The Revisionists (33 page)

“Excuse me?” He turns his head.

“Tasha Wilson. Unless your intel is wrong, nothing happens to her for a few days. If you were smart, you’d come out only when you need to.”

He scowls at me. “Do I know you?”

“No one knows me.”

He smiles at that. “Well, you’re butting into something that doesn’t concern you.”

I remove the gun from my jacket’s inside pocket and, holding it low, angle it so he can view it from the direction you never want to see a gun.

“Whoa,” he says, eyes wide. “You have the wrong idea.”

“Then give me the right one.” I check the faces of the other people on the train. No one’s watching us, and we’re talking too quietly to be overheard.

“I’m just following her. It’s a simple job, man. Come on, put that away. They’re not paying me nearly enough for—”

“Who’s paying you?”

“I don’t even know. It’s all thirdhand. I was told this was simple, noncontact. Whoever you are, I don’t need to know. Really.”

It’s customary for cornered hags to pretend that they’re just contemps. But I find myself believing this one—he’s taking risks by putting himself out in ways hags usually don’t.

If he isn’t a hag, then why did Wills send me to follow him? I can think of some answers to that, and they’re not reassuring.

I ask him his name, and he says Larry Ansler. I look him up in my databases and there he is: age, forty-five; residence, Alexandria; family, none; occupation, private investigator; past occupation, Metropolitan Police Department.

“You don’t know who hired you to follow her?”

“No.” He tells me he has a buddy who came to him as a middleman and said there was “a company” that needed this woman followed. He gives me the buddy’s name, but that’s all I get.

“All right, Larry. Maybe I do have the wrong idea. I’m sure your following Ms. Wilson around is perfectly harmless. You can go back to your job tomorrow and forget all about this conversation.”

“You got it, pal.”

I slip the gun back into my pocket as the train reaches L’Enfant Plaza, an intersection of three subway lines. It’s a convenient place to escape, so I hurry off the train, taking a quick glance back to make sure he isn’t following.

Some game must have ended downtown; people passing me to board the train all wear matching jerseys and jackets and hats and look dazed and happy, drunk on other people’s success.

18.

A
t eleven o’clock on garbage night, Leo left his apartment to see if Sari had tossed anything interesting.

He walked north on Mount Pleasant Street, past the commercial district, and the houses soon became grander, looking down on the cluttered streets from the wizened visages of their stone steps and Southern porches. He turned west, and the canopy of trees thickened as he approached Rock Creek Park. Hyun Ki Shim’s house was on a quiet side street from which the hustle of 16th and the flow of traffic on the Rock Creek Parkway seemed farther away than they actually were.

Leo had driven through the neighborhood often to get an idea of when Hyun Ki and Sang Hee retired for the night. Sari had told him that their bedroom was in the front of the house, second floor, and he’d noticed the lights were usually out by ten thirty. There was no traffic here; the streets were so quiet Leo could hear what sounded like an owl or maybe some exotic wildlife from the nearby National Zoo.

Leo had tailed Hyun Ki as the diplomat went to and from work, even staking out the embassy for a few hours here and there, though doing so was tricky, as he didn’t want to run the risk of being observed himself. He’d seen nothing odd, but then again, any savvy spy would have ways of meeting with people or doing unsavory things without being noticed. And Leo was on his own; if he saw Hyun Ki meet a man for lunch, Leo would have no way of knowing who the man was, and there was no institutional knowledge to fall back on.

Sang Hee rarely left the house. The two of them were, thus far, a completely vanilla diplomatic couple, if a bit cruel with their domestic help.

Leo walked slowly and naturally, passing stinky garbage barrels and recycle bins crowded with their owners’ sad hopes for a better future. He was wearing an old jean jacket he usually found too unstylish, and a blue Nats cap; he’d forgone his glasses in favor of contacts, and he had eschewed his preferred shoes in favor of quieter sneakers. He tried to step around the acorn caps and dry leaves scattered on the sidewalk.

The lights in the houses of the diplomat’s immediate neighbors were off, but across the street a few were on. Crouching in front of their trash barrel, which blocked him from the house’s view, he fidgeted with his laces as if he were retying one of his sneakers. Then he carefully reached into the recycle bin. This was hardly the way the Agency had taught him to do dead drops, but given Sari’s restricted movements, it was the best he could come up with.

He had told her to put whatever items she had for him in the side of the recycle bin closest to the street, to save him the trouble and the noise of rummaging through the whole thing. He found it on his first try, in an empty can of baby formula: a flash drive. He was impressed.

He stood up and continued the way he’d been going, taking a meandering route home. Once there, he immediately uploaded the files onto his computer, erased the drive, and walked back to the Shims’. Decorative white stones were laid at the edge of their property; he lifted the second stone from the right and slid the drive beneath it. He nestled the drive into the dirt so the rock wouldn’t crush it.

The data on the drive had all been in Korean, of course, which Leo didn’t know as well now as he had in his grad-school days. He wasted a couple hours scanning different files before conceding that he needed a translator. The next morning he handed it to Bale, who said he’d get some people to work on it.

Late the next night, another quick call from Sari: grocery run, tomorrow. Evening this time, as Sari was needed around the house during the afternoon. He gave her new instructions, annoyed by the call. Maybe he hadn’t been clear enough; that last grocery run was supposed to be their last. Once you established the relationship, you weren’t supposed to meet with your spies any more than necessary.

Of course, he
wanted
to see her. For not entirely professional reasons. Hell, for totally unprofessional reasons. But she sounded nervous on the phone, so he told himself the meeting would help calm her down; he could reassure her that she was doing a great job.

Bale’s translators were quick; the following day, Leo was told by his boss that the drive had contained “some useful information,” but, though the translators hadn’t quite finished everything yet, most of the data seemed to be little more than “diplomatic dick-fondling,” as Bale described it—nothing important enough to be important. Try again, he said. And this time get Sang Hee’s computer, not her husband’s.

At nine thirty that night he met Sari at a small parking lot beside empty fields in the northern finger of Rock Creek Park. The city’s light pollution made the sky above the spindly branches glow movie-screen gray.

“Thank you for getting that flash drive,” Leo told her after she got in his grocery-laden car. He noticed she was wearing only sweats and had no jacket or gloves and that she was holding her hands together tightly. He turned the heat on full blast for her sake, and unbuttoned his jacket. “But we’re particularly interested in what’s on Sang Hee’s computer.”

“I’m sorry—I assumed his information was more important.”

Leo had told her otherwise, hadn’t he? “We’re very interested in Sang Hee. What you did was helpful, but I want to focus on her.”

“She hurt her ankle again. She’ll be on crutches for a while longer, otherwise I wouldn’t get out like this.”

“Good. You’re doing an excellent job.”

“I can’t do this much longer. She suspects something.”

“Why do you say that?” He tried to sound calm and natural. “Has she said something?”

“I don’t know. She watches me, all the time.”

“You said she did that before.”

“I’m afraid something is… going to happen.”

“What do you mean?”

Sari started rambling. She was scared and seemed convinced that Sang Hee could read her mind or something. She told him about some story Sang Hee had spun, about Sang Hee’s being a prisoner in a North Korean work camp, and how she’d murdered her family. That’s probably when the woman became possessed by demons, Sari explained. Leo would pass that on to Bale, not that it made sense.

“She’s a mean lady, you’re right.” He had to redirect her. “What you’re doing is the best way of getting away from her permanently. You need to remember that.”

She stared out the windshield. Looking over her shoulder he saw headlights as another car made its way down the curving narrow road. He watched it, then reached forward to adjust his rearview mirror so he could see the car drive away. No one should be on this dead-end road, as the park grounds were closed. Hopefully the driver was just lost in the labyrinth of Rock Creek Park. Or maybe some congressman was looking for a good place to dispose of an intern’s body. The car was getting stuffy but Sari still looked cold.

“We should get the groceries out of your car,” Sari said.

“If you focus on the good that will come from this, it will make it easier.”

“The good. I don’t know what that means anymore.”

He waited. “Why did you leave Jakarta? Why don’t you want to go back there?”

She seemed prepared to dodge the question again. He was being too direct with her, overlooking the cultural differences, the power imbalance. He would scare her away if he didn’t change tack.

To his surprise, she looked up at him. “They burned my mother alive.”

“Who did?”

“All of them. All of them.” Some leaves landed silently on the windshield. “I don’t even like to think of myself as Indonesian or Javanese anymore. I’d rather be something else. But I don’t know what. Everything else seems just as bad.”

“What happened?”

“When Suharto fell, all the riots. The people in the city hated the Chinese, said they were leeches, they ran all the businesses and loaned all the money and we Javanese were their slaves. So they rampaged through town, attacked Chinese, burned their shops and homes. My family worked at a store owned by a Chinese couple. People chased me and my sisters, but we got away. My mother stayed in the store, and they burned it to the ground.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“We looked for her for days. My sisters didn’t want to admit she’d been killed, thought maybe she was hiding somewhere in the city. But I knew she was gone—she was in my dreams that first night, and she hasn’t left them. After a couple of weeks the police got around to pulling all the bodies out of the rubble.”

He searched for something to say, in any language.

“My eldest sister went to Korea first, then the middle one. First I lived with some friends of my mother’s, but eventually they told me I had to leave, they couldn’t afford to keep me. I nearly starved. There were rumors some people in the city refused to hire anyone who’d worked for Chinese, as punishment. As soon as I got my chance to go, I took it.”

“It was a… a bad time. There are other places, safer ones, where you could start over.”

“Safer places?” She looked insulted. “That was my home. I grew up there. It felt safe to me, until one day it wasn’t. That’s the funny thing. Everyone knew he was a horrible tyrant—you weren’t supposed to talk about it, but people would say things when they felt they could trust you. But then when the horrible tyrant was finally stepping down, look what we did to each other. Maybe all those students and protesters were wrong. Maybe it was good to live under a dictator.”

It was so hot, he wanted to turn down the heat but he saw that she was still holding her hands in front of the vents.

“Well, it seems to me you’re living under one now, in that little house of theirs. And you don’t like it very much.”

“I’m learning that everywhere is just as bad as everywhere else. Sang Hee hates me just because I’m not Korean. In North Korea they hated her just because her husband said something good about South Korea, or something. And here in America they’ll hate me because I’m not American.”

“We’re not like that. Some people are, maybe, but most people—”

“Do you believe that? Or are you just trying to cheer me up?” She’d never been this direct before.

“I do believe that. I do believe that people can improve. That’s what my country’s all about, finding a better way, a noble experiment.” Jesus, he couldn’t believe he was giving her a civics lecture. But what she’d said made him feel defensive about his country, about his job. “There are bad people in the world, yes, I’m not naive. But when you finish this job for me, when my friends say they have everything they need and they can pay you back, you’ll see that life doesn’t have to be as hard as it’s been for you.”

She watched him for so long he felt uncomfortable.

“I don’t know if you really believe that, and you are naive,” she said, “or if you’re just trying to trick me into doing you more favors.”

“I’m not trying to trick you.”

“Then why did you tell me you work for a bank?”

She said it so naturally, in the same blank tone she’d been using, that it took him a second. “I used to work for a bank, in Jakarta, like I said, but—”

“And now you read the computers of Korean diplomats and have well-connected friends who can help foreigners with no passports.”

He waited, reassessing her, then said, “If you don’t want to do this anymore, I won’t force you. I can just walk away.”

“Then I’d have no one to speak Bahasa with.”

He could feel sweat rolling down the small of his back, it was so goddamned hot in there. The windows were starting to fog, and he feared some park cop might come knocking on their windshield, hoping to get a glimpse of a half-naked Bethesda cheerleader.

“I’m sorry we can’t talk more,” he said. “I wish there were another way to do this. It would be great if I could take you out and show you the city. Maybe when this is finished…”