The Middleman_A Novel

by Olen Steinhauer

  “They was me, and we never did track your car.”

  He shrugged. “The Bureau’s a big place. We both know that. Lots of moving parts that don’t always meet.” He shook his head. “But it still wouldn’t work. Track us to Lebanon and then send in a sniper in … what? An hour, max? I couldn’t see it. But in the car, all I could do was go along with Ben. Ingrid, though—it wasn’t until after we topped off the tank in St. Paul that she accused Ben. He’d used snipers like me to take over the Brigade.”

  “She really believed that?”

  “It’s what made sense to her. I would’ve thought the same thing in her shoes.”

  “And now?”

  “Maybe he did it. Maybe not. Maybe the report will clear everything up.” He took a sip, then licked his lips. “Maybe it’ll muddy the waters even more.”

  12

  AGAIN, RACHEL considered opening up. She might have cornered him here, but they both knew that she didn’t have any kind of authority. He didn’t have to tell her anything. Yet he was telling her a lot. Everything? She couldn’t say, but he was trusting her in a way she was unable to reciprocate. Perhaps his openness was a kind of trap, something to seduce secrets out of her. Who was to say this place wasn’t wired, after all?

  “What does all this mean?” she asked finally. “If the Bureau didn’t kill Martin, then who? Ben? A rival faction in the Brigade?”

  “Far as I could tell, there were only two factions: Martin and Ben.”

  “And Ingrid,” said Rachel, but he didn’t weigh in on that. “So you lean toward her theory, that Ben got rid of him.”

  Kevin downed the last of his whiskey. “I live in the middle of nowhere, Rachel. I’ve made a new career of not leaning toward any theory.”

  She watched him get up to look in the refrigerator. He took out two bottles of Poland Spring and set one in front of her.

  “The tap water up here tastes like sulfur,” he said by way of explanation as he unscrewed his own bottle and drank.

  She let hers be. “Tell me what happened when you got to Watertown.”

  He did, and as he had in that ambulance he told the story with concision, but this time he told more, explaining how Ingrid discovered what he was. “You just let her go,” she said.

  “Like I told you, she’d had enough. That’s why I kept her out of my report.”

  She shook her head, stunned by the stupidity of what he’d done. “She could have ruined the whole thing. All she had to do was walk back inside and tell everyone about you.”

  “What would you have done, Rachel? Strangle her?”

  “You could have tied her up.”

  “I didn’t have any rope.”

  She hesitated, trying to picture the moment from his perspective. What would she have done? Would she have killed Ingrid?

  “Look,” he said, “I did what seemed like my only play. I wasn’t going to murder her—I didn’t have that in me. So I had to commit to something. And it seemed to work. I sent her away and went back inside. They asked where Ingrid was, of course; I said she was taking some time to clear her head. They had no reason to doubt this.”

  Kevin drank more water, then wiped his mouth. Rachel noticed that his fingernails were chewed down to the quick, the skin on the fingertips dry and peeling.

  “All I had to do was wait for the cavalry. People started going to bed. I imagined how easy it would be, everyone asleep when the SWAT guys showed up. And then the landline rang. Ingrid had found a pay phone.”

  “Shit,” Rachel said.

  “Yes. Shit.”

  He told her about being dragged upstairs, and the few words Mittag said to him in the bedroom before the lights went out and the SWAT team poured in, guns blazing.

  Man, you’ve really got it all wrong, don’t you? We’re on the same side … Or, we used to be.

  “What did that mean?” Rachel asked, puzzled.

  Kevin shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d have some idea.”

  There was something in his tone, and the way he stared coolly at her, waiting. Was he trying to turn this interview around on her? “I don’t,” she said. “Was he trying to say he worked for the Bureau? He did put in an application long ago. But he was turned down immediately.”

  Kevin rocked his head, but she couldn’t tell if this was news or not.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this when I interviewed you before? When we were in the ambulance. It had only just happened.”

  “I didn’t know you, Rachel. A man with a gun tells me we’re on the same side right before being shot, then a woman I’ve never met bangs against my stretcher and starts asking me questions … I didn’t know what to think.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m testing you, Rachel. Can’t you tell?”

  She wasn’t insulted, though she might have been. “And what about the official debrief?”

  “I kept Ingrid out of it, but Ben’s last words?” He shrugged. “I told them, and they didn’t like it at all. Told me how the common people would suspect the worst. They wanted my assurance that I would stay quiet. Gave me something to sign, so I signed it. I bet you did, too.”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t sign it.”

  “Oh?” he said, surprised, and she knew then that this had been her great mistake in Seattle, not signing that nondisclosure agreement. If anything had put a mark on her head, it had been that. Christ, what was her problem? Why couldn’t she just let things go? Hadn’t she learned over the past eight months that what happened outside her little world wasn’t her responsibility?

  She tried to focus. “You really don’t know where Ingrid Parker is?”

  “I really don’t,” he said. “And I don’t want to know.”

  “How much money did she have?”

  “She’d been carrying Martin’s stash—twenty, thirty grand. Enough to get her started.”

  “So she could be anywhere.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Any thoughts on how Massive got hands on all that money?”

  “Money was just there.”

  “Did anyone mention a company called Magellan Holdings?”

  He shook his head. “No one told me anything about any of that.”

  Whether or not she believed him didn’t matter; this was all she was going to get. The problem was that the only way for her to know what to do, and who she could trust, was to get clarity on what had happened last year. Ingrid Parker, it seemed, was the only one who might give her that clarity—why else would Owen come all the way out here with Johnson and Vale, looking for her?

  Through his kitchen window the sun was low. She said, “What do you think of Watertown now?”

  Kevin sucked on his lip. “Do I agree with all those protesters in the middle of town? Is that what you’re asking? Do I think it was an unnecessary massacre?”

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m asking.”

  He snorted. “Of course it was.”

  “And now you’re out here, thinking about leaving the Bureau.”

  Kevin leaned back, closing his eyes, as if ready for a nap. He said, “Anyone who tells you there’s a single reason that they’re leaving the only job they’ve ever known is a liar.” He opened his eyes and got up, then grabbed the bottle of Knob Creek. “There’s never a single reason for anything a human does.”

  He refilled their cups, and while they talked for another half hour Rachel still did not tell him about Seattle. By then she trusted him well enough, but she read in his laconic behavior a clear message: I do not want to be involved. He was out, and that was where he wanted to stay, communing with nature and sharing recipes with neighbors. It was what you did when you resurfaced after a year undercover: You hooked your wagon to the repetitions of domesticity. You kept things as simple as possible and tried to reconnect with whoever you originally were before you spent a year being someone else.

  There was a chance she was misreading his message, but those who take no sides in a fight are pawns for bo
th sides. Tomorrow, Johnson and Vale could show up and ask questions and quickly deduce her next stop—a stop that the bourbon haze had suddenly helped her see with clarity. But she needed a little time, and she didn’t need Kevin Moore giving her away.

  As she got up finally and pulled on her jacket, she posed the question that had begun to nag at her above all others. “The Bureau killed Mittag. For the sake of argument, let’s say we killed Bishop, too. The question is: Why? Why risk martyrs? Why open the door to demonstrators shouting conspiracy theories in the street?”

  Kevin thought about that. “The same reason I probably should have killed Ingrid. To shut them up.”

  “About what?”

  He had no answer.

  As she drove back down his hill in the Impala, the late-afternoon sun twinkling through branches, she looked out for rental cars, or oversized Suburbans that were the hallmark of unexpected Bureau visits. All she saw was a rust-speckled pickup, not unlike Kevin’s, driven by a pretty brunette wearing a bandana on her head. The neighbor, she guessed, who shared recipes with Kevin. No wonder he didn’t want to leave his mountain. It was the American dream, circa 1880.

  That was when she realized that she’d forgotten something in Seattle: her cane. For nearly three days she’d survived without its support and hadn’t even noticed.

  13

  “IN THE shift from a fragmented world of powerful nation-states to the emphasis on cooperation and a dual-power structure in the postwar world—the West and East in a perpetual standoff—espionage fiction found its ideal soil for growth.”

  There were maybe two hundred undergraduates filling this NYU auditorium, and at the front David Parker, in obligatory tweed, regaled them with his expertise on the world of spy fiction—an expertise Rachel never would have suspected. From the back wall, she reflected that the man she’d seen at his lowest had regained himself. As chapters from his new novel appeared in the rags, his star rose, and now he could preach to an army of aspiring writers and feed, like a born actor, on the attention it brought him.

  Sitting in on History of the Espionage Novel had seemed like her best bet, since Parker’s home would certainly be under surveillance, so she stayed for the full hour and listened to Parker’s analysis of the two major strains of spy fiction—the fantastic (James Bond, Jason Bourne) and the realistic (George Smiley, Paul Christopher).

  The students were a healthy bunch, fresh faced and appropriately cynical, which reminded her of the mishmash that had only half filled that other auditorium on the other coast, in 2009. Martin Bishop, now dead, but back then so full of dire optimism.

  It had been three days and eighteen hundred miles since Boulder, and Rachel had crossed the New Jersey line in a 1985 Ford Escort she’d picked up in little Paxton, Nebraska, for $400. Neither the air conditioning nor the heating worked, and if she left her foot off the gas at a light it died, but the car had brought her all the way to High Bridge station, at the end of the Raritan Valley Line. She’d parked and taken the train to Penn Station before continuing on foot—she wanted to avoid the subways—down to NYU.

  Halfway through her long journey, while dozing in an Illinois rest stop, she’d sunk into a vivid dream about James Sullivan, and while looking over the bright young faces of David’s students the dream came back to her. She and Sullivan were drinking martinis in a coastal bar, maybe Florida or California, and he wore a Che Guevara beret. He told her, “The Third World is just around the corner.” Then the bar rose and fell, as if an earthquake had struck, drinks spilling and customers tumbling, but Sullivan held her upright as their stools spun. The last thing she remembered was a huge wave smashing through the windows, filling the bar with salt water.

  As the hour was wrapping up, Rachel moved down to the front, and Parker caught sight of her, stumbling over his final lines. Then he turned back to the students. “Next week, then, okay?” The auditorium was suddenly noisy with the sounds of packing up. Rachel approached the podium and told David, “Josie Woods.”

  The name seemed to confuse him briefly; then he recognized it. “Okay,” he said.

  She turned away and pushed through the students, and by the time she reached the street she’d pulled on the hood of her new jacket, picked up from a roadside Target. She continued to the corner of Waverly and Mercer and took the stairs down into the Josie Woods Pub, a brick-walled underground sports bar. Today, though, instead of sports, CNN played on the screens. She stared for a long time at the face of Mark Paulson, who explained to a newscaster why it was taking so long to declassify a report for public consumption. “Have you looked at the streets recently, Mr. Paulson?” asked the newscaster. “People are getting impatient.”

  It was true. On her long walk to NYU she’d seen protesters heading to competing demonstrations around City Hall and Trump Tower. Painted faces and signs and effigies of both the president and the Bureau’s long-suffering director. She remembered Lou Barnes and Erin Lynch and morose Richard Kranowski making fun of the White House’s fear of the Massive Brigade. How did they feel now? The president’s poll numbers were tanking even worse than usual, which meant that theirs were, too.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she heard, and looked up to see David Parker heading toward her, laptop bag banging against his hip.

  “Nice to see you, too, David.”

  He sat down, agitated. “They warned me I might hear from you.”

  She stiffened. “Who?”

  “I don’t know their names. Couple days ago, these two stiffs told me to call if I heard from you.”

  It wasn’t a surprise, not really. If Jakes had made a house call to speak with Kevin Moore, then someone certainly would have visited David. “What else did they tell you?”

  He hesitated, as if worried about bruising her feelings, then plowed on. “That you’ve gone off the deep end. They said that having this shit in the news again, it’s dredged up a bunch of demons in your psyche. They said that inevitably you’d come to me.”

  “Demons?”

  “They said you’d be looking for Ingrid.”

  “Let me guess. Lyle Johnson and Sarah Vale,” she said, stifling a yawn. It wasn’t boredom, though; the exhaustion of crossing the continent was catching up to her.

  He made no sign to suggest she was right or wrong. Her detective work meant nothing to him. “They said you’re dangerous.”

  She smiled to help him see that she wasn’t dangerous, but from the look on his face she could tell it wasn’t working. “I’m just trying to find out what’s going on,” she said.

  “What do you mean, what’s going on?”

  “They were right about one thing. I do need to talk to Ingrid.”

  His head bobbed. “Well, I’d like to talk to her, too, but I don’t know where she is. And I keep telling you guys that.”

  “Who’s been asking?”

  “Couple weeks after Watertown, this asshole shows up at my apartment. Bandage on his head. Says he’s one of yours.”

  “Owen Jakes.” She shook her head. “By then I was out, under investigation. He wasn’t one of mine anymore.”

  He nodded—maybe he knew the story, maybe he didn’t. “Well, that’s what he told me.”

  “Go on,” she said.

  David scratched his chin and explained that, at first, it had been friendly. Owen Jakes showed his badge and said that Rachel had asked him to check up on David. Jakes carried a file, and he referenced it while asking questions about Ingrid. Where were her relatives? She had none. What were her political leanings? To the left of left, usually. Then: “When was the last time you talked to her?”

  “June 19,” David told him. “The day she disappeared.” Then he brought out the ultrasound, which he’d protected in a plastic sleeve and kept on a high shelf. “And you guys saw this already.”

  “But you’ve spoken to her since,” Jakes said, a statement more than a question.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Maybe not by voice, but emails. Texts. A woman
doesn’t send this,” he said, referencing the ultrasound, “and simply go silent. That’s not done.”

  “Well, that’s how Ingrid does it.”

  That was when the friendliness abruptly ended. Jakes stood and thrust a finger at him. “Cut the bullshit, okay? Ingrid wasn’t just another one of Martin’s followers—she was traveling with him.”

  “What?”

  “They were lovers. Are you really going to stand there and protect her when she went on a sex spree with Martin Bishop across the fucking nation? Tell me, David. Tell me where Ingrid’s hiding, or I swear to God I’m going to drag your ass into federal detention and throw away the key.”

  Now, months later, David’s cheeks flushed from the memory. Why had Jakes gone after Ingrid Parker with such venom? Rachel didn’t know, but the story only reinforced her conviction that if there was an answer to be found it lay with Ingrid, and only with her. She pursed her lips. “So? Any ideas?”

  “I didn’t know where she was back then. And I still don’t.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded, averting his gaze angrily, and she knew then that she was out of options. She covered her face with her hands, rubbed her eyes. Had she really thought she could track down Ingrid without the Bureau backing her up? Hubris. Maybe she should just turn herself in. Sign away her rights, just like Kevin Moore had. Was it too late for that?

  Six nights ago, a man had come to kill her. He’d stripped himself of anything identifiable. He’d prepared her bath to stage a suicide, then come at her with a needle rather than a gun. That was the definition of too late.

  Maybe it was exhaustion, or the realization that there was nothing left to fight for, but Rachel began to cry. It wasn’t obvious, just the dampening of her eyes, the blinking, and when she wiped at her left lid a single tear traced a line down her cheek. In that moment she was more terrified of breaking down in front of David Parker than she was of Johnson and Vale. She sniffed, pulling herself together, and stood.