The Revisionists (34 page)

She surprised him with a smile. He hadn’t seen her do that very often. “A date? A date with an American?”

Oh, Jesus Christ, was he
blushing?
He hated himself. He reached for the heat, turned it down a bit, as if this action might make her think the redness on his cheeks were something else. He needed to remember that she was not as meek as she sometimes seemed.

“Is that so hard to believe?” he asked.

“Not so hard.” She was still smiling, but he found her face inscrutable—yet more evidence that this was not the best line of work for him. There were too many mysteries he couldn’t begin to puzzle out. “What would we do? On our big date?”

“Well, that depends,” he said. “What kind of food do you like?”

“Anything but Korean.”

“There’s a great Thai restaurant not far from my house, near Dupont Circle.” He allowed himself to wander down this fantasy, inviting her along. “We’d have dinner there, then see a movie at my favorite theater, and—”

“I wouldn’t understand a word.” She laughed.

“I’d translate.”

“I don’t think the other people would appreciate that.”

“Then I’d rent out the entire theater just for us.”

“This sounds like a very big date.” She raised her eyebrows, impressed. “But I don’t think I’d believe your translation. I’d wonder if you were just telling me the best parts and making up the rest.”

He didn’t know what to do with that. “And then we’d take a taxi to the Washington Monument and ride the elevator to the top and see the city sparkling below us.” He hoped that wasn’t too phallic a reference.

“And I would see all the happy Americans, holding hands.” She rolled her eyes. “It sounds very nice, like the fairy tales I tell their daughter every night.”

Maybe she was right; his translation wasn’t all that believable.

“I want to help you,” he said, trying to appear earnest. Then he reached out and took one of her hands in his. It was cold, the fingers narrow and hard. He felt her tense up and worried he’d made a mistake again. “Please stay with me a little longer.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze before releasing it.

“Okay. But we’re running out of time. Can we move the groceries now?”

After placing the last of the bags inside her SUV, they stood beside each other like a couple at the end of a date. And because he was still living in that little fantasy he had sketched for her, and because they both wanted to believe his translation, he stood closer to her than he otherwise might have. She looked up at him, and it seemed she was leaning toward him, or maybe he was only hoping she was—he wasn’t sure. When he leaned down to kiss her, she did not laugh at him or recoil. Perhaps his translation wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.

Then he stepped back, and she smiled at him before getting in the SUV. Neither of them said good-bye.

He should have gone straight home.

Instead he drove slowly through the park, finally emerging near Chevy Chase, far from not only her house but also his own, to foil any potential watchers. The kiss, and the way she’d looked at him, and their strange, topic-spanning conversation had him too amped up. This was a ridiculous operation—it wasn’t even an operation, strictly speaking, just a blind trolling for anything of interest. He never should have told Bale about her. He should have just driven her to the Indonesian embassy, told her what to say. She would have had to go back to her homeland, which she didn’t seem to want, but surely that would have been better than where she was now. He had told her he’d help her even though he probably couldn’t. The more he thought about her, the worse he felt about the deception, and the more he wanted to deliver on his promise.

At a red light, he looked at his empty passenger seat. The vinyl still bore the slight imprint of her thighs. He let his finger glide there. He breathed in and thought he could smell her.

There was no practical reason for him to drive back to the diplomat’s neighborhood. It was counterproductive to risk being seen. Yet after driving into Maryland and coasting through Bethesda, watching the couples strolling to this Lebanese restaurant or that sports bar, and then winding his way back into the city, he pulled into an empty spot a block away from the Shims’. His windshield was just beneath the low bough of an elm tree, and he could barely see the dark windows of the house. He turned off the engine.

He found himself yearning for another a glance, hoping she’d raise the window shades or maybe step outside. I’m a stalker, he realized. That’s all he’d ever been, really, and at least now he was being honest. He was a low-level errand runner, a pawn of secret machinations he would never fully understand. He knew this, and he hated it. He should be doing something else with his life. This was not the way to make a difference.

The passenger-side door opened. He’d been lost in thought and was jarred by the sound and by the internal car light and by the way the vehicle sagged with the added weight of this unexpected stranger. He saw a pair of knees entering his car, and then a torso, and then a gun.

“Keep your hands on the wheel,” the man said. “Look straight ahead. Now.”

Leo obeyed. The man closed the passenger door and the light slowly faded. Leo could peripherally see the man holding the gun in his lap, aimed at Leo’s midsection. It was a black automatic. He had seen the man for only a second—somewhat dark-skinned, ethnically ambiguous; short hair; dark jacket, maybe leather; and black slacks. He seemed big, but maybe that was just the gun.

“You can take the car and my money—”

“Who are you,” the man asked, “and why are you tailing Mr. Shim?” The man opened Leo’s glove box, passed his hand through the stack of oil-change receipts and AAA maps, then closed it. Leo’s mouth went dry.

“I don’t work for anyone. I’m just sitting here waiting on a friend, and—”

“Spare me the innocent contemp act. Who do you work for, and where are the rest of them?”

The man cocked the hammer of his gun. Then he started moving his hands, doing something Leo couldn’t discern from the corner of his eye. Another dark object was in the man’s hand. Leo could hear the sound of metal fitting atop metal.

“No one ever seems to walk down this block,” the man said. “You would be amazed by the things I can do inside a car. If you don’t give me answers, I’ll start with your kneecaps.”

Leo tried to swallow.

“That a wallet in your pants pocket?”

“Yes.”

“Take it out very slowly, and place it on the seat between us. Keep facing forward.” Leo complied, and the man flipped it open, removed the driver’s license, and dropped the rest. “All right,
Leonard
. Tell me about yourself.”

“Look, I don’t know what I’ve stumbled into here, but—”

“You don’t need to know. You only need to answer questions. Do you work with Wills?”

“Will who?”

“How long have you been back here?”

“Back where?”

“
Here, now.
How long have you been in this beat?”

Whatever jargon this guy was using, it was new to Leo. “Look, this isn’t an operation. This is… my own thing.”

The man seemed to consider this for a moment. “I’m asking for the last time: Who do you work for? Try to dodge that and you’ll never walk normally again.”

Leo breathed. Who was this guy? He talked like he was an insider but he was threatening to
shoot
him. “Targeted Executive Solutions,” Leo said.

“And you have no actual client, you just took it upon yourself to tail a random diplomat?”

“I was… approached by someone with access. Someone I could run. I’m just… following up.”

“Someone in the house, a maid?”

He nodded, hating himself.

“This has been going on how long?”

Leo lied, shaving the time in half. His hands were sweaty, his fingers so slick on the wheel he had to tighten his grip to guard against their slipping suddenly and causing the man to shoot him.

“You said
them
. Who are your targets?”

“It’s, um, it’s pretty vague.”

“Clarify it for me.”

“The diplomat’s wife is a person of interest.”

“But not the diplomat himself?”

“Thus far, no.”

The intruder thought for a few seconds. “Tell me, Leonard Hastings: Do you believe in God?”

Leo had heard of people feeling cold shivers run down their spines, but he’d never before experienced it. “What?”

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. In your opinion, how much of what we do is truly up to us? How much of it is predetermined, or at least dictated by larger forces we can’t control? Have you ever wondered that?”

Leo’s voice was a rasp as he said, “Existential thoughts are beyond my pay grade.”

“As is so very much. But it’s been puzzling me. All this activity, all this running around. Whatever intent we might have, not that someone like you seems to have much. But people in general. We try and we try, we work so very hard, we seek to control our own destinies. Isn’t that hilarious? We control nothing. Well, one another, maybe. We enslave one another, conquer one another—that’s the closest any of us get to God. We use the word
God
to make ourselves feel better about how tiny and insignificant we are.”

Leo was slick with sweat. All the oxygen had been sucked out of the car.

“Maybe you should think about these questions sometime,” the man said. “Like when you’re sitting in a car alone, watching people.”

“Okay.”

The man laughed and leaned back. “You really thought I was going to shoot you, didn’t you?”

“I’m… having some trouble figuring out your motivations.”

“Get used to being confused. I’m going to go now, Leonard. Do your best not to remember this conversation.”

Leo kept staring straight ahead as the man kicked open the passenger door and started to slide out. “Can I have my license back?”

“Call your DMV.”

With that the man left, leaving the door open, which again triggered the internal light. Leo looked at his mirror, but the glare obscured his view. He leaned over and pulled the door shut. The man was gone. Leo sat there, defeated, and gave his nerves a moment to settle before checking his wallet to make sure nothing was missing other than his license.

He started the engine and pulled onto the road, wondering if he was being watched even now. The intruder had moved with such effortless confidence that surely he hadn’t acted alone. They might even be renting one of the houses on this block; they’d no doubt filmed Leo’s recent recycling pickup. He decided not to drive home yet and instead found himself taking Prospect Street over Rock Creek Park and onto Connecticut, scouting for a place to pull over so he could get a drink, figure this out.

It didn’t make sense.

If Leo had accidentally stumbled into the surveillance net of some other agency—CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, Homeland, whoever—they wouldn’t have been so brusque as to point a
gun
at him. Turf battles were one thing, but death threats were a bit much. Did the man work for a different country or some stateless group? Did he merely want Leo to
think
that he worked for the U.S.?

He hadn’t been wearing gloves, had he? Leo wasn’t sure. God, what a failure he was, not even to be certain of that most basic fact. It was his job to observe, but add the specter of bodily harm into the mix and his panicked eyes turned inward. Maybe Leo
did
deserve the Knoweverything assignment; maybe he was no better than a mole sent to kvetch with lefty dreamers. He couldn’t handle the dark side. He replayed the scene in his head: he had told the man everything he’d wanted to know, had ruined his little operation in thirty seconds.

At least he could check for prints on his wallet and glove box, try to identify the stranger. He would sit in his apartment and recollect every step he’d taken to this point, try to figure out where he’d gone wrong.

His fingers weren’t shaking anymore by the time he parked his car. He looked at the passenger seat. Sari’s imprint had been obliterated by that of the mystery man.

Z.

I
’ve never been so confused about a mission before. Maybe that bump on the head affected more than I thought; maybe those strange people who claimed to recognize me were warnings. Or maybe it’s simply that I’ve never been in a beat for this long—I’ve let myself get comfortable here, let myself care too much about what happens to the contemps.

After questioning the man on the Metro—not a hag, just a contemp investigator tailing Tasha, although I’m not sure why—I switched lines and took a train up to Mount Pleasant, to case the diplomat’s house. Which was where I found Leonard Hastings, another contemp playing shadow, another man who couldn’t identify his client as he spied on key targets. It made me wonder if that was how life worked in this beat, if everyone spied on everyone else, if parked cars were full of cops and feds and dicks, if on every Metro ride you were subject to the gazes of paid informants.

I pore through my intel again. Scan it backward and forward, look for the pieces I might have missed, extrapolate what the Department itself might have missed or willfully left out.

Then I catch a cab so I can get back to the motel Wills and I have been using as our home base. After hearing the unappealing destination, the cabbie grudgingly takes me there.

Wills’s light isn’t on. I knock on his door loudly. I hear him stumble out of bed, then he opens the door. Like me, he sleeps in his clothes.

Before he can ask me what the trouble is, I walk in and tell him there’s been a development with Tasha. I pace the room, glancing at him quickly to gauge just how unsettled he is.

“I messed up,” I tell him. “They got her.”

“They got—who?”

“The hags took out Tasha Wilson,” I lie. “I was watching her place, like you said, but without a GeneScan I couldn’t tell that another hag had snuck in the back. I heard the shot, and I broke into her house as they were leaving.”

“Oh.” He’s trying to think fast. “That will… definitely create some complications.”