The Revisionists (8 page)

When the second tower fell, he stood motionless, surrounded by an equally frozen group in front of the TV. And then this one man at a nearby bar who had been sitting the whole time, like a sort of sacrilege, like some apostate churchgoer who refused to kneel at the appropriate moments, this man started
laughing
. Again there were gasps. Was the guy crazy? He wore a suit, had short hair, an athletic build. He was ethnically interesting, darker skin without actually being dark-skinned, and he was fucking
laughing
. Finally an equally imposing, Irish-looking guy—a construction worker or off-duty fireman—yelled at the laugher. The laugher took that as his cue to leave; he stood and dropped some bills on the table beside his empty martini glass (who drank martinis at that hour?). The fireman said something. Words were exchanged. Then the fireman punched the guy in the face. There were more gasps and a few claps of applause. Then the laugher, who wasn’t laughing anymore and wasn’t even smiling but still somehow
seemed to be
smiling, like with his eyes maybe, shook off the blow and walked away. Only later did Leo think to himself,
Jesus, that could have been one of the terrorists, he could have been left behind for some reason. He wasn’t really drinking, the martini glass was just a cover. And we let him escape.

In a weird way, in a way that Leo knew didn’t make sense and was due to the shock, he felt that his own proximity to the mysterious laughing man implicated him in the day’s horrors. He should have punched the man himself—he’d thought about doing it, he’d wanted to do it, but he’d stayed motionless and impotent until this burly fireman or longshoreman or cop had stepped in to play the hero. Leo never
did
anything; despite all his academic laurels and achievements, when he was honest with himself, he knew he had done nothing. People who did things were guys like that cop or fireman (his brethren who minutes earlier had perished by the dozens in Manhattan) and the young soldiers from rural and ghetto America who would be sent to pay those bastards back. Leo was a lucky representative of the creative class, except he didn’t really create anything, and over the following weeks he began to feel like a complete, utter asshole. God or good fortune or luck or the Constitution of the United States or his white skin and Y chromosome had given him so much, and what had he ever given back?

One month later he defended a dissertation that suddenly seemed less relevant to the world. His own words sounded stale—he almost wanted to revise the whole text, but it was too late. Afterward, one of his advisers took him out for celebratory drinks that Leo didn’t feel he deserved. Like a confused foreign correspondent, Leo tried to describe the conflict roiling in his mind, tried to analyze the two warring camps and explain their historical grievances to his audience.
Is this what I’m supposed to be doing with my life?
The professor said he understood, that he felt the same way sometimes. And then he told Leo that it was interesting he’d brought this up, as the professor knew of a certain job opportunity. What did Leo think about working for the government? There were people who would like to talk to Leo, who were impressed by the arguments elucidated in his papers, a few of which had landed in policy journals and on the desks of important think tanks. His recent experience living in the world’s most populous Muslim nation and his fluency in Bahasa certainly didn’t hurt. Leo’s adviser gave him a name and a number, which Leo saved into his phone but was afraid to call.

The number stayed unused in his phone for two months.

In December he rode Amtrak to Manhattan to attend the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, where all the young PhDs begged and groveled for teaching positions in the safe ivory tower, like escapees of police states pleading for asylum. He had a few interviews the first morning and heard himself trying to convince not only his interlocutors but also himself that this was what he wanted.
Yes, put me somewhere safe. Surrounded by books. Where all I have to do is read and teach and think. And not
do
anything.
He felt the shame burning in his stomach, rising up to consume him. He blew off his afternoon interviews so he could walk to Ground Zero. He stared into the gaping hole, and the gaping hole stared into him.

He walked a few blocks west, found a relatively quiet corner, and called the number his adviser had given him. He was routed from person to person and then had a long conversation with a man who did not introduce himself. When an ambulance drove by in the middle of one of Leo’s answers, the man asked Leo where he was.

“Um, honestly, I’m standing in what would have been the shadow of tower number two.”

There was a pause, and then the man asked him if he could take a cab to Penn Station and buy a ticket to Washington so they could talk in person.

“Right now?”

“Unless you have something better to do.”

Leo caught the train.

A few years later (and a few misadventures later and a few politically motivated, territorial clusterfucks later) here he was, walking the postapocalyptically deserted hallways of TES.

He was still fuzzy on how the company’s organizational flow chart was structured. There was no watercooler gossip, as the operatives were discouraged from fraternizing—he’d only met a few of his coworkers, and they were not friendly. The walls were soundproofed, and employees were told to keep their doors shut at all times, so he could never tell if he was the only one at work or if dozens of other drones were typing and collecting within the hive. Leo didn’t know if his accomplishments would be noticed by anyone important, or if this sanatorium-like space would be his prison, a solitary confinement lasting the rest of his professional life.

More irritating was the fact that he hadn’t yet met his client. All he knew was what was expected of him: he was to keep tabs on various D.C.-based domestic activists, learn what they were planning and when, find out where their funding came from (particularly if any of it was from abroad), and, specifically, determine the sources of some distressingly accurate muckraking stories on new Web sites such as knoweverything.org. It was an extreme Left site, the typical rants and diatribes, but a handful of its articles were unusually sound journalistically, suggesting that these people knew what they were doing. But which people? There were no bylines on the stories, no masthead listed. A search of the ISP had yielded only an obscure holding company in Sweden, which meant that a lot of work had gone into covering the authors’ tracks. They had written exposés on military contractors’ financial excesses and uncomfortably accurate stories on the activities of government intelligence agencies overseas and at home; they’d reported rumors of illegal wiretapping, and even posted a sensitive (and, actually, pretty funny) transcript of a drunken conversation between an anonymous reporter and a nameless administration official in which the official had spilled some rather delicate secrets. Some of the site’s stories were filtering out to the mainstream media, causing problems.

There were various foreign organizations and persons with vested interests in dampening the American public’s appetite for the wars, and Leo needed to learn which of them were funding the activists. Some of the stories on the Web site could only have been written by people with access to classified intelligence, meaning that the publishing of those stories was a crime. Also, it was wise to stay informed of such groups’ activities and learn their recruiting strategies, study the ways in which they conned impressionable young people into joining in their dissent. It felt light-years away from the counterterrorism work he’d been doing in Jakarta, but his new boss had argued that there were many parallels indeed, and that Leo’s experience infiltrating groups of youthful malcontents was invaluable.

Two months earlier, after readjusting to life in America, he’d started the assignment by showing up at a multiorganizational meeting to discuss an upcoming antiwar rally, and he had barely gotten comfortable in the hard plastic chair when an aging hippie with a bad case of the touchy-feelies had started blathering to him about the importance of what they were doing (“I just want to get involved, you know, have an
effect
on something,” she’d explained in a quick but monotone voice, a prophet crossed with a zombie). He’d already known what was in store: unbelievably long meetings, torturous portions of which would be dedicated to deciding arcane matters of nomenclature and semantics; motions in favor of or against items whose importance he could not fathom; spirited debates between people whose opinions were so closely aligned that their minute philosophical differences would drive them into apoplexies of conscience. He had been sure to have a strong cup of coffee beforehand. And there he had sat, fidgeting from caffeine and boredom, hoping he might stumble upon some information that could possibly interest his client. He entertained himself by mentally composing sections of his report. How many
d 
’s were in
pedantic
? Did
pathetically
have a hidden
a
in the penultimate syllable? If he made the report as boring as possible, would that be a sly way of spurring his boss into granting him a new assignment, or would institutional inertia maroon him on this desert island?

He’d had enough in the bank that he could have taken time off, traveled, maybe tried to write some political essays or even a spy novel. Yet still he felt the calling, so he’d put out feelers for any kind of opening. Which had brought him to Targeted Executive Solutions, but he saw immediately that the job was beneath him: it could have been handled by any rent-a-spook who looked young enough to fit in with a roomful of angry twentysomethings.

He filed his reports with his boss, Mr. Bale, who passed them on to the unknown client. Leo was unclear if this extra layer of insulation was at the client’s request or if it was TES’s way of controlling how the company’s image was presented to its cash-laden government handlers.

He knocked on his boss’s door at ten exactly.

“Morning,” Bale said as Leo sat down. Bale pretended to smile, and Leo tried too. On the wall behind the desk were four framed nature photographs Bale had supposedly taken while hunting in Michigan, images of a wolverine devouring a deer carcass.

Bale had some follow-up questions from Leo’s report from the previous week: what meetings Leo had attended, what Web sites he’d trolled, what contacts he’d made.

“Still no closer to the source of those stories?” Bale asked.

“I get pushback from certain people whenever I try to get too close, which tells me something. But I’m worried I’m making myself
too
present—this overeager guy who shows up at every meeting of every group in the city? I’m making myself too visible.”

“I suppose.” Bale always spoke in bland tones, whether he was talking about the Hoya game or ethnic cleansing. He was like a minor character actor whose name you never learned even though you’d seen him in twenty films. Bale could be an accountant, a market researcher, a soccer dad, an Internet porn addict, a failed novelist, a quiet neighbor, just another suddenly middle-aged guy who’d been left behind. Which made him good at what he did. Leo feared that in another ten or fifteen years, he’d look just like Bale. At least Leo was taller. “What are you getting at?” Bale asked.

“I wonder if it might be better for me to stand down for a little while, do something else.”

“I know you aren’t thrilled with the assignment. But we need someone on it, and you seem right for it. Unless you have a way of getting an agent or two to do the work for you—which I’d be okay with depending on the circumstances—we need you out there.”

Leo had thought of this too. He’d tried to identify conflicts within or between the various groups, leadership rivalries, unappreciated members whose divided loyalties could be exploited. There were many such rifts, but the right situation had yet to present itself.

The tone of Bale’s comments—“you
seem
right for it,” the remark about Leo’s inability to turn an agent—annoyed him. He was about to be dismissed when he found himself saying, “There’s something else, unrelated. Something that could be interesting for the firm.”

He kept it short: He had met a young Indonesian maid who was possibly being abused by a South Korean diplomat. He could prove nothing, but he let slip a few of the more telling details.

“What did she say about her situation?” Bale asked.

“Nothing. I think she was just so stunned I spoke Bahasa. But she took my name and number.”

Rising eyebrows undid Bale’s poker face. “You get hers?”

“No. She had a cell, but when it rang she seemed scared of it. I don’t think it was hers.”

“Still, a diplomat beating a maid isn’t exactly illegal. Neither is keeping her chained in the basement and raping her—nothing they do is.”

“But Korean men have their pride. It’s all about face with them. If we have something that could embarrass him—he’s beating this poor girl, or not paying her—that’s leverage.”

“And if it turns out he’s raping her, that’s even more leverage, huh?”

It was one of Washington’s dirty little secrets, how diplomats sometimes brought over servants from their home countries, usually immigrants there, whom they paid slave wages or no wages at all. Sometimes the servants were kept locked in the house, or were beaten, or worse. Diplomatic immunity protected their ambassadorial bosses, as did the fact that, usually, no one ever saw the servants or had any idea what was going on inside that charming Tudor in the Palisades. The Americans were hesitant to raise a stink, as their own people working abroad were hardly without fault. Leo knew from experience that American diplomats hired entire crews of locals for pennies a day, and often the young women’s services extended to duties more physical than dusting. The moral line was fuzzy when national borders were crossed, and no one wanted to lose his own perks by eliminating someone else’s.

Bale leaned back in his seat. “Even if it’s really egregious, the worst we could do is pass it on to State, and they can complain and maybe the diplomat gets reassigned.”