The Middleman

by Olen Steinhauer

  And now she’d spent the day being reminded of that other life. She’d been asked to spill all of it and then promise to never speak it aloud again. Had she been wrong to blow up at them? Wrong to deny them their little signature? Maybe, but she wasn’t in the mood to judge herself just yet. Tomorrow, or the next day, she would go through it again and, most likely, call Headquarters to ask Johnson or Vale to please send that form for her to sign. She wanted to be as free of this as the Bureau did.

  What troubled her more, though, was that a life reexamined is a source of mystery. She’d been tossed off the case without answers, and by voicing the questions today, they felt more pressing than they’d felt in eight months. Who had funded Martin Bishop before his magical disappearing act? Who killed him with that long-range sniper’s rifle? Why had Jakes pushed for deadly force in the end? And what, really, had Martin Bishop wanted to do with his band of followers?

  Though the questions nagged at her, she knew from experience that every case ended with blank spaces. The Bureau was never all-knowing, and answers were never complete. What you did was paper over holes with a grand theory, finding ways to divert the eye from the flaws. That was what the report would do when it came out next week—decorate and deflect. Nothing new, yet the questions still wouldn’t leave her.

  From her purse, she took out her bottle and popped another dihydrocodeine, then tipped the dreadlocked waiter generously. But instead of getting up to leave she went through her contacts and paused on FORDHAM, JANET. She hadn’t thought much about her until today, remembering her breathless updates on OSWALD. The last time they’d spoken over drinks they’d had a good rapport, both decompressing from the fiasco. Kevin’s had enough, Janet had said. He’s retired to the mountains outside Boulder. He wants to be a lumberjack.

  She sometimes thought about Kevin Moore’s surrender to nature and wondered if she should’ve chosen a similar life, somewhere in upstate New York to be near her mother. But that wasn’t her, never had been. She’d worked too hard for too many years to give it up.

  She scrolled on, passing names that brought on more memories, some good and some not, then paused on one that in this shrine to veganism brought on welcome carnivorous memories. She pressed CALL, and Ashley answered on the third ring. “Rachel? You in town?”

  “Seattle. Just thinking about you. Got a minute?”

  “I’ve got hours. DC traffic is no better than when you were here, and the protests aren’t helping. Don’t know when I’ll get home.”

  “Still giving all your money to Fogo de Chão?”

  “What else would I spend it on? The poor?”

  She’d forgotten Ashley’s dry humor. “Mind if we talk work?”

  “Have we ever talked about anything else, Rachel?”

  It was a slight, but a fair one. She’d never really gotten to know Ashley, or any of her colleagues, during the Massive investigation. “How far did you ever get on Magellan Holdings?”

  She heard the distant sound of honking; then Ashley said, “Beyond Laura Anderson? Not far. We followed the family tree, thinking she’d been chosen by a relative. No kids, only a few living relatives. There was a nephew we were looking at, but he didn’t fit our profiles.”

  “So, nothing.”

  “You worried about the report?” Ashley asked.

  “It’s not mine to worry about anymore. Seattle, remember?”

  Ashley laughed. “Can I join you?”

  Rachel had a thought. “What about co-workers?”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you say that Anderson worked for the UN for … what? Fifteen years?”

  “Yeah, but…” Another car horn—it sounded like Ashley’s. “But why would the UN want to fund some US radicals? Has the West Coast turned you into a conspiracy head?”

  “Just thinking aloud.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s the direction to go. But it sounds like you’re having trouble leaving it be.”

  Rachel remembered those monitors in that chilly barn. Crack, crack, crack. “You’re not?”

  “Erin Lynch keeps me busy. Drug lords. Want to shoot myself.”

  “Take care of yourself, then.”

  “You, too, Rachel. Keep fighting the good fight.”

  7

  DESPITE HER creaky leg, she managed to get out of the restaurant without stumbling. A brisk chill had settled in, and the streetlamps made puddles of light between black sidewalk. Light, dark, light, dark. In her foyer the mailbox presented her with bills, and the elevator clanked and banged on the way up to the ninth floor. The building’s owner had promised a repairman by the weekend, but none of her neighbors were holding their breaths.

  It wasn’t until she’d entered her apartment that she realized something was wrong. The alarm, which she dependably set every morning, was disarmed. That thought barely had time to cross her mind before she felt, against the back of her neck, the movement of air. Instinctively, she dropped to the floor and felt a scratch against the rear of her skull as she kicked backward with her good leg, digging her heel into something—a shin. She rolled against the carpet, finally catching sight of her attacker: a hand holding a syringe; sneakers covered in clear plastic protectors; a green windbreaker; a black balaclava.

  The man was stumbling back, one leg up to keep balance, and without thinking Rachel grabbed his other leg and jerked with all her strength. His arms flailed, leg kicking out, and when he crashed onto his back she plunged a sharp, hard elbow into his groin. A choked gasp of pain. She was up on her good knee by then and dropped herself on top of him, all her weight behind an elbow aimed at his solar plexus. The little air still in his lungs escaped him in a tiny explosion, and he lay stunned, gasping, arms splayed out, the syringe rolling across the hardwood floor. Just enough time for her to scramble up his body and shove her forearm into his throat while her other hand snatched the syringe. She slid it into his carotid artery. His eyes popped open. His mouth opened, too, but he didn’t have enough breath to speak.

  “I’m going to squeeze the plunger if you don’t tell me,” she said. Since she couldn’t read the expression in his masked face, she jiggled the needle; he winced. “Let’s start with who,” she said.

  He managed two syllables. “Don’t … know.”

  “What’s in the syringe?”

  The man blinked, eyes now bloodshot. “Et—or—phine.”

  Now Rachel blinked. A drop of pure etorphine would kill her, but diluted it would knock her out instantly, and deeply. Which version was she holding? His strength was returning; she wouldn’t be able to hold him down much longer. She squeezed the syringe. Once he realized what was happening it was too late. He tried to yell but fell unconscious, his body relaxing before the sound escaped him.

  Her leg hurt like hell.

  She closed her eyes. Counted to twenty. Then checked his pulse.

  He was alive.

  She tugged the balaclava off his sleeping face. Forties, Caucasian, thick eyebrows and a flabby jawline. Gray hair. She tried to steady her breathing, but it was hard, because this was him: early August 2017. An Arlington street corner. A .357 Magnum.

  Though her impulse was to call the police, she changed her mind after searching his body and finding that he carried nothing at all, not even keys, and that the labels had been cut out of his clothes. No—not like an aggrieved Massive Brigade follower coming for revenge. Not that, but …

  Thoughts ran fast and slow in her head, crashing into each other. She closed her eyes, trying to focus on one: Who?

  He said he didn’t know, and she believed it. He was just a hired hand who’d failed back in August and had been sent back to finish the job.

  Why?

  She had nothing. Without one she couldn’t know the other. Who would explain why, and vice versa. But she had neither.

  In her steamy bathroom, she discovered that the tub had been prepared with hot water and a straight razor.

  Oh.

  She threw up in the toilet and cleaned
herself off in the sink, trying not to look at the razor.

  When she came out, patting her face with a hand towel, she noticed that her desk was clean, her laptop gone. Slowly, she walked through the studio, saw where this nameless man had rifled through shelves and opened up books. On the kitchen counter, she saw an open tin of Quaker Oats, and her heart sank. She hurried over and discovered that the Browning pistol she hid there was missing.

  The gun and laptop were nowhere to be found, which meant that either they had been taken by an accomplice or her visitor had put them in his car, still parked someplace nearby …

  But he had no keys on him. Therefore …

  She pounded her forehead three times with her fist.

  Therefore, someone was waiting downstairs for him to return.

  She went back to the man, who was still out cold, and slapped his face. “Hey. Wake up.” But his skin felt cool, and she noticed, looking down, that his pants were wet from a bladder that had relaxed completely. Hesitantly, she placed two fingers under his jaw and waited.

  Tried again.

  Again.

  “Shit.”

  Though only five minutes had passed, it felt like a half hour had trickled by before she pocketed her cash and left the building, wearing the dead man’s windbreaker, hood up. Rain had begun to fall, black puddles reflecting the lights above. She walked quickly, half-hobble, still trying to get her thoughts straight. Light, dark, light, dark. She watched for waiting cars—accomplices, perhaps, or maybe, she thought, the killer’s car took a fingerprint instead of a key—when a parked van ahead of her started up, lights flashing on, then going dark. It pulled out into the steady drizzle and drove slowly past her. As it passed, in the shadowy cabin she caught sight of the green, glowing tip of an e-cigarette, balanced between a woman’s fingers. Then it was gone. She walked faster. From behind, she heard the van stop. She looked back to see red brake lights. Then the white lights of reversal.

  She ran.

  8

  THERE WERE police barricades at the intersection of Fifteenth and Spruce. Beyond the wooden barriers, contained by concrete façades, women and men and children clutched signs as they shuffled toward City Hall, shouting words Rachel couldn’t make out. As she’d driven into Boulder, radio commentators had estimated fifteen thousand; real numbers, they admitted, were hard to come by. On the sidelines, actually witnessing the thoroughfare packed from edge to edge, she knew their estimate was conservative. Slogans bounced in the cool, crisp air:

  TRANSPARENCY NOW!

  OPEN UP THE FILES

  REMEMBER WATERTOWN!

  THE TIME FOR ANALYSIS IS OVER

  It had taken two very long days of driving, crossing Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Wyoming, to reach Colorado, and each mile she’d been plagued by the feeling that Johnson and Vale were in the car right behind her, or were in some control center full of monitors and blinking lights, spying on her through traffic cams she’d somehow missed when plotting her escape. She’d slept once during her journey, five hours of shut-eye parked behind a billboard for Vicodin outside Buhl, Idaho, and for the rest of the journey had sustained herself on convenience-store provisions: energy drinks, microwaveable meats, bagged chips.

  Now, she stood on the tranquil side of the barricades, among locals who, like her, wanted to check the pulse of the city. Whether these spectators were sympathizers or critics, they, and she, hadn’t made the leap to participant. Not yet.

  She backtracked and found a Starbucks identical to the ones she frequented in Seattle, and like those it was packed. On their phones, customers watched live coverage of the march a block away. When she finally reached the counter, she ordered a double espresso from a plump, fuchsia-haired teenager who, as she gave Rachel change, said, “You marching?”

  “I’m just passing through town.”

  “Well, that’s no excuse—is it? If I didn’t have this stupid job I’d be out there screaming with them.”

  “Why?”

  The girl looked as if the question made no sense. “I mean, look around. Is this really the world you want?”

  Though she didn’t reply, Rachel could have, for she’d had two days to wrestle with some of these big questions. She could have said that we’re born into the world; we don’t shape it. We can adjust it and add to it, but thousands of years of history and patriarchy can’t be erased in a single lifetime, not even by a million people in the street; it can only be built upon. Everything is built on the past.

  The same, she guessed, was true of this girl. After sixteen or seventeen years of felt history, her mind wasn’t going to be changed by a stranger on the other side of this counter. So Rachel only thanked her for the coffee and took it outside to the pedestrian street, where she could keep an eye on the car she’d stolen from a long-term lot near the Seattle airport. It had been easier than she’d imagined, waiting for the attendant to step out of his box for a bathroom break and grabbing a fob that led her to a white Chevy Impala. By the time the owner returned from his trip and discovered his car was gone, Rachel would be far away. At least, she hoped so. While she’d cringed at the idea of theft, there had been no other options. She’d only been able to withdraw a thousand dollars, split between two ATMs, before hitting her daily limit. Until she figured out what was going on, her cards were useless to her. As was her phone—her first precaution had been to shut it off and remove the SIM card.

  While waiting for the parking attendant to leave, she’d struggled to get some kind of clarity. Had she misread the situation? Was she jumping out of her skin like the anxious, wild woman her colleagues saw in her? Really—in a city of six hundred thousand, did she really believe Sarah Vale was the only woman who smoked green-tipped electronic cigarettes?

  In that moment, though, the who had felt less important than the what: a man with the labels cut from his clothes—the same one who’d failed to kill her seven months ago; the bathtub scene; the fact that her laptop had already been removed—the laptop that held the fifteen thousand words of her original report, the report that she had just been asked to regurgitate. These were the cornerstones, and she could only build on these facts, which was what she’d done endlessly over the past two days.

  Whatever the truth, in those initial moments she’d known only one thing: to stay still was suicide; she had to move. First on foot, her hobbled run through wet alleyways, then a taxi out to Bellevue, suburb extraordinaire. Two ATMs, then an airport-bound bus in the other direction. Evasive maneuvers in a camera-ridden city like Seattle were nearly useless, though. So now in Boulder she just waited, watching the Impala, filthy from a thousand miles of American dirt. She waited for someone—anyone—to approach it.

  In 2009, while working on her hallowed report on the left, she’d listened to a drug-addled Marxist lay out his evidence for the murderousness of the ruling classes. He cited stories ripped from the web that chronicled chilling deaths that had followed Hillary Clinton from her time as first lady through the beginning of her tenure as secretary of state—men and women who had served the Clintons and either had turned against them or were rumored to be in possession of damning evidence of one kind or another. Despite the drugs, he was a convincing orator, able to lay on questionable rumors at a rate that left the listener lost in a conspiratorial web. She tried attacking him with logic—despite multiple investigations costing millions, not a single charge had come close to being proven—but that only shored up his opinion: It pointed to a cover-up. The original proposition—that the first lady, New York senator, and secretary of state was a murderess—had morphed from a wild accusation in need of facts to a fact that was a litmus test for any documented evidence Rachel might bring up.

  Was she doing the same thing? Was she beginning with a ridiculous proposition—that two Bureau agents had arrived in town to question and then kill her—and looking only at the evidence that might bolster the proposition?

  But what else made sense? The only people who cut the tags from their clothes were profession
als, not aggrieved radicals.

  No—with her life on the line, she didn’t need proof. Suspicion was enough. Possibility led to radical moves: a stolen car, a disassembled phone, and disappearing from her life.

  And now, Boulder.

  She was like one of the deserters who’d gone off to join Martin Bishop. But she wasn’t joining anyone. She was down to $632, alone, standing outside of Starbucks with a now-cold double espresso, staring at her stolen car, waiting for her pursuers to show themselves.

  But after an hour no one did, so after pouring the caffeine down her throat she tossed the cup and walked through the growing crowds back to the car. On the way she saw a young woman in a pink pussyhat, carrying a sign to the demonstration: THE FUTURE IS FEMALE.

  9

  IT TOOK an hour to reach the mountains, and twice she stopped on empty roads deep in the forests to wait five, ten minutes for shadows who never appeared. Eventually, she pulled up in front of a tidy little cabin made of planks and sheet metal. A narrow coal chimney stuck up like a damp cigar. She parked next to a filthy pickup truck with Virginia plates and got out, stepping onto the moist carpet of dead leaves. There were three loose steps leading up to the screen door, and when she rapped on it the doorframe shivered as if ready to fall off.

  “Hey!” she heard, but from behind, and turned to find Kevin Moore, in heavy boots and flannel, climbing out of the woods, a shotgun hanging from a strap over his shoulder. Just like she’d imagined. There had been three Kevin Moores in the Boulder-area telephone directory, and this had been the only one living outside the city limits.

  She raised her hands in surrender, coming down to meet him. “Remember me?”

  “I remember,” he said without breaking stride.

  “How long have you been up here?”

  He took the shotgun off his shoulder and carried it in both hands as he passed her and approached the steps. “Five months, about.”