The Revisionists (52 page)

“Tell me again why you need this.”

“I have a friend who’s in trouble. She needs an ID and a Social Security number, and I need it in a few hours.”

Edwin raised his eyebrows at the time constraint, which Leo hadn’t mentioned during their brief call.

“Guy I know, he can do this, but I don’t know about that fast.”

Leo figured the guy operated in this very neighborhood; there had been a few police busts for identity theft and the selling of fake passports and SSNs at some of the local restaurants and ethnic shops.

“I can pay more if he wants.”

Edwin mulled this over. “Why a guy like you need this?”

“My friend needs it.”

Edwin looked at the photo again. “This is for love?”

“She needs help. I don’t know where else to turn.”

“How I know this ain’t a trap?”

“If I hadn’t called to warn you that time, you’d be back in Managua. In jail.”

Edwin thought about this. “Yeah. But you’re the one set those guys up. How I know you didn’t just warn me that one time so you could set me up again later, use me to bust more guys?”

“I didn’t bust anyone. I just gathered information for someone who…” Leo’s voice trailed off as he realized that his rationalizations meant nothing.

“I don’t really know you, Leo.”

Who did? “Look, you can take my money right now and just run off with it. If you do, sure, you screw me, but nothing’s really going to happen to me—
I’ll
be fine. But a very good woman will get deported, or worse. I’d like to stop that from happening to her, just like I stopped it from happening to you.”

It was borderline humiliating that Leo, whose former employer could have provided him with false identification papers in mere hours, was reduced to groveling before a Nicaraguan immigrant in a fast-food joint. He tried not to focus on this latest evidence of how far he had fallen.

“She really your girl?”

He shook his head. “I’m not good enough for her.”

Edwin grinned. “Okay, you wait. I check with my man.”

Leo sat with his cold food and hot briefcase as Edwin disappeared to consult with his source, who Leo now knew for certain was in the area. Leo took the time to pore over Jones’s files and connect more dots.

Ten minutes later, Edwin was back.

“Okay,” he said. “Pay now. He says he leave it for you in envelope at mailbox for house at 1009 Kenyon Street Northwest. Is vacant. Someone’ll put it there in two hours.”

Leo opened his wallet below the table, fished out the cash plus extra for the rush charge. Then he slid it into an envelope and passed it to Edwin.

Leo left the fried-chicken place and walked three blocks—checking for surveillance the whole way—to the only pay phone left in this neighborhood. He found Special Agent Michaels’s card and dropped some coins into the slot.

“Yes?”

“We spoke at my place earlier tonight.”

If Michaels was annoyed or confused by Leo’s cryptic greeting, he didn’t show it. “Yes, of course.”

“I have something you’re going to want to look at.”

“Already? This time I’m the one who’s impressed with how fast
you
are.”

“He came by, not long after you did. And he led me to believe that time is of the essence here. What do you know about a reporter named Chaudhry?”

There was a brief pause. “A good amount.”

“I’m told someone is going to meet a similar fate very soon, at 702 R Street Northeast. How quickly can you meet me?”

32.

I
t was rather too fitting that Tasha again found herself in the back of a van. At least this one had windows, and no one had thrown her into it. She’d opened the door herself, boarded of her own free will. Or had she? How free had she been, in any of this?

After sifting through the wreckage that was her home for longer than she could stand, she’d washed her face so she wouldn’t look like she’d been crying, then walked over to the house of one of her friendlier neighbors, a fortysomething gay man who liked to brag about being the first person to gentrify this neighborhood. He always brought up the time he’d seen a man chase his girlfriend/lover/prostitute down the street while wielding a bloody steak knife, a week after he’d moved into the house. Tasha was never sure how she was supposed to take these stories of the neighborhood’s wayward past, and she noticed at parties and sidewalk chats how her race threw complications into the cozy narrative of white gentrifiers saving a bad neighborhood. But the neighbor was friendly, and he had a phone. (She didn’t trust hers anymore, and had turned it off.) She’d lied to him that her phones were out, and she called T.J. and said there was something she needed to tell him in person. He told her to meet her at a certain street corner east of Shaw, his words unusually terse.

She’d called for a cab, not wanting to walk anywhere near the Metro station from which she’d been abducted; she was already too freaked out by whatever was happening. Who was following her, and why? She assumed that whoever had trashed her house worked for the same people as the men who’d driven her around in the van; perhaps the interrogation itself was less important than the fact that it kept her out of her house so someone could search it.

And the more she thought about it, the more she wondered about Troy. He’d tried to say something to her about “not being a part of this,” whatever that meant, and he’d looked legitimately ashamed of what she found in his briefcase. She’d thought it was just more of his act. But maybe he’d been telling the truth? Had Troy’s relationship with her been less of a con than she’d assumed? Had it been genuine, and had he been trying to figure out his new role in this maddening world just as she was?

The cab dropped her off at the intersection where T.J. said he’d meet her, but there was no T.J. There was no anyone, and this didn’t feel like a good place to be killing time. It was cold and windy that night; acorns popped off parked car roofs like tiny firecrackers. She was still in her heels and business suit, and she felt she must look like a big wallet to someone.

A blue van pulled up. Jesus, another van. The window rolled down and she recognized the driver, a white kid with bad skin and worse facial hair, from one of T.J.’s meetings.

“T.J. says sorry for the subterfuge. Hop in back.”

She hesitated, but he looked too unthreatening for this to be a dangerous proposition. She got in the back, and he asked her to keep her head low so she wouldn’t be spotted. He apologized again in a hipster monotone, as if telling a housemate he was sorry for smoking all her weed. T.J., he explained, was a bit “wigged” due to a few “developments,” and they were taking precautions.

“I don’t remember your name,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s cool, actually. Probably better not to.”

His radio was playing whatever fuzzy style of rock had supplanted grunge in the white kids’ world. The singer was screaming,
“I won’t waste it / I won’t waste it / I won’t waste my love on a nation!”

Even with her head low (why exactly did she need to hide?) she could look up and see the tops of buildings. He drove them a few blocks north of Rhode Island Avenue, a part of town unreached by the Metro lines and therefore on the dark side of the moon as far as young professionals and college kids were concerned. She’d had a friend who lived around here once, maybe in second or third grade, but Tasha hadn’t been in the neighborhood since.

“It’s a good spot,” he said, as if hearing her thoughts. “You know, off the beaten path but close enough to New York Ave. and the B-W Parkway to be useful for getaways.”

A minute later, he pulled up in front of a row house whose lights weren’t on. “He’s on the porch.”

Even when she sat up, she couldn’t see what he was pointing to, but she got out anyway. Only after he’d pulled away did she see a form sitting in a chair on the porch. She climbed the steps slowly, and then the form stood.

“Hey, Tasha,” T.J. said, his voice quieter and calmer than usual. He was wearing a slim brown leather jacket, blue jeans, and running shoes whose intense whiteness was not as conducive to hiding at night. She had no idea if he’d come from inside the house or if this was a vacant place he’d chosen as a random rendezvous spot.

She made a point of looking around at the quiet, empty block. “What’s going on?”

“You first,” he said. “What is it you needed to tell me this late, in person?”

Her thoughts had been so muddled that she hadn’t even planned this part out yet. “I need to apologize.” Looking into his green eyes, though it was so dark out they could have been any color. “I got myself caught in a bind. The information that I’ve been giving you, about Consolidated Forces… It’s not true.”

He watched her for a moment. “How so?”

“I leaked the GTK story. I… I wanted to do it, I knew it was right. But someone found out about it, and they threatened to tell my firm. I would have been disbarred, gone bankrupt. So—”

“So the girl who’s made compromises all her life decided to make one more.”

She had busted her ass for years so she wouldn’t wind up in a neighborhood just like this one, yet to the raised-in-Berkeley rebel standing before her, it was all “compromise.”

“I was
stalling
them, T.J. Someone tried to play me, so I played them right back. I was never going to let you run with those stories; I just needed to string them along until I could get something out of them about Marshall.”

“So if you were to write a column about this in that arts weekly of yours, the hypothetical letter would say, ‘Dear Tasha, I’m being blackmailed into betraying a friend who’s dedicated his life to tearing down the walls of power, and I feel kind of bad about this.’ And your advice to yourself would be ‘The hell with him, girl, do whatever you need to keep that corporate lawyer gig.’”

She wasn’t sure if he hadn’t heard her explanation or if it had just sounded like so much equivocal bullshit.

“That corporate-law gig is effectively over. And I’m probably going to be disbarred, so don’t ask me to defend you next time you’re arrested for trespassing. But I’m sure I’ll still seem oh-so-bourgeois to you and the true believers.”

A familiar bass line vibrated up her feet as someone’s car’s subwoofer inched closer. She and T.J. both turned their heads as a black SUV cruised down the street, slowly. She realized she’d been holding her breath when it reached the end of the block and proceeded north. The beats faded and she exhaled.

He looked across the street at a row of houses identical to the ones on his side; it was as if a mirror had been lowered into the center of the asphalt, reflecting everything but themselves.

“You know, I’m not as against the mainstream media as you think I am,” he said. “I do know some good folks who are reporters. But I know one fewer than I used to. This buddy of mine, Karthik. He worked for Reuters. Was real interested in all these private intelligence contractors running around D.C., acting like they’re the CIA only they don’t have to report to anyone. He wrote some eye-opening stories, and he was working on a new one that was going to shine a light on a couple of companies in particular, on work they were doing for other countries, and how some people in U.S. intelligence even helped out so long as they got paid their share. So they killed him.”

She’d seen a file about the reporter in Troy’s briefcase. She thought about voicing this but didn’t see the point. She was still trying to figure out
T.J.’s
point.

“The files you were giving me, Tasha, they were interesting. But I guess whoever was giving them to you thought we were dumber than we are, that we wouldn’t double-check anything. Some of the names in there are real—just enough to get us in trouble for libel—but plenty of them aren’t. And the companies too—some of the ones in those memos are real, others aren’t. I don’t know who it was that gave them to you, but he didn’t cover his tracks as well as he thought.”

“So… you’ve known all along?”

“Not all along, no. I believed you at first. Believed you really were taking a chance on me, taking a chance on yourself, to do some good.”

“Is that why we’re talking on some strange porch in a dead part of town?”

“I’ve been followed the last few days, and so have some other folks. I don’t think it’s the same people that have been trying to frame us, but it could be. Doesn’t matter. I’ve never lacked for enemies—if I ever do, it’ll mean I’m not doing a very good job. So me and my folks are leaving town. Some of the other projects we’ve been working on will have to fall through, but that’s okay. The Knoweverything story is more important, and we can do that from anywhere.”

“But… the stories are fake.”

“That
is
the story. We aren’t going online with ‘Consolidated Forces’ Internal Documents Show That’ blah blah blah, we’re going with ‘Privatized Intelligence Industry Spreading Disinformation, Tailing Activists, Killing Reporters.’ Those fake docs you gave me, those are part of the story, definitely. But not in the way your blackmailers thought.”

She tried to straighten this out. “So
I’m
in the story?”

“We won’t use your name. But we will have to say ‘an unnamed attorney at a Washington law firm who leaked the GTK story and was blackmailed for it,’ et cetera, et cetera. Kind of an important point.”

The way he said that, she could tell he’d already known she was the leak even before her admission tonight. He must have read the e-mails she’d sent to the
Times
reporter after all. “Jesus, might as well use my name then!”

“Are
you
expecting
me
to apologize?”

“T.J., I was going to tell you in time. I was.”

He gave her a patronizing look. “I’m sure that’s what you told yourself.”

Leave it to T.J. to make her regret the fact that she’d warned him, or even apologized to him. She folded her arms. “If thinking that people like me are part of the problem makes it easier for you to fight your battles,” she said, “then fine, go ahead and demonize me too. See how many people you wind up with on your side.”