The Middleman

by Olen Steinhauer

  Only now did Rachel realize that David had fallen asleep in his chair. He blinked, coming to.

  “Can you cook up some formula?” Ingrid asked. “My boobs are running on fumes.”

  He pushed himself to his feet and wandered off. Soon they heard a radio playing in the kitchen—NPR morning news. Rachel knew without being able to see outside that the sun was rising. She turned to Ingrid. “So you arrived in Lebanon, Kansas. And Martin was killed.”

  “Yes,” she said, raising Clare to her shoulder and patting her back. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking about Berlin or Spain. All I could see was Ben, the fucking idiot who had ruined everything, and how he would benefit from Martin’s death. The whole movement would be his. He’d be the one giving orders. He could burn everything down as he saw fit. I was blinded by rage. It wasn’t until we’d gotten to Watertown that I remembered Martin’s story about this FBI guy—Jakes, I guess. He’d killed eighteen people in Berlin, and Martin knew all about it.”

  Rachel rubbed her sore thigh, remembering what Jakes had done in Watertown. “So you thought the FBI killed him. Specifically, Owen Jakes.”

  “Yes.”

  Kevin stood and paced, swinging his arms to shake off the anxiety. “But eight years had passed since Berlin,” he said. “You think Jakes couldn’t have taken him out plenty of times before then? Like, before he became a star?”

  It was a valid point. “Maybe,” Rachel said, “Bishop really did have a protector.” She thought of James Sullivan, watching over Martin Bishop for eight long years, even calling to warn him to flee this very house … until, in the middle of a wheat field, his protection finally failed. She still didn’t know how Jakes could have placed a sniper in that Kansas field on such short notice. And she didn’t know who James Sullivan was, or what had happened between him and Bishop in Spain. There was so much she didn’t know. She rubbed her forehead and asked, “What did you do then, in Watertown?”

  When she began speaking, Ingrid switched to bouncing Clare on her thigh. “I went to the bathroom to take my vitamins, and that’s when I started to feel the walls closing in. I rushed out, ran across the field, and sat under a tree. Had myself a good cry. Look, it wasn’t just Martin. It was everything. I’d thrown away my life to join something that, in no time at all, had unraveled. I had to deal with that alone. Then I heard this guy,” she said, nodding at Kevin, “tramping through the leaves. I stayed where I was. I heard him make that call. Mother, he called her. ‘Benjamin Mittag is here.’ And then: ‘Did we do it? Did we kill Bishop?’ And I knew. This guy with a cell phone and a zip-lock bag, he was a Fed. He was responsible for everything. So, yes, once he sent me off, I tried hard and remembered the phone number from the kitchen. I found a pay phone and gave him up to Ben. It didn’t matter that I hated Ben by that point, that he’d done more damage to the Brigade than Kevin ever had. I wanted to make life hard on the people who had killed Martin and those eighteen kids in Berlin.”

  When she looked at Kevin, that old hatred had returned to her face, and with the baby in her arms it was an incongruous sight. Rachel wanted to say something, to mediate between them in some way, but that wasn’t her role. She wasn’t here to comfort them but to learn as much as she could.

  “Where did you go afterward?”

  “East, back to Flint. I hadn’t been since high school. I still had cash from Martin’s bundle, and that lasted me a couple of months while I looked for a job. Enough to keep me in bottled water—I wasn’t going to drink Michigan lead. I found a restaurant that wouldn’t hassle me about Social Security numbers, and I thought I was doing a good job. I visited Planned Parenthood for checkups. No one knew where I was. And then—this was in late November, I was about ready to burst—my landlord called me at work and told me that two FBI agents had shown up looking for me.” She looked at Rachel. “You’ve heard of Sarah Vale and Lyle Johnson?”

  Almost a whisper, Rachel said, “Yes.”

  Ingrid nodded, as if she’d expected this answer. “I went back to Montana and found Dr. Hernandez. She took me through the rest of my term.” She looked down at Clare, who was starting to fuss. “David,” Ingrid called. “The formula about ready?”

  “Almost!”

  “So once she was born,” Rachel speculated, “you went back to David?”

  She shook her head. “Kevin showed up.”

  Both women looked at him, and he shrugged. “I knew she hadn’t gone home, even after the amnesty was announced. So I asked Fordham for a peek at the debriefs. This one guy from Albuquerque talked about driving Ingrid to a clinic in Montana. I followed the clues.” He looked over at Ingrid, and there was warmth in the look. “She wouldn’t be safe staying with me. That’s why we contacted David, and it turned out the Ferrises had left him their keys when they moved to Florida.”

  “We know it can’t last,” Ingrid said. “Bill and Gina will come back eventually. But we were waiting for something to change. We thought that once the report was released the story might come out on its own.”

  Kevin cleared his throat. “Then you showed up. Turned out you were the change.”

  Rachel didn’t like the way both of them looked at her, as if by entering their lives she had brought solutions. She hadn’t. She’d simply been trying to stay alive and had been sucked into a world of conspiracy theories that, true or not, were still not verifiable. What could be done next? What could be done to save Rachel’s life, to keep Ingrid and her baby safe, and, ideally, expose the truth behind the story she’d just heard? Was that even doable? Or was it better for them all to try to relocate beyond the reach of Owen Jakes and his two smiling minions?

  Christ, how had she ended up here?

  She’d opened her mouth, ready to speculate on their options, when David returned from the kitchen, a towel over his forearm but no baby bottle in sight. His lips trembled from nerves, or maybe just fatigue. “The FBI just released the report on Massive.”

  Rachel looked at Kevin, and Kevin said, “Looks like there’s change all over the place.”

  THE END OF ANALYSIS

  THURSDAY, MARCH 22, TO MONDAY, MARCH 26, 2018

  1

  AFTER LANDING at Berlin Tegel early Thursday morning and showing his passport to a nonplussed German officer, Kevin used cash to buy a prepaid credit card and a throwaway phone with data service from the airport gift shop. He stepped outside to smoke and set up the phone, pulling up a Russian hosting site he’d already used to create an email account with fake information in the account’s NAME and FROM lines. Then he typed up a friendly but brief email, signed it with Owen Jakes’s name, and sent it to the address for Fay Levinson of the embassy’s FBI legal attaché office.

  From there it was a matter of slowing down, shuffling in the line leading up to the Hertz counter, then meandering through Berlin’s midmorning traffic to the center of town. He was struck, like most first-timers in Europe, by how narrow the road was, girded by businesspeople on bicycles who rode beneath a slate-gray sky. He checked the time—forty minutes had passed since he’d sent the spoofed email, which was just about enough time to be sure she’d read the message. He parked in front of a DM drugstore and dialed the number he’d found online.

  An embassy operator picked up, and he asked to be connected to Fay Levinson’s line. Who was calling? He gave his name, and after three rings he heard a lilting voice say, “Levinson.”

  “Hi, Fay—listen, I don’t know if you got Owen’s email—”

  “Was just reading it. Kevin Moore?”

  “That’s me. Just need five minutes of your time.”

  “Are you in town?”

  “Just landed,” he said. “Are you free in, say, a half hour? Or is that pushing it?”

  “I can set aside five minutes for Owen.”

  “Terrific.”

  “See you soon, then,” she said, and hung up.

  Christ, but that had been easy. Too easy, perhaps, and maybe before he got there she would call and wake up Jakes—it was three thirt
y in the morning back home—and the whole ruse would fall apart, ending with the embassy marines shackling him in some basement room.

  He’d already been taken aback by his good luck at JFK, where despite the tension in his chest he’d gotten through the chaotic security without incident, and no one had cornered him at the gate before boarding. He eventually realized that, unlike Rachel, he’d signed away his right to free speech, and there was no reason to think anyone from the Hoover was tracking his movements.

  The flight had given him time to think, and time to ask himself if he really knew what he was doing. The truth was that he usually acted from instinct. Back in November, when he’d searched in vain through the detainee lists for Ingrid Parker, he’d been moved by an unnamed instinct. Had he fallen for a woman he’d only known for a handful of hours, a woman who had tried to kill him?

  He remembered Shonda Jardoin in New Orleans, the youngest of three Creole sisters who’d fallen deep into the heroin underworld out of desperation—five years earlier Hurricane Katrina had left the family penniless. So she, like her sisters, had done what was necessary to survive and even thrive—a character trait he knew well from his own single mother, who had worked herself sick to raise him right. Later, in the hospital, after a rival shoved a knife into his lung, Janet Fordham told him to close down the operation, and he refused, explaining that if he didn’t return Shonda would end up dead. Fordham accused him of being in love. “No,” he told her between painful breaths. “Empathy, not love.” Which was how he felt about Ingrid.

  Fordham, though, hadn’t been convinced. “Don’t fool yourself, Kevin. Empathy is just another word for love.”

  What about Representative Diane Trumble? What had motivated him to follow through with the shooting? Months later, he would run through it all again, finding avenues of escape: sabotaging the car Holly used to drive him to the site; feigning sickness; simply missing entirely. But at the time those ideas had seemed risky, or simply hadn’t occurred to him.

  And now he had been presented with other choices that, eventually, had put him on a plane to Germany. Each step of the way he’d had so many options but had, more often than not, taken the least reasonable-sounding one. What was wrong with him?

  He walked with crowds to reach Pariser Platz, a huge open square full of tourists taking selfies with their backs to the Brandenburg Gate. As he approached the embassy, which a German newspaper had rightly called “ugly but safe,” a uniformed guard asked him his business. Kevin flashed his patented I’m-not-a-threat smile along with his passport. “I’ve got an appointment.” The guard waved him on.

  He made it through security without a problem, leaving his burner in a box, then crossed the circular lobby to reach the front desk, which was staffed by a preternaturally calm woman whose accent sounded suspiciously Canadian. He asked if she could call up to the FBI’s legat office, but as she picked up the phone he heard “Mr. Moore?” and turned to see a white woman with very pink cheeks approaching in a navy blue pantsuit, hand outstretched. “Welcome to Berlin, then.”

  As Fay Levinson walked him to the elevators, they passed a framed Sol LeWitt and a Jasper Johns. He was impressed. “I’m imagining the most ridiculous art heist in history.”

  Levinson grinned. “Don’t think you’re the first.”

  Her windowless third-floor office sat opposite a long room of cubicles that overlooked the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete slabs behind the embassy. “You move up in administration,” she said, “and they steal the natural light from you. Come on.”

  As he took a seat opposite her desk, she closed the door and said, “How are things back home? I heard the protests are winding down now that they can read for themselves that the Bureau isn’t a monster.”

  “It’s only been two days,” he said, reaching again for that guileless smile.

  She matched it. “So Owen’s working on a secondary report?”

  He nodded. “Focusing on Bishop’s history. Berlin, 2009.”

  “You mean the Kommando Rosa Luxemburg.”

  “That’s it.”

  Levinson sighed and rocked her head. “Well. If Owen Jakes wants me to dig back into that, then you know I’ll do it.”

  “He’d appreciate it,” Kevin lied.

  “How is he?”

  “Busy.”

  “I bet,” she said, then started typing on her computer, pulling up the old files.

  Kevin said, “What we’re interested in is after the Kommando blew themselves up. What was the effect here in the embassy? Where did Martin Bishop go? What did he do?”

  She leaned back and put on reading glasses, squinting at her screen. Kevin could see the reflection in her lenses. “Well, first you have to know how it was before the explosion. Relations with the Schröder administration had been rough sailing, but Merkel came in looking for a new way. Despite some awkward shoulder massages, she and W. made friendly, and we were all hoping for a lot of goodwill from the German intelligence agencies. What we didn’t account for was the power of the bureaucracy to override the chancellor’s wishes.”

  Kevin shifted in his seat. “I’m afraid I’m unfamiliar with this part.”

  “Ask Owen; he knows. He suffered through it longer than I did. The real problem was an old Cold Warrior named Erika Schwartz who had taken over foreign intelligence, the BND. She was one of the most virulently anti-American Germans I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.”

  “Was?”

  “Oh, she died a few years ago. Drank like a fish. Certainly didn’t watch her weight.” Levinson shrugged. “But in 2009 she was still going strong and was busy cutting us out of the intelligence pool. We registered our disappointment, but Schwartz had by then convinced Merkel that we weren’t to be trusted any more than we had to be. That bigotry also permeated domestic intelligence—the BfV—and we even lost the right to engage in joint antiterror operations on German soil. It was unbelievable. But then, the Kommando Rosa Luxemburg blew themselves up. That was the Germans’ come-to-Jesus moment. We had been warning them—Owen had been warning them. But Erika Schwartz said otherwise. After the bomb, the BfV finally came back to us.”

  “So you felt the difference.”

  She snorted, a half-laugh. “The difference between their cooperation before and after the bomb was night and day. Everything changed for the better. Owen asked them for something, he got it. We all got what we wanted after that.”

  “I’ll bet that was good for everyone’s career.”

  “You could say that.” Levinson pursed her lips. “More importantly, it was good for our joint security.” She went back to the computer. “But nothing’s ever storybook, is it? In 2013, they discovered we were listening to Merkel’s phone calls, and it all shut down again. They canceled our intelligence-sharing agreement, sent the Agency’s station chief home, compared the NSA to the Stasi, and told us to go fuck ourselves. As if they hadn’t known all along.” She shook her head, then looked at Kevin over the rim of her glasses. “Owen knows it all. I’m still not sure why you had to cross an ocean for this.”

  “I was already coming on other business,” he said, then leaned closer. “Confidentially? Jakes is worried. In DC there’s a leak culture the likes of which we’ve never seen. If it gets out that he’s preparing a secondary report, then he’ll be forced into releasing it. At this point, he doesn’t know what he’s going to find.”

  “You’re telling me he doesn’t trust anyone in his own office?”

  “I suppose he trusts me, but if I access everything from HQ, there’s no way to keep it a secret.”

  “Still,” she said, “it’s a radical move.”

  “Well, you know Owen.”

  Levinson smiled. The story wouldn’t survive a call to Jakes’s office, but if she hadn’t called yet, she wouldn’t until DC woke up. That was all that mattered. She looked at her screen again. “You wanted to know what Bishop did after the explosion.”

  “Yes.”

  “We
ll, I’m afraid we don’t have much. This is who he went to,” she said as she turned the monitor so he could see what she was looking at: a file on a thin-faced woman, blond dreads: ELLI UHRIG. Quickly, he scanned the screen, catching important details: Uhrig’s last known address on Lückhoffstraße, and her phone number. He committed them to memory as Fay explained, “Uhrig wasn’t a KRL member, but she was part of their circle. Lived just down the street from their meeting place. You know that Bishop was outside the apartment when it exploded, yes? Well, he went directly to her.”

  “Any reason other than convenience? That she was nearby?”

  She blinked, as if surprised by what he’d said. “Uhrig,” she said. “Anika Urhig, Bishop’s lover, was her sister.”

  “Right,” he said. “Of course.”

  Levinson turned the screen back to herself. “We interviewed her. So did the Germans. She was a bartender. Budding singer. She didn’t know Martin that well, but she gave him some cash so he could leave town.”

  “And go where?”

  She held up her hands, palms exposed. “I told you we didn’t have much. Sorry you wasted a trip.”

  Kevin leaned back, hands on his knees, and sighed. “Grist for the mill.”

  “Want me to send the paperwork on to Owen?”

  “Can you send it to my address?”

  She cocked her head, squinting, finally showing signs of apprehension. “This is all sort of sudden. I’d rather shoot it to him.”

  “Sure, I get it.”

  “Everything?”

  Kevin didn’t want her to send anything to Owen Jakes. He wanted to leave Levinson’s office and never be spoken of again, but he knew that was beyond the realm of possibility. It was too late, anyway. He knew from that brief squint that as soon as nine, or maybe seven, eastern time rolled around she would be putting in a call to Jakes. There was only one thing to say if he wanted to get out of this building in one piece. “Absolutely. He’ll want everything.”

  2