The Revisionists (35 page)

“Yes. But maybe we can fix them. I have one of the hags.”

“What?”

“Tied up, in the trunk of his car. Here in the parking lot. I thought we could interrogate him together.”

“Wow. Good. Has he… said anything yet?”

“Not yet. I stunned him; he’s still out. Want to help me carry him in?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“It’ll be tricky to get him in without being seen,” I say, watching Wills carefully. He’s telling me plenty without saying a thing.

“I need to go to the bathroom first,” he finally says. “Wait a minute.”

I wait for much less than that. After he shuts the bathroom door, I lightly walk up to it, listen for a moment, take out my Stunner, and kick the door open. He’s standing in front of the toilet, loading a gun. He looks up at me and extends an arm, but he isn’t fast enough and I’ve already taken three steps toward him. I hit him with the Stunner, and his head snaps back from the shock. His fingers loosen around the gun barrel, and I take it before he can drop it—I don’t want a round to go off accidentally. For a second his hand stays in the air with mine even as the rest of his heavy body falls to the floor.

When Wills wakes up, he’s naked in the bathtub. I’ve bound his hands and feet, and the base of his head is leaning against the hard lip of the tub, the spigot scraping his temple. I’ve taped his mouth and he breathes loudly through his nose. I run some water on him, and his body tenses from the cold; he turns his head away to keep his nostrils clear. I shut off the water and sit on the toilet, gripping the Stunner, waiting for a moment so he’ll understand.

“You played me very well,” I say. “You weren’t sent here by the Department. The Department would never send two Protectors to the same beat—I knew that, but I was so thrown to see you here that I figured there must be a reason. I overlooked the most obvious one.”

I tear the tape from his mouth. He inhales deeply, then says, “What’s wrong with you, Zed?
Think!
We’re on the same—”

I hit him in the chest with the Stunner, set relatively weak. His head jolts back and snaps against the tub’s wall behind him. Fortunately the tub’s not porcelain, just plastic, otherwise the impact might have knocked him out.

“This will take a very long time if you don’t start admitting things.”

“Zed, I was sent here same as you. I’ve been—”

“You’ve been working for the hags, keeping your eye on me. The hag that I got at the convention center, he looked so shocked to see me. I wondered why. It’s because you were supposed to be stalling me, tricking me into following random people around, telling me they were hags doing recon. You didn’t do it well that first day. But ever since, you’ve been pointing me in the wrong direction while you
claimed
you were eliminating other hags. The only thing I’m still trying to figure out is why you didn’t just kill me.”

I stun him again.

After a few seconds, he says, between pants, “I know you’re going through a hard time, Zed, but you’ve got to forget about—”

Another shock convinces him, finally, to stop denying it.

“You’ve had me staking out a hotel for nothing; you knew my GeneScan wasn’t working, so you lied about what yours said. You must have gotten a real kick out of playing me like that. Now it’s my turn to get some kicks.”

“I haven’t been the one playing you, Zed,” he says after catching his breath. “The
Department’s
been playing you—been playing both of us, this whole time.”

“How did the hags get to you? Did they use your family?”

“I don’t have one.” His eyes are cold.

“What, then? They offered you something the Department didn’t?”

“Yes: the truth.”

“Just tell me where the other hags are, Wills, and maybe we can still part friends.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Okay, I’ll give you an easier one: Admit that Tasha has nothing to do with the Great Conflagration. You just had me follow her to distract me.”

He laughs. “You
wish
she weren’t important—that’s obvious. The job hurts a lot worse when you get to know the people that our bosses have already written off, doesn’t it? History’s losers. But maybe they’re
all
important, Zed. Ever think of that? Maybe everything’s important, everything matters. What if the Great Man theory is a myth, and everyone can be great, and there’s no way for you to tell which person might one day make history?”

I stun him out of his philosophical reverie.

“Zed,” he says, biting his lips so hard he draws blood, a line of it dripping down his chin, “
listen
to me. What you and I have done for the Department, it’s all lies. We aren’t preserving the integrity of history, we’re
rewriting
history, remaking the world in the regime’s image. There was no Great Conflagration, not originally. But they’ve sent so many of us back, and they’ve tinkered, they’ve eliminated the people who opposed them and eliminated the Events that went against their worldview.
All the conspiracy theories are true, Zed
. This is our opportunity to make it right, and—”

“You’ve lost it. The time travel, adjusting to the beats, avoiding contemps—it’s hard, I know. You couldn’t handle it, and they got to you at the right moment, spun your head around.”

“No one ran me, Zed. No one recruited me. They tried to tell me the truth, plenty of times, when I was the one with the Stunner in my hands. But I followed orders,
preserved the integrity of history
. I kept lying to myself, just like you are. Still, all those dying words echoed in my head. They sounded
eerily true,
you know? When I was back home, I started digging around. I noticed the changes, changes that
we
had made. Entire peoples had disappeared, areas had completely vanished. Society not quite the way I remembered it.
That’s
why they keep us sequestered on campus, Zed—they don’t want to let us see the world that we’ve helped them remake. You saw how they reacted when we left campus that one night.”

“That was Derringer trying to recruit us. I see that now.”

“
Wrong
. Back on campus, I looked into the background of our superiors, the ones we’ve been serving so faithfully all these years, and—”

I hit him with the Stunner again, square in the chest. His teeth chatter for a few seconds afterward. I might need to stuff a cloth in his mouth soon.

“This is going to take a very long time,” I say. “But time is the one thing we’ve always had a lot of, isn’t it? Come on, no more of your hag stories. I want facts. I want the exact number of hags who are back here, and where they are right now. And where they’re really coming from, so I can stop them as soon as they appear.”

“There are millions, Zed. They’re everywhere.”

I laugh. “Great. Thanks.”

“Everyone is a hag to the Government, don’t you see? Not just the rebels who send themselves back, but everyone ever born, in any time. Anyone who dares to see the world in a different way than—”

I stun him again.

After recovering, he’s back at it: “We believed we were working for our Perfect Society, Zed, but we weren’t! We’re just doing it to keep a bunch of bastards in power! They use us to turn their fictions into reality—I know you’ve thought this too. They told us we were part of the Disasters Division, right? Well, there
is
no other division, Zed—it’s all disasters! All we do is ensure disasters for everyone else!”

He’s getting too loud, so I fasten the gag on him and stun him again.

I exhale deeply, lean against the wall. Suddenly feel overcome. Hopefully he’s in too much pain to notice. He’s spinning stories, I tell myself; he’s trying to confuse me. I won’t get anything out of him; I should just kill him now. There was a time I would have done that, quickly and without overthinking. I hate that I can’t do that anymore and hate how horrifically true all of his stories sound so far.

I tear off his gag.

“Zed. Let me ask you something.” He’s speaking through gritted teeth, his voice a thin whisper hammered flat. “If everything is so perfect in our time, then why are you in so much pain?”

“
I’m
the one in pain?”

“You’re a walking sympathy card.”

“What happened to my family… has nothing to do with our job.”

“Really? Why is it that—”

“It was an accident! Some idiot spun out of control on the thruway, and suddenly my life is different. That has
nothing
to do with—”

“But it does.” A line of bloody drool hangs from his chin. “What’s the point in going to such trouble to create, to protect, this supposedly
perfect
order if it
isn’t
perfect, if it
can’t be
perfect? Because we ourselves are so damned imperfect. Even if our pasts are erased, even if every group forgets what horrible things it did to every other group, even if all those hatreds and vendettas and grudges are wiped clean, we’ll still make messes. We’ll still have accidents. We’ll still insult each other and irritate each other and sleep with the wrong person and grow to hate each other. We’ll still want what the other one has.”

“You’re talking about two different things.”

“Fine, keep living in their dream world. Be their slave a little longer.” Then he laughs—an impressive feat at this point—and there’s a condescending tone to it. “So, did they make you the promise? And you believed them?”

“What promise?”

“They made me the promise too. That after I fulfilled my quota, after I performed enough missions and the trouble with the hags was over, they’d send me back to her.” His eyelids are drooping from fatigue, but his eyes shine. “And I believed them too.”

“Why don’t you just—”

“Has it occurred to you how odd it is that all of the Protectors are widowers or have lost children? Or maybe you didn’t realize that, because they did their best to prevent us from getting to know each other. That’s one of the ways they recruited us, Zed. Sad men who’d do anything to have their pasts back. They knew we wouldn’t care about the irony. None of that political nonsense matters when it’s your own family.”

I feel heat behind my eyes, spreading down my limbs.

“They’re not going to save your wife and daughter, Zed! If that’s why you’re doing all of this, if you’re still holding out hope that after you finish your missions they’ll send you back to save them and live happily ever after, then you’re—”

I pull the trigger of the gun I hadn’t even realized I’d picked up and blast the rest of his sentence through the back of his skull.

Trying to breathe, I place the gun on the lip of the bathtub.

He only said that to force me to shoot him, to spare himself what I was planning to do next. He was lying—he didn’t have a dead wife; he must have gained access to my file and learned about my family, then tried to get to me through them. He discovered their promise in my personnel file somewhere.

I tell myself these things as I clean up the mess I’ve made.

Part Three

Green-Tags

20.

T
asha hadn’t expected so many checkpoints at Walter Reed. It was as though the military had brought all the security from the Green Zone back here to northwest D.C., where the biggest danger was being hit by an SUV driven by a texting soccer mom. She wanted to blame the military for this new life of having her bag and purse checked everywhere she went—not just airports but Wizards games, the Smithsonian museums, her own office building—even though she knew the military was hardly to blame. This was America, and for once she didn’t want to be treated like some potential assassin, would appreciate a smile from a stranger, would like people to remember how it felt to live in a city made up of neighbors rather than spies and informers. She knew it was petty to feel this way, knew that some of these guards themselves might have returned from the desert, might battle nightly memories of explosions from queues just like this one. Perhaps she was angry only because all these men in uniform made her miss her brother more.

When she reached the front desk and finally got to a person who did not want to x-ray her or examine her belongings, she told the woman whom she was here to see. Then a call was placed, a pen was tapped against a desk, a message was relayed, and Tasha was asked to wait.

A few days ago she had finally reached Sergeant Velasquez, one of the only soldiers from Marshall’s company who’d been willing to speak to her. It was unclear whether the silence she’d otherwise encountered was due to some nefarious plot or to collective survivors’ guilt or to the practical difficulty of getting active-duty soldiers to reply to a stranger’s phone calls or e-mails during a war. Her hopes that Leo would be able to leverage his contacts for information were proving equally fruitless—she’d met with him a third time now, and he’d told her only that he had “some people” looking into it. She had the uncomfortable feeling that he was trying to wait her out, the same thing she was doing to him, all the while knowing a timer was getting closer and closer to zero, and she’d soon have to either deliver T.J. to Leo or tell Leo that she would never entrap her friend, regardless of the consequences.

She waited in the hospital lobby for another ten minutes, then saw a man wheeling toward her. She’d been seeing a lot of wheelchairs lately, it seemed—an unusual number of young black men in her neighborhood and on the Metro sat in the contraptions, and she often wondered who had been shot in a street dispute, who was a returning veteran, who a slow victim of diabetes. The man before her looked to be in his early twenties, had the standard military haircut, and wore a ratty gray Oakland A’s T-shirt stretched tight across his chest. He was handsome and too young.

“Miss Wilson?”

“Tasha.” She smiled. “Pleased to meet you, Sergeant.”

She shook his hand. His left foot wore a red Nike, and she could see a glimmer of white gauze just inside the right tails of his shiny black basketball shorts.