The Middleman

by Olen Steinhauer

  “You sound worried, Rachel.”

  With the adrenaline coursing through her, she didn’t know what she felt. Then she did. “I’m feeling apprehensive, sir.”

  “Tell me.”

  She took a breath, but the cigarette stink of that back room in the sheriff’s office left a bad taste on her tongue. “I’ve spent the last several hours talking to these followers, and what I’m hearing doesn’t make sense. July 4 wasn’t what they were expecting, and in a way it wasn’t what I was expecting. Bishop’s spent the last eight years maintaining a balancing act. Talking about violence while never actually encouraging it. He’s been so careful … and now this?”

  “People don’t make sense,” said Paulson. “Try spending an hour talking to my daughter.”

  “That’s not it, sir,” she said, wanting to make herself clear. “By doing this, by killing politicians, Massive delegitimized itself. It’s the kind of act that either triggers spontaneous revolution, or it buries everything you’ve spent your life working toward. And look outside. There’s no revolution in the street.”

  “They fucked up—I agree. What we have to do now is capitalize on it.”

  It was, in Paulson’s opinion, a moment to celebrate while pushing forward with renewed vigor. She felt the same, but there were still too many questions to answer, and it hurt to know that she would never be able to put those questions to Bishop himself. The only person who could answer them was Mittag, and she didn’t know where he was.

  She spent an hour videoconferencing with Ashley and Doug; Owen was in Chicago, checking on a source who claimed to have set up Bishop with five foreclosed houses. At the same time, interrogation reports from the second raid in Nephi were starting to come in, as were preliminary forensics from the murder site. Bishop had been killed with a 7.62 millimeter shot from a rifle. Long range. Sam Schumer’s story was that Mittag had committed the murder, but if he had he had used a sniper. “How do we think Schumer got his intelligence?” she asked Doug and Ashley.

  “I don’t think you realize how popular Sam Schumer is,” Doug said. “He could start his own revolutionary organization in about two tweets.”

  True enough, and the only way to get any further on it was to talk directly to the man. She stretched out on the sheriff’s leather sofa, one of many items the sheriff had pointed out proudly when she arrived, saying, “Asset forfeiture,” and made the call.

  Schumer picked up quickly, and before she could speak he said, “You finally going to confirm a few things, Rachel?”

  “I’ve called to find out how you talk to the Massive Brigade.”

  A laugh from his side. “You think those guys speak to me?”

  “How else did you learn about Martin Bishop’s murder before we did?”

  “Rachel,” he said, turning to the professor’s voice that he sometimes used on his show, signifying that it was time to dumb things down. “I learned long ago not to tie myself to a single source in any government department. Particularly when my one source doesn’t like me anymore.”

  “What makes you think I don’t like you, Sam?”

  “I like you, too. But who do you think told me, back in March, that Martin Bishop’s merry band was preparing for terrorist action?”

  She remembered Schumer’s anxious “exposé” on Bishop, which she’d always taken for a business move—his ratings had been on a downward slide. “I assumed you’d made that up.”

  “I’m a journalist, Rachel. You don’t have to agree with my conclusions, but I don’t make these things up. And since you don’t talk to me anymore, I’ve had to lean on my ace in the hole.”

  “Who is…?”

  “Who is confidential. You know that.”

  The conversation stalled because they both knew what they wanted but neither had come with anything to offer. When she hung up, it was dark outside, and the asset-forfeiture sofa was feeling extremely comfortable. She closed her eyes and didn’t open them when the phone rang again. She just brought it to her ear, saying, “Proulx.”

  “He called,” said Janet Fordham.

  Rachel’s eyes snapped open, and she sat up. “Does he know how Bishop died?”

  Janet sounded flustered a moment. “A sniper. He doesn’t know if it was Mittag’s doing. But listen—”

  “How does he not know?”

  “Forget that,” Fordham snapped. “It’s not important. What’s important is that we know where Mittag is. And we have enough time to get him.”

  22

  THEY HADN’T seen the white pickup since fleeing Lebanon, and as far as they knew it hadn’t followed them. Ben, at the wheel, was scared, and then angry—he was unsteady enough that Kevin nearly offered to drive before thinking better of it. After a half hour, Bishop’s friend, Ingrid, started talking and crying. She was pregnant, it turned out, and this wasn’t how she’d imagined her child’s future. Kevin remained quiet; he had no idea what had occurred back in Lebanon, and he knew he didn’t have enough information to figure it out. All he could do was hold on tight and listen.

  Ben eventually calmed, processing what had happened, while Ingrid used fast-food napkins to wipe Martin’s blood off her hands. It was clear to Ben that the FBI had done it. One safe house had been closed down, and while they were driving they heard about a second bust in Nephi, Utah. “The Bureau’s closing in,” he said in a rare moment of naked fear. “They’re wiping us all out.”

  Kevin didn’t believe that, if not for moral reasons then for logistical ones—when he’d called Janet Fordham from East Texas he’d had no idea where they were heading, and he doubted she could have gotten satellite coverage so quickly. Still, he had no other theories to present, so he just agreed with Ben. And Ingrid said nothing. She kept turning to look at Kevin, as if measuring him with her eyes, until they topped off the tank in St. Paul, Nebraska. Ben went around the back of the station to have a piss while Kevin filled up. Ingrid leaned against the car and said, “How far away were you?”

  “What?” Kevin asked.

  “From Diane Trumble. When you shot her.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, checking the scrolling numbers on the gauge to hide his expression. “Half mile?”

  “Pretty precise,” she said, then turned away as Ben emerged from around the corner of the building, hiking up his pants. She said nothing more, and neither did Kevin. But it had been a loaded question, and the asking of it added a fresh tension to the car that Ben never noticed until, about a half hour beyond the South Dakota border, Ingrid reached into her jacket and placed a Smith & Wesson revolver on her lap. “Going hunting?” he asked.

  “Asking a question, and I want to be sure I’m heard.”

  From the backseat, Kevin saw Benjamin’s eyes flash at him in the rearview. “Shoot,” said Benjamin. “So to speak.”

  She turned to place her knees against the back of her seat, so she was facing both men, wedged against the door. Gun in hand. To Benjamin: “Did you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Martin. Did you kill him?”

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  She waved the gun at Kevin. “You’ve got a sharpshooter right there. You’ve got others, too. The FBI’s not magical; they’re not omniscient—if they were we would’ve been caught weeks ago. The simplest solution is usually the right one.”

  Benjamin stayed cool, driving steadily, but Kevin didn’t like the sight of the gun in this small space. Shooting either of them would deafen them all, for one thing. He saw a fiery crash in their future. So he said, “That might be simple, but it makes no sense. As soon as everyone finds out Martin’s dead the Brigade’s going to splinter. You know it. Ben knows it. This is the end of us.”

  But Ingrid had already considered that. “You know what Martin told me when we heard about those assassinations you guys pulled off? He said, It’s over. Everything he’d worked for, it died the moment you pulled the trigger. And it’s his fault,” she said, swinging the barrel toward Benjamin. “What do you think we were f
ighting about back there? The fact that you assholes have turned the Massive Brigade into a terrorist organization. Now tell me again that Ben had no reason to kill Martin.”

  Kevin leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes, remembering that moment in the window, above Key Biscayne, squeezing the trigger, hoping without hope that he would maim but not kill the congresswoman. All that, to find out that it hadn’t even been endorsed by Martin Bishop? It was hard to control the rage bubbling inside his chest. “Answer the woman, motherfucker. Did you kill him?”

  “Hell, no! Of course not. I about shit my pants back there.”

  Kevin felt very warm. The car seemed to close in on him, and the only way out of it was for him to say, “Fuck,” and slap the side of Benjamin’s head.

  The car swerved, Benjamin said, “Ow! Shit!” and Ingrid held on to her seat to avoid tumbling. Kevin looked out the window. He didn’t want any more of any of this. He didn’t even give a damn when Benjamin once again blamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation for Martin Bishop’s murder. Kevin no longer gave a shit.

  By the time they reached the farmhouse outside Watertown, South Dakota, they had gone back over it all, Ingrid directing the conversation, and Kevin learned that violence had been a point of disagreement from the very start of the Massive Brigade. Benjamin, unsurprisingly, had insisted that revolution was by necessity violent, and to think otherwise was liberal weakness. Martin agreed that the threat of violence was necessary, but actual violence would undermine their support among the masses. “Our disappearance was an act of self-preservation, but Martin knew we could turn it into a statement,” Ingrid said. “And when we returned, however we returned, all of us would carry with us the threat of vanishing again. Fear would surround us as we organized in our hometowns, preparing to shut things down. That was where we were heading. We were going to bring the country to a standstill. And it would’ve worked, until you,” she said to Benjamin, “fucked it all up.”

  Benjamin said nothing; his cheeks were scarlet.

  At the Watertown safe house, amid fields of soybeans glowing in the sunset, the news of Martin’s death had just dropped, and while Sam Schumer was pushing the story that Benjamin had killed him, the local radio station was less adamant, and so, by now, was Ingrid. When they gathered with the other nine followers in the kitchen, Kevin noticed that there was a telephone on the wall with its number writ large in Sharpie on the handle. But there was no way he was going to be able to use it without being seen.

  “We need to take a few days,” Ingrid said after she and Benjamin had told them the story of Lebanon. “We have to reassess and figure out what the best way forward is. Mistakes have been made, and Martin is dead, but we aren’t. We know enough to do whatever we want; we just have to agree on what that is.”

  “What does that even mean?” asked a Korean guy on the verge of tears.

  “It means that we stay smart,” said Ben, but over the course of the drive his voice had lost much of its natural authority. So Ingrid clarified:

  “It means we act. We don’t react.”

  A few people cleared out so Benjamin could get his own room upstairs. No matter his mistakes, he was a founder. Kevin sat on the bed, watching him unload his pockets, filling a bare set of shelves with car keys, wallet, and the zip-lock with his phone and battery. Ben was even starting to sound contrite. “What do you think, man? Do you think it was the wrong way to go?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “Always.”

  “First of all, you’re an asshole for making me think Florida was the accepted plan.” Ben didn’t reply, so he continued. “But yeah. I think it was too early. The people aren’t ready for bloodshed yet.”

  “When will they be ready?”

  “Maybe they need more education. Maybe they won’t be ready until we’re dead and gone.”

  “You’re a ray of fucking sunshine,” Benjamin said, and grinned. “Use my bed if you like. I’m going to go do some team building. I might get drunk, too.”

  “Do it,” Kevin said, and watched him leave. He waited five full minutes, listening to people moving around in the hallway, then grabbed the zip-lock, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, and left the room.

  Downstairs, he ran into two housemates, Michael and Keira. “Where you going?” asked Keira.

  “Fresh air. Back in twenty.”

  Michael perked up. “Company?”

  Kevin raised his hands. “Need some alone time.”

  “I feel ya.”

  He paused just outside the door, looking up the gravel driveway that stretched into the dusky fields, and took a breath. There were no houses for as far as his eye could see, just a blue barn to the east and small islands of trees here and there. He was, finally, alone. He walked, consciously meandering since he knew someone would be watching from the house, and worked his way in the gathering darkness toward a copse of ash trees carefully planted for privacy. Once he was among them, he looked back across the field. No one was following. He took out the zip-lock and assembled the Nokia quickly. He powered it up. He dialed.

  “Mother?”

  This time he didn’t cry, though he did feel the urge. He told her that Mittag was with him, but he didn’t know how long he would stay. Janet Fordham told him to sit tight. She told him they would be on their way, but he knew all that. He didn’t need to be told. What he needed was something else:

  “Did we do it? Did we kill Bishop?”

  “No,” she told him. “Of course not.”

  Leaves crunched, and he turned to find Ingrid standing ten yards away, just visible in the shadows. He hung up and dropped the phone into the zip-lock. He was about to tell her the story he’d prepared, that after the whole experience he’d called his mother out of weakness, but he saw the look on her face, and he knew that she had heard too much of the conversation.

  He was already hurtling toward her when she turned and ran toward the house. She only made it ten steps before he tackled her into the leaves. She hit hard, the wind gasping out of her. He turned her over, holding her wrists together with one hand, the other hand gripping her mouth. Her eyes, wide and bloodshot, swiveled in their sockets.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’m going to save your life. Do you understand?”

  She made no reaction.

  “Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “Very soon,” he said, “everyone in the house is going to be taken away. There’s nothing to do about that. You have no control over it. What you do have control of is yourself, and your baby. You stay, you’re giving birth to that child in a federal penitentiary, and then your kid’ll be taken from you. You don’t want that. So you’re going to leave.”

  She knitted her brows, as if she wanted to question that, so he said, “I’m going to take my hand off. Scream, and I break your neck.”

  Carefully, he took his hand off her mouth. She bit on her lips, trying to get blood back into them.

  “It’s simple,” he went on. “You walk in that direction.” He pointed west. “And I go back to the house. You have money?”

  She nodded.

  “You just go.”

  After a brief moment, she said, “Why?”

  Why, indeed? “Maybe I like you, Ingrid. Maybe I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  “When are they coming?”

  “In less than fifteen minutes, the first ones will surround the place,” he said, though he had no idea how long it would take them to get there. He just needed to get her moving. “Which is why you have to go now. You wait, and they’ll pick you up before you can reach the next house.”

  The argument was playing out in her head; he could see that.

  “You said it yourself,” he told her. “This isn’t what you imagined for your child.”

  That seemed to register. He stepped back and helped her up. She pulled her hair back out of her face and gave him a look. “Did you really shoot that congresswoman?”

  He nodded.

 
“Maybe you’re more of a believer than you think,” she said, and walked westward without looking back. He waited until she had crossed the field and was out of sight. Then he turned back to the house.

  23

  SINCE HER plane had been recalled to Headquarters, Rachel waited at the county airport for Denver to send a Cessna six-seater. She checked in with Ashley, who had asked the consulate in Sydney to check on Laura Anderson at her nursing home in Brisbane, and the report had just come in. Though Anderson’s signature on various company documents had been authenticated, she had never heard of Magellan Holdings, nor, in fact, Martin Bishop. “They used her,” Ashley said.

  “But who is they?”

  “Exactly. Sydney’s checking on family connections, but she’s spent all her life Down Under. Worked her last fifteen years, until 2004, for the UN in New South Wales. Other than that, there’s nothing raising any red flags.”

  “The United Nations?” Rachel asked, remembering James Sullivan, the man she’d met in 2009 in San Francisco, the same man who had warned Bishop to flee that party in Montclair, calling from the corner of Forty-First and Second, a block from the UN headquarters.

  “Coincidence,” Ashley said, reading her mind. “The UN doesn’t have the funding to waste on American politics. Do you know how broke they are?”

  Rachel didn’t, but she also didn’t put much faith in coincidence these days. “Forward me whatever they sent you,” she said.

  Before disconnecting, Ashley hesitantly asked, “So this is it? You’re really going to close down the Brigade tonight?”

  “Let’s wait and see,” she said, because she wasn’t allowing herself to feel excitement. She’d dug in, prepared for a long war, and it was unimaginable that, in the end, she would face only a couple of skirmishes.

  Over the three hours she spent in the air, she conferred with the team already on the ground in Watertown, which had eyes on Mittag’s new safe house. “We’ve verified three males, two women,” said Luis Gonzales, the SWAT commander, “but there are more.”

  “Anyone leaves, pick them up quietly, out of sight of the house. I’ll be touching down in…” She checked her watch. “Two hours.”