The Revisionists (19 page)

While helping T.J. design and print some pamphlets, she asked him if he knew of any ways to create an untraceable e-mail account. T.J. told her yes, and he knew people who could do it; the hacker crowd and the activist crowd were tight, at least in D.C.

“But why do you ask? You making me party to credit card fraud? Or some underground kidnapping ring?”

“I need to contact someone anonymously. It’s a good deed, I promise.”

The next time he saw her, a few days later at a coffee shop near her office, he handed her a yellow Post-it with a password and an e-mail address: [email protected].

“What’s carsonsgillem?” she asked.

“Hedge fund. Guy I know hacked into them, decided not to take them down but play around with them instead. He created a few e-mail addresses on their server; they’ll never know, at least not until he comes up with something really crazy to do to them. He told me the account should work for at least a few months. You’re free to use it as long as it lasts. Just don’t say anything identifying on it, and don’t access it from your home or office computer.”

So she’d waited in line one lunch break at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, basically a homeless shelter in downtown D.C. where people occasionally checked out books. The wait time for a computer almost took her entire lunch hour, and the kiosk stank of the previous person’s BO when Tasha finally logged into the hedge fund’s site. She e-mailed the
Times
reporter.
Hello,
she typed.
I do not work at carsonsgillem but am accessing this account to reach you. I recently sent you information pertaining to GTK Industries which I had hoped would provide material for an important exposé. I was wondering why you have not written about it. Please write back to this address.
She didn’t bother inventing an alias to sign off with.

The next day she returned to the library, this time at four thirty, just in case varying her routine was important. As it turned out, Notreally Aname had mail; one e-mail from the
Times
reporter. Yes, he had received the files and was very grateful for them. Much time and effort had been spent studying them, and various attempts had been made to verify certain bits of information. GTK was proving most unhelpful in their responses, he explained. Tasha’s stomach tensed with the realization that while she’d thought nothing was happening, GTK’s public relations department was receiving prying calls from the
Times
. That meant someone at the firm might already know about the leak, even though no story had broken yet.

The only reason the
Times
hadn’t run a story, the reporter explained, was that a few issues were still confusing him. There followed a long list of follow-up questions and requests for clarification. Tasha’s heart was pounding now, sweat on her back. They
were
going to run the story, so long as she could answer their follow-ups. She read through his questions, committing them to memory; a few would require a bit of digging into the files. Which she would need to do with extreme care, especially if anyone at GTK had tipped off her firm about the company’s receiving alarming questions from the
Times.

She spread the research out over the next week. Worked late every night (not that that was unusual) so she could access the GTK files when no one was around. One of the reporter’s questions, which asked her to identify herself or at least explain her relationship to GTK, she chose to leave unanswered.

* * *

The next time Tasha saw T.J. (at a meeting to plan the candlelight vigil in front of the White House), she told him to ask his hacker friend to kill the account and delete the e-mails.

“You gonna tell me what it was all about?” he asked.

She realized that the hacker friend could just read them himself. Who was this hacker friend? Would he read the e-mails and tell T.J., or someone else? She’d taken such care to cover her steps; maybe there truly was no way to move without a trace. She’d make a lousy criminal.

“No,” she told T.J. “Maybe one day. You’d approve, trust me.”

The reporter worked fast; the article appeared three days after their last e-mail exchange. Tasha had opened her paper one morning and there it was, on page A-3. Not a front-page story? She seethed for a moment, then read it through. He’d done a good job, even finding a former GTK employee (unnamed) who said, “I’m not surprised to hear about shenanigans like this,” and posited that this could be “the tip of the iceberg.” But Tasha’s documents provided the bulk of the story, and she felt a surge of pride that what she’d done did indeed matter to someone—hopefully, to many hundreds of thousands of someones. Including the important someones, the someones who had the power to stop such awful machinations, the someones who would now be roused by popular outrage into action.

People at her firm saw the
Times
story, of course, and an internal audit was launched; junior associates were questioned by the most court-savvy of the partners. But Tasha was cool and had rehearsed her answers many times; at the conclusion of her own thirty-minute inquisition, she felt she’d eluded the firm’s suspicions. On coffee break with her pal Jill one morning, Jill asked Tasha point-blank if she was the leak, and Tasha confessed that the news story had made her happy, even thrilled, but she swore that it wasn’t her; she still remembered Ethics 101, thank you very much.

The
Times
story instantly went viral. It hit on all the major liberal news-segmentation sites and countless like-minded blogs, which used it as evidence of the war’s inherent illegality. Conservative and military bloggers touted the story as well, as proof of a bureaucratically mismanaged defense policy and an industry that cared less for patriotism than profit. By the third day, the
Times’
competing publications, like the
Washington Post,
were augmenting the tale with their own investigations. Cable anchors were disgusted, op-ed columns employed angry adjectives from the back pages, and a couple of congressmen vowed a close audit of GTK’s business dealings.

And then, just when Tasha was feeling most proud of herself for making a difference, the GTK story receded into the media netherworld. She Googled it daily and sometimes found a heartfelt open letter on the blog of another bereaved military relative or saw an angry new screed from some critic of global capitalism, but that was all. The cable anchors had moved on to other stories of injustice, the op-ed pages were incensed by something else, and the two congressmen turned to other tasks more compelling than launching some boring audit of a very connected company. GTK Industries weathered the storm. Barely a week after the
Times
story appeared, a subcommittee chairman lightly admonished GTK from the Senate floor moments before voting in favor of giving the company a vast new defense contract.

It dawned on Tasha slowly, the irrelevance of what she had done.

A few nights later was the vigil at the White House. Suddenly she was going to so many meetings and events, leaving the office “early” at seven to make them, running the risk that her billable hours would be too low, that someone in HR (or one of the partners) would put a black mark by her name, file her under Lacks Commitment. She’d almost skipped the vigil, wary of that black mark and figuring the event would be just useless symbolism. Which it was.

But she’d gone, and it hadn’t been a total disaster, as that’s where she’d met Troy Jones. Maybe she was confusing her mourning with her loneliness, her heart with her libido. She’d spotted him right away—how could she
not
have?—and had angled to talk to him. Brothers like this did not drop from the sky. His hair was cut short and was very dark against his skin, and his light eyes—were they green? or gray? possibly the lightest sapphire blue?—seemed somehow double-lensed, like he was observing things from a certain remove. She wondered if his mother was white, or perhaps a grandfather, and there seemed to be some Asian in there too, possibly Vietnamese—perhaps Troy’s very existence owed itself to America’s past military adventures.

He reminded Tasha of her brother. He seemed to carry himself like a soldier, a certain bearing and gravity, so unlike the typical guys who figured using slyness and humor was the quickest way into her pants. After the vigil, she’d returned home and studied Marshall’s military portrait, which her parents had given her and which she’d hung on her wall. Years ago they’d given her his first such portrait, and Marshall in all that regalia had been almost unrecognizable to her. She’d since grown used to it, and he’d grown into it. This picture, taken just before his last deployment, was the Marshall he had always been fated to become.

The day after the vigil, she used a much-deserved sick day after working three consecutive seven-day weeks and spent much of the day sifting through Marshall’s old journals and trying to contact his war buddies.

Then she’d received the phone call. A mystery man, telling her to meet him at the Topaz Bar the next day. Calling from a blocked number. Someone who knew her name, her home phone number, that she worked at the firm, and that GTK was one of its clients. Someone who implied that he knew even more.

She barely slept that night. Had distinct memories of rolling over and staring at her clock to see that the time was 12:01, 1:57, 2:30. Telling herself not to panic. Maybe it was only the original
Times
reporter, or someone who worked with him? Maybe the guy hadn’t really been threatening her?

In her head, the law school professors were clearing their throats.

* * *

The Topaz was one of those so-called boutique hotels that had appeared in D.C. over the past few years like infiltrators from a trendier city. Tasha had gotten drunk here with law school friends once, had vague memories of the rotating red and blue lights that bathed the bar in alternating warmth and coolness. At two in the afternoon, the bar was bright and nearly empty but for a few lone men wearing business suits and jet lag, tapping messages in their PDAs or chatting on their phones in foreign languages between sips of coffee. None of them looked up at her.

Even the location of this meeting was disturbing, suggesting that the mystery caller knew it was close enough to the firm’s office for Tasha to walk here on break, yet far enough from it that it was unlikely they would meet or be overheard by any of her colleagues.

She’d been sitting at a small table by the window for five minutes, nervously telling the server she was waiting on a friend, when a familiar man walked in. He came right up, said, “Hi, Tasha,” and sat down opposite her as if he’d been expected.

Who was he? Wait, now she remembered; she’d seen him at one of the antiwar meetings she’d attended. Couldn’t remember his name. Tall, built like a track runner, short light hair, and glasses. What was he doing here? He was years younger than the voice on the phone had been.

“Oh, hi,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I’m waiting for someone.”

“Yes: me.” He sat there with an implacable face, waiting for it to sink in.

“You aren’t—”

“I’m not who called you, no. He sent me here in his stead.” She noticed that he was carrying a black man-purse, which he flung open now. He removed two manila file folders and placed them on the table between them right as the waiter appeared. He ordered a vodka tonic, and it took her a few seconds to realize the waiter was looking at her. She managed to utter a barely audible “Iced tea.”

Things were slowly falling into place.

She tried to remember what they’d talked about during their five-minute chat a couple of weeks ago. He’d said he was a graduate student, something about Asian history. He’d recently returned from years teaching English abroad and he was incensed at the direction their country was headed in.

“I’m afraid I forgot your name,” she said, trying to keep calm as everything shifted around her.

“Leo Hastings.”

“And you want to talk to me about one of my firm’s clients?”

“Yes, GTK. That was quite a story that broke in the
Times
. The reporter had access to all kinds of confidential information about a company that’s represented by your law firm.”

“That story very much angered our client.”

“You’re the lawyer here—I’m sure you could skew things any way you want. But all I have to do is pick up the phone and call one of your firm’s partners and tell him that I represent the government and I happen to know that one of his associates leaked those GTK files. One of his associates decided that her political opinions were more important than legal ethics, more important than the firm’s reputation for defending its clients. And then I’d say your name.”

The glasses arrived and Leo informed the waiter they wouldn’t be ordering any food.

“I’m not sure how any of this is your business, Leo, but here are the facts. The partners already interviewed everyone at the firm, including myself, about the leak. GTK performed its own internal review as well. We still don’t know who did it, and I have no idea why you would think it was me.”

He smiled. “I get it. You think I’m taping this, and you need to be circumspect. Which is smart. But here are some more facts: The e-mail account you used to contact the
Times
reporter was created by a hacker we’ve been following, a hacker who travels in the same circles that you’ve unfortunately started traveling in of late. Your buddy T.J. And when those e-mails were sent, the account was accessed from the downtown D.C. public library, which is a five-minute walk from your office.”

She needed a few seconds.
T.J.
and not a friend of T.J. was the hacker? Which probably meant that T.J. had read those e-mails she’d sent and never said anything about it.

“The library’s a five-minute walk from
thousands
of people’s offices,” she said, “and most of them are much more politically connected than me and must have had access to something about GTK.”

His smile hadn’t changed. “You need to scan in and out of your building at the security kiosk. Terrorism-prevention measures—aren’t they a bitch? We can match the times you scanned in and out with the times those e-mails were sent. Three times, all perfect matches.” He tapped one of the manila folders, then slid it closer to her. “This has the evidence that the e-mails were sent from MLK Library, and also the security scan times at your office building.”