The Middleman Read online

  Rachel took out the single page, examined it for a moment, then showed it to Doug and Ashley, who made appropriate expressions. She folded it back into the envelope and said, “Thanks, Owen. I’ll take care of this myself.”

  Which was why she showed up in Tribeca at noon the following day, took the stairs this time, and asked David Parker how he was holding up. The question was rhetorical, for she’d had her answer as soon as she saw him standing hungover in the middle of his living room surrounded by open cardboard boxes. He was dressed, but she imagined that if she hadn’t called ahead he would have been stumbling around in a pair of briefs.

  He said, “I’m still on my feet.”

  She nodded at the boxes. “Moving?”

  “Ingrid’s stuff.”

  “Given up already?”

  “Why? You know where she is?”

  She shook her head. “But it’s only been two weeks.”

  “Long enough to figure out that I don’t give a shit anymore.”

  They both knew that was a lie. She’d seen it before: The biggest surprise for men who’d been abandoned was that they were no good at being alone. The apartment, like his body, was going to pot, and he no longer maintained the pretense of controlling his drinking. He’d become a homeless person with a roof over his head, and the only thing that had changed was his wife’s absence. Without Ingrid, his work and daily routines were collapsing. The discovery of this dependency, for most men, was heartbreaking.

  “What are you going to do with the boxes?” she asked.

  He rubbed his face, unsure, then sat down.

  “When I last talked to you,” Rachel said, “you told me that we’d never find Ingrid because she’s committed.”

  “Yeah. I remember.”

  “How’d she get that way?”

  He scratched at his neck, then shrugged. “Her father was a union organizer, back in Flint. I never met him, but I heard a lot about him. Staunch Communist, very old school. Bitter. He hated that Stalin had ruined the one chance for Communism to thrive in the world. Somehow, he took it as a personal slight. His disappointment—it was so big that his friends used it to explain away his cruelty.” David hesitated, maybe wondering if he should go on; Ingrid wasn’t around to establish boundaries for him. “Ingrid’s mom, she was a regular at the local free clinic. Cracked ribs, swollen jaws, black eyes. This was Ingrid’s childhood. Then when she was sixteen she went at the bastard with a shovel, and that’s what finally convinced her mother to leave him. Two years later, during a bad winter, her father drank himself to death on the banks of the Kearsley Reservoir.”

  Rachel knew, because she read such things, that the UN estimated that one in three women in the world experiences physical or sexual violence in her lifetime, usually from an intimate partner, and this was a statistic that she had never been able to shake. In her world, that ratio was even higher, and not only because she was a victim herself. It was because violence begets more violence, and the women who’d lucked out tended not to end up under her microscope.

  “Do you think that helps explain her actions?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Special Agent. What do you think?”

  She didn’t answer, only took her briefcase from beside the chair and opened it. “Well, we haven’t found her,” she said, “but we do have something.” She removed the envelope Owen had given her and held it out.

  David recognized the handwriting immediately, which was probably why he had so much trouble taking out the single sheet of paper even though it had already been opened, scanned, and tested for fingerprints and DNA. He stared hard at the page. He turned it around, as if he thought it was upside down; then his eyes caught the single sentence Ingrid had scribbled across the bottom corner. He looked up at her. “You intercepted this?”

  “Yesterday,” Rachel said. “It’s postmarked Idaho Falls, Idaho.”

  “Idaho? What the fuck is she doing in Idaho?”

  “It’s not surprising,” she explained. “Large, open spaces. Not necessarily a good tactical choice, but it gives fugitives the illusion of being far away, out of our reach.”

  “Fugitive?” he said, but it was a whisper, a thought that had slipped out unawares. She knew it was a word that hadn’t occurred to him, and probably hadn’t occurred to the families and friends of the other four hundred. But that’s what they were: fugitives. They were grains of chaos thrown to the winds of America, spreading through the beautiful and frightening heartland. Public enemies. His mouth worked the air a few seconds; then he shook his head to get rid of the cobwebs. “So you’re closing in. Yes?”

  Rachel tilted her head. “If they know what they’re doing, they’ll have couriers to mail letters from other towns. I doubt she’s there. But our people are looking.”

  “Idaho. You’ve got a state to look at,” David said. “Cordon it off.”

  She didn’t bother to explain how difficult it was to cordon off anything in those wide, open spaces.

  David looked again at the ultrasound in his hands. The fuzzy black-and-white smear of pre-child, the printed numbers and measurements running down the right side, and at the bottom corner, in ballpoint: I’m going to call her Clare.

  “You’ll be all right?” Rachel asked.

  David didn’t answer. He folded the sheet and held it between his fingers. His eyes were wet.

  11

  IT WAS an M-40 just like the one he’d trained with on Black Mountain, but with a new Schmidt and Bender day scope with a Horus reticle. Beyond the lines and dots and numbers were people. Hundreds. So many little lives buried behind that grid, filling the street, ready to celebrate the Fourth of July.

  When he blinked, he remembered that windshield in the Nevada desert. Spots of blood appearing like magic.

  Kevin had a decision to make, but didn’t know if he could.

  He’d spent three days trapped in a Toyota with Benjamin Mittag, and it had been a relief to finally arrive in Florida and emerge from that claustrophobic car, even though by then he knew why he’d been brought there.

  “Where’s Martin?” Kevin asked between towns in Missouri, mountains in the distance.

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Meaning, you don’t know?”

  Mittag rocked his head, staring hard at the road. “This is a big country, man. And when you’re not using the internet you can’t direct people from one spot. Martin’s got his half of the country, I’ve got mine. He’s east, I’m west.”

  “But we’re driving to the East Coast.”

  “Yep,” Mittag said, as if there were no contradiction.

  “So how do you talk?”

  “We don’t. Not often.”

  Kevin wondered how anything could get done if the two leaders couldn’t sit down on a regular basis and strategize. And, really, what were they supposed to be getting done? Were they really just hiding out to avoid detection, as some said? Or was there a master plan that Kevin had now become a part of?

  “How do you know what to do, then? If you can’t talk to him.”

  A flash of anger crossed Mittag’s face. “How does he know what to do if he can’t talk to me? That man does the talking because that’s what he’s good at. But without me, there would never be any action.”

  Kevin let that sit a moment, then: “I heard you used to lecture, back in the beginning. What I heard was that you took the paint off the walls.”

  The compliment relaxed Mittag, just a little. “Yeah, I didn’t mince words. But if I’d kept it up I’d have been thrown back inside long ago.”

  “Inciting violence.”

  “Inciting action.”

  If everyone was his own special interest, Mittag was unique, for he seemed to hate every part of society. He’d spent much of his youth incarcerated and felt that this gave him a more realistic view of the world than the college-educated kids he now found himself allied with. The cops who’d put him away, the wardens, the politicians who made the laws, the shop owners he stole from, the mothers
and fathers who twisted their kids into kleptomaniacs in the first place, the teachers who tried to mold children into good little consumers, and even the thieves like the one he’d been—everyone was lined up for ridicule. They would all be standing at the wall come the Revolution.

  Unlike Bishop, who spoke as if hope were his engine, Mittag was motivated by the angry conviction that he had always been looked down on, and it was time to make America pay for its contempt. But this kind of motivation, Kevin reflected, is volatile. The desire to get back at the elites who scorned him could easily change if his comrades started to piss him off—what was to stop him from turning on his own people?

  “Where’d you grow up?” Kevin asked somewhere in Tennessee.

  “One of Pennsylvania’s many assholes.”

  “And Martin? Why hook up with him?”

  Mittag gave him a sidelong glance. “I saw an opportunity.”

  “For what?”

  “For change,” Mittag said, but the way he said it Kevin wasn’t sure if he meant change for the world or change for himself, for Benjamin Thomas Mittag—he suspected the latter. “And you’re the first step.”

  “Me?”

  “You, brother. But you won’t be alone. Don’t worry. You’ll never be alone anymore.”

  That, perhaps, was the most frightening thing Benjamin Mittag said the entire drive.

  Kevin sniffed, drawing his sight across the crowd, then raised it to the platform at the intersection of Crandon and Harbor, festooned with the colors of the flag and full of local dignitaries. Through speakers, Miley Cyrus sang “Party in the U.S.A.” Though blocks away, the music rose to his open window on the seventh floor of a condo building. He measured distances. He estimated wind resistance. The platform was partially obscured by palm trees, and when he turned slightly the oppressive sun flared across his lens. But he’d done this in worse conditions.

  In small-town Georgia, Mittag used a pay phone while Kevin waited in the car. When he returned he was jubilant. “Six!”

  “Six what?”

  Mittag started the car, grinning. “Six fists into the face of the country. Six drops of blood to feed the vampire.”

  A windshield under the glare—six spots scatter across it.

  Time to go, kids!

  So there were six of him. Six Kevins across the United States, sweating, clutching rifles or wiring explosives or poisoning meals—or any of the numerous ways there are to kill a person. Six operations, simultaneously.

  Of course, knowing this made none of it easier. It did him no good. When they reached Liberty City, Holly was waiting for them. She took custody of Kevin and brought him to a suburban house with no phone line. A safe house for two. She was a pretty girl—twenty-two, sun-dappled blond. And she didn’t let Kevin out of her sight.

  She had already drawn up the plans, which she unrolled on the dining room table. There was his building. That was the street. Here was the platform where the target would speak. A single road across the Bear Cut Bridge would take them to the place of assassination; a boat would take them away. Holly knew it all, knew how to get in and how to get out, and she would have been happy to pull the trigger herself. But like the Revolution itself she knew her limits.

  What had happened? After two weeks among comrades whose primary concern was staying out of sight of the law—two weeks in the position of defense—Mittag had dragged him into the epicenter of an offense that he’d never even caught a whiff of. Whatever he’d thought he knew about the Massive Brigade, it turned out, hadn’t been much more than conjecture. And while green-eyed Mary hadn’t gotten the memo that killing people was part of the Brigade’s MO, she was still a gatekeeper—I told them how fine you were. Now, because of government-trained skills and dumb luck, he’d ended up at the sharp end of the revolutionary bayonet.

  The music ended abruptly, followed by cheers and hoots and applause, and the mayor approached the mic, or someone who looked like a mayor. Kevin wasn’t sure. There was only one face he needed to watch out for, and she’d been sitting at the far edge of the stage, chatting and laughing with one of her aides. Now she was on her feet, still smiling, brushing her long skirt straight.

  The mayor thanked everybody for coming out on this beautiful day, and thanked, with a wink, Miley Cyrus.

  Hoots. Hollers.

  Sun-dappled Holly had driven him across the bridge and into the key. She’d parked a block over from the condos, and as he started to get out, shouldering his bag, she’d told him to slow down. Take it easy. She walked with him the whole way; they were part of a growing crowd, enjoying the clean ocean air. Holly gave him the condo key and told him that she would be waiting for him right there once it was over. He told her to stay safe, and in reply she opened her light jacket. She was carrying a little Walther PPK “in case these Florida boys decide to get fresh,” she said, then kissed his cheek. “Good luck.”

  There was no one in the lobby, just an empty desk. There was a phone in the seventh-floor apartment, but it had been disconnected. Stale furniture—he wondered how long Bishop, or Mittag, had held on to this place, waiting for today, and for someone like him. Then he walked to the window and unzipped his bag.

  The mayor said her name, and she heard it. One last brush of the skirt, plaster on that smile, and step confidently forward into the bright sunlight, arm raised, waving. A congresswoman ready for the public. A shining example of modern democracy working so damned well.

  He remembered: Crack, crack, crack.

  The lines and dots and numbers lined up on her face. They added up. Everything was balanced.

  Let’s get moving, right? We’ve got a long road ahead of us.

  He had a decision to make, but wasn’t sure he could make it.

  12

  DESPITE HIS earnestness the previous week, pulling into her office and offering his historical perspective on Martin Bishop, then sitting in a corner to read through all available files, Owen Jakes soon made himself scarce. Rachel had verified with Lou Barnes that his Berlin story was legit, but not even Barnes knew much about him. Jakes had dutifully gone through the messages sent to the FBI’s tip line—since they hadn’t released a statement about the four hundred missing followers, and Schumer hadn’t yet broken his story about them, the leads were only a handful of unconfirmed sightings of Martin Bishop himself. When he called to update her, Jakes admitted that nothing had come of the tips. “But I’m running down old contacts.”

  “For what?”

  “Too soon to say.”

  That irritated her—who was working for whom here? “Why don’t you tell me anyway?”

  There was a brief silence on the line before he said, “With the internet, everything’s international. I’m working my European contacts. Arguably, that’s where Massive was born, and there’s a growing number of fans on the Continent. You should see the spray paint in Berlin.”

  Given that they had four hundred people to track down, his brilliant idea sounded like busywork. But on the other hand, it would keep Owen Jakes out of the way. “Okay, then,” she said. “Keep me posted.”

  She kept an open line to SAC Janet Fordham in New Orleans, who promised to keep Rachel in the loop if anything came back from her undercover agent. Fordham, though, wasn’t full of hope. “I’ve known OSWALD since he first went undercover in 2010. Twenty-two years old, fresh from Quantico. We chose him because he’d come from the streets. Funny thing—a year at the academy had made him softer. Cleaner. And five weeks later, when he showed up in the hospital with a knife stuck in his right lung, I tried to pull him out. But he wouldn’t have it. He asked me what I thought would happen if he suddenly disappeared. Shonda, the woman he’d used to infiltrate the gang, would be accused of working with him. She’d be mutilated, or killed. So he went back. Two years later we took down the whole operation, primarily as a result of his work.”

  The story, to Rachel’s ears, was a testament to OSWALD’s formidable skills and level of devotion, but Fordham had been trying to say somet
hing else. “He cares too much, and that’s his weakness. New Orleans was beginner’s luck. Now he’s dropped off the face of the earth, and for two weeks we’ve heard nothing. I’m too old to believe that luck holds.”

  She was thinking about that conversation on the morning of July 4, her first day off since the disappearances. She was drinking coffee in her mother’s living room in Croton-on-Hudson, reading the paperback of Gray Snow that Pierce had given her. It was better than she would have thought having met David Parker; in fact, she was hooked. One character, Irina, a starving concentration-camp survivor, had just been robbed of her tiny morsel of food after starving for three days straight. What the hell was going to become of Irina?

  “Why don’t you go back to bed?” asked her mother, using a walker to move from the doorway to the comfy chair, her puffy green robe looking too big for her meager body. “You got in so late.”

  That was true. Rachel had flown into Westchester Airport on a red-eye from Tennessee after a difficult reconnaissance with Hank Abernathy, who ran the regional office in Memphis. “I slept enough.”

  “Don’t fight it, honey. Or you’ll end up like me.”

  “Lack of sleep leads to arthritis?”

  “Could be,” her mother said as she lowered herself into the chair. “Where’s the remote?”

  Rachel found it between the sofa cushions and turned on the TV. She raised the volume so her mother could better hear the Food Network, then went to the kitchen to open up her laptop and go over the notes from Tennessee.

  “Two whole weeks,” Abernathy had reminded her in his humid conference room. “You fly down here from DC like you got the light of God on your shoulder. You really think we’ve been sitting on our hands down here? Five kids vanished from Memphis, another nine from Nashville. Not a one of them has called his folks. Every single one left his phone and credit cards behind. Look, it means something when a young person abandons his computer these days. Leaves his phone behind. You know?”