The Middleman Page 8

“It was a pitch. You know his history—Southern Baptist do-gooder. Raise the poor so they can help themselves. Then he made himself some liberal friends and learned how to blame the rich. Not violent, no, but he was on his way. Smart—that’s for sure. But gullible. And he had none of the magnetism he would later display. The Kommando was going to eat him up. So I made the decision to bring him in. Cleared it with the Germans, then took Martin to a safe house where I laid it out for him: Groups like the KRL—as you well know, Agent Proulx—are layered. Where Martin was, on the outside, it was all happy idealism. Dig deeper, you find the hackers. Still deeper: the bomb throwers who keep posters of Andreas Baader on their bedroom walls.”

  Rachel thought about Martin Bishop, the one she’d seen in 2009 as well as the one who swayed huge crowds, and said, “How did he react?”

  Jakes shrugged. “Martin wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t hear logic. That’s not to say he believed me when I explained how dangerous they were—he didn’t—but he understood our concerns. The way he saw it, by keeping me in the loop he would help to clear their name.”

  It irritated Rachel that she was only hearing this now, ten days after the party and eight years after the story itself, but perhaps that was why Jakes had come personally—a charming messenger to ease the blow. “How long did this go on?”

  “Four, five weeks. Then they blew themselves up.”

  “For some of the West Coast left,” she told him, “the KRL explosion is fake. A lot of people don’t buy the official story.”

  Jakes raised his hands—he knew all about this. “The Germans blew them up? Those same idiots think the American government would fly two passenger planes into the World Trade Center.” He shook his head. “I was there, Agent Proulx.”

  Rachel considered his story, turning it around to look at it from all sides. “I assume there’s a report on this somewhere.”

  “You’d assume correctly,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “However, it was never cleared for distribution. We don’t want it getting out that he was on the Bureau payroll, even if we didn’t actually pay him.”

  “That would be a mess.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Well, it would be helpful to clear me for access.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Berlin, then.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that, but okay: She could write up a request. “Does the report tell where Martin went afterward? There’s a gap of about two months between the explosion and him reappearing stateside, making speeches.”

  “That’s a question mark,” said Jakes, exhaling loudly. “But I suspect he was pissed off at the world and sat in a hole for a while. He really believed the KRL was peaceful. It was a blow.”

  “You said he had no magnetism. I saw him in San Francisco later that same year. It was in front of just a handful of people, but he certainly had that magnetism there.”

  “September?” asked Jakes.

  “Yeah.”

  He smiled. “We were in the same auditorium, then. I don’t remember seeing you there. Remember me?”

  She didn’t. It had been a long time ago, and all she remembered from that day was Martin Bishop and the elusive James Sullivan who, eight years later, was the last person to call Bishop before he disappeared. She remembered the Mission District rat trap that had been her home, and the months she’d spent examining the convergence of Silicon Valley money and radical progressive action. She remembered sitting in on meetings in churches and squatters’ homes and parks, and becoming friendly with anarchists and socialists and hackers convinced that anything that existed in the virtual world should be free, including other people’s bank accounts. The resulting work, “Shifts in Radical Thought and Organization in the 21st Century,” had made her name.

  “If it’s all right with you,” Jakes said, “I’d like to join the team. I think my familiarity could be a benefit, and…” He nodded at the other desks stuffed into their cramped space. “And it looks like you could use some more hands.”

  9

  GREEN-EYED MARY asked him to join her on a shopping trip into town—the closest town being Dayton, population 757, a half hour away. By then he’d been with them for a week and a half, and had even grown to enjoy the routine. People joined in anger were remarkably generous with one another. He mentioned this to Mary as she drove the house pickup down Highway 14.

  “You’ve only been around a little while,” she told him with a smile. “Give it time. Radicals are as catty as anyone else. Worse, probably.”

  “I saw that back in Frisco.”

  “Longer,” she said, and winked.

  “You’ve been with it a while, then?”

  She didn’t answer, but Kevin knew that this was her way. Mary liked to let other people fill in the blank spaces in conversation.

  So he said, “I’m wondering where this is all leading.” A field opened up to the left, bright under the blazing sun, full of grazing cows. “You’ve got these people hiding from the government. They’re talking and talking and shooting in their spare time—but you’ve got to see it, right? They can’t hit squat. Mary from Dallas and those two guys—St. Louis and Denver—they know how to aim. The rest?” He shook his head.

  “You think you’re the only one complaining?” Mary asked. “Every day I get an earful. Some are like you, thinking we should be running strict obedience lessons, teach everyone how to massacre at will. Others—and you probably know who they are—are horrified they have to touch a gun. They pull me aside and demand to know if we’re building an army.”

  “You’re not building an army.”

  “Damned right,” she said. “We’re building a community.”

  “Tell that to the George who brought me and Tracey to your place.”

  “What about him?”

  “He killed a woman he thought was following us. Shot her in her car.”

  Mary went silent, chewed on her lower lip. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”

  Why hadn’t he? “Because I thought you knew. I thought that was the way.”

  “I didn’t get that memo,” she said, then fell back into silence as the landscape unrolled around them. After a year in San Francisco’s narrow streets, Kevin still found these open spaces exhilarating and terrifying.

  He said, “When did you meet Martin?”

  “After he came back from Berlin,” she said. “Back in Austin. He was trying to figure things out.”

  “The Kommando Rosa Luxemburg.”

  “They got a raw deal,” she said.

  He waited for more, but she didn’t look like she was going to share, so he pressed: “From what I heard, they blew themselves up.”

  “That’s what you would hear, isn’t it?” She shook her head. “False flag op, all the way. The Germans, maybe with a little help from us. The KRL had humiliated them with those email leaks, so they got them back.”

  Kevin looked out the window. False flag: the Twin Towers, Waco, Charlie Hebdo, Sandy Hook … Pearl Harbor. He’d heard all the conspiracy theories, and every time someone said “false flag” his stomach seized up, because he knew he’d entered a space where rational thought was being thrown under the bus. Thankfully, Mary wasn’t interested in jumping further down that rabbit hole right now.

  “Austin was fun, though. Full of possibility. We drank a lot.” She cleared her throat. “That was in late ’09, early ’10—before it got serious. A lot of us were taken in by Obama, before realizing he was more of the same.”

  “Martin opened your eyes?”

  She grinned. “My eyes were already open. Most people’s are. They just don’t know what to do next.”

  “What’s next?”

  “Really?” she asked. “You really need an answer?”

  “What I need,” he said after a moment, “is a direction to point myself. It’s the way I’m built. We’re not making an army, you say. We’re building a community. Cool. But what’s the end point?”

  “Men,” she said, sighing.


  “What?”

  “You can’t just take a drive, can you? Always need a destination.”

  The cows had given way to sugar beets, and Mary told him about an article she’d read concerning the sharp rise of celiac disease in America, that rare gluten allergy that sent its victims to the toilet all day long. The article, she said, showed that the rise of celiac diagnoses directly paralleled the increased use of the toxic herbicide glyphosate just before wheat harvesting. The process yielded 30 percent more seeds but also left trace amounts of glyphosate in the wheat. She said, “Americans aren’t falling victim to celiac disease; they’re being poisoned in order to maximize profits.”

  When they reached Dayton she didn’t slow down, not even when they passed the Corner Grocery. Once they crossed the Little Tongue River they were out of it. He said nothing, only watched the passing fields until after another ten minutes she turned down a long driveway beside a broken mailbox. The truck bounced where recent storms had dug ravines across the drive.

  A part of him worried, as he had that first day, that the gig was up. Had he been marked for exclusion? Among these people, that could mean anything. He hadn’t made the cut, perhaps, or they’d decided in their myopic way that he was part of the other—an interloper, a spy.

  They reached a farmhouse, one of thousands that had been abandoned across the United States in the past decade as small farms had gone under. This one was in serious disrepair. Slanted shutters, snapped porch planks, smashed windows. Paint cracked under the blazing sun. They parked in an empty, overgrown yard. He hadn’t asked a thing, and Mary hadn’t bothered to tell him. She only led him up the front steps, cautioning him to watch out for loose boards, and together they entered the house, which held some abandoned pieces of mildewed furniture. She said, “You ate breakfast, right?”

  “Sure.”

  She nodded, looking around the empty place. Was she nervous? He couldn’t tell. He said, “We’re waiting for someone?”

  “You are,” she said. “I’ve got groceries to buy.” But she looked around the place a little more, lingering.

  “Who am I meeting?” he asked.

  A shrug.

  “Are you picking me up after shopping?”

  “I’ll be told one way or the other, okay? You need a bottle of water?”

  “Depends on how long I’m standing around here.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  He followed her back out to the truck, hot wind buffeting them, and accepted a Poland Spring. “Look,” he said, “if I’m in the doghouse you might want to tell me.”

  She grinned, shaking her head. “Nothing like that. You’re fine. That’s why you’re here.” She got back into the truck and started it up. “I told them how fine you were.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She hesitated, then: “What happened on the road. George, and what he did. That’s not what Martin is about. I know this. That George—maybe he was stressed from driving so much. Paranoia, I don’t know. But that isn’t the kind of people we are.”

  He watched her drive off, then went back inside. In the kitchen, he found a phone screwed to the wall, but it was dead. Carefully, he took the stairs to the attic floor and peered out windows, looking for signs of life: cities, houses, trailers. There was nothing, not even in the direction of Dayton, which meant that there was no place to go.

  The warmth inside the house was worse than in the open field, so he went outside again and drank half the water, then took a leak around the back of the house. The day came and went, and by the time the sun first brushed the horizon he heard the engine. It came from the north, an SUV bouncing through difficult, untended terrain as it headed toward him. He considered going back inside but didn’t see the point. So he stood in front of the house, his hands loosely held together like a man considering prayer but not yet committed to the act.

  When the dusty SUV pulled up, two men climbed out. One—a wiry Hispanic—he didn’t know, but the other one—big, with a wheat-colored beard and blue eyes—he recognized as Benjamin Mittag. Neither was smiling. Without introducing himself, Mittag walked past Kevin and entered the house. The other man approached Kevin and said, “Get inside.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that, but there was nothing else for him, so he went back into the house to find Mittag sitting on the old coffee table. Beside him lay a Springfield 1911 semiautomatic pistol. The other man entered behind Kevin and closed the door.

  “Tell me,” Mittag said.

  “What?”

  “Who you’re working for.”

  Kevin didn’t answer immediately. He took a breath. “No one.”

  Mittag laid the Springfield on his knee. “Look, Kevin Moore. We know you’re working for someone. FBI? Homeland Security? Fucking CIA?”

  Kevin put some effort into controlling his expression but had zero idea how he really looked. “How do you know this?”

  “Because we’re Massive. Because we’ve got an army of hackers on our side. There are no secrets anymore. Not from us. So let’s start with who you work for.”

  “I don’t work for anyone,” Kevin said.

  Mittag stood and raised the pistol so that it was two feet from Kevin’s forehead. Kevin closed his eyes, exhaled, then looked again at Mittag. He said, “Pull the trigger.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  Kevin frowned, shook his head. “You don’t trust me? Then pull the fucking trigger. But don’t waste my time with accusations.”

  Benjamin Mittag didn’t move. He just stared into Kevin’s eyes over the barrel of the pistol. Then he lowered it and smiled. “All right, then.” He stepped forward, clapped a hand on Kevin’s shoulder, and said, “Let’s go fight the good fight.”

  Then he and his partner were gone. Kevin took a moment, fighting an onrush of nausea, wrestling with his bladder. He inhaled and exhaled, then followed them outside.

  10

  SHE HAD successfully avoided Sam Schumer for nearly two weeks when Assistant Director Paulson called. Schumer, it seemed, had gone above her head. “You may not like him, Rachel, but you’re in bed with the guy. Cut him off completely and he’ll invent worse stories than what’s actually going on.”

  “He does that already, sir.”

  “As bad as things seem, they can always get worse.”

  Which was how she ended up having coffee with Schumer at the Politics and Prose bookstore on a gray, drizzly morning, twelve days after the party. She was as congenial as she could manage, and he was as self-aggrandizing as she remembered. He rubbed his bald scalp, fooled with the ends of his mustache, and asked if it was true that dissident elements of the FBI had assisted in Martin Bishop’s escape on June 18. “Are you really asking me that?” she countered, and he shrugged, telling her that there were a lot of stories going around, and that was one of the more believable ones.

  Then he took a sip of his coffee and said, “Look, Rachel. Politically, you and I are on the opposite ends of the spectrum. I know it. You know it. But I’m just here to get at the truth, and I know you are, too.”

  “No, Sam. No one in the FBI helped Martin Bishop escape.”

  He leaned closer. “What happened? We used to get along so nicely. Have I ever stuck it to the Bureau? You guys are my goddam heroes!”

  “If we’re your heroes, Sam, then try emulating us. Verify your facts before you share them with millions of Americans.”

  Schumer frowned, leaning back again. “This is about that North Mexico story, isn’t it? That was based on a respected study—”

  “By a right-wing foundation that had been accused of race-baiting by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

  “Their numbers add up, Rachel.”

  “Not according to The Washington Post, to New York Times, CNN—”

  “Not according to the corporate liberal media. What a surprise! If this is the kind of head-in-the-sand thinking that runs the Bureau these days, then I’m not sure I’m such a fan anymore.”

  They
both let that sit a moment. She was experiencing the same uncomfortable feeling that, days before, Kevin had felt at the mention of “false flag.” If two people could not agree on the validity of numbers, then what hope was there for the future?

  But she had a job to do, and that trumped numbers and her feelings of disgust. “I’m told you have a question for me, and I don’t think you’ve asked it yet.”

  “Yeah,” he said, and licked his lips. “There are a lot of reports of young people—teens, twenties—going missing on June 18, when Bishop and Mittag disappeared. Parents on Facebook are noticing each other. They’re starting groups looking for their kids. Is this connected to the Massive Brigade?”

  “Not that we know of,” she lied. “But thanks for the information. We’ll look into it.”

  That afternoon, she gave Paulson’s deputies an update that consisted of potential leads that had not yet borne fruit. Barnes asked pointedly what the president was thinking now—was he still afraid of shadows? Lynch cracked a few jokes. Kranowski equivocated.

  There was a collective sigh of exasperation when she reported on Sam Schumer’s question about the missing kids. “If we don’t get ahead of this now,” she warned them, “we’ll never control the message.” But they would not budge.

  Back in the office, she spoke openly about her frustration, and Ashley and Doug shared her dismay, while Owen Jakes, leaning against the wall with his hands behind his back, disagreed. “That might have mattered a decade ago, Schumer breaking out an exposé on lost children, but do you think that really matters these days?”

  The three of them looked at him.

  “It’s not a matter of what’s being said,” he explained, “but what’s accepted as truth. Schumer says something, all we have to do is say the opposite, and convincingly.”

  “And the truth?” asked Ashley.

  Owen grinned. “We misplaced that back in 2001.”

  “I thought you were tracking down leads from the tip line,” Rachel said, irritated.

  “I was, and then we intercepted this.” He took his hands out from behind his back to reveal an envelope in a plastic sleeve. He handed it over and watched as Rachel slid it out and saw the name on the outside: It was addressed to David Parker. “I’d love to be the one to take that to him,” said Owen. “See how he reacts.”