The Middleman_A Novel

by Olen Steinhauer

  So simple.

  Martin turned to Albuquerque George, who was still frowning. “What do you think?”

  He scratched at his eye, shaking his head. “It’s just not how I imagined it.”

  Mary grinned. “You imagined soldiers shooting cops in Lolo. That’s a lack of imagination.”

  “No it’s not,” Martin said. “It’s an expression of frustration. That’s all any of this is, an expression of anger. But we’ve always known that the only way for the ruling class to serve us is for them to fear us. I’m just trying to find a way to accomplish that without getting anyone killed.”

  “So is that the plan?” George asked. “Is it settled?”

  “This isn’t an autocracy,” Martin said. “I’m going around and collecting opinions. And even if we do it, we want to wait long enough for everyone’s absence to be noted. It’s not in the news yet.”

  “They’ll arrest you,” said another Mary, from Toledo. “There’s a warrant out for you.”

  Martin shrugged. “I can spend some time behind bars. I’ll be in good company. But even if they can’t arrest you, you should know that there will be resistance. You’ll be harassed; some will be beaten. Maybe killed. In some ways, this would be harder than heading into town with machine guns.”

  “But then what happens?” George asked. “We’re there, we’re silent. Eventually the news will find other shiny things to look at.”

  “That,” Martin said, “is another reason I’m bringing this to everyone. What do you think?”

  They spent the rest of the evening discussing possible next actions, and the ideas ranged from violence to hackers leaking state secrets to another mass disappearance, but larger this time. By the time they’d finished dinner, Ingrid had tired of the conversation and went out to the porch, where she tried to identify constellations in the clear night sky. The Big Dipper, curiously enough, eluded her. Eventually, the door opened, and Martin came out with a beer in his hand. He sat down beside her and said, “How many months?”

  By then, everyone in the house knew that she was pregnant, and now Martin did as well. “Four and a half. If I wasn’t wearing this sweatshirt, you’d be able to tell.”

  “Taking care of yourself?”

  “Yep.”

  He sipped at his beer. “You don’t have to stay with us, you know. No one knows what’s around the corner. We make our plans, but all it takes is one gun-happy Fed to ruin your day.”

  “Stop worrying about me, okay?”

  He grinned. “Listen, tomorrow morning I’m heading out. For the next few weeks I’ll be visiting safe houses, and we’ll have this same conversation. Would you like to come?”

  “Me?”

  “A grand tour of the Resistance.”

  She looked up and found the Big Dipper immediately. It had been there all along. “Why me? You think you can protect the pregnant lady only if you’re next to her?”

  He rocked his head. “I’ve got thousands of miles ahead of me, and the most important thing I need is good conversation.”

  She thought a moment, then nodded. “But first I need to mail something to my husband.”

  24

  “OVER THE next five days, we visited six houses,” Ingrid said.

  “How many safe houses were there in total?” Rachel asked.

  She shook her head. “In total? I don’t know. But he was going off of a list he kept in his wallet. Must’ve been twenty or more there. In each house, it was the same thing, these young people wanting reassurance from him. Wanting a plan. Over time, the basic idea gathered details. For example, a Mary in West Virginia suggested that after we returned, we release a steady drip of leaks, suggesting a date—maybe New Year’s—when something would happen. So rather than media attention fizzling out, it would build steadily toward that date. It would require an actual event, and no one could agree on what that was. But the leaks became part of the plan. And it was up to each person to find ways to connect to each other once they returned home. And bring in newcomers. So that by the prearranged date we could send out a message—just a single word—to trigger thousands to act at once.”

  “A single word?”

  Ingrid opened her hands. “Something known but not commonly used. Martin suggested ‘inscrutable.’ I pushed for ‘circumnavigation.’ It didn’t matter what the word was, as long as everyone knew it.”

  “Tell her about Berlin,” said Kevin.

  Rachel raised her head, curious.

  “Yeah, right,” Ingrid said. “He told me about the Kommando Rosa Luxemburg. They had been his friends, those people who were killed in the explosion. He was still upset when he spoke about them. One of them, a woman named Anika, was his lover.”

  Rachel blinked. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, she died. And after the explosion he left, went south to Spain.”

  “Did he tell you what he did in Spain?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. But he did say he met someone important there. Without this person—a man—he never would have been able to do what he’d done.”

  “Financially?” Rachel asked, then saw the question in Kevin’s face. “We followed his money back to the shell company I asked you about: Magellan Holdings. But we weren’t able to ID the owners.”

  Kevin took this in, interested, and Ingrid said, “He never told me why this guy was important. Maybe it was inspiration. Or, yes, maybe money. But he said he was international, that he knew an unbelievable number of languages. Martin spent a week with this guy in Spain, and they drank vodka martinis and discussed the future of Western society.”

  “Vodka martinis?” Rachel asked, remembering her Russian who was not a Russian, James Sullivan who was not James Sullivan. The only thing she really knew about him was that he drank vodka martinis. “Anything else about him?”

  She shook her head. “We didn’t dwell on him. Martin didn’t tell me more until everything went to hell. After July 4.”

  “The day of the assassinations.”

  “We were at a house in Indiana—near Lexington—when the news came on the radio. At first, and like everybody else, we thought it was al Qaeda, or ISIS.”

  “Everyone except Martin,” Rachel said.

  “Everyone including Martin. You don’t get it, do you? He never ordered those killings. He had nothing to do with it. We wanted to frighten the politicians, but actually kill them? All that would do was turn people against us. When that message came out on The Propaganda Ministry we were all stunned. But Martin—he was fucking furious. I’d never seen him like that. I was scared.”

  To be sure Rachel understood, Kevin said, “The assassinations were a rogue operation, run entirely by Benjamin Mittag.”

  “And with that one action,” Ingrid said, “Ben ruined absolutely everything. Martin was laying out a plan for everyone to return home. How did that look now? Massive was officially a terrorist organization. Each one of us was now a criminal, and we’d be thrown in jail as soon as we showed our faces. Everything had been for nothing.”

  David got up and went to the kitchen. He looked as if he’d heard this story too many times already.

  “But … why?” Rachel asked. “Why would Mittag do that?”

  Ingrid turned her attention to Clare, and when she finally spoke it was directed, softly, toward her daughter. “Because he wanted war. On both ends of the political spectrum live people like him, who see bloodshed as the only way to real change. They’re inspired by the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution—”

  “The Red Army Faction,” Rachel cut in.

  “Exactly.”

  David returned with an uncorked bottle of red and three glasses. He placed them on the table and, as everyone watched, filled the glasses, then took one back to his seat. Rachel took one as well. With the first sip she knew she needed it.

  “How did Martin get word to Benjamin to meet?” she asked.

  “He had a phone,” Ingrid said. “He kept it disassembled, but once a day he’d
drive out somewhere, put it together, and check for messages. Once Ben’s manifesto made the news, he got in the car and drove off to send a message. By the time he returned he had calmed down, and we discussed other options. It was looking like surrender was all we had. But he didn’t want to make any decisions until he’d faced Ben. I told him I was coming with him. He didn’t like that—he wanted to go alone—but I wasn’t going to be denied. I remembered Ben from the party. I remembered how easily he’d tossed David off the porch.”

  “So you were worried Mittag might do something to him.”

  “After what he’d done to those politicians? I was sure of it.”

  25

  ON THE long drive, Martin filled a lot of hours complaining about Benjamin, whom he had saved from a life of petty crime and penitentiaries of increasing levels of security. “I taught him every word he used in that manifesto,” Martin said, gradually leaning toward self-recrimination. “I should have seen it, back at the party. When my friend called to warn us that the cops were on their way, I told Ben that we had to split. That it was time for everyone to disappear. You know what he said? ‘Already done, boss.’ I took that as a figure of speech, but later I talked to people, found out when they’d gotten the word to leave. He wasn’t lying—people had been leaving from early that morning.”

  “How did he know so early?” Ingrid asked.

  Martin glared at the road ahead of them. “Because he set the whole fucking thing up. He put the missile launcher there. He called in the anonymous tip.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  By the time they were halfway across Missouri, heading to Kansas, his murderous impulse had faded. He’d regained the composure that had attracted her and four hundred others. But they both knew the situation was dire.

  He said, “I need to tell you about Berlin.”

  “Why?”

  “Because someone other than me should know about it.”

  Berlin, he told her, was supposed to be an education. He was a young man who’d soaked up progressive thought in America but was increasingly drawn to European movements. “In America, we’re already co-opted by capitalism. Private property, the authority of the employer, the profit motive—these are American progressives’ starting points. But Europe has been through horrors, and nothing is taken for granted. Everything is up for debate.”

  He made contacts at rallies and left-wing watering holes, trying to learn in the field about the ways in which citizens could influence the path of government. At BAIZ, a Marxist bar in Berlin-Mitte, he became involved with a group of bookish Berliners who were so well versed in radical history that they named themselves after Rosa Luxemburg, the fiery revolutionary socialist who was killed by government-sponsored paramilitaries during the Spartacist Uprising after World War I, her body tossed into the Landwehr Canal. The KRL had come together as a political study group at the Free University, and after graduation they simply kept meeting, growing slowly, though they never had more than twenty-five members at a time.

  What separated the KRL from other discussion groups was the fact that, a year before, a hacker had sliced his way into a government email server and released the entire trove online. The emails dominated the news for months, and three of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats were forced to step down due to impolitic messages that had come to light. A month after that, the BfV, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, arrested a twenty-two-year-old who had been one of the KRL’s founding members. “But he acted independently,” Martin told Ingrid. “They could never pin it on the group as a whole, and it frustrated them. Their efforts only succeeded in giving the Kommando fifteen minutes of fame—in Germany, at least. By the time I arrived, that was all part of their history. Some of them had talked to the press, and one had gotten a book deal, but they were essentially back to what they had been—a study group focused on political theory. Though I was trying to learn German, they usually switched to English for me. It was wonderful. Back home, my friends would only get so far in a debate before stopping themselves. They self-censored. These people didn’t. They let the conversation go as far as it possibly could, the assumption being that even the impossible could inspire something possible. So no one blinked an eye when we talked about mass suicides or murder, mandatory gender reassignments, or shipping city dwellers, Mao style, into the countryside to rediscover their connection to the land.”

  “Mandatory gender reassignments?” she asked as Missouri unfolded around them.

  “That’s what you do in a study group. You brainstorm and spitball, and sometimes you stumble upon wonderful ideas. Personally, I found it exhilarating. And then, a few weeks after I started going to their meetings, an American struck up a conversation with me in a bar. Eventually he admitted he was FBI. He told me that the Bureau, and the German government, were worried about the Kommando Rosa Luxemburg. I told him they were wrong. The KRL were talkers. No one needed to be scared of them. Maybe one of them had hacked some government servers, but that had been more embarrassing than threatening. They weren’t terrorists. Our most pressing real-world concern, I told him, was that the television in the apartment we used for meetings had died.”

  The story Martin told Ingrid, which Ingrid related eight months later, matched the version Owen Jakes had told to Rachel. Up to a point. Where Jakes had skipped from Martin “keeping me in the loop” to “they blew themselves up,” Martin filled in that space.

  “He and I met twice a week—not at the bar, though. We used a safe house in the center, a crummy little apartment where he would mix instant coffee and I’d give him a rundown of the latest conversations. I did this—I cooperated—in order to prove to him that the KRL wasn’t a threat to anyone. To show him that, if anything, they were guilty of wasting time they could have spent helping out in community centers—that, by then, was a critique I’d started to bring up. But he told me that the Germans were picking up information that I wasn’t privy to. He told me to keep digging. When I asked what kind of information the Germans had, he said I didn’t have clearance for it, but he could vouch that they were planning something serious.”

  As he drove, Martin checked the rearview, tracking cars and trucks. She noticed how he occasionally pulled into the right lane and slowed down, letting cars pass them, before climbing again to sixty. “Did you ever find anything?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “Nothing. Then one day, as I was getting ready to go to Friedrichshain for another meeting, I got a message from this guy. He wanted to meet me at the safe house. By then I was sick of his paranoia, and I was sick of trying to convince him. I was even thinking about telling everyone about him. Certainly Anika, who I’d been dating a month by then. I was in a bind, though—by telling them about the FBI, I’d be admitting my own collusion. But that didn’t mean I had to make life easy for him. I told him we could meet the next day. He said it was important, that he had new information. But I’d had enough. I told him to fuck off.”

  “Was this the night?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, just watched the road. “Anika—she had put together contributions and ordered a new television for the apartment. It had been delivered a couple of hours before I arrived, and we set it up in the living room, where we usually talked. Ulrich—it was his apartment—turned it on, but the reception was messed up. The only channel that worked was playing these cartoons—sixties, faded color, Italian. The others had grown up watching them, so we left it on with the sound off, opened some bottles of wine, and got to talking.”

  He paused again, looking off into the fields. “I remember the subject—nationalizing health industries. It wasn’t a particularly lively discussion; sometimes we were just there to drink. Anika sat with me, and eventually she got bored and told me that we should go back to her place. I told her, ‘Let’s give it a half hour,’ because I was hoping for something fresh to come up.” He grinned, but there was no happiness in the expression. “My phone rang. I took it out and re
alized it was Mr. FBI. I was worried someone would hear, so I gave Anika a kiss and hurried downstairs to the street. I told him that I wasn’t going to meet him, and he asked where I was. I told him, and he said, ‘Outside or inside?’ I said, ‘Outside.’ He said something I couldn’t understand because music was playing loudly through some window—‘All Tomorrow’s Parties,’ Velvet Underground. So I said, ‘What?’ And then, right in front of me, Ulrich’s apartment exploded.”

  26

  THE SILENCE in the living room was complete; then Clare stirred, crying a little as she woke. “She’s hungry,” Ingrid said, and turned her attention to the baby, shifting the little body around. She pulled out her breast and began feeding.

  Kevin sighed loudly. “He never told her the name of this FBI guy.”

  Ingrid kissed Clare’s forehead.

  “It was Owen Jakes,” said Rachel.

  Kevin turned to her, eyes big. “You’re kidding.”

  “He told me his version of that same story, but there was no mention of a phone call or a television.” She looked at Ingrid. “That was it, wasn’t it? The television.”

  “It’s what Martin thought.”

  “Hold on,” said Kevin, hands up. “You’re telling me that Jakes planted a bomb in that apartment in order to frame some German lefties? To make them look like terrorists?”

  No one bothered to answer him.

  “Martin was supposed to meet Jakes the next day,” Rachel said to Ingrid. “Did he go?”

  “What do you think? He got the hell out of Germany. He’d met people from other groups—sister organizations in Poland, Italy, Spain. He tried Spain.”

  “And in Spain,” Rachel said, “Martin met his new benefactor, who set up a company to funnel money to him.”

  “Protector.”

  “What?”

  “He called the guy his protector,” Ingrid said, then turned. “David?”