Free The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen Page A

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’