The Middleman Read online

  “Okay, David. Thanks.”

  He frowned up at her, brows knitted. “You all right?”

  “Yeah—I’m fine. I just…” She just what? “Take care of yourself, okay?”

  He looked confused.

  “And so you know, David: There was never any suggestion that Ingrid and Martin Bishop were lovers.”

  By the time she was out on the street the tears had returned, and knowing she was alone—or, hoping she was alone—she let them flow.

  14

  SHE SERIOUSLY considered taking the train north to Croton-on-Hudson. Though they talked regularly, she hadn’t laid eyes on her mother in months, and it would have been good to get the visual evidence that she was in decent shape. But to go to her mother, to even call her, would be to direct her would-be murderers to Croton, which could not end well.

  In a Cuban dive in Chelsea, she ate boliche—beef roast stuffed with chorizo and potatoes—which brought her down to just a few dozen dollars. She tried to get her head around things. It was hard, because all she had was a handful of notable facts and too few lines of connection. Were there connections, or was her Bureau mind merely desperate to create an intricate web when in fact she was looking at parallel lines of inquiry that would never meet?

  There was July 4, and the assassinations that Kevin had taken part in. This had always troubled her, for it was incredibly shortsighted. This one act of revolution could only ruin the image of the group and push its agenda back a decade. With that act—instigated, apparently, by Benjamin Mittag—they had ruined everything, even targeting some politicians who were relatively sympathetic; Hanes and Trumble had been prepared to face off with Plains Capital and IfW for helping international billionaires commit tax fraud. How did their murders make sense, even to a hothead like Mittag?

  Then there was the Brigade itself, and its funding, which had led to Laura Anderson, an old woman in an Australian nursing home. She was obviously a cutout for someone else, but whom? Her old employer, the United Nations? Down that path lay unhinged conspiracies—next thing, she’d be marching across town to bang on the door of its headquarters. Besides, the UN survived on a shoestring budget, every penny meticulously accounted for, and funding a movement to undermine its largest contributor made little sense.

  What about James Sullivan, her mysterious person of interest from nine years ago? An American who spoke perfect-sounding Russian and pretended—or maybe he wasn’t pretending?—to work for a pharmaceutical in Switzerland. Was he the financial through-line between his employers and Martin Bishop, using Laura Anderson?

  And then the murder of Martin Bishop. Had the Bureau done it? As Kevin had pointed out, that was logistically impossible. There was simply no time between his call to Fordham and the shooting for even the Federal Bureau of Investigation to pull it off. Ben Mittag was the more believable culprit, but what was he aiming to achieve? To take over an organization that was synonymous with Bishop’s name?

  And what about Sam Schumer? That purveyor of self-promotion masked as objective news had learned of Bishop’s murder before the Bureau had. Maybe Vale was right—maybe a witness had decided to call Schumer’s hotline but not inform anyone else. But Sarah Vale had smoked her green e-cigarette and waited for news of Rachel’s murder, so anything she said was in doubt.

  Rachel got up and paid, thinking that this was too much for her to deal with alone. She needed help, but help was something she couldn’t depend on. Kevin wanted nothing to do with it, while David was a man motivated by fear. Her colleagues at the office were loyal to the Bureau, and she didn’t know how she stood with her employer. Maybe Ashley would be willing to look into something; maybe not.

  When she returned to Penn Station, rush hour was under way, and she joined the cattle-car press of warm bodies trying to get home. If she was going to be on the run, she didn’t want to be trapped on the island of Manhattan.

  She boarded the train, looking over her shoulder but finding only strangers’ eyes, then settled next to a sad-looking woman with a Macy’s bag. Where, she wondered, could she hope to find answers?

  In the final report, perhaps. The timing was too perfect—they had asked for her version of the Massive Brigade story, then asked her to give up her right to ever speak of it again. Her refusal had signed her death warrant, which could only mean that she had contradicted their version of events. In what way, they hadn’t told her. Certainly Watertown would look different, but was protecting Owen’s job enough to justify murder? If so, then she was living in an even darker world than she’d imagined.

  Of course it was about more than just Owen’s job, because this hadn’t been their first attempt on her life; her sore leg attested to that. As early as last year, they believed that she knew something, or could find out something, that would make trouble for them. That they’d left her alone for so long suggested that they assumed the attack in Arlington had knocked the fight out of her. In many ways, they had been right.

  They, she thought with dismay. That all-encompassing they, that evil shadow behind all conspiracy theories. She’d become the kind of person she despised.

  By the time the train left a station called Lebanon, two stops from the end of the line, most of the car had cleared out and she was plotting the near future: picking up her car and driving upstate and crossing over to the vast farmlands of New Hampshire, where she could find a small town and lie low for a while. Money was an issue, but that was tomorrow’s problem. She was thinking in terms of hours, not weeks or even days, and this left her in a state of anxiety that she knew would exhaust her sooner rather than later.

  As the train stopped, released its passengers, then continued on, she thought that what she really needed, more than anything, was a drink.

  And as if on cue, Kevin Moore sat down in the seat across from her. She straightened, shocked.

  “Where you headed?” he asked.

  She didn’t know if she should reply. Maybe—and this was only a passing thought—she’d dreamed him up as a kind of salvation. No. He was here, and he was asking her a question. “End of the line,” she said.

  He shook his head and stood slowly. “No, you’re getting off at Annandale. It’s the next stop. My truck’s parked there.”

  “Am I?”

  He shrugged, looking down at her. “Your choice, Rachel. But I’d take this chance if I were you.”

  15

  IT TOOK an hour for Kevin to drive her to Montclair under cover of darkness, but he refused to answer her questions. He parked on a side street near the center of town, and from there they went on foot, following sidewalks past lit-up homes squeezed together in tight rows. Despite his infuriating silence, when Rachel said, “You lied to me, didn’t you?” he said, “Once or twice.”

  “Had a change of heart?”

  Kevin smiled at her. “Did you really cry in front of David?”

  She rubbed her face, blushing.

  She knew where they were headed, and remembered how, in the summer, the street outside the house had been full of cars. Now, there were no cars lining the street, and the driveway was empty. The house itself was dark.

  “Where are the Ferrises?” she asked.

  “Florida,” Kevin told her as he jangled a key ring in his hand. “And, no—they don’t know.”

  He stuck the key in the front door, unlocked the deadbolt, and pushed it open. He let her in first; then, once he closed the door, he turned on the light.

  The entryway windows, she could now see, had been covered with cardboard. The doors to the other rooms were closed, and when he opened the pocket doors leading to the living room, she was faced with the enormous space she remembered from last summer, lit up, the high windows covered in more cardboard. David Parker stood by the fireplace, looking nervous, while on the sofa Ingrid Parker, her hair chopped short and a soft layer of mother’s fat filling out her cheeks, was breastfeeding a chubby baby girl, who, Rachel calculated, was about three months old. Then she remembered, and said the name aloud: “C
lare.”

  But the mention of her daughter’s name did nothing to soften Ingrid. She looked at Kevin. “This is a mistake.”

  “It might be,” Kevin admitted.

  “It’s not like things are getting better here,” David cut in. “And going to the cops isn’t an option.”

  “You’re so fucking impatient,” Ingrid said. “You always were.”

  “You want to raise our daughter in a boarded-up house? Hidden away from everyone? That’s crazy. She might be able to help us out of this.”

  Though they were arguing about her, they were arguing as if Rachel weren’t standing right there, hearing everything.

  “Cool it,” Kevin said to them both. “This is the situation now. All right?” David and Ingrid acquiesced, falling silent. To Rachel, Kevin said, “Come on, have a seat.”

  Slowly, so as not to startle anyone, Rachel took a comfy chair that faced the fireplace and sofa. Clare’s cheeks were pink, eyes closed in milk-sucking bliss. “Is she healthy?” Rachel asked.

  “Gassy,” Ingrid told her, almost defensive. “But otherwise, yeah.”

  “You have a pediatrician?”

  Ingrid hesitated. “She has her shots.”

  “Good,” Rachel said, then tried to look at David and Kevin, but her gaze was continually drawn back to the baby, as if Clare contained her own gravitational force.

  Visibly irritated, Ingrid said, “What I need, more than a pediatrician, is an internet connection.”

  “Yeah, right,” said David. “So you can rally whatever’s left of your troops.”

  “So I can Google advice on her health.”

  Kevin sat next to Ingrid, breaking into the domestic dispute. “Rachel? I know you’re tired, but you’re gonna have to start. You know that. We don’t say a thing until you tell us the truth. Why are you driving across the country looking for Ingrid?”

  “I told you—”

  “You didn’t tell me shit.”

  David headed to a spare chair. All eyes were on Rachel, in particular Ingrid’s. She had that new-mother fatigue, but there was also the fierceness of a mother’s perpetual adrenaline, the kind that could take down a lion. Her gaze was so intense that, were Rachel clear-headed enough to fear anyone in that room, she would have feared Ingrid.

  “A week ago, an attempt was made on my life back in Seattle. I think it was the Bureau.”

  Kevin leaned back, not taking his eyes off her, and both David and Ingrid looked to him for some kind of confirmation. He leaned forward again, elbows on his knees. “Okay. We’ll dig into that later. How does that lead to here?”

  “Vale and Johnson, those agents who came with Jakes to visit you,” she said, then turned to David. “The same two who told you I was off my rocker. They spent seven hours that same day debriefing me about last summer. The whole thing.”

  Kevin shook his head. “But didn’t you write a report on that?”

  “Not much of my report ended up in the final draft. Or so they told me.”

  Silence descended again as Kevin thought through what all of this might mean. When he finally shook his head, disbelieving, she said, “I know, me, too. But it’s true.”

  “But why come looking for me?” Ingrid asked.

  “Because that was one of their most urgent questions. Where is Ingrid Parker? They wanted to know why you didn’t come in when the amnesty was announced. They said they wanted to talk to you about Bishop.”

  Ingrid had developed a defiant streak after months on the lam, but even that couldn’t hide the fear that bled into her features. She looked at David, who nodded. He told her, “You called it.”

  “Martin called it,” Ingrid corrected, then turned to Rachel. “He told me that the Bureau would be after me, once they knew we’d spent so much time together. He said that once they knew what I knew, they might even try to kill me.” She shook her head, using her free hand to rub her forehead. “And look at me now. In a room with two FBI agents. How stupid am I?”

  Kevin, overcome by nervous energy, stood again and walked to the cardboard-covered windows. He squeezed his eyes shut and thought a moment, then turned back to Ingrid. “You need to tell her.”

  Ingrid didn’t like the sound of that. “I don’t need to do anything, Kevin. You said it yourself—there’s no proof. And until there’s proof it’s dangerous to spread my story around.”

  “I said it’s self-defeating. I said if you post it online it’ll just be another conspiracy.” He nodded toward Rachel. “But there obviously is proof.”

  “Proof of what?” Rachel asked.

  Kevin ignored her and crossed back to Ingrid. “They’d only try to kill her if there was proof.”

  They argued a little longer, and Rachel tried to decipher the detail-free points everyone was making. “Look,” she said finally. “It sounds to me like we need each other. But I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s happening. So can you please tell me your story?”

  Ingrid held Clare tighter, working her way through a decision. Rachel understood the anxiety: Ingrid wasn’t simply putting her life at risk; she was putting her baby’s life at risk. But something had to be done, so Ingrid turned to face her squarely and said, “Remember Jerome Brown?”

  Rachel did. The young father in Newark. He’d been all over the news back then. “What about him?”

  “He’s as good a place to start as any.”

  16

  DO YOU know why I pulled you over?

  No, sir.

  Registration’s out of date.

  Ingrid had watched the video fifteen times, and more—from her desk at the Starling Trust, on her phone in the subway, at home in the kitchen while David sat with a drink, watching B-grade TV.

  Anything in the car I should know about?

  A gun. But I got a license.

  Don’t—

  Bang. Pause. Bang.

  The few times she’d brought up Jerome Brown and that New Jersey cop, David had shown little interest, quickly pointing out that, hey, the guy was reaching for a gun, right? Then he’d find a way to redirect the conversation back to his long-suffering novel.

  Jerome? You kill my boyfriend? Wake up, Jerome! Did you kill my boyfriend?

  So she let it be, creating a secret space in her life that held Jerome Brown, his girlfriend, Moira, and LaTanya, the five-year-old in the backseat who’d filmed her father’s execution.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d heard this kind of story. Not the first time she’d seen handheld video of uniformed cops and young black men and heard the two-strike thumps of a trigger being pulled. Cities as catchphrases for institutional racism: Ferguson, St. Paul, Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, Montgomery, Raleigh, Charleston, Staten Island, Baltimore. She commiserated with friends at work; together, they shook their heads and lamented the state of the country—white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, after all! And knowing that even if they weren’t part of the solution at least they recognized there was a problem. They weren’t coldhearted.

  How could she not watch it, along with five million others? How could she not read the Times for its hourly updates and listen to the talking heads who commented on all the sticky topics that surrounded the murder of black men in America? Ingrid’s head filled up with incessant partisan chatter: race and gun control and insufficient police training and fatherless childhoods and the medieval state of America’s criminal justice system. Then all that was swept away by the final moments of the video: a five-year-old crying off-camera as she tried to hold the phone still, just as she’d been told to, her mother telling her it’ll all be fine, telling her to not shatter completely.

  Baby. Baby, it’s all right. Mama’s here.

  When on Facebook she saw the call to gather in the center of Newark to protest the genocide of African Americans by the police, how could she not go? Back in college, she would have joined the struggle without a second thought, but she was a different person now. She’d grown addicted to comfort and quiet, while around her the world had
deteriorated and the ruling class had consolidated its enormous power. She and her peers had slept for too long; it was time to do more than simply recognize a problem.

  On Friday afternoon she left work early and took the Montclair Line to Newark’s Broad Street station, then hailed an Uber to take her to police headquarters, but the driver had to let her out a block away because the protesters had spilled into the road all around the building. She paid with her phone and got out and approached a crowd that seemed to have no end. Young and old, black and white, a kaleidoscope of ornate religions. Children on the shoulders of chanting fathers and grandfathers, teenagers waving signs and fists, watched over by police in riot gear, faces hidden by Plexiglas helmets. At first, she was overcome by weakness and a sharp terror—What are you doing, Ingrid?—wanting to turn around and hurry back to Tribeca and watch all of it through the safety of her television. But she’d made a decision, and so she moved beyond the police and into the crowd, through the sparse periphery—deeper, to where the night grew humid from the press of bodies and warm words. It was so loud, the shouts—Black lives matter! Hey hey, ho ho—these racist cops have got to go! Off the sidewalks, into the streets! Why are you in riot gear; we don’t see no riot here!

  And then it came out of her, too. She couldn’t help it. Her mouth opened of its own accord and shouted: The people united will never be defeated!

  On another day, in another place, sipping from a glass of rioja with her smart friends, she’d have laughed at clever jokes about these kinds of slogans. But now … now she stood with them. She spoke with them. Her voice had a thousand mouths. Her fist was in the air, punching the evening sky. Not just her fist but hundreds of them, punching holes in the clouds. If this went on, she thought with a hint of giddiness, the sky was going to crack and fall.

  Speakers climbed on crates and shouted through bullhorns. A well-dressed local alderman, scores of fevered citizens, and a zealous preacher who asked, “What do we want?”