The Revisionists (32 page)

Another ad warns me to
BE PREPARED,
recommends that I heighten my vigilance around people wearing “unusually baggy jackets.” It occurs to me that most of the young black people on the train are wearing exactly such jackets. Everyone here is afraid of something.

 * * *

When I finally made it back to my apartment after being interrogated by counterintelligence, I had not seen my wife and daughter in three days.

Our apartment was a mess. Plates were piled in the sink, jackets lay on the floor. Some food had burned, but hours or even days ago, just a faint note of its despair lingering. Cemby called my name and ran from the bedroom.

She hugged me. It was the last thing I had expected. I felt a tightness in my throat.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “I’ve been
terrified
. Is Dad with you?”

She looked like she’d slept as little as I had. Her hair was frizzy and uncombed, her eyes red and puffy. She’d been staring into the face of something she couldn’t understand. I was the one who had to explain it to her.

I asked her where Laurynn was. In school, she said—she’d be home soon.

“What happened?” I asked. “How long ago were they here?”

“Who?”

“No one from Security came?”

“
No one
from
anywhere
came. I’ve been here for days with no word from you, no explanation from anyone about—”

“No one’s questioned you?”

“Stop asking
me
questions, and tell me what’s going on!”

My head was pounding. I kept hearing the voices of the counterintelligence officers, all seven or eight of them—they’d gone at me in shifts, taking breaks and sleeping and coming back refreshed while I festered in that tiny room.
Tell us again about the day you met your wife. How did she strike you then? How long did you date before you proposed? What was her father like? What sorts of questions did he ask you about your job?
Their suspicions became my own, an osmosis of fear pulling at me.

“Where’s Dad?”

She had received a call from her father’s assistant, then calls from some of his friends. She tried to reach me but couldn’t. She assumed that he had been taken in and so had I, and that soon they’d be coming for her. She thought I was here now because Security had finally realized it was all a misunderstanding, and her father would be right behind me.

“Cemby, if you know what Joseph’s been doing, you need to tell me now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s already made… certain confessions. This will be much easier on us if you can tell me whatever you know about it.”

She was shaking her head.

“Even if he never told you, you must have
noticed
something, some stray comment, maybe new friends he wouldn’t introduce you to?”

“What’s happening?”

I held up a hand. “Look, this could have been a lot worse. We just need—”

“Worse?
Where is he?
Take me to see him
now
.”

“I don’t know where he is! Do you understand how serious this is? He’s admitted to being a part of a conspiracy to… circulate historical information, anti-Government propaganda. He and a handful of other Archivists, and people in the scientific sector. He’s had contacts with rebel groups in the Outer Regions.”

Her whole body was shaking, and there were tears in her eyes. “
What
rebel groups, Zed? The ones your bosses make up to keep everyone in line?”

“
Don’t
say that.” Recently, there’d been reports that rebel groups had established a base in the previously uninhabitable Outer Regions, an area where the Government’s reach did not yet extend. I’d heard a few people whisper that those reports were untrue, political fabrications; such accusations were treasonous. Weeks ago, Cemby had implied that she agreed with the doubters, and I’d snapped at her.

Of course, the interrogators asked me if she’d ever said anything like this. They would have found out anyway.

“You need to be very careful about what you say.” I tried to suppress my emotions. If our apartment hadn’t been bugged before, it certainly was by then.

She started to laugh, but it wasn’t a laugh. It scared me to hear it. “What did they do to you in there?”

The analysts kept asking their questions in my mind.
Tell us more about this friend of your wife, the one she meets for lunch every other Tuesday. And that friend, the one who made those comments you didn’t approve of last winter—you filed the report but never followed up. Why was that? Your wife’s seemed depressed lately, hasn’t she? What do you think is troubling her? Does she confide in you the way she did when she was younger?

“I know this is hard,” I told her. “We need to rest, we need to calm down and pick ourselves up. Because of your father, people will be watching us for a while. People will feel uncomfortable around us. I’ll probably be put on temporary leave. We need to be calm and smart, and not do anything—”

“They can’t do this. Someone in this family still has some decency.” She started putting on her jacket. “I’m going to wherever they have him and I’ll sleep on the damned sidewalk if I have to.”

In your wife’s vid-diary, what do you think she meant when she said, “Sometimes I wonder if we’re all being pushed to buy this delusion that used to make us happy but doesn’t anymore”?

I grabbed Cemby’s arm and told her she couldn’t go back to my office, she would only make it worse. “You need to tell me everything you know about this,” I said. “Immediately.”

“So now
you’re
questioning me?”

“Better me than them! If we can get everything into the open, there’s a chance—”

She slapped me with her free hand. Instinctively I squeezed the forearm I was holding. Finally I released her. She backed up and stared at me, rubbing her arm. Her cheeks were wet, her eyes shimmering with hatred.

I told her we needed to calm down and clean up, act normally. Laurynn would be home soon.

“Is this normal for you?” she asked in a whisper. “Is this what you do?”

I tried to explain. There were layers to this. Things were going to be difficult but we’d make it through. She walked toward the door.

“I told you not to—”

“I’m going to pick up Laurynn!”

I told her she didn’t seem in any condition to drive, but she only laughed. I told her to please watch what she said while she was out. She suggested I follow her and record all her statements for my superiors. I let her go.

I pull the bill of my Nationals hat lower and slump my head as if I’m just another dark-skinned man falling asleep on the Metro as the car empties out. I don’t think the hag has noticed me yet, and from here I have an idea what he’ll do. Tasha’s house is close to the next stop, Potomac Avenue, so I play dead as the train slows toward the station.

The window beside me offers just enough reflection of the rest of the car for me to see that the hag is standing at the doors now, waiting for them to open. At the
bing,
I look up and he steps through. Then I rush out the back door and step onto the platform behind him, hoping he won’t turn around. He doesn’t, and I stand behind a thick pole that displays a map of the subway lines as he follows Tasha up the escalator.

I tap my line and call Wills.

Are you sure the guy you sent me after is a hag?
I ask him.

Of course I’m sure. I’m the one with a functioning GeneScan, remember?

He’s not acting like a hag. He’s just following her. Watched her have a meeting with Trenton and then go home. It’s not like them to do recon like this. They come and they attack their Event, that’s it.

I slide my card through the slot, the mechanical doors let me through, and up ahead I see Tasha opening her red umbrella at the top of the next escalator. Rain cascades through the night; the metal teeth of the escalator shine as they’re pulled along on their endless circuit.

Maybe he knows you’re tailing him,
Wills says.

I’m better than that, thanks. Something’s wrong. Something is definitely wrong.

Then stay with her. Keep watch at her place. You’d like to do that anyway, wouldn’t you?

We can’t hear each other’s voices—it doesn’t work that way, it’s more electronic, ones and zeros processing through our brains—but I can almost feel him smiling at me.

Something isn’t adding up. The hags tried to prevent the disappearance (and likely murder) of the reporter Karthik Chaudhry. They tried to prevent the murder of former spymaster Randolph McAlester. They will soon try to prevent the murder of T.J. Trenton and several of his associates—an Event that, unfortunately, will also involve Tasha. But why are they following her
now?

I ask Wills what he’s doing.

Hags just tried to stop the Korean diplomat from meeting with contacts from Zaire and Sierra Leone. I didn’t let them.

I’m glad one of us is doing something right.

Relax. See what your guy is up to, and, if you get a chance, take him out.

The escalator deposits me on the sidewalk and I let my feet take it from there, unwilling and unable to stop the momentum.

The night after my argument with Cemby was when I received the visit from my former boss at Security and some of my ex-colleagues. I thought they’d come with news of Joseph or some update on my own status. Instead, they told me about Cemby’s accident.

We had nothing to do with it,
Myers told me when I called him.
She’d been driving too fast and made a wrong turn into traffic, the other driver said. It’s being looked into.
Whatever else he told me vanished, just like Cemby and little Laurynn, who are now relegated forever to the realm of my memory. The sparks that flare and linger but will one day fade completely despite my attempts to keep them vibrant and alive.

 * * *

This part of Capitol Hill is quiet at night, though there are enough pedestrians returning to their homes from work that the hag and I can follow our respective marks without attracting attention. The rain has stopped; some people have lowered their umbrellas, but others still hold them as if they don’t quite trust the night. They also carry handbags or groceries, push strollers, or cradle phones. Some of them manage to do all these things at once. Tasha walks alone, red umbrella at her side, her ears phoneless, the noise of the world not reaching her, at least not at the moment.

She’s a block from her house when the hag stops at a street corner and takes out a cell. I back into an alley and focus on his lips while my internal microphone does the rest.

“Affirmative. She met with him and went straight home. Nothing doing tonight.”

I can’t hear the voice on his line.

“Got it. I’ll pick up tomorrow.” Then he puts the phone in his pocket and heads back to the Metro.

The so-called Revisions project, which we’d discovered thanks to my initial pursuit of Dalton and that began to come to light with the interrogation of my father-in-law, produced a trove of information on what the rebels were plotting. No one had seen anything like this, not since the Government had been established. There’d been warnings to the public to be vigilant against agitators, but no one on the inside had thought such well-orchestrated resistance was possible.

The investigation merged with an internal one that the Scientific Explorations Agency had been conducting; apparently, the rebels had stolen the technology for time travel, which the Government had recently discovered and barely understood (and had, of course, kept secret from the public). Only preliminary tests had been run. The Intelligence Department was informed of this a few weeks after my family’s accident. I was still in shock; everything seemed equally stunning and impossible. My too-large bed; my daughter’s dusty bureau; the possibility of time travel; the sickness in my stomach; the fact that someone could change history itself; the awful silence when I woke in the middle of the night.

The clandestine Department of Historical Integrity was formed to institute new safeguards. Only the finest, most trustworthy officers were recruited to join the team of Protectors. No one was more highly regarded than myself, they told me. I had assumed the Joseph situation would blacklist me, shunting me to dead-end assignments in windowless rooms. But the very opposite occurred: my superiors, colleagues, and countless bureaucrats I’d never seen before shook my hand and impressed upon me the gravity of the situation and how much they needed men like me. I was someone who had sacrificed all he had for our society. A lesser man might have stepped in and interfered with the investigation of Joseph, might have tried to pull some strings. I, however, had allowed parts of myself to die so that our Perfect Present could continue, exemplifying all that was good about what we did.

I was a hero.

Tailing the hag back into the city is trickier. At this hour, few people are boarding inbound trains. I follow him to the Potomac Avenue station at double the previous distance. I take an escalator down to the platform opposite his, and I linger behind what used to be a pay-phone stall but no longer is. Everyone has a cell phone now; the kiosk has a large hole in the center where the phone was once affixed, and old wires capped with plastic dangle from it. A bumper sticker taped beneath the hole tells me to
FREE D.C. FROM WASHINGTON,
whatever that means.

A Blue Line train tiredly rolls in. I board after the hag and sit in the same row as him, across the aisle. There are only five other people on this car, and three of them appear to be sleeping. I check for security cameras, but there are none. We reach the stop for Eastern Market and two more people get on, a young white couple, holding hands. They sit a few rows in front of us.

I get up, cross the aisle, and sit directly behind the hag.

“You’re good at following people,” I say just loudly enough for him to hear over the voice of the driver, who’s naming the next stop.