The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  She was used to prisons. This one was a little smaller than the last, but at least there were no screaming kids.

  Then he asked about the Shims. What they had been talking to each other about lately, if she’d noticed anything different. He was very interested in the fact that they’d been bickering, though she did not mention the approaches Hyun Ki had made to her. He asked if there had been any visitors, any change in Sang Hee’s routine, and whether Sari had ever seen a tall man who looked perhaps part black and part Asian and part white, but she shook her head.

  He told her there were towels and soap in the bathroom, and he opened his messenger bag and emptied it onto the bed. She saw what looked like candy bars and packages of nuts. “I know it’s not a lot, but it will keep you going for a little while. I don’t know how much time I’m going to need. I’ll try to come back within two days—hopefully tomorrow, but I’m not sure. And you absolutely cannot call me. Someone will trace the call and figure out where you are.” She realized he was awaiting a reply, so she nodded.

  “How’s your arm?”

  It was throbbing worse than before, but she lied and said she would be fine.

  “Let me look at it again.” He rolled up her sleeve and took off the dressing. She sucked in her breath; the wound glistened red, but there was less blood on the gauze than she’d expected. “Good,” he said. “It’s better.” She hadn’t noticed him packing the first aid kit, but there it was; he applied a new bandage and handed her pills for later.

  The alarm clock beside the bed claimed that more than three hours had passed since she’d left the diplomat’s house.

  “What’s going to happen?” she dared to ask.

  “I’m going to come up with a brilliant idea, and you’re going to be fine.” He said that as if he were reading a newspaper’s synopsis of the plot of some outlandish new movie he was not terribly interested in seeing.

  She asked him one of the questions that had been echoing in her mind for days. “What did you really do in Jakarta?”

  He stood up and paced.

  “I would like to know,” she said, “that I can trust you. Was what you did there so terrible that you can’t tell me?”

  He stopped pacing. “It wasn’t terrible.”

  “But it wasn’t a bank.”

  “I went to Jakarta,” he said slowly, as if trying to construct the sentence in his head before he lent it to his tongue, “to write. I helped write stories for a newspaper based out of Hong Kong. While I was there, it was also my job to… to make friends. To make friends with people who might know about certain activities in Indonesia. People who recruited angry and confused young men and tried to talk them into blowing up hotels and killing Western tourists and attacking my country. It was my job to watch people like that, and write about them, but not for the newspaper.”

  “And that’s what you’re doing here, with me? Making friends? So things won’t blow up?”

  “It’s different.”

  “What happened to your ‘friends’ there?”

  “They didn’t get to blow anything up.”

  “But they would have if not for you?”

  “Yes. Some of them. Maybe not all of them. But that was one of the lessons, that you have to watch who you become friends with.”

  “That’s good advice.”

  They looked at each other. If he had been two paces closer to her, she would have felt that he was looming over her. As if mindful of this, he stayed where he was.

  “I am trying to do the right thing,” he said. “I have always tried to do the right thing. I could be living a very different life right now. I could be making money and raising my little family and telling myself I’m a great person for doing nothing.” Yet he sounded like he regretted his choices.

  Not that she had a choice. She had had one, once, and she’d made it, and that choice had led her here. To a motel room with a bed and a locked door and a man who seemed part chameleon.

  “So, the people you work with, they can help me? You’re a… a spy, and your group can help clear all of this up?”

  “I don’t work for them anymore.”

  This was as alarming as anything he’d said. “Why not?”

  “They didn’t think I was good at what I did. And I didn’t think they were good at what they did.”

  She ran her fingers through her hair and pulled at it for a moment, stopping herself before the pain became too intense. “I’m tired of you talking in riddles.”

  He sat down beside her. She exhaled, brushed the hair out of her face.

  “When I decided that people were doing wrong, people that I’d been following and reporting on, we took them,” Leo said. His hands were folded in his lap and he was staring forward at the blank television. “Sometimes we had evidence and could give it to the local police; sometimes we didn’t. So I had to be sure, sure that they were the right people to target. I didn’t know what happened to them afterward, where they went. I didn’t. Then a couple of years later, I found out. I’d heard stories but didn’t believe them. Then I saw it for myself, and I didn’t like it. It didn’t feel… like something my country should be involved in. It made me feel even more pressure to get things right, to make sure I was targeting the right people. If I made a mistake, I would have to live with that forever. Live with knowing a person would be kidnapped, locked in a box somewhere in Thailand, and tortured, maybe for years. I would have to live with that. So it got much, much harder to know when I was sure I was targeting the right people.”

  He spoke slowly and almost tonelessly, as if he had rehearsed this in his mind but never said it out loud. And certainly not in her language.

  “It went on like that for months, and I wasn’t sleeping very well. There were other things bothering me too, but…” He didn’t continue with that. “There was this one man; not really a man, I think he was seventeen. Funny, smart, the kind of guy who could make everyone his friend. But there was another side of him, and he was talking to the wrong people, and I told my bosses to target him. That’s how it worked: I sent a note with someone’s name on it to a person I barely knew, and I’d never hear anything else. That way no one person had to be too involved. But after I had this kid targeted, I learned some more things about him that made me reconsider. I kept thinking of him in that box. Just a kid, the wrong kid, and I’d ruined his life. Or worse.

  “Now I couldn’t sleep. I drank a lot. Finally I found a way to tell my bosses that I’d made a mistake, that it was the wrong kid. I tried to explain my case, show them more evidence. I begged and pleaded for them to let him go. I threatened to quit if they didn’t.

  “So they let him go. Back to Jakarta, to his family. I wanted to visit him, see how he was doing, but that would have been a mistake. He would have put two and two together. And I didn’t want to see what had become of him, what my mistake had done, what had happened to him while he was in that prison for five weeks. But at least, at the very least, I could look at myself in the mirror and know that I had undone my mistake. That I’d managed to wring some good out of the bad.”

  He sighed deeply, as if he’d just dropped a weight.

  “Three weeks later he blew himself up at a hotel in Bali.”

  Leo looked at Sari and went on. “So, the questions. Had I been wrong to tell them to release him and right to have him targeted initially? Because he really was bad all along? And I’d set free a man who would kill forty people and maim dozens more? Or had he been a good person before, until my people got their hands on him and turned him against us because of my mistake?”

  He was staring at her so intently that she felt he needed an answer. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Neither do I.” Then he smiled, and it was frightening to her. “And I never will.”

  He looked away and exhaled deeply a few more times, and she realized he was trying not to cry. That explained the scary smile, all the jumbled emotions coming out wrong.

  “I’m sorry that happened,” she said.


  “I’m not even sure if I should be sorry. Maybe it all happened for a reason. Maybe it was necessary for me to make a mistake like that so they could weed me out. So they could clear away people like me and make room for men who really know how to do that job.” He shook his head. “You wanted to know if my old employer can help you, and that’s why the answer is no. But you can trust me. And you can trust that I do know enough, that I can do enough, to get you out of this.”

  “I trust you.” Thinking, Do I? Or do I just want him to stop talking?

  He looked at her. Then his hand was on her cheek again. It felt less clinical this time when he looked into her eyes. Her leg was pressing against him. She had thought before of being alone with him, but not like this. There were too many other things in her head now.

  “You’re very brave,” he told her. It was about the last thing she’d expected him to say. She had just been thinking of how scared she was, too scared even to move his hand away. Too scared even to look at him, so she closed her eyes.

  Misinterpreting, he leaned forward, and suddenly his lips were on hers. All she could think about was waking up in the bedroom those three hours ago.

  He stopped when he noticed she wasn’t responding.

  “I’m very tired,” she managed to say.

  He stood and told her not to answer the door unless she heard a series of three hard knocks followed by two quick ones. He demonstrated his code on the tiny table that the unplugged TV rested on.

  “Lock the door after me,” he said, then walked out and left her to her new prison.

  24.

  Tasha sat at her kitchen table the next morning, her hands cupped around a warm mug of coffee. The wonderful sound of a shower running, the knowledge that a gorgeous man was in there. She did have a bit of a headache, further proof (not that she needed any) that she’d drunk too much. Still, no part of the previous day was regrettable. Her colleagues would no doubt be suspicious about yesterday’s early exit, but she’d make up for it. Lord knew she felt energized.

  She was staring off into space when she glimpsed, in the corner of the room, Troy’s briefcase. He always carried it with him, which was one of the stranger things about him. Who carried a briefcase anymore? Troy was a throwback to an earlier time—no shoulder bag or man-purse for him. She found that traditionalism endearing, even though she figured that if she mentioned it, he might take it as an insult. He had this strange innocence to him, a lack of awareness that so many of his mannerisms were slightly off. Maybe it came from having an immigrant mother, or maybe it was his scientific background—he really was a nerd, if a six-two nerd cut like a cornerback. And, damn, his clothes—she’d started to wonder how many outfits he had here in D.C., if he was one of those traveling businessmen who simply alternated between two shirts and two pairs of slacks. Still, if that was the worst of his faults, she’d found a keeper. His fashion sense she could always work on.

  She looked at the briefcase again.

  She knew it would be wrong to go through his things, but a girl could never be too careful these days. You were allowed to look through a guy’s medicine cabinet, so you should be able to look through his briefcase—it was permissible under the single girl’s rules of self-defense.

  To her surprise, the inside of the briefcase was quite unlike the orderly Mr. Jones. Pages everywhere, some upside down, some horizontal, some even torn. Indecipherable scribbles in the margins, black ink blotting out entire lines. File folders had been bent in half and crammed in. For a moment she wondered if he’d picked up the wrong briefcase at a meeting—surely this couldn’t be Troy’s. Also inside was one of the smallest laptops she’d ever seen, barely an inch thick, and three flash drives.

  She picked up a random sheet of paper, read it, and started to feel dizzy.

  She was standing by the front window, after pacing in the living room, when he finally descended the stairs. He took a while to get going in the morning, which was good, as it had allowed her time to move from shock to confusion to hurt to rage. And here he was, in yesterday’s clothes and jacket, but looking so good she wanted to slap him. The living room was cluttered, her shoes everywhere, magazines on the floor, the wastebasket full of mashed Kleenex. She was a terrible housekeeper. And a terrible judge of people, apparently.

  “Health statistics, huh?”

  He looked at her blankly. Then he noticed the briefcase in her arms. She underhanded it; one of its corners hit him hard in the chest as he managed an awkward catch.

  “That was very enlightening reading. Normally I’d apologize for going through someone else’s things, but it looks like you of all people would understand.”

  Still he was silent, shifting the briefcase to one hand. She took a few steps toward him but went no farther, kept her distance.

  “Who are you, Troy?”

  “I’m not that person, Tasha.”

  “Don’t even say my name. Jesus, you conned me pretty good. What, was I a test subject for what you assholes can do? You pretty proud of yourself?”

  “I’m not proud at all.”

  She was so angry she almost didn’t notice his expression—he looked not just stunned but disappointed, like he was as hurt as she was. She’d assumed he would have ten lies ready to deploy in case of emergency. “So, what, you guys spy on political activists? A little domestic surveillance to make sure people stay in line? Is Leo your boss, or are you his?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not a part of that.”

  “The hell you aren’t—I read the files, Troy!” Document after document about surveillance, how to watch people, how to filter through their e-mail and Web browsing, listen in on their cell phone calls, decode their texts. T.J. had been right all along. “You photocopy my diary while I was sleeping? What, you decided to take it to the next level by getting me in bed?”

  “That briefcase isn’t me, Tasha. You have to believe that.”

  “Oh, you saw the light when you were fucking me, that’s your story? What about the health-care-consultant bit, you remember that one? You getting confused from all the different lies you’ve been telling?”

  “I think everyone’s confused right now.” His calmness only made her want to hit him more. This was so cerebral to them, so analytical. They didn’t understand how personal this was, and that’s how they were able to play games like this, manipulate people. She had thought he was one of the few who understood this when in fact he was the opposite. “I know this is a difficult time for you,” he said, “but you need to understand that—”

  “Stop it! You can stop acting now, Troy, or whoever you are. Jesus Christ, that story about your wife and kid wasn’t even true, was it? Just part of your con?”

  “I wish it weren’t true.”

  “And your brother?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I cannot believe this. I can’t believe anyone would be so low.” Her voice broke, goddamn it. Her anger had initially overpowered the hurt, but the hurt always won eventually. “You are fucking scum. Get out of my house.”

  He watched her for a final moment, and the look in his eyes again was so unexpected, a look of sadness, of empathy even, as if he wanted to come forward and wipe the tears from her eyes, as if he had that right. He didn’t seem capable of acknowledging the fact that his game was over. She hardened her face, willed the hurt away, made herself a wall.

  Finally he walked past her, toward the door. She looked out the window.

  “You shouldn’t tell anyone what you saw in here,” he said from behind her.

  She spun around. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do!”

  “Tasha. For your own good: Don’t tell anyone about this. Don’t tell anyone about me.” That could have sounded like a threat, but he said it differently. Sadly. Like he was trying to explain the concept of death to a child with a sick parent.

  “I wish I could tell you why,” he said, “but…”

  Without further explanation, he opened the door. She let him go, j
ust stood there at the window and watched Troy Jones walk south until the diagonal line of row houses on Potomac stole him from view.

  A good while later, after she had taken some time to compose herself, she called Leo. He’d given her his number, telling her she should call only in an emergency. She reached a generic voice-mail box, and a computer recited the number she’d reached and advised her to leave a message. Did she ever.

  He called back in less than five minutes. The caller ID was blank, just like the time she’d received a ring from the suspicious voice that had roped her into this.

  “You have some goddamn nerve,” she said as soon as she picked it up.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re through, Leo, or whoever you really are. You blew our deal. If you ever call me again, I’m going media crazy with this story. I’m calling every reporter on the East Coast with the scoop of a lifetime about domestic surveillance and—”

  “What are you talking about? Calm down. What happened?”

  “Your little lover boy blew his assignment. He got a little sloppy with his briefcase. I don’t like what I’ve been doing for you, but I thought that at least we had an understanding. I didn’t think you’d have a partner following me. And I didn’t think your observations would extend to the bedroom, you sick fuck.”

  Silence for a few beats. “I don’t have a partner in this. And I don’t know what you mean by a lover boy. I know this kind of work can make a person a little overly on guard, but—”

  “You people are unbelievable. I read his files, Leo! I know what you’re doing, who you really work for.”

  He exhaled. “Maybe I’m the one who’s confused. Tell me who you’re talking about. Please.”

  “Troy Jones.”

  “I don’t know a Troy Jones. He said he works with me?”