The Middleman

by Olen Steinhauer

  During those first hours, as they had gradually escaped the congestion of Westchester County and crossed through New Jersey headed west, Mary had been chatty. She was an intern at Montefiore in the Bronx, a person used to the sight of damaged humanity. “And blood,” Mary told her. “Not at first—when I first observed an operation I seriously considered changing my major to gender studies.” But her parents had forced her to stay on track, and by now she was over being resentful—she was proud of what she did.

  “So why this?” Ingrid asked.

  “I’m proud of what I do, not proud of how this country and the drug companies run my profession. And without good doctors, the Revolution will burn out before it’s gotten started.”

  “Revolution?”

  “Well, right now we’re just trying not to get arrested.”

  “I see.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Why this?” Mary asked.

  Ingrid mulled over that, because though later she would be able to describe the cause and effect that had led her to this car, so soon after her escape the only answer she had was “Because this is the only thing that makes sense to me.”

  “Foreclosure Lane,” Mary said now as they cruised down an unlit, pockmarked Chicago street lined with dilapidated, abandoned row houses half obscured by overgrown postage-stamp yards. The toddler-high grass and boards over the doors brought to mind postapocalyptic movies, Nature coming back to consume the works of Man. And it was hot, the city heat settling into her even with the windows down. Mary pulled up to one of the rougher-looking houses and killed the engine. Unlike the others, this door was unblocked, and there was dim light coming from deep inside, glinting off the jagged edges of a broken window.

  “You can go in,” Mary said.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “Each of us has a role,” Mary told her. “Right now mine is to go from point A—here—to point B.”

  “Where is point B?”

  “Your role is to enter that house. What you do from there? It’s not up to Martin. Not up to me. Not up to anyone, just you. Remember that.”

  Ingrid exhaled, only now in the silence hearing that music was coming from the house—short stabs of punk rock, a female voice shouting accusations.

  Mary started the engine, and Ingrid got out. She wanted to say something else, to thank Mary for the ride, maybe, anything to keep their connection alive a little longer—but the car was already pulling away, heading to another stop where another naïve American would be waiting to vanish from his or her life.

  Then she was alone.

  She took a moment to breathe in the faint smell of exhaust and burned tires, then walked through the chain-link gate, through the high weeds, and up a few spongy steps to an aluminum screen door. She didn’t know if she should knock or just enter. Then she spotted a rusty doorbell. She pressed it and heard, through the faint thrashing of guitars and wild horns, a happy three-tone melody. After ten agonizing seconds, the door jerked open, and she was faced with a shirtless, finely muscled black man, shiny with sweat, eyes bloodshot.

  “You Ingrid?” he asked, though it sounded like an accusation.

  She nodded.

  He looked out past her to the dark, empty street, then pushed open the squeaky screen door. “C’mon, then.”

  She, too, glanced at the street, hesitant, before stepping inside. The light and music came from a back room. These two front rooms were barren, the old wallpaper scratched and marred by patches of water damage.

  “I’m Reggie, by the way.” He was smiling and sticking out his hand, so she took it. His handshake was strong and quick. He led her to the back room, where, illuminated by a single floor lamp beside the kind of old boom box she hadn’t seen since the nineties, Martin Bishop set aside a laptop and rose from a foldout chair, smiling at her.

  “Oh, Christ,” she said without thinking. “It’s good to see you.”

  She was surprised but relieved by the way he embraced her. After her long journey the hug felt right. “You made it,” he said into her ear. Then they separated, and he offered her a chair. Was she hungry? They had pizza in the kitchen. He asked about her journey, and she praised Mary in the way you praise an employee to her boss.

  “And … David?”

  “Let’s not talk about him.”

  She couldn’t tell if Martin approved or not. Then she caught herself—why would it matter either way? Not up to anyone, just you, as Mary had said.

  “And you’re sure about this?” he asked. When she gave him a look, he raised his hands. “It’s just that you’re going to be living rough. At this point, all you’ve done is take a break from your life, and you can step right back into it. Once you stay, you’ve made a commitment. That’s how the Feds will see it. You stay, and you’re on their lists.”

  “How about you tell me what the plan is?”

  He bit his lip, hesitant.

  “If you don’t think you can trust me, then okay. Then I’m leaving. Because by showing up, I’m trusting you, and I’m too old to go into an unrequited relationship.”

  He smiled and rubbed his face. “There is no plan, not really. We had to get all our people out of harm’s way. It’s not like we wanted to disappear.”

  She was surprised. “I thought that was part of the master plan.”

  His smile grew, and he shook his head. “It’s what Ben wanted. He’s been pushing for us to move underground for months. He set up the whole communication structure, the safe houses, the triggers. But using that—actually performing our vanishing act—that was a defensive move. But Ben’s happy. He’s been vindicated.”

  It was something to wrap her head around, and with this knowledge her own escape lost some of its luster. It wasn’t a sprint to something but a panicked flight. She said, “How many are there?”

  “A few hundred.”

  “Hundreds?” she asked. “Just vanished, like me?”

  He nodded. “That missile launcher they found? It’s not ours. The Feds planted it in order to arrest me and Ben. We were lucky—a friend called to warn me. First arrest us, then everyone. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this country’s been turning into a police state for years.”

  “That’s it?” she asked. “You get hundreds of people to drop out of their lives, but you’re not going to use them for anything?”

  “We’ve got some ideas.”

  “Such as blowing up buildings?”

  “There are more poetic ways of making a point.”

  What could he be thinking of? “Mass strikes?”

  “Sure. Or maybe it’s as simple as disappearing and then, all at once, reappearing.”

  She thought about that. Hundreds of people vanishing for weeks or months and then, one day, showing up again. “It would depend on what they said when they returned.”

  “And what if they said nothing?”

  “What?” she said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe it is, but then again maybe it’s not.”

  Reggie, eating cold pizza in the kitchen, said, “Martin?”

  “You think on it,” he said, then left to join Reggie at the counter, where they huddled over a large map. Beside the map lay a revolver.

  She turned to the windows that gave way to blackness, thinking of hundreds of vanished people reappearing, mute … and then what?

  On a doorframe she saw pencil lines notated with dates that had marked the growth of a child up to about four feet. Standing there, it didn’t occur to her that maybe the family had moved to another, better neighborhood; she could only imagine that the family had been evicted. Children weren’t only suffering in Nigeria, she thought. They were suffering all over.

  21

  “DIDN’T THAT strike you as weird?” Rachel asked.

  “What?”

  “That Martin didn’t have a plan. He’d gathered four hundred people and squirreled them away around the country. Yet he didn’t know what to do with them.”
>
  “Yeah,” Ingrid said, lightly stroking Clare’s head. “But their first responsibility was to save everyone. For months they’d heard the rhetoric on television. All those accusations. They were being labeled terrorists. It was just a matter of time before you guys started rounding them up.”

  Rachel shook her head. “Sure, the media was blowing up, but the Bureau wasn’t. We weren’t going to move against the Massive Brigade until we believed they were going to do something. Once we found the missile launcher we knew we had to move.”

  “It wasn’t their missile launcher.”

  “Well, Ingrid, it was somebody’s. And, no—we didn’t plant it. Do you know who called to tell us to look in that storage space? Her name was Holly Rasmussen, and she was a friend of Mittag’s.”

  Kevin shifted, and Ingrid glared at Rachel. “Okay,” she said, but her face became more reflective, as if the Holly Rasmussen news meant something.

  Rachel went on. “So don’t tell me there was no plan in the works. The missile launcher was part of the plan, and even if not everybody was on board, July 4 was, too.” She turned to Kevin. “Is this really the story you wanted me to hear?”

  Kevin shrugged. “Maybe you want to let her finish.”

  Rachel’s leg was acting up again, and immobility wasn’t helping. So she limped over to a wall and stretched the leg out. The pain rose and then subsided. She nodded at Ingrid. “Okay, then. Go on. What more did Martin Bishop tell you?”

  Ingrid seemed amused by Rachel’s irritation. She said, “Nothing, yet. He had to go somewhere, and Reggie drove me west, to Montana. It took two days, but we didn’t stop. Drove in shifts.”

  “You just handed yourself over to this stranger.”

  “That’s what trust is, Special Agent.”

  Rachel didn’t reply.

  “Lolo, Montana, a stone’s throw from the Idaho border. A log cabin in the mountains. Sixteen people, young people, and they went by the names George and Mary. Most of them were scared, you could tell. They didn’t know what to do next, so they stuck to a schedule. Chores, firing practice, group talk sessions. Most of them were peaceful, though there were some exceptions. George from Albuquerque, an economics grad student. Albuquerque George wanted to ride into Lolo and take over the town by force, establish a beachhead. ‘One city at a time,’ he liked to say.”

  “And how did the others react to that idea?” Rachel asked.

  “They didn’t. All ideas were on the table. Though I did point out to him that Martin wouldn’t be on board, and Reggie agreed. He and I were the only ones who had spoken with Martin. To the others, he was a face on a screen or words on a web page.”

  “He was an idea,” David said, his first words in a while.

  “Yeah,” she said, looking back at him. “He was an idea.”

  22

  DESPITE ALBUQUERQUE George’s obvious disapproval, Ingrid left her Smith & Wesson in the truck. “It should never leave your side,” he said.

  “This doctor’s an ally, right?”

  “Yes, but who knows about the people around her?”

  “There’s a time and place for everything,” she told him as she got out. “One day you’ll be old enough to understand that.”

  During the hour’s drive from the safe house to the little clinic in the middle of nowhere, he’d played country music and, instead of asking why she needed to see a doctor, lectured her on the difference between Keynesian economics and the Stockholm School, and how both were doomed to fail. “Once we’ve dealt the big blow to the system, someone’s going to have to come up with something else.”

  “The big blow?” she asked.

  “When we crush it.”

  Ingrid wondered how George thought their little band of outcasts would bring down a two-hundred-year-old system that had been bought into by 320 million Americans. That was a future discussion. As Waylon Jennings sang about some good ol’ boys never meanin’ no harm, they parked in front of a little block of building with a weathered sign that said WOMEN’S CLINIC. When she opened the door he said, “Don’t forget your gun.”

  The sight of Dr. Hernandez—a bald woman with huge brown eyes and a lab coat, tattoos emerging from under her sleeves, no older than thirty—filled her with anxiety. The ultrasound was already set up in the back room. “You’re nervous,” said Dr. Hernandez. “Don’t be. Women have been doing this a very long time.” Then she showed off the most beautiful smile Ingrid had ever seen.

  She’d spent four days with strangers like George whose time was filled with intellectual adrenaline, self-righteous anger, and little splatters of utopian hope, everything seasoned with the fear of capture. The safe house was rich with emotion, but only the strident emotions of radical debate and sudden paranoia. It was refreshing to simply fall in love with a smiling face.

  “See that?” Dr. Hernandez asked, and Ingrid looked at the fuzzy screen. Nothing but static. The doctor adjusted the probe, pushing it through a puddle of clear gel on Ingrid’s belly. “There,” she said, now touching the monitor, and Ingrid really could see it, just barely. Oblong head, curved back, fragile extremities …

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Would you like to know the sex?”

  Ingrid nodded.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  The doctor hesitated. “Well, your life is different now, isn’t it?”

  “You could say that.”

  “You’ll be moving around a lot. I don’t know what you’ll be doing each time you reach a place—I don’t want to know—but I’m guessing it could be strenuous.” Dr. Hernandez was a sympathizer, but not even sympathizers wanted to know the secrets and methodologies.

  “What’s your point?”

  Dr. Hernandez settled her hands in her lap. “Do you want to keep the baby? If you don’t, I won’t tell you anything else, and I’ll take care of it right here, right now. It’s your choice.”

  An hour later, clutching a paper bag with a printout of the inside of her belly and a big bottle of pills, Ingrid climbed down from the pickup truck and thanked George for the ride. In reply, he opened the glove compartment and handed over her pistol.

  As he drove around the back to where they kept the cars under a shelter of leafy trees and green tarp, she approached the ruggedly beautiful cabin that overlooked Lolo Creek Road. In the distance, higher up in the mountains, she could hear her housemates shooting at their targets, playing army. She’d been up there herself, learning to use the Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm that she’d been presented on Day 2 by Mary—real name Yelena—the unofficial house mother.

  Reggie had moved on to other parts of America, and she hadn’t seen Martin since Chicago and the boom box that had been playing, she learned, a band called the Downtown Boys. Though her new companions were welcoming, Lolo Creek didn’t feel like a destination. It felt like a pit stop on the way to somewhere—both metaphorically and literally. They shot guns and made vague and sometimes outrageous plans to export the Revolution outside their cabin. It reminded her of the conversations at Bill and Gina’s parties. But the devil was in the difference. At Lolo Creek, they were all fugitives, and because of that their conversations, no matter how outlandish, had the ring of possibility.

  She was in the kitchen boiling a pot of twenty eggs when Albuquerque George returned. “You never told me how it went with the doctor.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “What are those drugs she gave you?”

  “Prenatal vitamins.”

  “Oh,” he said, then blinked. “Oh, shit.”

  He was the first person she’d told, and the flash of worry in his face reminded her of Dr. Hernandez’s concern. She was bringing a baby into a world where fugitives shot at trees, and eventually their talk of revolt might actually turn into action. George’s face said what the doctor had been too polite to ask: Are you fucking crazy?

  Maybe, yes.

  23

  SHE’D LIVED at the house for six days when Martin
came on June 27. The others fell over themselves trying to get an audience with him, but Ingrid could see that what they really wanted was reassurance. They wanted to know what they were supposed to be doing. Martin was trying out his disappearance-and-reappearance idea, and he asked what they thought would happen if all of them returned to their homes on the same day and said nothing.

  “Say nothing?” Albuquerque George demanded. “Then what do you think’s gonna happen? Nothing! This is bullshit.”

  Martin didn’t defend his idea, just looked around for more reactions. Mary from South Carolina shook her head. “Well, first of all, it would be a media sensation. Every local station would carry it, and the national media. Then they’d ask us questions: Where were you? More importantly: What are you planning?”

  “But no one says a thing,” Ingrid said.

  Mary nodded. “What will they think? They’ll think we are planning something.”

  George shook his head. “And you know what they’ll do? They’ll arrest us all. Which is why we disappeared in the first place!”

  “Will they?” Mary asked.

  “They can’t,” Ingrid said. “None of us have broken the law.” She turned to Martin, who was watching them hash it out. “They’ll be terrified.”

  Mary nodded. “And there’ll be nothing they can do but live with their fear.”

  Ingrid was finally able to see it, that by returning and saying nothing they would be able to create a kind of terror that the elite had never felt before. Because unlike demonstrations that filled the streets of American cities, this threat would be invisible, something that could not be monitored, because it remained locked away in these young people’s heads. And the media would be Massive’s ally, whipping up a fury of breaking news excitement that would set the country on edge.