The Middleman Page 6

  “And then?”

  “And then I’m gone.”

  Once they were in the corridor again, Pierce said, “When we get to the city we might want to make a stop before Federal Plaza.”

  “Why?”

  “David Parker’s wife has disappeared.”

  5

  IT WAS afternoon by the time they reached the tall co-op in Tribeca, and as she buzzed the intercom Pierce surveyed the crowds—tourists, mostly—inching along the sidewalk under the ever-present Manhattan scaffolding, a city in a perpetual state of repair.

  “Yeah?” David Parker said through the speaker.

  “Special Agent Rachel Proulx,” she told him. “We spoke on the phone.”

  A hum, and they were inside, passing mailboxes where someone had stenciled KILL ALL PIGS. Pierce grunted at that. The graffiti inside the elevator was limited to a single word in Sharpie: MASSIVE. Though they both took a moment to reflect, neither bothered to comment on it. Instead, Pierce said, “You should read Gray Snow. It’s his best one.”

  “You’re a fan?”

  “I’ve never been a fan of anyone in my life. But the novel’s all right.”

  She noticed immediately that David Parker had been drinking. He might not have touched any alcohol that morning, but the pungent stink of gin was leaking from his pores, misting up a claustrophobic apartment that had fallen to a remarkable level of disarray, considering his wife had only walked out yesterday morning. On a table lay an old issue of Rolling Stone—she knew that issue, because it featured Martin Bishop. And on the screen of his open laptop, a YouTube video had been paused in the middle of one of Sam Schumer’s rants.

  While Pierce drove, she had followed up on the details of Parker’s life, first by visiting his website with its overly detailed bio page, then by sifting through the public records. A string of bookstore and library jobs until the publication of his first novel, at which point he ran off to Berlin to live the expat life. There, he’d met Ingrid Frasier, who worked for the Starling Trust, an international philanthropic organization.

  David exhaled, deflated, and settled on a stiff Bauhaus chair, hands on his knees. He told them the story of Bill and Gina’s party. The way he told it, it was clear that David Parker had taken everything Martin Bishop had said and done as a personal affront. “Seduction. That’s what I was worried about. But it was worse than that.”

  “What’s worse?” asked Rachel.

  “Recruitment.”

  “That’s your theory?”

  David leaned back, hands flashing open. “It’s not a theory; it’s a fact. Why else would she leave? She’s pregnant. She wouldn’t just take my child away. Not unless he convinced her the world would be better for it.”

  Rachel’s opinion, which she formed as she watched him pace and lay out his opinions as facts, was that David Parker was utterly self-absorbed: If his wife picked up and left, it couldn’t be the result of his behavior, that wouldn’t do. David Parker could only be the victim of terrorism. She knew his type all too well.

  Besides, Ingrid Parker didn’t fit the profile of a Massive Brigade convert—she was forty, with (as David had just pointed out) a child on the way. She wasn’t part of Martin Bishop’s demographic. She’d walked out for the same reason women walk out every day: Their husbands have become unbearable.

  “What happened when you got home from the party?”

  He thought about that, staring down at his joined hands in his lap. He was closing himself off from them. “Well, we didn’t fight. There was peace in the house.”

  Rachel stopped herself from correcting David, from saying that he had wanted peace in the house and had hoped that silence signified that he’d achieved it. In real life it rarely did.

  Maybe sensing her doubt, he amended his statement. “Well, we didn’t really speak at all. I put on the radio in the car, and when we got back here she went to shower and I turned on the TV. Schumer Says.” He hesitated. “And there he was, all over again. Martin Fucking Bishop. Gone like a thief in the night. I thought about getting her out of the shower so she could see for herself what a threat he was.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  He shook his head. “I made myself a drink and kept watching. Next thing I knew it was morning, and she had gone to work.” He reached into his pocket and took out a folded piece of lined paper. “I found this in the kitchen.”

  When he handed it over, she unfolded it and saw David written in tight script. Then she unfolded it the rest of the way and read:

  I need some time to myself. I’m staying with Brenda. Don’t call, and don’t come. I’ll be in touch.

  —Ingrid

  “Who’s Brenda?”

  “Old friend, lives up in Pelham.”

  “Did you call Ingrid anyway?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “And?”

  He scratched his brow. “And she cut me off. I apologized, okay? I’ve been … look, I haven’t been the best husband. Since my last book was … well, it was rejected. And I’ve been hard to live with. But I had a new idea. I tried to explain it to her. She knows—when the work’s going well, I’m great to live with.”

  “But that didn’t convince her?”

  Again, he reached for his face. He was a smorgasbord of tells. Whatever kind of woman Ingrid was, she obviously hadn’t fallen for his BS. “She told me she needed a little time to clear her head.”

  “That sounds reasonable.”

  “Later I found out that she did call Brenda and ask to stay a few days,” David explained. “But a few hours later she called from work to tell Brenda she’d changed her mind. Brenda thought that meant she was coming back home, but she never did.”

  “Other friends? Family?”

  “I’ve called her friends. Her mother died last year. That was all the family she had.”

  Rachel considered the facts. It hadn’t even been forty-eight hours since David had last seen his wife, and it was unlikely that a mother-to-be had decided to disappear and join the Massive Brigade. She expected that within a day or two he would hear from her, but to help him get through those hours she said, “We can watch out for her—credit cards, phone, email sign-ins. We’ll find her.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  His reaction surprised her. “You sure about that?”

  “Ingrid doesn’t do half measures,” he said. “If she doesn’t want to be found, she won’t be. Because she commits. And when she’s committed to something there’s nothing else in the world for her.” He pulled examples from their shared past. “First she was into yoga, and all day she’d speak that annoying lingo, and she kept rearranging the furniture to get the energies just right. Feng shui. But that wasn’t for her, so she turned to the kabbala. Other than work, she refused to leave the house. After that she spent a horrible month with est…”

  “I see.”

  The Rolling Stone caught David’s eye, and he picked it up. He opened it to the Martin Bishop feature—a piece that, in Rachel’s opinion, glamorized a dangerous man. “I know him,” David said quietly.

  “Bishop?”

  “Not know—I’d never met him before. But I know his type. I could tell what kind of guy he was. He’s dangerous.”

  “You’re right,” she admitted.

  “No one else believes it,” he said. “They think he’s just hot air. But when I punched him, that’s when I realized it. He…” David paused, thinking. “He was waiting for the punch. He expected it. As if he’d written the script beforehand, and I was just playing to it.”

  She remembered Bill Ferris saying something similar. When two people notice the same thing, pay attention.

  “Why would he do that?” she asked.

  David leaned back, throwing out his hands. “I don’t know. To get sympathy? To push Ingrid farther away from me? The point is that he was willing to sacrifice himself for some little goal. Risk a broken nose or a concussion, just to make whatever point he wanted to make.” He sniffed. “Talkers don’
t do that. Talkers pull back and save their pretty faces. Bishop is a true believer.”

  Earlier that morning Rachel had read the Nashville field office’s interview with Bishop’s parents. They painted the young Martin as a wholehearted Christian with love in his heart. His father insisted that Martin “only wants to serve God by serving others. You have to understand. Martin is not like our daughters. He was always special. For him, the value of his life is measured by how much he can help those around him.”

  So this is his way of helping, the local agent asked, preaching for people to rise up against the government?

  His father shrugged. “We haven’t seen him in seven, eight years.”

  “He’d just come back from Germany,” Bishop’s mother clarified.

  “And what he saw during his time abroad,” his father added. “I don’t even know what he saw. But it taught him that people in America—the very poor, the blacks, the immigrants—are tricked into fighting each other. He said that this was backward, and that all of us are the victims. We just don’t want to see it.”

  Rachel said, “There was some overlap between you, Ingrid, and Bishop in Berlin. Is it possible she knew him there?”

  David shook his head, then frowned. “Well, she never said.”

  “A long shot,” she admitted as she stood. “You’ll call us if you hear anything?”

  “Just find my wife, okay? She’s not taking my kid away.”

  Later, as she and Pierce were getting back to their oversized Suburban, her phone rang, but it wasn’t Sam Schumer. It was an analyst back in DC. “We’ve got an update on how many people have disappeared.”

  “Hit me.”

  “Two hundred and thirty-eight.”

  “Shit,” she said, and closed her eyes, an uncomfortable feeling slipping over her. Despite her doubt, she said, “Let’s get someone over to the Starling Trust offices here in Manhattan.”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “To scour Ingrid Parker’s work computer.”

  She hung up, then looked back up the street to David Parker’s building, wondering why she couldn’t shake her natural distaste for the man. Then she knew why: He reminded her of Gregg, her ex, he of the sanctimonious outrage and sudden fist. Narcissism made flesh. She didn’t think of Gregg often these days, but when she did her thoughts inevitably slid further, to his new wife, Mackenzie. She wondered if he hit her, too, in their little house outside DC; and if he didn’t, why not?

  Which made her, she knew as she climbed into the Suburban, a horrible person.

  6

  ASSISTANT DIRECTOR Mark Paulson squinted down the length of the conference table, eyeing three of his deputies, as well as Rachel. He’d just returned from a meeting in the Oval Office, and it had taken something out of his usual swagger. Less than two months ago, Director Comey had been dismissed by the president, so any visit to Pennsylvania Avenue, alongside the new director, was fraught. “You know what the president said to us? Your only mission is to keep the country safe, and don’t let the Bureau get between you and that goal. Not those words, but that sentiment. That’s the kind of opinion he has of this organization.”

  A collective sigh of irritation. Lou Barnes mouthed the word “prick” as, out of the side of her mouth, Erin Lynch said, “And when he said safety was your only job, you believed him?”

  “Guilty as charged, Erin,” Paulson said, raising his hands. “But you know what? I don’t care. I’m going to be the naïve kid in Washington. I’ll be Mr. Smith. Because in the end right will prevail.”

  Lou Barnes’s arms were crossed over his flabby chest—they had been glued there the entire meeting, as if there were far more important things waiting for him at the Intelligence desk. Rachel had noticed this. She’d noticed how the mood of the room had shifted as soon as Paulson entered it, having come straight from the Mountain to this pokey little conference room on the second floor of the Hoover Building, with its air conditioning that sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Once he arrived, the ripples of anxiety and discontent flattened like a thread that had suddenly been pulled taut. Word around the office was that none of these deputies had any respect for Paulson, who before his appointment had been a longtime CEO of the now-embattled Plains Capital Bank, having chosen the perfect time to step down and back a long-shot candidate on the campaign trail. Not so long ago, Paulson had simply appeared out of thin air, claiming a law enforcement expertise that had yet to be proven. But there was no sign of these administrators’ contempt here. They were surprisingly good actors.

  “So tell us,” Barnes said. “Tell us what the Oracle requires.”

  “Answers,” Paulson told him, tapping his ballpoint against the table, “and solutions.”

  Erin Lynch, again: “I thought he was hired to solve America’s ills.” Grins all around. Erin was on a roll.

  But Paulson didn’t grin. He didn’t even look at her. He lowered his head and opened the slim folder he’d brought with him. Then he read aloud: “Martin Louis Bishop. Benjamin Thomas Mittag.” He looked up at everyone, even Rachel. “Ring some bells?”

  Finally rising out of his silence, Richard Kranowski from Cyber said, “Really? The president’s losing sleep over Bishop? He’s got to stop watching Sam Schumer.”

  Lynch saw her chance. “Anything to distract from the approval numbers.”

  This time, her joke fell flat. Though Mark Paulson had only been installed two months ago, everyone else knew that they had moved on from the warm-up shots that typified his senior meetings. Those warm-up periods had grown noticeably shorter, particularly now that the director, facing public criticism over impolitic statements about Muslims, had been shoveling more responsibility onto Paulson’s shoulders.

  There would be no rebuke for Lynch—that wasn’t how Paulson ran his shop. Only a line of stiff mouths, and silence. Rachel watched as Erin Lynch processed this shift, leaned back in her chair, and finally made a contribution to the meeting: “Bishop is on the run. He’ll float around the country until someone gives us a call. His face is out there, and two hundred grand is no small reward.”

  Barnes looked at his own ballpoint, clicked it open and shut. “She’s right. Bishop and Mittag are stars. Of a sort. They’re known. Richie’s watching online activity, and we’ve confiscated his missile launcher—I’m not sure how much damage he can do at this point. A week has passed, and there’s been nothing.” Barnes hesitated, then shrugged. “But, okay. If the White House wants us to make a bigger deal of going after him, then we can do that.”

  As Barnes spoke, Mark Paulson’s gaze moved from his deputies down the table to the far end, where, by the buffet and its dozen bottles of water, Rachel watched in silence. Now he said, “You all know Special Agent Rachel Proulx?”

  Heads swiveled to look down the table. They did know her, tangentially, either from occasional reports with her name on them or as a quiet presence in meetings like this. None, however, really knew her. No one, if pressed, would be able to say where she had come from. Yet they all nodded.

  “Rachel’s a specialist. She conducted extensive research on the West Coast—you’ll know her report on left-wing movements because it’s the best thing we have on the subject, and she’s had her eye on the Massive Brigade since before it existed. Suffice to say, when she speaks I know enough to listen. Here.” From his folder he passed around copies of her ten-page memo, a brief progress report she’d emailed Paulson that morning. Suspiciously, Barnes, Lynch, and Kranowski scanned the opening lines. Paulson said, “Rachel?”

  She straightened, pulled her chair closer to the table, and began.

  “As you all know, we’ve established that a week ago, on June 18, Bishop took with him approximately four hundred followers. Based on pre–June 18 statements and communications, the reasoning for a mass disappearance has always been defensive: When the federal government comes after us, we’ll have to go underground. But while we’re quite sure that he’s got more in mind than hiding out in perpetuity, the organization’s actua
l plans are a question mark. And the preparations that went into this mass disappearance—the timing and techniques—were communicated through encrypted Tor clients, burners, and face-to-face. There’s no way—short of trashing the Constitution—that we could have predicted it.” She cleared her throat. “I was able to speak with one follower who didn’t make it—a young man in Baltimore. If he’s typical, then none of them were told much. Just: Go to this place and wait to be met.”

  “So there’s nothing new,” Lynch said, sighing audibly.

  “Not exactly,” she replied. “We followed up on the anonymous tip that sent us to Mittag’s storage facility on June 18. The call was from a pay phone in Manhattan—Avenue A, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets. We tracked down CCTV footage and ID’d the caller. You’ll see her on the third page. Holly Rasmussen, a known associate of Benjamin Mittag.”

  There was movement. Nothing dramatic, but the air conditioner had taken a break, and in the dead silence any shift in posture caused a racket.

  “Where is she?” asked Lynch.

  “She disappeared the same day as Bishop and Mittag and the others. Our initial thought, once we had her name, was that she had turned on them. But the fact that she left her life at the same moment suggests otherwise.”

  “Or she was killed for her transgression,” said Kranowski.

  Rachel sent a nod in his direction. “Perhaps. But until we find a body we’re assuming she was under orders to make the call.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” asked Barnes.

  “I,” she said. “I should have said I.”

  “And me,” said Paulson. “As well as POTUS.”

  Silence. Paulson looked up and down the table, waiting for his deputies to add two and two, but it was taking too long. He said, “Bishop was playing us on June 18—everything was prepared. That’s the understanding we’re going with. He was drawing attention to his exit, and we assisted in the publicity. So to assume he’s ‘on the run’ would be, let’s say, idiotic. Are we agreed?”