I’m afraid to take my eyes off the gunman, Hale—but a certain relaxation of Leo’s shoulders tells me his arms aren’t being held so tightly now.

Because I knew what was coming in advance for so long, I felt that I was moving forward through events that were moving backward, like I was walking in place. Always hurrying but never getting any farther ahead. This is the first time since I’ve been with the Department that I feel completely unmoored, unsure of what will happen next. It scares me, but not as much as I would have thought.

No better ideas have come to me yet, so I keep the gun aimed at Hale’s face and then pull the trigger.

I turn to the others next, but they scatter. One of them dives behind the back of the van, leaving Leo standing in the open, and another runs in the opposite direction, toward the fence that blocks off the rail yard, pulling a gun from his jacket and firing. I move my arm to follow him and pull the trigger again and again while the world flares and everything around me seems to explode. Including the van’s headlight—someone else’s bullet hits it, and shards of plastic and glass spray into my face. My eyes clamp shut and I duck behind the van. I put a hand to my face and feel for a wound, then pull it back and try to open my eyes. The right one refuses, and everything’s blurry and wet through the left.

Still, I lean out from behind the van and fire blindly. Then, afraid of hitting Leo, I pull back and stop. I hear someone else shooting, then the clatter of a gun on pavement and the heavy fall of a body, the scrape of limp shoes.

I hear another shot from the back of the van, and then I feel motion to my left. I somehow must have missed Hale with that first shot, because there he is, coming toward me from across the street, arm extended. I turn and fire just as he pulls his own trigger. I step back frantically, my heel hits the rise of sidewalk, and down I go.