The Revisionists (28 page)

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.

“Holy shit, I know this dude,” he said.

“Who?”

He told her there was a story about a reporter who’d recently gone missing. Allegations were made that he’d been kidnapped, or worse, to silence an investigation he’d been reporting on, something to do with intelligence matters. Tasha couldn’t tell how much of that was in the story and how much of it was T.J.’s conspiracy-minded editorializing.

“How well do you know him?” she asked.

“No, I just meant”—and he looked up—“like, I’ve read his stuff. Jesus.”

Was
that what he’d meant? At the office, when she was working on a GTK-related matter, she found herself overanalyzing comments her coworkers made. She obsessed over anything any of the partners said about the
Times
story, wondering if the remark had been made for her benefit, to goad her into a confession. When someone voiced a criticism of U.S. foreign policy, Tasha held her tongue, worried that a similar comment coming from her would mark her as a dissident, a disgruntled American who might have leaked documents.

What if someone at the firm was still investigating, checking computer records to see who had accessed which files when? What if she played along with Leo (or
pretended to
play along with Leo) only to have the firm nab her anyway? She was battling on two opposite fronts: pretending to be innocent at work and pretending to act with deceit for her spymaster.

As if reading her mind, T.J. asked what kind of law she practiced. He’d never shown any interest in her work before, had been happy to let his activism dominate the conversations.

“Corporate law. I admit it’s not very edifying. But I have so much school debt, I have to do this for a few years until I can move on to something more… worthwhile.”

“That’s it right there. They rope us in with our debts and our 401(k)s and our property values. Make us vested participants in shit we don’t like. Because we’re
American,
we
deserve
all this. Everything done in our name, for our own good, and we’re supposed to smile and thank them with our votes.”

“Not that you vote.”

He made a distasteful face. “I try not to do things that can be stolen. Democrats and Republicans are pursuing the same agenda.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Seriously. Republicans believe that the scariest thing in the world is an all-powerful, unfettered government crushing their freedom. Right? And Democrats believe that the scariest thing in the world is a group of all-powerful, unfettered corporations crushing their rights. What they don’t want to admit is that the corporations and our government are completely intertwined: the modern corporatist state.”

“Is
corporatist
really a word?”

He shrugged. “If it ain’t, you can file a petition for me with the relevant office.”

Then he glanced at the cover photo on the newspaper between them, the president smiling while making some doubtless important announcement from the Rose Garden.

“You know what a president actually is?” he asked. “An unreliable narrator.”

“Really.” She sensed a speech coming.

“He’s the one who tells us how it is, right? And we fall for it, we read along with his story and let him construct the reality around us. We want to be entertained, soothed. Until one day, we hit that certain chapter, right, and suddenly we see the light and realize,
Holy shit, we’ve been lied to the whole time. Reality ain’t like that at all. His story was bullshit.
But by then, it’s too late. We’ve all been suckered, and we just have to follow along with his little plot.”

“You really believe that?”

“You don’t?”

“Look, I have friends who are journalists, and they’re hardworking, level-headed people. They do their best to sublimate their opinions and tell a story objectively. I don’t think that makes them ‘tools of the Man’ or whatever you want to call them.”

He watched her for a second. “So why are you here talking to a freak like me?”

A damn good question. Was she here for Leo or for herself? For Marshall or for T.J.?

This was the best segue she was going to get. She told herself she wasn’t actually doing what Leo wanted, she was only pretending she was. She would simply gauge T.J.’s interest. Stringing T.J. along now was practice for deceiving Leo later.

“Sometimes the freaks like you are right about some things,” she said, “but no one’ll listen to you unless you have someone like me to lay it out for them.”

“Well put.”

“Speaking of which. You know that GTK scandal that hit a few weeks ago?”

T.J. nodded. His eyes, she thought, suddenly seemed more professional than friendly. Leo had told her that T.J. himself was the hacker who’d created the e-mail address for her, which meant he had most likely read her correspondence with the
Times.
Or had he kept his word and stopped himself from e-eavesdropping?

She leaned closer, and he seemed happy to do the same. “Someone at GTK or my law firm must have leaked it. We still don’t know who did it. But it got me to thinking. I mean, do you know who some of my firm’s clients are?”

“I don’t keep up too well with legal rosters.”

“Well, one of the firm’s clients is Consolidated Forces, a private police group, like Hellwater but smaller, and worse.”

“I know who they are.”

“Break into their training camp to shoot any documentaries?”

“Not yet, but I’d love to try. They’re way out in the middle of the Nevada, so they’re hard to get to. Some groups based in San Francisco have tried it, but they have guards at the outer perimeter.”

She had rehearsed this, telling herself it wasn’t wrong, that she wasn’t setting up a snare for someone she considered a friend because she would in fact free him just in time. Legally speaking, it might seem that she was entrapping T.J., but ultimately she wouldn’t let that happen. She was doing this in the name of finding out the truth about Marshall. T.J. had his cause, and she had hers. He’d understand.

“Charges have been brought against Consolidated for some shootings last March,” she said, “when their guards, who are just supposed to provide protection for diplomats, opened fire at a market. There weren’t any diplomats nearby, so they had no reason to even be there. It was a vendetta or something; they killed the relatives of a woman the guards had raped.”

“I’ve seen a few stories.”

“The other night I had some drinks with a couple of the associates who are working on the case. That company is crooked, T.J., and the guards are guilty as hell. They’ll never get punished, though. The U.S. is pressuring the local government to drop the charges, tying it in with aid packages. But what if the public learned more about what really happened?”

Leo had told her to be vague, sketch things out slowly. She was only supposed to have talked to people over drinks; her knowledge should have holes in it. Leo’s story, more or less, was that her law firm’s defense of Consolidated had turned up troves of files relating to
other,
as-yet-unreported crimes. Shootings, kidnappings, rapes. All perpetrated by the company’s mercenaries, and all pretty much sanctioned by the U.S. government.

These crimes were fictional, Leo had explained. The files that he and his nameless colleagues would soon give to her, and that she was to pass on to T.J., contained detailed information about imaginary events and nonexistent people. A real news organization would discover this when it tried to corroborate the story, but an enraged, politically motivated Web site would rush online without doing its homework. Once readers learned it was all a hoax, the site would be discredited, Consolidated would have all it needed for a libel suit, and Leo and his associates would know for certain that T.J. was behind the Web site.

She would have to hope she could bleed information about Marshall out of Leo before T.J. did anything with the fake story.

“So you’re thinking of leaking it to a reporter?” T.J. asked after taking a moment to digest what she’d said.

He still wasn’t tipping his hand about GTK. Maybe he was wondering why
she
wasn’t.

“No. And I’m surprised to hear that from you, Mr. ‘The Mainstream Media Is in Cahoots with Washington.’ You saw what happened with that GTK story—whoever leaked it sent it to the
Times,
mainstream media outlet number one, and it was instantly absorbed into the Establishment’s story line before vanishing again. The only way to truly influence things is to go outside the system. I’m thinking something edgier, maybe a Web site.”

She felt dirty to be borrowing his own language and ideology like this. If he noticed her appropriation, he didn’t show it.

“Would those associates who told you about this be willing to dig up some more?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, they’re disgusted by it, but it’s the kind of disgust people just suck up and live with.”

“As so many millions do.”

“But
I
could dig around.”

“It would be a hell of a story. How long would it take you?”

“I don’t know. It’s not my client, so I’d have to find a way into the files. Pull some later-than-usual nights, tap into someone else’s PC.” In truth she could never do something like that in an office like hers, but she was using T.J.’s ignorance of standard office culture against him. “Even if I got some kind of smoking-gun document, what would I do with it?”

“Give it to me.”

She raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Why you? I came to you for advice, not to get you—”

“I know some people, all right? If you got this to me, we would find a way to use it in the most effective way possible.”

She paused. “I’ll look into it. I can’t even promise I’ll be able to access anything. This is my career we’re talking about, remember.”

He said that he understood. “Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with.”

She wished she could tell him just how far outside her comfort zone she already was.

16.

S
ari kept thinking of the word
slave
. Leo had said she was their slave, but that wasn’t right. The diplomat was still sending money to her sisters in Korea, wasn’t he? He claimed he was, though there was no proof yet. She wanted to write to her sisters, tell them of her plight and confirm they were getting the money, but she wasn’t sure if there was a way to mail it—if the Shims weren’t sending the payments, then they would certainly intercept the letters. And they never let her online. Maybe she could give a letter to Leo. If she ever found time to write one.

Had she been a slave back in Seoul, a new arrival from Jakarta, scared of a new country that seemed so different, so mechanistic, so cold? Had she been a slave when she’d been a night janitor in those offices, or when she’d worked in that plant assembling toys for children she would never meet, and her fingers were slashed by the machines and her back ached from stooping for hours? Had she been a slave as a girl, helping her mother work in the Mings’ store? The Mings had worked them hard, had not been terribly kind, but surely her family hadn’t been
slaves
. They had been paid for their labor, had managed the rent for their apartment. Part of her hated Leo for using that word, hated the way it made her look back at her own life, and her mother’s. Perhaps someone like Leo was simply so free that anyone else’s life looked like slavery.

She hid the cell phone he’d given her beneath her mattress, and every third night she left it plugged in under the bed so it would have power if she needed it. He had asked her what days she took the garbage and recycling out (which she did twice a week, a former annoyance that now would come in handy). He told her how to leave notes for him and what signals to put in the windows, the sash here or the sash there, a lamp moved to this side or that. But her employers were sticklers for order, and she interrupted Leo many times—
No, they would never let me move the lamp there, they would suspect something
—before they finally found a manageable solution.