The Revisionists

by Thomas Mullen

  “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.

  I land hard on my shoulder and the back of my head. I roll so the van shields me from him, though I don’t know where anyone else is. My gun is gone. I hear three more shots, then nothing. No footsteps even. Smoke mixes with the dryness of the air, leaves descend in slow motion.

  My head aches from the fall. The asphalt is surprisingly cold even through my shirt and jacket.

  It’s amazing how many stars they can see here, even with all the light from the city bleaching the night.

  “Are you all right?” Leo asks. He’s standing a few feet away, holding a gun. His eyes look wrong. He bends down and picks up my gun, looks at it like it’s the solution to a puzzle that’s been bothering him. The answer buckles his knees, and he lands hard on his backside and leans against the van.

  It’s a miracle he could stand at all. His jacket is torn by bullets in at least two places. He’s breathing loudly, and now he tilts his head up as if he too wants to stare at the stars, and I see blood at the base of his neck, the stain growing as blood pumps out from behind the shredded collar of his jacket.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Leo says.

  My right eye burns when I try to open it, so I stop trying. I hesitantly stand up. The other three men are sprawled in various poses of hasty exit from this world. The men who abducted Chaudhry and poisoned McAlester. The men who, less than one hour from now, were supposed to kill T.J. Trenton and his friends—and Tasha—in the final Event that I was sent here to protect.

  I go dizzy for a moment as I take this in. I have officially blown my mission, betrayed the Department, and destroyed—if it ever really existed—the Perfect Present. Whatever happens next can’t be foretold by any Archivist or planned around by the Engineers and their theories. I feel a weird chill start at the base of my neck and radiate out; my fingertips tingle with the sensation of newness and discovery.

  Which is an altogether different sensation than what Leo is feeling. I stand before him now and stare down into his eyes. They’re wide with questions, wider still at the answers. That horrible, horrible look on his face is a result of my own actions, not some preordained script.

  “They weren’t… FBI,” he manages to say.

  “No. They weren’t.”

  His hands are on his thighs, palms facing the sky, and held limply in each hand is a gun, mine and his own. He looks at mine for a moment, then he extends his arm and points toward the train yard, pulls the trigger. We hear a click.

  “What… the hell… is this?”

  It’s the best approximation of a contemp nine-millimeter automatic that our Engineers could come up with, that’s what. But I don’t feel like telling him that. Also, it seems to have run out of bullets.

  “A fake gun? You shot at them… with a fake gun?”

  The answer would take longer than he has, so instead I say, “I’m sorry, Leo.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  His eyes look like they’d be crying if his fluids hadn’t been draining out everywhere else. It hits me now, looking at those wide, dry eyes, that I never should have involved him, that I was still a slave to the Department’s mind-set, unwilling to take the necessary steps myself. My indecision killed him. My half measures killed him. I killed him.

  “How did you… know about this?”

  “They did it this way to Chaudhry. Different location, same idea. You described one of them to your doorman. I didn’t realize it at the time, only later. They work for Enhanced Awareness. They were sent to clean up Troy Jones’s messes once and for all.”

  I’m not sure if he’s trying to find one last way to arrange the angles and make up for our many mistakes or if he’s about to go under.

  “You’re hit?” he asks.

  “No, just some glass.”

  His eyes convey the strongest possible envy.

  “Can you drive?” he asks.

  With the one eye nonfunctional, I don’t see things as clearly or three dimensionally as I’d like to. But since I’ve already lost the advantage of a fourth dimension—knowing what will happen next—the flatness I see before me seems somehow fitting. “I think so.”

  “Take the briefcase… to the FBI field office downtown. Now. Report the gunfight too. Tell them… you were with me. We were… going to give it to them… thought they were FBI. They’d come to me… earlier today. Flashed badges… Jesus. I’m an idiot. And throw your fucking fake gun somewhere… it’ll only confuse them.”

  I take it from him, noticing that his blood is all over the handle. I’ll need to wipe it down before I toss it.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he says again.

  I wish that I were a superstitious contemp, wish I could believe that Leo is bound for some charmed afterlife. But if there were an afterlife, I would have found it by now. I’ve been a wanderer through so many lives, so many afters and befores, and all I’ve found is myself. My flaws, my mistakes, the ramifications of all that I’ve done.

  “There’s something else… you need to do,” he tells me, his voice higher pitched now. Desperate to get this out in time. “There’s a girl.”

  34.

  He watched Troy Jones walk away with the briefcase that had damned Leo despite the fact that he had possession of it for less than an hour. He heard sirens in the distance but, this being D.C., they might have been headed to some other misadventure. He hoped that Troy Jones could be just sane enough to explain everything to the FBI. He hoped that the wheels of justice would turn despite all the institutional inertia that kept them more comfortably in park, or in reverse, or just aimed at conveniently crushable objects.

  He wasn’t sure if Troy would explain it right, if he’d say Leo had been helping him or that he’d been helping Leo, or maybe that Leo was a partner of these three other corpses. Perhaps in the final story—if one was ever written and the sto
ry wasn’t instead swept under carpets, flushed down toilets, and any other overused metaphor signifying erasure and irrelevance—Leo would be portrayed as a villain, as just another crooked green-tag who’d lost sight of his moral compass, of wrong and right, of cause and effect.

  There would be no etched star in the halls of Langley for Leo Hastings.

  He tried not to think about his parents.

  He thought about Sari.

  He realized anew that there was no one else to think about.

  He was in the far too familiar position of being amazed by his own stupidity. A litany of grave errors. Literally grave. First some men from Enhanced Awareness had conned him into thinking they were from the Agency, and he’d believed them until he learned about their company from Gail. So he’d called Sentrick, who’d sweet-talked Leo but realized it wasn’t working. So Sentrick had immediately launched a second level of deception, sending more men to Leo and telling him they were FBI agents who desperately wanted to nail Enhanced Awareness, knowing that was exactly what Leo wanted to hear. Appealing to his sense of honor and decency—that he could help fellow patriots take down a crooked company bent on disseminating intelligence secrets to his country’s foes—and to his desire to still be a part of the system, to play with the big boys. He’d fallen for every one of their ploys.

  There was only one way to ensure that he did not fuck up any more, and they’d taken care of that too.

  His last target in Jakarta had been a kid named Gunawan. The name meant “meaningful,” which was hilarious, because what exactly did it mean? Only that it had some meaning, but whatever it was forever eluded Leo. Leo liked him. He liked a lot of his targets. He often reminded himself that madmen and megalomaniacs and soldiers of unjust causes could be likable, that likability need not connote innocence. It was human and normal to feel guilty after sending one of these likable young men on to the next link in the Agency’s chain. Leo was allowed to feel guilty, but he wasn’t allowed to let guilt cloud his decisions.

  Every time he passed a name on to them, he’d have an extra drink that night, privately dedicated to the kid in question. A likable person who had been swayed by the wrong forces, the wrong reasoning, the wrong story line. Bottoms up, kid. Here’s to you.

  The moment he passed Gunawan on, he was convinced he’d made a mistake. Convinced. He couldn’t bring himself to pour a drink in Gunawan’s name. So he’d done everything he could to bring the kid back: wrote memo after memo, sent coded signals, pleaded with middlemen. Made himself look terrible in his superiors’ eyes. Caused everyone to question his judgment.

  How many ways are there to tell people you made a mistake and you’re sorry and you want to undo it, but you need their help for that to happen?

  If the FBI didn’t believe Troy, if they arrested him for the murders of Leo and these other three green-tags, then what would happen to Sari? How many days would she wait in that motel before giving up and heading out on her own? Where would she go? Would someone else find her?

  Had someone already found her?

  Leo’s plan had been so simple, he’d told himself that its simplicity was a sign of its genius. It felt very much the opposite now. Why was he thinking about her? With what clarity of thought? Most of his body was numb. Why was the car he was leaning against so cold? Christ, there were a lot of stars out tonight.

  He would have driven her south, to the Amtrak station in Richmond. Union Station in D.C. would likely be watched; from Richmond, she could get a train that would eventually take her to Chicago.

  During the two-hour drive to Richmond in a rented car, Leo would have handed her the new ID and a pretty staggering amount of cash. He would have imparted instructions on how to buy a ticket to LA once she’d made Chicago. After coasting past the apartment towers of the increasingly outer Virginia burbs and then beneath the brontosaural overpasses of the Beltway, the road would have flattened out, the tall trees of the South standing sentry at either side. He would have stopped at one of those trucker gas stations in the blank space past Quantico and bought her some more sweat clothes and some cheesy NASCAR T-shirts and toiletries and junk food. Maybe a tiny American flag.

  (He’d given the cash to Troy and told him where to find the ID, advised him to hide the money and papers somewhere before stepping into FBI headquarters. Hoped he’d remember to do that.)

  Leo would have asked her one last time if she’d ever overheard Hyun Ki Shim say anything about some business deal, make some weird comments about phone lines or the Internet, but she would have said no. He hoped she’d never witnessed anything important and hoped that no one from Enhanced Awareness (if Troy was unsuccessful in nailing them) or from anywhere else would try to track her down just in case.

  He would have apologized that the fake license and Social Security card were all that “his friends in Immigration” had been able to do for her.

  He would have said that he’d wanted to help her all along but that he’d initially thought maybe he could help her and accomplish some other goals at the same time. Those other goals had only seemed to get in the way of his helping, she might have said. He would have told her, Yes, you’re right. That paradox has always stymied me, yet I thought I could find a way around it. Either I just wasn’t smart enough, or I was too stubborn to admit the way the world worked.

  It was so cold out he was surprised he couldn’t see his breath. It made him wonder if he was breathing.

  The Agency had pulled him out of Indonesia the day after the bombing.

  In the early days, after it sank in, he’d wanted to go back, desperately. Felt it was required. He should see the shell of a building, the blackened walls, the insides blown out. He should go to a funeral, should walk down neighborhoods where he’d hear the suffering grieve. The Agency had deprived him of that penance. Just whisked him away, like the country didn’t exist anymore. Like the whole damn thing had blown up.

  He would have given her a pad of paper and a pen and told her to practice signing her new name while he drove. He would have told her where to put the cash, how to distribute it across her wardrobe and her few possessions.

  He would have apologized for the fact that he hadn’t always been honest with her. But he was honest at the end. She might have given him a look then, as if that was a strange thing to say. Which it was. Because did it even matter what note you ended on when every note up until that moment had been so discordant? The end might have worked out, sure, but the means had been hell, and that was what she would remember him for.

  He would have coached her on how to buy a ticket herself, then he would have hovered behind her in line so he could overhear her doing it, practice for later.

  He would have stood at the tracks with her, waiting for the train. He would not have angled for a kiss but he would have taken one if she’d offered it.

  Two hours of dark highway driving back up north would have gone by quickly and then 395 would have curved round the Pentagon, and there D.C. would be, spread out before him, flat and white as if melted there by a light that had lingered too close too long. The vista would have given Leo the same jolt it always did when making that drive at night. He would see the Washington Monument in the center with its red warning beacon, would see the Capitol dome glowing to the right. Straight ahead would be the office buildings that respectfully hunched their shoulders and looked down at their feet so as not to be taller than the grand symbols of democracy to the east. Then 395 would make another sharp turn, and he’d be on a bridge, the river unseen beneath him as he glimpsed Jefferson caged in his rotunda, and then another turn, and into the tunnel that had always seemed too brightly lit when cabbies drove him, drunk, from Adams Morgan or one of the clubs on U to his old apartment on Capitol Hill. He had missed that when he was in Asia, missed those nocturnal cab rides. Sitting in the backseat while he drunkenly looked at the city scrolling past, a cab driver listening to the world’s horrors on BBC radio, some immigrant who lived in outer Maryland and drove fares for a living even
though he’d no doubt been an engineer or a physician back in Nigeria or Pakistan or the former Yugoslavia. And Leo sitting in the backseat wasted after a night at the 9:30 Club, having felt he deserved to blow off steam after hours or weeks of intensive training at the Agency, was entitled to a few hours of shambolic garage rock and stiff bourbon and gingers before reentering the muddled world, and the cabbie, after heading south through the city, would whisk him into the otherwise empty highway tunnel that had been carved into the earth beneath bland government buildings. Buildings staffed by clerks and associates and spies and people who maybe were going to be fired the next morning for some indiscretion they or someone else had committed; or by people putting in their time before checking into better-paying private work; or by those dedicated to remaining a part of the bureaucracy until their pensions kicked in; or by the ones who still really Believed in It and that’s why they were in the office at two while everyone else was asleep or trashed. And the cabbie would be shaking his head at the BBC’s stories of floods or ethnic strife back home, or maybe he would call someone on his cell phone, speaking in a language Leo never knew. Sweet-talking a girl, or telling his kids he loved them but go to bed already, he’ll see them in the morning. Sometimes Leo would chat the guy up, express his genuine interest in this person’s extraordinary life, but sometimes he wouldn’t bother because he couldn’t stand looking like that stereotypical privileged white guy slumming it with the real folks. Couldn’t stand the way it made him wonder who he really was, what he was doing, why he was here.

  Then he’d tip the cabbie well and climb up to his safe row house less than a mile from the U.S. Capitol building, and try to let all this slip away as he fell asleep.

  She was so beautiful.

  Standing there surrounded by overpriced canned goods, hits from the early nineties faintly playing around her. The sounds of his high-school days, The Cure and the Lightning Seeds, reincarnated as a shopping sound track, and he wanted to dance with her. Only she looked so confused. And scared. His eyes drawn to hers, and to that crescent moon darkening her face. Leo thinking, There is something I can do. I can’t let her walk away. I need to tell her something. Pushing his grocery cart toward her, thinking up a line.