The Middleman Read online

  Rachel knew, but Abernathy was trying to make another point that lay just beyond her. From the moment she’d entered his office, he’d been trying to make points. It wasn’t the first time she’d faced this kind of reception: Jackson and Detroit were high on her shit list. “So you have a working theory,” she said.

  “Yes I do,” he said, then took a sip of his coffee, drawing it out, waiting for her mouth to water in anticipation. She decided not to oblige. He said, “They’re dead. All four hundred of them.”

  Her first thought was instinctual: This is how you clear your workload; you kill it off. She said, “You’re telling me that Martin Bishop gathered four hundred people from around the country to have them … what? Drink poisoned Kool-Aid?”

  He leaned forward, hands open. “Look, these kids—they abandoned the things they love most. Two whole weeks, none of their folks have heard from them. They’ve vanished. How’s that possible? How does one kid not give a call home, just to say he’s still alive? Here’s how: They’re not.”

  “Why would Bishop do that?”

  Abernathy dropped back in his chair and shrugged. “Who’s to say what Bishop is thinking? Maybe he wants a bunch of martyrs. I mean, that man’s insane. He’s running his own cult. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Have you read any of his writings?”

  “Should I?”

  The agent who drove her back to the airport was sympathetic. “Memory,” he told her as Memphis International, adorned in red-white-and-blue posters celebrating the holiday, came into view. “If it’s not exploding in front of him, Abernathy’s going to forget it exists. Then he comes up with theories to justify what he doesn’t remember.”

  Tragedy plus time isn’t comedy, thought Rachel. It’s amnesia. She’d seen the same thing in the report Philly had sent to her on Benjamin Mittag’s mother, Jenny, a trailer-park queen living on the outskirts of Waynesboro. “Yeah, he was trouble,” Jenny had said. “But all boys are. He had beliefs, though. You know he tried to become one of you?”

  Me? asked the interviewer.

  “A federal agent. Applied and everything. If you’d accepted him, everything would have been different.”

  A note mentioned that the agent had verified the mother’s claim before arriving: Benjamin Mittag’s 2008 application had been swiftly rejected and filed away. The decision had been justified by Mittag’s spotty juvenile record.

  “But he did try to convince his mom,” Jenny went on. “What I’m telling you. He had beliefs. Year or so later this guy comes to speak to him. They go off to have a beer. Ben comes back, he tells me that the FBI changed its mind. They want him.”

  A note here stated that her claim could not be verified, and the agent explained this to Jenny: We have no record of that, ma’am.

  “You think I’m an idiot?” she demanded. “Yes, I believed it at first. I’m a mother, for God’s sake. I should’ve remembered, but I chose not to. He was always a good liar, the best. He went south and I didn’t hear anything from him until his name came up with the Massive Brigade. A liar.”

  “Ray!” she heard from the other room. Rachel found her mother holding her phone, which was lit up bright, vibrating. Doug was calling on his day off.

  “You watching this?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “Turn on your television.”

  On the screen, a woman was instructing her mother on how to make turkey stuffing. “Yes, and?”

  “The news, Rachel. Put on the news.”

  13

  KEVIN WAS shaking when he reached the lobby and pushed through to the sidewalk, kicking a discarded plastic cup, and found Holly leaning against a Lamborghini. Christ, it was bright out here; his eyes hurt. From the other side of the palm trees they could hear screams, shouts. Sirens.

  Holly said nothing, only met his eye, smiled nervously, and started walking; Kevin followed. The parade crowd was breaking up in a panic, families rushing from the main route, Crandon, into the side streets. Holly stayed a couple of paces ahead, and he sometimes had to push through wild-eyed people to stay close. Once he knocked down a woman. In a panic himself, he stopped and helped her up, apologizing. The woman was yelling something at him, but he couldn’t hear; everything was buzzing. He turned away and realized he’d lost track of Holly. He hurried forward until, finally, he saw that she’d stopped at the next corner and was watching him. The smile was long gone. Fear, perhaps, or something else. He didn’t know. He hurried on.

  Another block, and they were in the car. He tried to ignore the pandemonium he’d caused. He thought of the woman he’d knocked down, and imagined how many other women, children, and men had tripped or been pushed aside, and then trampled. Humans did that. They lost their minds. Their feet became weapons against the weak.

  She drove south, staying off Crandon until she had no other options, but they were far enough away to be outside the melee. They entered Bill Baggs Cape Park, the narrow road bordered by thick foliage. Before reaching the entrance, where a park guard would be waiting, she pulled off the road.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Let’s go.”

  They got out and worked their way slowly through the low, wind-stunted shrubbery to reach the shore. His face and hands were scratched. In the distance, they saw it: a small motorboat heading toward them. Holly stepped into the water, then looked back at him.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Good.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  How did he feel? Not good, no. He’d realized, as soon as the bullet left the barrel, that it was all wrong. That distance, estimating at wind resistance and trying to calculate the arc of the bullet—why did he think he could do it? Who was he trying to impress? Did he want to hear stories, later on, about his shooting prowess? Incredible—he only nicked her from that distance! In his state of mind, that was as good an explanation as any, and now a politician was bleeding out.

  “Come on,” said Holly, and she waded out into the water toward the motorboat.

  14

  DURING THE first year that he lived with Ingrid in Berlin, David would walk the three blocks from their coffin-sized Prenzlauer Berg apartment, laptop in hand, to the Communist-themed Bar ’56. He’d take a corner table under the mural of Khrushchev and sip Americanos as he worked. After three or four hours, once he’d finished a day’s writing, he would order gin tonics and chat with the bartender, Elli, the tattooed singer of a band called Unterwelt, or Underworld. She had huge eyes and an attractive sort of heroin chic about her, and she quizzed him intensely about “ridiculous” and “criminal” American politics while he in turn questioned her about growing up in Leipzig, in the old East.

  He quickly began to look forward to these mildly flirtatious conversations, and began ordering his first drink earlier—fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour—until eventually he found himself writing only an hour or so before catching her eye and finding a question to ask.

  This went on for weeks, drinking and chatting until four in the afternoon, at which point he would pour a double espresso down his throat and rush home to greet Ingrid, just back from work. Sometimes she noted his tipsiness, and he’d lie, telling her he was exhausted from too many hours of writing.

  What was it about Elli? Was it the way she wore her cutoff T-shirts so that the sleeves of her tattoos were on full display? Was it the way she opened up so easily about the various little traumas of a childhood in the depressed post-Communist East? Or maybe it was simply that a young, hipper-than-thou Berliner found this frumpy, thirty-five-year-old American interesting enough to spend her time with. She validated his high opinion of himself, and thoughts of her followed him all day and to bed, even as his wife dozed beside him.

  Ingrid had just gotten a promotion at the Starling Trust, and part of her new duties included attending April meetings at their global headquarters in New York. He helped her pack
a bag for the four-day trip, and once her taxi disappeared around the corner from their apartment he walked directly to Bar ’56 and asked Elli what she was up to that evening.

  Later, he wouldn’t recall having a specific plan. Infidelity wasn’t foremost in his mind. Ingrid was so distracted by her job that when she came home she had little interest in asking about the book; Elli, on the other hand, was fascinated by his creative process, which he could talk about for hours. So when he went to her that day he was merely seeking a receptive audience. Or so he told himself.

  Whatever the motivation, Elli told him that Unterwelt was playing a gig that evening in a squat apartment block in Friedrichshain, just south of Prenzlauer Berg.

  It took him a while in the crisp, chilly darkness to find the building, but once he reached it he paid his cover to a multiply pierced, chain-smoking bouncer and was pointed to a crumbling courtyard illuminated by fifty oil lamps. On one side was a cash bar stocked with beer, and on the other the four-piece Unterwelt setting up to play. Elli, tuning her rhythm guitar, gave him one of her gorgeous smiles and thanked him for coming as the crowd, dressed like down-market Brooklynites, streamed in.

  Throughout the evening he tried, largely in vain, to find the melodies in Unterwelt’s songs, an odd mix of acid rock and Kraftwerk. Still, he admired Elli’s voice and how she stalked the audience hungrily. She needed open spaces to express herself, not the narrow confines of a bartender’s domain. She was, in front of the crowd, someone quite different, but no less intriguing.

  Because of the neighbors, they shut down at nine, and he waited for her to finish packing up. He lied magnificently, pointing out the songs that he admired most, and sharing his surprise at her electric performance. He wasn’t sure if she believed him or not, but she let him carry her guitar case and walk her home to another bleak-looking squat nearby. “I’d invite you in, but my roommates are assholes,” she told him. Then she kissed him on the lips, a long, lingering kiss that tasted of the beer she’d sipped between songs. “See you tomorrow?”

  “Man’s got to work,” he said, and she laughed, because even she had noticed that he was no longer getting any work done.

  Turning away, David told himself that he hadn’t planned a thing, and this marked the beginning of an eight-year self-delusion. What, really, had he done? He’d come to listen to a band he’d heard so much about. Supporting a friend—then she’d kissed him. David Parker had done nothing wrong.

  He pulled his jacket tighter as he walked, light-footed, down the cracked sidewalk. Kids in leather were smoking hash. Up ahead a guy was on a phone; across the street, two girls were laughing. From a window, someone was playing the Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” and he’d just been kissed by the lead singer of a Berlin rock band. Pretty fucking cool.

  Then his eardrums shuddered at the huge bass thump as—there, ahead, above the laughing girls—the top floor of a dilapidated apartment building exploded in concrete and fire. The girls screamed and ran. The man on the phone stepped back and lowered his phone. David’s bladder, bubbling from too much beer, released itself.

  Eight years later, he told this story to Bill, who had called him—out of pity, he knew, but he didn’t care—to celebrate Independence Day with him and Gina in Montclair. Bill served him drinks and nachos, CNN playing in the background, while Gina spent most of the time in the kitchen gabbing with Francine, her cousin in Fort Lauderdale. It turned out that she had finally convinced Bill to give Florida a try, and they were in the middle of arranging their plans for a seasonal move.

  “What happened with Elli?” Bill asked, swirling the whiskey in his glass.

  “Don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I never stepped foot in that bar again.”

  Bill cocked his head, maybe wondering what kind of friend he really had.

  David sipped his beer. “That was the Kommando Rosa Luxemburg. Martin Bishop’s gang. That’s the kind of guy Ingrid has gone off to join.”

  “She’s smarter than you give her credit for. Probably smarter than you. I’m guessing that once she sees his operation up close—if he even has an operation, which I doubt—she’ll leave.”

  David thought that two weeks was plenty of time to see an operation close-up, and was going to comment on this, when he noticed that Bill was staring at the television. He turned, too, and saw that something had happened. Bill raised the volume.

  They listened closely to a serene CNN newscaster reveal the details of a shooting: Arlington, Virginia, House Republican Paul Hanes, at the annual Barcroft Fourth of July Parade. Already, the studio in Atlanta was lifting amateur phone-camera footage from YouTube and Facebook: wobbly, sun-bleached shots of Hanes with his wife and two boys on a porch of some kind—place of honor—laughing in the midst of local families. Then Hanes tipped his head back (more accurately, his head was tipped back by a single bullet that marked a black spot in his forehead), and he dropped, disappearing behind others. Because of the noise of the crowd, the gunshot was unheard, and there was an instant—a second or so—when no one realized he was gone. His wife continued to smile, and his boys, in unison, held their cupped hands to the sides of their mouths and shouted at someone unseen. Then the wife turned, perhaps to say something to her husband, maybe remind him to smile, and realized he was no longer there. She looked down, then shouted as she, too, dropped out of the frame.

  “Well, shit,” David said.

  “Gina!” Bill called, but she was still on the phone, making plans.

  It was too early for the police spokesman to share details, and too early for CNN to put cameras in front of their experts to speculate on who, what, and why. A specialist in international security, the only one they happened to have in the studio, suggested that this was not al Qaeda, simply because the target was a House member who had no record of anti-Muslim comments. An ISIL devotee would have targeted a large number of people. Conversation veered in the direction of mental illness, though David noticed that, as usual, no one pointed out that the mentally ill are almost never violent toward others. The bulk of murders in America are committed by the healthy.

  Bill took his glass and headed toward the kitchen to share the news with Gina. Then the newscaster said, “This just in—we have reports of another shooting, in Miami. At the … yes. At the Key Biscayne Fourth of July Parade.”

  Bill halted, the empty glass in his hand, and returned to the couch.

  There was no useful amateur footage from Miami, not yet, but the news came in quickly: Representative Diane Trumble, a Democrat, had been shot. Her condition was unknown. Up north in Arlington, the police spokesman verified that Paul Hanes had indeed been killed by a single gunshot to the head. Down south, Diane Trumble was wheeled into an ambulance. That was when the newscaster, losing the script a moment, turned to someone off-screen and just stared, dumbfounded. A full three seconds of silence—an eon on television. Then she cleared her throat, turned to the camera, and muttered, “Breaking news. Again. Republican Senator Joseph Wallace has been killed in an explosion in Little Rock, Arkansas. Excuse me—no, his death has not been verified, but he was reportedly inside the car with his driver, and as it left his driveway in the neighborhood of Pleasant Valley, it exploded.”

  “Gina!” Bill called.

  She appeared in the doorway, phone in her hand. “I’m not deaf, Bill.”

  By five o’clock, there had been four attacks. A few minutes before the hour, in Helena, Montana, Representative Gary Heller, Democrat, was shot dead in his own backyard, on the way to his in-ground pool. Three dead men and one lone woman, Diane Trumble, on life support in Jackson Memorial Hospital.

  The now-exhausted newscaster touched her ear, nodded, and said, “This just in.”

  David gasped, expecting a fifth assassination, but this was news that had been taken from the internet, because the event had occurred on The Propaganda Ministry, the blog Martin Bishop had let go fallow for the previous two weeks
, ever since he disappeared. It had then spread like wildfire through Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, Reddit, and any number of other social websites. Notified by their own alerts, CNN staff shared its message with the rest of the country:

  America!

  This is the first day of the first situation that will give rise to further situations leading to the liberation of you, each of you, each one.

  Do not be confused or frightened—there’s no need.

  Those who do not move do not notice their chains.

  The time for analysis is over.

  Let’s move.

  “Where there is power, there is resistance.”

  The Massive Brigade has opened its membership to include the entire country. You are one of us now.

  The Massive Brigade is resistance. You are resistance.

  What we have done anyone can do.

  Go. Do.

  —The Massive Brigade

  “Oh, shit,” said Bill.

  Gina, unsurprised, said, “Of course.”

  David said nothing. He was remembering that explosion in Berlin, stumbling home in his piss-stained jeans, climbing the stairs to his apartment. Pausing to answer his ringing phone. Ingrid, in New York, had just heard about the explosion and wanted to know if he was all right.

  “Of course I’m all right,” he’d lied.

  15

  THOUGH SHE could have gloated, she didn’t. Rachel was simply grateful that once four members of Congress had been attacked and the federal government went into lockdown, the purse strings finally loosened, and her team was moved to a set of three interconnected offices on the fifth floor of the Hoover. Each regional analyst got his own desk, as did Doug and Ashley, and Rachel got her own room.

  She slowly filled the third room with agents who could do the legwork that was beginning to run her into the ground. By July 5, seven of the twelve desks were already in use by agents focused on the tidal wave of leads being called into the FBI’s hotline.