The Middleman_A Novel

by Olen Steinhauer

  It wasn’t until they disembarked at East Croydon that the feeling of unease came over him. Ahead, her light skin stood out among the brown faces all around her, and then they were out on the street and … there: She turned down the little lane he had first visited last night when a Jamaican driver named Elijah brought him here. She stopped in front of Mattie’s door and checked the number with something on her phone. She was getting ready to press the buzzer.

  “Ms. Primakov!” he called, jogging up to her.

  She looked back, gave him a double take, then cracked a smile. “Mr. Moore. How’d you get behind me?”

  “How do you think?”

  She raised a brow, then nodded toward the main thoroughfare. “Want to take a stroll?”

  Before he could answer, she was walking, and he had to jog. By the time she joined the noisy lunchtime crowd, he had caught up. “Are you going to talk now?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “It’s not my place to tell you anything.”

  “Okay…”

  “I need to you to verify something first.”

  “Shoot.”

  She glanced at him again, a wry smile. “You are working with Rachel Proulx, correct?”

  He wasn’t sure he should answer, but if he didn’t talk she wouldn’t either. She’d already made that clear. “Yes.”

  “She’s not here, though, is she? Back in America?”

  This time, he nodded, not wanting to put voice to what he was starting to feel was a failure on his part to hold any cards.

  “Right. Tell her that she’s wasting her time worrying about ancient history.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that whatever papers I wrote up in 2009 are of no importance. Tell her to look at July 4 of last year. Tell her to ask who benefited the most.”

  Her coyness was beginning to irritate him. “How about this, Alexandra: How about you tell me who benefited?”

  She shook her head. “That would be telling you what I know, which would lead to you asking how I know it. I don’t like those kinds of questions.”

  They walked on, past a rack of sneakers presided over by another woman from the islands. “How do I know you’re not trying to divert us from the real story?” he asked.

  “Good,” she said, smiling. “Now you’re getting the hang of this.”

  9

  RACHEL DROVE to Arlington holding down yawns and trying to focus her vision. An awkward night sitting up with Gregg and Mackenzie, then in the guest room with Ingrid and Clare, wasn’t conducive to any kind of rest, and only after Gregg left for the city in the morning was she able to catch a couple of hours’ sleep. When she came downstairs at nine, she found Mackenzie and Ingrid sitting with coffees, talking like old friends. Mackenzie was explaining that she had left her job when she married, so she could focus on the dream her own mother had had for her—raising a family. But after years of failing to conceive—and Mackenzie was the first to admit it—she’d developed a horror of returning to a nine-to-five life. She’d tried out some online businesses, but nothing had taken yet. Rachel poured herself a coffee and listened to the two of them speak as if nothing were strange in the world, as if both of them shared the same preoccupation with finding a satisfying career. Ingrid seemed to have shed her dogmatism, at least for now, and said nothing about wage slaves or the machinations of the ruling classes.

  “I should be back in a few hours,” she told them.

  “Something?” Ingrid asked.

  “We’ll see.”

  She stuck for as long as possible to the Beltway simply because it skirted the edges of DC. As if taking that highway meant Johnson and Vale would have no idea how to find her—which, given the state of surveillance technology, was ridiculous. Still, it made her feel a little better. Within a half hour she was parking among cute houses on Stuart Street and walking south to take the escalator down into the Orange Line’s Ballston-MU Station. This was Ashley’s station, five blocks from her rental duplex.

  Once she’d descended into the cavernous space, the Metro’s famous grid arching overhead, Rachel wandered to the inbound platform. Along the edges of the station a concrete barricade rose to waist height, and she dragged her fingers along the back of it as she slowly made her way to the end of the platform. About halfway down, just past the dot-matrix sign telling her that the next train would arrive in nine minutes, her fingers ran into a stuffed envelope that had been glued against the back of the wall. She ripped it off and kept moving, her hand not leaving the wall. When she reached the far end, she turned back, slipping the bundle into her jacket pocket, and headed back to the exit as, ahead, commuters hurried down the escalator to catch the incoming train.

  She didn’t look at the envelope until she had reached Stuart Street and was safely behind the wheel again. The outside was blank, torn where she’d ripped it off the wall, and inside were five sheets of printout, folded tightly to fit. It was a spreadsheet listing calls made to and from Benjamin Mittag’s phone, beginning June 18, 2017, the day Bishop and Mittag disappeared, and continuing until July 8, the day Bishop and then Mittag were killed. The calls were made to a total of three numbers, one of them—Janet Fordham’s, presumably—only once, on July 8. She concentrated on the coordinates of the other two numbers—longitudes and latitudes to the fourth decimal point. One of the two numbers bounced around the country, coordinates changing constantly. 30° to 50° N and 70° to 120° W. Martin Bishop, certainly, always in motion. Then there was the third number.

  What she noticed was that this final number, with the exception of one call, remained around a single place—38° N and 77° W. While she only had an entry-level familiarity with map coordinates, she recognized this set: the DC area.

  It took ten minutes to find an internet café in the rear of a tiny grocery, and in the darkened space she typed in the full DC coordinates: 38°53'40.7976", -077°01'30.0468".

  Was she surprised by the result? No, not entirely, but it still hurt a little when she found herself looking at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, the Hoover Building. She sniffed, feeling a cold coming on, then checked the dates. There: July 8, a couple of hours after Bishop was killed. She typed in the coordinates of Mittag’s phone and found herself staring, bird’s-eye view, at a gas station around St. Paul, Nebraska.

  Benjamin Mittag had made that call, but the other number wasn’t in or around the Hoover this time—the coordinates were completely different. She typed them in and found herself in central Chicago. She rubbed her temple, something nagging at her.

  Yes: Rachel, I’m not stepping on anything here, don’t worry. I was in Chicago when Paulson called me, and I lucked out with one of those new Gulfstreams that fly like the wind.

  On the same day he would later be killed, Mittag called Owen Jakes in Chicago.

  She closed her eyes, pressed the bridge of her nose, and tried to work through it slowly. Tried to remember that last conversation Kevin had had with Benjamin in Watertown. After punching him and closing the bedroom door, Mittag had said, FBI, right? Who’s running you?

  And then:

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

  Then she remembered more.

  10

  KEVIN LANDED at Aeropuerto de Bilbao—in Basque, Bilboko aireportua—at five in the afternoon, and when they touched down he looked across the tarmac at the wedge, like a wave, that rose from the roof of the terminal. It was a small airport, but its glass-and-steel modernism gave it a magnificent feel. He joined the other passengers on a bus that brought them from the plane to the old customs counter. In some months, the separation of Britain from the European Union would ensure that staff waited behind the counter, but for now there was no one to listen even if he’d wanted to declare something.

  He joined a queue leading to a line of white taxis marked by red stripes on the doors. On the short flight he’d decided to take it one step at a time. He’d used the Hushmail account to pass on
Alexandra Primakov’s message, and until Rachel replied he was an independent agent. He would head to the city center, check into a room, and then find out if the paperwork for Magellan Holdings had been filed with the local government offices. While finding new names on the paperwork Primakov had drafted was a long shot, it was a place to start before diving into the more daunting task of looking for Sebastián Vivas, about whom he still knew almost nothing.

  The taxi was a bubble-shaped economy car, and the driver played Basque music full of flutes and drums as they drove south toward town. The music was loud enough that at first neither of them heard the siren. When the driver noticed, he frowned into the rearview but kept driving at full speed. It wasn’t until the police car was right behind him, blinking its lights, that he finally got the message and slowed down, then pulled to the side of the road, muttering, “Arraioa!”

  Kevin didn’t bother asking any questions. He only looked over his shoulder as the driver kept cursing, and watched a tall, dark-skinned man exit the passenger side of the police car while a uniformed policeman behind the wheel stayed where he was. That didn’t look right at all, but they were on the side of a highway with bright, open fields all around, and no matter how fast he ran Kevin wasn’t getting away.

  When the man approached the driver’s side window and conversed in Basque a moment, Kevin noticed that the driver relaxed, his tone lightening, and he looked in the mirror at Kevin and raised his hands from the wheel, international sign language for Take him if you want. The man turned to look at Kevin through the window. He had a pencil mustache, a wandering right eye, and excellent English. “Mr. Kevin Moore? Please come with me.” Kevin followed his instructions, getting out of the taxi and walking with him toward the police car.

  “Who are you?”

  “I work for the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia.”

  “You’re an intelligence officer.”

  “Just so.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Indeed,” he said. “I am Sebastián Vivas.”

  He briefly wondered if this could be a coincidence—was it a common name? Then Vivas said in a friendly tone, “These idiots let you leave the airport. We’re usually more professional.”

  “Why pick me up?”

  “Because you’ve come here to find me, and I’d like to know why.”

  It was the kindest abduction Kevin had ever experienced.

  Vivas joined him in the backseat as the mute police officer—had he been reprimanded for his ineptitude?—sped farther down the road and used an access road to cross the median and take them back toward the airport.

  “So,” said Vivas. “You have flown from London to Bilbao in search of myself. Am I correct?”

  “Have you always worked for the same employer?”

  He smiled. “Right to it! Well, yes. For a long time.”

  “In 2009?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Kevin looked at the dry fields passing them by. “That’s when you helped Martin Bishop, who had just come from Berlin.”

  “Did I?”

  Kevin couldn’t tell if it was innocence or playfulness, so he just kept going. “At the time, you were part of an underground group connected to the Kommando Rosa Luxemburg. Or were you a plant?”

  “Like you and the Massive Brigade?”

  Kevin sized him up a moment. Unlike many in their line of work, Sebastián Vivas wasn’t being smug. He was merely establishing what he knew so that Kevin wouldn’t waste time dancing around the facts. “Alexandra Primakov called you?”

  Vivas’s smile broadened, but he wasn’t going to verify that. Whoever these people were, this network of individuals in London and Bilbao and perhaps Berlin—they were knowledgeable as hell.

  “Nine years ago you were a revolutionary,” Kevin said.

  Vivas looked like he might laugh. “Spain was a fascist country until the seventies.”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “Well, revolutionary is not a bad word in Spain.”

  It was a kind of answer. “Were you one of the officers in Magellan Holdings?”

  Vivas shook his head. “I was not.”

  “How about James Sullivan?”

  Kevin’s words seemed to please the Spaniard. He rubbed his scalp and brushed at his mustache and shook his head, a quiet gasp of laughter escaping him. “I haven’t heard that name in a long time.”

  “Well?” Kevin asked.

  “Perhaps he was.”

  “So his name is on the company charter.”

  “There is no charter for Magellan Holdings, not anymore. The company was dissolved months ago.”

  “After Martin Bishop was killed?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “There’s no paperwork left?”

  He rocked his head. “Sadly, there was a fire.”

  “A fire?”

  “Just so.”

  The cop at the wheel took a turnoff for the airport. Kevin had no idea what awaited him once they arrived, so this might be his last chance to ask questions. “Can you draw the connection for me? Who is James Sullivan?”

  “Just a name.”

  “A name for whom?”

  “That’s all you want? Someone’s name?”

  “I could start with that.”

  “Okay, Mr. Moore. But once I tell you, you have to promise to leave my country, and myself, alone. Can you do that?”

  It was a big ask, but Kevin had nothing on his side but a credit card nearing its limit and a change of clothes that were by now dirty. “Yes, I can do that.”

  “Good,” said Sebastián Vivas. “Now, have you ever heard of the CIA’s Department of Tourism?”

  11

  RACHEL COULDN’T get that call out of her head. Just a few hours after the shooting of Martin Bishop, Ben Mittag had called Owen Jakes from a gas station in Nebraska. It hadn’t been their only conversation—no, Ben and Owen talked regularly, Owen usually inside and around the Hoover Building. In fact, there had been a call on July 6, two days earlier—the same day Ben Mittag told Kevin that they were going on a drive together: Boss man wants a meeting. The connection, now, was undeniable: Mittag knew that Bishop would be outside Lebanon, Kansas, when he called Owen on July 6. That gave Owen two full days to pull in a sniper and set him up in that field of wheat. A cinch.

  Yet it still didn’t compute. Benjamin Mittag, a petty criminal who, by all accounts, despised everyone. What had he to gain from working with the FBI, or with Owen Jakes?

  Were that the only mystery to solve, then her course would be clear. She would push and push on that one question until a crack formed in the wall of her ignorance. But there was more: Why did Owen wait until Bishop was underground to kill him? It would have been so much simpler and less risky to get rid of him at any other point during the previous eight years. And then there was the message from Alexandra Primakov, which she’d read in her and Kevin’s Hushmail drafts folder: She says we should be focused on who benefited on July 4. She says everything else is distraction. I don’t know—we have no idea who she’s representing, so everything she tells us has to be taken with a grain of salt.

  Kevin was right, of course. Nothing given to them could be taken at face value, particularly anything handed over by Alexandra Primakov, who with her unknown friends had spent years supporting Bishop and Mittag’s brand of anticapitalist rabble-rousing.

  As for who benefited on July 4, they both knew the answer, because only a week ago Representative Diane Trumble, in her anger, had spelled it out: Let’s not allow international tax dodgers to benefit from the tragedy of July 4, 2017. Plains Capital and IfW, and the super-rich protecting their secret systems of money laundering—they were the ones who benefited.

  What had Martin Bishop said to Ingrid at the party in Montclair about the congressional investigation? Yes: They’ll find a way to shut it down. They always do.

  But wasn’t this more of that diseased logic that convinced her Marxist friend, nine years ago, that the Clintons were
serial killers? She didn’t know.

  It was late afternoon when she reached Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, near the Maryland border. She’d traveled miles along curving mountain roads that cut through the Appalachians, following the lines on a state atlas she’d picked up in Gettysburg. She was still behind on sleep, and despaired of ever catching up.

  She found the Stayfair Trailer Park by using the phone directory at a Shell station, and once she reached the community she rolled down her window to ask a skinny teenager where Jenny Mittag’s trailer was. He pointed deeper into the park and said, “Lot twenty.”

  The road that wound through the place had been covered in gravel, and the mobile homes sat in plots of overgrown grass, spotted with puddles from recent storms. The rusty shell at number 20 sat on cinder blocks and was decorated with a pink flamingo leaning at a dangerous angle. She got out and took a circuitous route to the screen door to save her shoes. While she rapped on the door, a couple with a yapping Chihuahua stared suspiciously as they passed. Then the inner door opened, and a haggard-looking blonde stared back at her, looking just as suspicious as the couple had been.

  “Who’re you?”

  She took out her badge and held it close to the screen. “Special Agent Rachel Proulx. I need to have a word with you about Benjamin.”

  “I already talked to you people.”

  “I know. I read that report. This is a follow-up.”

  Her face tightened. “He’s been dead for a while.”

  “May I come in?”

  Jenny looked back into her home, made another face. “I haven’t cleaned up. We can talk outside.”

  “Sure,” Rachel said, and stepped back.

  Jenny disappeared, then reappeared with a pack of menthols. She pushed through the screen door, let it slam shut, then sat on her stoop and lit up.

  “You told our investigator that Benjamin wanted to join the FBI. That he actually applied but was turned down.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then, some months later, someone showed up. Do you remember his name?”