The Revisionists (20 page)

She opened the file and was confronted by pages of techie-speak—acronyms and long streams of programming code, like android haiku. “I’m supposed to understand this?”

“You don’t have to, but your firm will, and GTK will. And the D.C. Bar will.”

She skimmed more of it and found the entire e-mail exchange between her unnamed self and the reporter. She felt dizzy and hot, and took a long sip from her glass.

“This is all circumstantial.”

He laughed. “That’s the argument someone would have to make if she was fighting this in court. You really want to do that?”

She waited, trying to consider her options. “What do you want?”

“That’s the good news—I’m not asking you for much. I need someone to keep tabs on different organizations, someone who can get in deeper than I can. Someone who’s an old buddy of one of the ringleaders. Someone with a gold-plated biography, a grade-A reason to be so involved with the groups.”

He opened the second manila folder and she saw a number of photographs of a familiar man. He was yelling in most of them.

“Thomas Jefferson Trenton, also known as T.J. Your old college boyfriend, now a radical activist with a long record of arrests for trespassing, destruction of property, computer hacking, and other acts of civil disobedience.”

“You know that we went to college together?”

“Public records, Tasha. It’s not that hard. Don’t worry, it’s not like we dug up dirty e-mails you’d sent to each other from your Oberlin accounts, though we could. But I respect privacy.”

Sure he did. College attendance records wouldn’t have told him that she’d slept with T.J.—Leo must have spoken to some mutual acquaintance at one of the meetings. She felt violated; her whole body was hot.

“I still don’t know what you’re asking of me.”

“I have strong reason to believe that T.J. is one of the brains behind a certain Web site called knoweverything.org. They like to post confidential, classified information just for the illicit thrill it gives them—I guess he outgrew the Internet porn he was into a few years ago. I need you to help us find out if this is true. All I want you to do is keep going to those antiwar meetings, maybe spend some extra time with T.J. and his pals, talk to them about what great work they’re doing, and what they should do next. And maybe, due to your insider position at a powerful D.C. firm with all sorts of clients in the Establishment, you’ll be able to offer them other juicy bits of leaked information if they’re interested.”

“This… You can’t do this.” She stood up.

“If you think things will turn out better for you by walking away and leaving this information with me, that is a mistake.” He tapped the table again and slightly softened his voice. “I’m sorry, I rushed things. You just got hit with a lot—sit down a minute. Please.”

She obeyed and he leaned closer. “You’ve gone to a few of those antiwar meetings, but only a few, and even when you’re there, you keep quiet. I’m willing to bet I know why: It’s because you’re smart and sane, whereas most of the people in those groups are crazies nursing grudges. You don’t agree with them, Tasha—they just want to exploit the pain of people like you and use it for their own political agenda. So why is it a problem to let me know what they’re doing?”

The pain
. He knew about Marshall. That’s what he meant by her “gold-plated biography.” If Tasha did try to insinuate herself more deeply into T.J.’s life and whatever he was doing, no one would ever suspect she was a mole. It would fit perfectly into T.J.’s worldview that the sister of a dead soldier would want to join his crusade.

“Maybe I
don’t
like some of them,” she told Leo. “But they have a right to protest.”

“I believe in the First Amendment too, thanks. I’m not here to run anyone in for saying they don’t like this president or that war.” He tapped the first folder. “Look, you sent those files in because the crooked bastards at GTK put their stock price and earnings reports above the lives of the soldiers those vests and ammo might have protected. Good for you; sincerely. I applaud that. The thing is, there are people on the opposite side, people like T.J., who find classified information about intelligence strategies or ongoing investigations, about diplomatic policy, and they publicize it, putting the lives of dedicated people at risk just so they can score some political points. Now, how is that any different from delaying a shipment of vests?”

She shook her head. “I see how this works. You’ll hold the GTK thing over me forever. One day you’ll tell me my little project’s done, but then, a year later, maybe five, I’ll get another call,
Hey Tasha, I need this favor
.”

He took a sip of his two o’clock vodka and leaned back in his chair. “I promise you, if there’s any chance I’ll still be working on assignments like this five years from now, I’ll shoot myself.”

Jesus, she was having a hard time figuring him out. “This is what you do, Leo? Blackmail, extortion? This is legal for you?”

He chuckled. “Feel free to sue me. I’m a government contractor, so I’m pretty insulated. Honestly, they’re still writing the rules about what applies and what doesn’t. But yeah, if you’d rather challenge this in open court, lay bare all of your secrets, go for it.”

“
Contractor?
Wait, who do you work for?”

For the first time, he moved around uncomfortably in his seat. “It’s complicated. But I am authorized by the United States government to be doing this, and I have its full protection.”

She tried to think. There were great, gaping holes in what he was saying. “I want something, in writing, that spells out what you want me to do, so that
if
I agree, then when I do finish it—”

“In writing? Sure. One copy for you and one for me, only I’ll need to make some extra copies for my boss and his boss, and then it’ll get entered into the system, which really means thousands of people can access it, and it’s in there forever. I wanted to make this as painless for you as possible, anonymous and off the books, but if you really want it to be part of the permanent record that Tasha Coretta Wilson assisted in the—”

“All right, all right.” What she really wanted was to slap him. The lawyer in her had already prepared half a dozen retorts beginning with “You have no right to—,” but she knew he’d deflect, counter, or ignore them all.

“I’m not angry at you for GTK,” he repeated. “You exposed wrongdoing. If you want to stand up and publicly take credit for that, then do it. Meaning: disbarment, and prosecution for legal malpractice, and never being able to repay your law school loans. A life of poverty for following your ideals. That’s your choice. But if you think you’re worth more than that, if you think you shouldn’t have to suffer for the rest of your life over one little ethical lapse, then help me expose a little more wrongdoing.”

“By war protesters?”

“If peaceful opposition is all you come across, then this will be the world’s most boring assignment. A lot of what I do is boring, Tasha. I can’t even tell you how boring. It would be par for the course if this leads nowhere. I’m not asking you to wear a wire or get in the middle of anything dangerous. Just keep your eyes open, listen, and tell me everything. That last part is important. If I ever find out you knew about something and kept quiet, if I so much as get a sense that you’re holding out on me, then you’ve broken our deal”—he rapped his knuckles on the first folder—“and you live with the consequences.”

She tried to contain her anger while he turned his eyes to the window to admire two young Asian women bouncing past in sleek running outfits. Who the hell was this guy? What parallel universe had he transported over from?

The joggers passed and his eyes went back to her. The smugness there, the obnoxious confidence in his tone, and the way he hadn’t even bothered to hide his ogling of those women, struck another chord in her. She realized that she was actually sitting across from someone from that much-imagined, never-before-seen world: the right-wing military-industrial machine that had consumed her brother. For months she’d been raging and raging at an amorphous, seemingly intangible foe, but here was one of its representatives in the flesh. Maybe this wasn’t such a terrible thing.

“Well,” she said, hoping her minor change in tone wouldn’t be too obvious, “since you seem like such a well-informed guy, I want a little something from you too.”

“We’re prepared to pay, but that’s—”

“I don’t mean
money
—yours probably all comes from laundering Afghan drug deals, right?”

“Sure, that and overthrowing leftist governments and raiding their national banks.”

So he had a sense of humor. “What I want is information, about my brother.”

“Specifically?”

“How he died. Where, when, all the contributing factors.”

“The army hasn’t shared anything with you?”

“Let’s just say I don’t believe it. I want to
know everything
”—she raised her eyebrows at the pun—“such as why his blog was taken down a week before he died and why he never sent any e-mails that last week. I want to know if something Marshall posted online pissed off some commanding officer or some suit at the Pentagon. I want to know if anyone in the chain of command gave any orders that placed him in harm’s way because of something he wrote or said.”

Leo thought for a moment. Tasha knew she wasn’t in a position to make demands, but part of being a good negotiator was acting as if you were.

“I’ll try,” he said. “But military intelligence isn’t exactly my turf. Us spooks don’t play together as nicely as we should.”

“Yeah, we all noticed that with 9/11.”

He eyed her for a moment, then grinned, as if granting her the point. “For the record, I was in a different line of work then. But I will see what I can do for you. Your brother was a hero, and if anyone in the army has lied to your family about him, I won’t like that any more than you do.”

“So we agree on something. How nice.”

“I think we agree on more than you realize.”

Her heart was still beating too fast but the sourness in her stomach was gone. She hated this guy, but she could use him just as he used her. She wasn’t sure how yet—she’d need time to replay the conversation and figure the angles—but this was what she’d always excelled at, from debate club through law school and up to the few trials that the firm had let her handle: finding her adversary’s weak points, the flaws in his logic, and outmaneuvering him. And just plain being smarter than him. Because who was Leo but some obviously low-level security-firm hack? If he were a superspy, he wouldn’t be in D.C. tailing activists. Yet surely he had connections, and these she could make use of. She still felt violated by his entrance into her life, but her fear faded as she got a better take on him. She would play along with him to get what she needed, for a while at least.

Leo leaned back again and took a celebratory swig of his drink. Then he told her how he envisioned their relationship working and where he wanted her to start.

Finally, he looked at his watch and apologized for how long he’d kept her from her important clients. He put the folders back in his bag and said good-bye, dismissing her, but staying in his chair. Apparently he wanted them to leave separately, her first, which seemed an odd bit of clandestine tomfoolery, considering they’d been sitting together in public beside a window for an hour now. Which only confirmed her opinion of him; he’d probably been a damned TSA baggage checker before winning a promotion.

It had started raining and she’d didn’t have an umbrella. She hailed a cab, needing to be alone with her thoughts so she could puzzle out the immensity of her conversation. The middle-aged Eastern European driver stopped muttering into his earpiece cell phone and asked, “Where to?” She told him, and like that the guy pulled a U and resumed his call in some Slavic tongue, speaking softly, as if afraid she’d overhear his conversation and understand it. Asking after his kids or the political situation in Ukraine, maybe, or talking soccer, or complaining about work or the weather or this damn city where the spoiled kids drink all night. It was easy to tune it all out when you didn’t know what they were saying.

11.

S
ari was more nervous than usual as she wound her way through Washington’s chaotic streets. The SUV was three times larger than anything she had driven before, and she thanked the gods for helping her steer it without running over another car. She also thanked her mother, whom she knew was watching her. At a red light Sari let her eyes wander, and there in the distance was the Washington Monument glowing in the dark; someone honked, and she saw that the light was green again. The wheel was too big for her hands—it would have been too big for an ape’s hands, and she didn’t understand how Sang Hee, who was no taller than herself, could enjoy handling something like this. No, of course she understood—the mistress loved power.

Sari didn’t have an American or even a Korean driver’s license, but Sang Hee said that didn’t matter.

The other cars sped along with a sort of impersonal professionalism, hurrying to their important destinations. Frightened pedestrians huddled on street corners, aware of their low status. Still, it felt so
good
to be out, not just out of the house but here in a city, even if an unfamiliar one. She’d lived in urban areas all her life and was used to noise and commotion. The noise was different here—no whine from motorbike engines, no street vendors calling out—but still the vibrancy charged her.

She knew that Sang Hee was timing her, so she could not afford any wrong turns. She followed the primitive map the mistress had drawn, only the relevant streets noted, along with an occasional landmark. The drive from their house in Mount Pleasant was short, and the clock told her she had been gone only ten minutes when she pulled to the curb in front of the store. She had been told not to worry about understanding street signs, that the diplomatic plates gave her license to park anywhere.

She walked inside. The automatic doors pulled open and there Leo was, standing in front of a display of freshly cut flowers. She smelled lilac and rose, and he smiled.