The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  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.

  The hag goes to the men’s room. I wait a few seconds, then walk there as well. Before opening the door, I see, hidden behind a potted plant against the wall, a yellow janitor’s DO NOT ENTER sign. I step inside, see a man at the urinal. It’s not the hag. There’s a pair of feet in one of the stalls. I wash my hands, slowly, and wait for the contemp to finish his business and leave. When he does, I walk out the door and set up the janitor’s sign. Back inside, I kick a rubber doorstop in place.

  There were no security cameras in the hallway and there are none in here, so I take out my gun and fasten on the silencer. I cough as I pull back the hammer, then I walk up to the front of the stall. What an embarrassing way to go.

  I kick the door open just after he flushes. He’s standing, and thankfully he’s all buttoned up. His eyes are wide.

  “Digestive troubles getting in the way of revolution?”

  “You…” He’s stunned by my appearance. Why are they always so surprised?

  “I have a question first. Before we make things even messier.” My gun is aimed at his head. He’s too far away to knock the gun from me, and my body pins the door to the side wall so he can’t try to kick it shut.

  “Are you one of the religious cultists?” I ask him. “This isn’t an overtly religious mission you’re on, not like some of the others I’ve had to deal with. But still: Do you believe in fate? Or in God? If there’s fate, if we’re being pulled along on trajectories that are beyond our power, then there’s nothing we can do to change that. Right? Which means that your whole mission, disrupting the Perfect Present, is impossible.”

  “Why don’t we have this conversation somewhere else?” He’s about my size and looks like he could be trouble if I didn’t have a gun on him. But his voice is tiny.

  “You’re not going anywhere. But you can buy a little time with an interesting answer.” Buying time, there’s another good one.

  “This isn’t about fate. This is about freeing ourselves. This is about—”

  “But freeing yourselves from what, fate? Or God? That’s my question. I’m betting you don’t believe in fate. You think we can step outside our boundaries, do whatever we want, have an effect on the larger forces. Am I right?”

  “Yes. I might feel that way even more if you stopped pointing that gun at me.”

  “But I’m doing my job. I’m fulfilling my fate, and the fate of all the people around us. What is going to happen to them has happened to them. If you go back and undo it, if I let you undo it, or if I suddenly decide to undo it myself—Sure, why not, let’s disrupt things and see what happens—then I’ve imposed my own moral judgment on millions, billions of people. The rest of humankind, really. I would be God, wouldn’t I? And so would you.”

  “I… I guess that’s one way of looking at it.”

  “But here’s the problem: If there’s fate, then there’s no God. Because the whole idea of God is that there’s free will, right? That we can make our own decisions and live with the consequences, that there is no fate, and anything is possible. If I let you disrupt things, though, I make myself God, but we’ve already established there is no God. So the whole thing just collapses. It’s a mess. A goddamned mess, as the contemps would say.”

  “You’re right to question what you’re doing, Zed. If we could just talk a little more, I think you’d begin to understand what we’re trying to—”

  “Flush the toilet again.”

  “What?”

  “The toilet. It stinks. Flush it again.”

  He still looks confused, but he slowly turns, daring to take his eyes off me, and he bends down a bit to flush it. During the loud whoosh I shoot him twice in the back.

  His body slumps awkwardly. There’s not enough space for him to fall, and he’s still slightly alive as I pull him down, hitting his head against the commode. I plant a Flasher on his bubbling chest—the bullets went straight through—and step back. The silent blast melts the walls of his stall and the ones flanking it, everything within six feet is blackened, the horrid pipes exposed. This clearly will perplex people—I’ve left more of a trace than I should have, as is becoming alarmingly typical on this gig—but I tell myself it’s the best I could do given the circumstances.

  I walk out, leaving the janitor’s DO NOT ENTER sign in front of the door. Hopefully no one will walk in for a few hours, maybe not even until the convention ends. I walk back through the hallway to pick up the binder and other paperwork, then I walk down one of the long hallways, past the meeting rooms, and find an empty spot. I sit on a couch and read through the binder in hopes it will help explain the holes in my intel.

  When it’s time for McAlester’s speech, I slip into the back of the assigned room. It’s standing room only, but I’m tall enough to see over other people’s shoulders. The introducer finishes regaling the crowd with a list of McAlester’s many achievements in the service of international peace and diplomacy, then the great man himself ascends to the podium amid the applause. He looks unusually sweaty and a little gray.

  He starts with a joke, badly delivered. Wins a few awkward laughs. He begins his speech, with weird pauses that grow in length. Heads in the crowd turn to each other, perplexed. Then McAlester’s voice trails off and he falls before anyone can catch him.

  People stand, voices compete for volume and clarity. I wait for an appropriate moment to leave, realizing that a hasty exit would arouse suspicions. Behind me, they’re all wondering what happened, a heart attack or a seizure, maybe exhaustion or a blood clot from the long flight. Only I, and a few others, know that Randolph McAlester has had a heart attack as a result of a refined and untraceable poison put into the coffee that someone handed him the moment he arrived here, poison the hag never had a chance to intercept.

  I’m back at the hotel; Wills is gone. I tap my appropriated line and call him—we swapped numbers last night. I can talk to him without actually using my voice, almost a form of telepathy.

  I’m at the Mayflower—where are you? I ask.

  Tracking another hag. He left the hotel about thirty minutes afte
r the other one did. I think he’s tailing the Korean diplomat.

  Interesting. That Event is still a few days away. Maybe I should take things from here?

  No, I’m fine. I downloaded everything from you last night; I know what’s happening. How did yours go?

  The integrity of history was preserved. I left a mess in a public bathroom, but no body.

  We decide I’ll stay outside the hotel in case I spot any other hags leaving, but without my GeneScan, it’s pointless. Going back to that coffee shop to kill more time would start to look suspicious, so instead I buy a vegetarian empanada at a vendor’s stand and eat it in a tiny triangular park surrounded by busy roads. The only other people in the park are two homeless men; I give them some money and keep my eyes on the hotel.

  15.

  For the second time in a week, Tasha left work early, passing through the electronic scanners on the ground floor at 7:30 (her billable hours would be suspiciously low) and emerging into an unusually warm autumn night. The leaves that had begun turning colors refused to fall, as if wondering if they’d been mistaken about winter coming. As if they could hang on, maybe turn themselves green again, reverse nature’s clock.

  Tasha wasn’t working as late as an associate was expected to because she was hurrying to T.J.’s anti-recruitment meeting. Her excuse the previous night had been a dinner date with Troy—it hadn’t necessarily been the greatest first date of her life, but guys who were great on first dates usually turned out to be guys uninterested in relationships, the ones who viewed life as a nonstop cocktail party and were frightened of serious conversation. Troy was a serious one.

  She was still figuring him out; all she knew for sure was that he was that rare man who didn’t seem to realize how good-looking he was. And he had an air of preternatural calm. He’d said he was a health statistician, so maybe this was just his scientific nature, doing calculus in his head while he pondered questions like fair reimbursement rates for city hospitals and the societal costs of obesity, hiding in his mental laboratory and observing the world from a distance.

  She liked him. Maybe starting a relationship now was exactly what she needed. But she was worried about his being a widower. Having lost not just a wife but a little kid—Jesus. She couldn’t imagine that. He had been vague about the details, said it had happened a while ago (how old was he, thirty-five, forty?). But there was no mistaking how present the pain was.

  Regardless, she realized that she was thinking about Troy and the too-brief kiss she’d allowed him mainly to distract herself from what she was about to do.

  She’d had a few days to digest everything Leo had told her. Though the evidence he possessed wasn’t as rock solid as he’d acted like it was, it was probably enough to get her fired. She had known the possibility existed that someone in the firm might think she was the leak; none of the other hundreds of lawyers at the D.C. office had any family members who’d been killed overseas, though a few secretaries and paralegals did. All Leo really had to do, as he’d said, was place a call to one of the partners, and the suspicion he planted (even without those computer-speak files he had) would lead to a confrontation that Tasha was no longer sure she could talk her way out of.

  On the one hand, maybe Leo was right when he said he wasn’t asking her to do anything terrible. T.J. was a big boy and could take care of himself. He projected an awareness that he was constantly surrounded by powerful enemies plotting against him—something she had considered self-aggrandizement at best and paranoia at worst. (Now she wasn’t so sure.) But whether T.J.’s politics and personality were extreme or not, that wasn’t the point. He was a friend, a friend who was trying to do some good in the world. Whereas Leo represented everything about the world that needed serious fixing. A power structure gone mad with paranoia of its own. A national belligerence that took out its grievances on its own citizens just as thoughtlessly as it took them out on Third World nations. An abject moral blindness.

  True, her enthusiasm for T.J.’s brand of activism was waning, but she would keep going to the meetings as a cover for her own ends. Leo would think she was doing his dirty work, but she wouldn’t be. She would stall him long enough to get information from him on Marshall, and maybe even learn more about who Leo was, who he worked for, and why the hell he was monitoring innocent civilians like some 21st-century Stasi. This wouldn’t be easy—he would likely require her to provide something on T.J. before he gave her anything on Marshall. She probably couldn’t make something up (Leo might catch her, and she wasn’t sure she could lie that well), but she could feed him just enough information on some of T.J.’s various activities to make Leo think she was holding up her end. She wouldn’t even need to act like she enjoyed it—she could show Leo that she hated herself for playing along with him, and maybe that would incent him to give her information on Marshall as a way of winning her loyalty. I appreciate your hard work, Tasha; check out what I learned from army intelligence.

  Unless she was just in denial, and her plan to stall Leo was in fact her way of putting off a real decision on how to deal with the mess she’d gotten herself into.

  She got off the Metro at Shaw and walked a few blocks to a Howard University classroom building, where T.J. had parlayed some connections (probably involving a smitten underclasswoman) into the use of a lecture hall for the launch of his guerrilla campaign against the United States military.

  The plan, T.J. explained from the podium, was to offer a message to counter “the siren song of glory and triumph that the army uses to seduce teenagers into carrying arms in the name of U.S. hegemony.” Tasha found herself wondering what it was that had initially attracted Marshall to military service. Their parents’ idea of heroic conflict involved getting blasted by fire hoses wielded by racist Alabama cops, and yet Marshall had joined the most powerful fighting force ever assembled. To Tasha (and, she could tell, to her parents), this represented a symbolic switching of teams, from the righteous underdog’s to the thundering bully’s. But to Marshall, it was a logical continuation of his parents’ activism: they had fought to ensure that democracy would exist in a true form here in America, and Marshall would do his part to protect that democracy and to extend its reach into oppressed nations. She still wasn’t sure who was right.

  Scattered about the lecture hall were two dozen people, most of them college students but others old enough to remember earlier wars. T.J. wore a long-sleeved black tee proclaiming EVOLUTION IS JUST A THEORY / REVOLUTION IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN. He explained to his listeners that military recruiters focused their efforts on the very people that the capitalist system ignored, the kids in violent inner cities and meth-ridden rural communities whose only options were jail and war. The people gathered in this room, he said, would offer these kids another solution. They would show up at high schools and community centers armed with information the recruiters didn’t want the kids to know, news from the front lines and the VA mental wards. “We’ll hit them with the truth so they can make informed decisions and not be led to the slaughter. We’re here not just to spread truth but to save lives.”

  T.J. peppered his speech with terms like imperialist regime and warmongers. Tasha found herself wondering if Leo was right, if T.J. was just someone with a permanent grudge, spoiling for a fight; whatever society he’d been born into, whatever conceivable utopia, he would have found reason to object, incite, attack. She had tried to focus on their common ground these last few weeks, but the earth was always slanted with T.J.; he was always dangerously pushing everyone into a crevasse. Guys like him gave the political Left a bad name.

  During a break in the consciousness-raising, while some of the college students distributed articles and statistics among the believers, T.J. walked up to Tasha.

  “Do you want to take the podium for a bit?” he asked her.

  “Me?” She’d never promised him she’d participate in the group; only after frequent needling had she consented to even attend the meeting. “Why?”

  “So you can tell your
story, you know. Having the sister of a veteran on our side, that’d mean a lot, carry real weight with the kids.”

  “My brother is not a rhetorical device, T.J.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I just figured, maybe you could get things off your chest, and at the same time it would rally people to be a part of this. That’s all.”

  She tried to breathe slowly, concentrate on not lashing out.

  “I don’t feel comfortable doing that right now.”

  He nodded, then returned to the podium to discuss who would start calling which high-school principals.

  After the anti-recruitment meeting ended, she and T.J. went out to Busboys and Poets for a drink.

  “I’m sorry if what I said about your brother was out of line,” he said after they clinked pint glasses.

  “That’s okay. I can be touchy about it, that’s all.”

  “And I can be tactless, I know. I’m working on it.”

  This was one of the many reasons she’d chosen not to tell him about Leo. Maybe T.J. would have some good ideas on how they could both string Leo along, but more likely he’d go public with the information and land Tasha in even worse trouble. She would tell him about it, she promised herself, but not until she’d gotten what she needed from Leo.

  Her phone buzzed and she excused herself to check who it was, hoping it wasn’t someone at the office demanding her return. No; it was her parents. She didn’t feel mentally prepared to deal with them right then. She stared at the phone for an extra second before silencing it.

  While she’d been distracted, T.J. had picked up a Post from the empty table beside them. He seemed particularly engrossed by whatever he was reading.