The Middleman_A Novel

by Olen Steinhauer

  Jenny shook her head.

  “But Benjamin told you that the man was from the Bureau, and that he had been accepted.”

  “My Ben was a hell of a liar. But mothers always believe, right?”

  Rachel had no idea but nodded agreeably.

  Jenny took a drag. “Next week, he packed his bag and left. But what kind of choice did he have? Stay here, he ends up a coal miner or working checkout at Walmart. I don’t blame him for lying to me.”

  “When did you realize he’d lied?”

  “Not for a long time. That Rolling Stone thing. Shock, I can tell you.”

  As Rachel nodded, Jenny’s gaze flashed off to the side, at another passing couple watching them.

  “Motherfuckers,” she said.

  “What?”

  “They all hate me. After the Fourth of July, my son was a terrorist. I’m the one who raised a terrorist.”

  Rachel watched the couple disappear, then turned back. “Do you have a computer?”

  Jenny frowned at her. “I’m poor, but I’m not a savage.”

  “Some people like to stay disconnected.”

  “Well, not me.” She crushed her cigarette and stood. “You wanna use it?”

  “Can I?”

  Jenny opened the screen door, and Rachel followed her inside. It was a cramped but tidy space, the kitchenette smelling faintly of mold, and in the living area Jenny opened a cabinet and took out an old, chunky Dell laptop. She placed it on the coffee table and powered it up. “I’ve been wanting to get a new one,” she said, almost defensive.

  “I just need to get online.”

  “I got the Hendersons’ password.”

  Once she’d connected to her neighbor’s Wi-Fi, Jenny turned the computer around for her guest to use. Rachel pulled up a browser and searched for images of “Owen Jakes.” A few hundred images came up, most of them random men spread across the United States. She added “FBI” and immediately found an official photo, Jakes standing in front of a blue curtain with an American flag off to the side.

  When she turned the computer around, Jenny pulled a pair of reading glasses out from between the couch cushions and slipped them on. She squinted at the screen, then nodded slowly. “Yep. That’s him. That’s the guy who told Ben he was getting into the FBI.” She saw the search bar above his face. “Owen Jakes?”

  “Yes.”

  Jenny hesitated, eyes back to the photo, to the American flag. “Wait. Are you telling me he was FBI?”

  “Yes,” Rachel said quietly.

  “Oh shit,” Jenny said. She stood. “Oh shit, shit, shit.” She took off her glasses and wiped at tears. “What does that mean?”

  Rachel closed her eyes, this final confirmation pulling her back in time, back through her memories and all the reports, connections sparking all around her. In the face of mounting evidence she’d kept pushing the truth away, but now there was no rejecting it. It was all there, right in front of her face, and she felt as if her whole life had been stolen from her. It was a horrible feeling.

  “You all right?” Jenny asked.

  Rachel reached out and gripped Jenny’s hand. “Thank you,” she said. “Can I use your computer for one more thing?”

  She signed into a VoIP account and made two phone calls. The first was to Ashley. It was foolishness to dial her directly, but she didn’t know when she might have the chance to get in touch again. Rachel gave her the phone number Owen had used while communicating with Mittag and asked her to run the same trace on it that she’d done with Mittag’s phone—calls made and their locations. Ashley, hearing the hoarseness in Rachel’s voice, knew this was important. “I’ll go back in tonight.”

  “What about Tom?” she asked, remembering her date.

  “Tom’s spending the weekend with his wife,” Ashley said without a hint of embarrassment.

  She made a second call, and by the time she left Jenny’s trailer darkness had fallen and a chill had settled in. Just beyond some nearby trailers, someone was having a party, blaring hip-hop throughout the park. She’d left things ambiguous with Jenny, explaining that whatever her son had been doing with the Massive Brigade, it wasn’t quite as it appeared. “You’ll know more soon enough,” she said. “Everyone will.”

  She got in her car and thought about the route ahead of her, south, to the suburbs of Chevy Chase in Maryland. Shut-eye would have to wait a little longer.

  She drove slowly, crunching gravel in the darkness, worried some spare children might jump out in front of her. Through her open window she smelled burned pork, and then she saw the party itself—barbecue pit, twelve-packs of Bud, and fifteen or so middle-aged revelers, most of them already drunk, grinding to the boom box. Around the next curve, she came to a stop: A Lincoln Town Car was parked in the middle of the lane, lights off.

  She was considering getting out when she noticed movement to her left, a figure emerging from the darkness. A tall man who, she knew before she could make out his features, was Lyle Johnson. Twenty feet away, he said, “Where you headed, Rachel?” with a smile in his voice. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  Ahead, Sarah Vale walked into her headlight beams.

  Rachel closed her window.

  “Why are you meeting with Jenny Mittag?” Johnson asked, now approaching very slowly. “What would someone like you have to say to someone like that?”

  Vale had reached the passenger side, one hand reaching beneath her overcoat, toward the small of her back.

  “You know,” Johnson said, stepping up to her door, “we found a dead guy in your apartment. Someone had injected the poor bastard with etorphine. Know anything about it?”

  Rachel checked the rearview, then threw the car into reverse. Vale jumped back and took out a pistol.

  A gun magically appeared in Johnson’s hand as well, but he yelled, “Don’t!” at Vale. Or maybe he was yelling at Rachel not to move. Either way, Rachel ducked her head as she switched to drive and hit the gas, throwing gravel and dirt in her wake as she skidded around the Town Car and smashed through a pink Big Wheel in someone’s crabgrass yard. As she swung back onto the gravel on the far side of the Town Car, she caught a glimpse of Johnson running and Vale getting into shooting position. But with the next curve she was out of sight, and she did not slow down until she reached Chevy Chase, Maryland.

  12

  GREGG AND Mackenzie had given Ingrid an attic room, away from the center of the house, but what they didn’t realize was that the central air also funneled the sounds upstairs, so when they fought Ingrid could hear every word. Which was why it took forever to get Clare to sleep.

  Not only their words, but the nuances of their words, the thump of an angry fist hitting a wall, the sound that Mackenzie’s voice made when she didn’t want to cry. At first Ingrid thought she was the reason for their fight, she and Clare, but she soon realized she was unimportant. The reason for the fight was Rachel, and that Mackenzie had taken them in. Gregg, apparently, would have sent them packing.

  It was educational, this eavesdropping. She learned that Gregg was Rachel’s ex-husband, and however they’d ended it there was still a lot of baggage between them.

  She didn’t begrudge them their fights, because the upstairs room she and Clare had been given was also an office, with a foldout couch and a computer connected to the internet. After months hidden away from the online world, she was finally back, reading about the demonstrations that had persisted despite the release of the FBI report. Analysts had been picking it apart since its release Tuesday morning, boiling it down for the masses. “You can’t fight violence with kid gloves,” said a conservative commentator, while someone from the other side of the political spectrum said, “In its rush for a ‘quick win,’ the FBI demonstrated the sin of impatience, which is how people get killed.”

  She read an interview with Assistant Director Mark Paulson, who had been directly involved in the hunt for the Massive Brigade, and was impressed by his calm, measured tone. “The fact is that no
one in the Bureau wanted this kind of a win, certainly not Special Agent Rachel Proulx, who spearheaded the case. What happened was tragic, but had we not moved against them when we did there’s no telling how many more acts of violence they would have committed.” Impressive, too, was the way he smoothly inserted Rachel into conversations, so she would be the one to take fire.

  When she heard the front door slam and the quiet sound of crying, Ingrid crept down to the second floor, where she tracked the noise to the closed bathroom door. “Mackenzie?” she said. “You all right?”

  The crying ceased; there was a loud sniff. “Hey, yeah. I’m fine.”

  She wasn’t, of course, and Ingrid didn’t want to leave it at that. After reading about the demonstrations, seeing with her own eyes that people were no longer content to wallow on their sofas and let the world go to shit on its own, she’d been filled with optimism. While she couldn’t join the crowds just yet, she could at least help the one person she had access to. She leaned against the door and said, “Look, we’ll leave tonight.”

  “No.”

  “I’m not getting between you and your husband.”

  Mackenzie pulled the door open, and her face was splotchy, her eyes bloodshot. “Really,” she said, her voice choked. “You and Clare should stay.”

  There was something in her face, something Ingrid couldn’t put her finger on. But it was familiar. It reminded her of her childhood. She said, “What’s wrong?”

  Mackenzie shrugged, a thin smile. “I don’t like fights, I guess.” Then she turned to go to the sink, and Ingrid saw it: the way Mackenzie’s shoulder twitched, as if an exposed nerve had been tapped.

  She knew.

  “Wait,” Ingrid said, following her into the bathroom.

  Mackenzie looked back.

  “Raise your arms.”

  “What?”

  “Raise them.”

  Unsure, Mackenzie raised her arms. When her elbows reached shoulder height she flinched but kept reaching until her arms were straight up in surrender. Slowly, Ingrid lifted her blouse. Mackenzie did not stop her, only stared down at Ingrid with those bloodshot eyes. By the time the blouse was up to her bra the bruises were exposed, running up and down the left side of her ribs.

  “Jesus,” said Ingrid. “I thought he’d punched the wall.”

  Self-conscious now, Mackenzie lowered her arms and pushed down her blouse. “Jesus had nothing to do with it.”

  Ingrid stepped back, feeling the past wash over her, seeing again the bruises that had been a familiar part of her mother’s body. Here she was—those same bruises in front of her—and she felt as impotent as she had as a child.

  No.

  “I’m going to kill him,” Ingrid said.

  “You don’t understand,” Mackenzie protested. “It’s not—he’s not like that.”

  “He’s not?” The anger was coming now, that sweet, warm anger. “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “Get out of here.”

  “You’re a pretty little idiot,” Ingrid told her.

  “Go!”

  She didn’t want to go; she wanted to beat the facts of life into this woman. But she’d been dragged too quickly into her past again; it had tongue-tied her. She knew she wouldn’t be able to say anything of use, not now. So she went back upstairs and checked on Clare. Then she sat in front of the computer and stared at the swirling screen saver. She saw flashes of fists, drunk men and cowardly women. She saw the child she’d once been, hiding in her closet to save her own fucking skin.

  She woke the computer and searched until she’d found a Tor client. She installed it and typed in the IP address that she and Martin Bishop had established back in July. It connected, but there was no one waiting on the other end. Not yet. There was just a blank space where her cursor blinked, waiting to be used.

  “Hey,” she heard, and turned to see Mackenzie in the doorway.

  Ingrid turned away from the computer to face her. For a moment neither spoke, until Ingrid said, “Sorry. I’m pushy. I know that.”

  “No.” Mackenzie came inside and sat on the corner of the bed. She first looked at Clare, arms and legs spread, softly snoring. The only sound in the room was the baby’s breaths.

  “My father was like him,” Ingrid said. “My mother waited and waited for him to change. In the meantime, she went from bruises to broken bones to internal bleeding. I tried to talk sense to her, but she didn’t listen. Maybe that’s how it always is. So it went on. In the end, I was the one who broke. I was sixteen, and he was going at her in the living room. I went to the basement and got a shovel and knocked him over the head. He turned on me—I could see in his face that he wasn’t really human anymore. The rage had turned him into a beast. Worse than a beast, because it wasn’t about fear but pride. So I hit him again. Again.” She inhaled loudly, remembering that moment. Mackenzie didn’t move. “They don’t get better,” Ingrid said. “I would have killed him had it not been for my mother, who climbed over his body in order to stop me. Do you know what I felt then? Contempt. Not for him, though. For her.”

  Mackenzie turned away, unable to look into her face, focusing instead on Clare.

  Ingrid said, “You’re going to leave him.”

  “Eventually. Yes, probably.”

  “No, Mackenzie. You’re leaving him tonight.”

  She finally turned back to Ingrid, a queer smile on her face. “That’s crazy!”

  “It’s the only thing to do,” Ingrid said as she turned back to the Tor client and, in the waiting space, typed “Circumnavigation.” She pressed ENTER, then quit and trashed the application.

  “What did you do?” Mackenzie asked.

  “We’ll find out soon enough.” Ingrid stood. “Now let’s take care of you.”

  13

  IT WAS not Rachel’s kind of place. The white-clad young man at the gate, once she’d given the name of the member who’d invited her, had pointed her in the direction of the clubhouse, an enormous white building that made her think of plantation houses in the antebellum south. When she drove up the rolling lane and looked across the lit grounds, sliced by a stone-edged canal, she thought that if she placed Jenny Mittag here the woman would probably die of a heart attack.

  And what about Jenny Mittag now? Had she put the woman’s life in danger by leading her pursuers to the Stayfair? She doubted it—she hadn’t shared enough for Jenny to be enough of a threat. But they would ask her questions, and while Rachel had been careful to erase the history of her computer use, it wouldn’t take long for Johnson and Vale to get a warrant for the neighbor’s internet provider and uncover the tracks she’d left leading to Ashley, and to here, to Sam Schumer.

  He was waiting in the Columbia Country Club’s lush marble lobby. A mildly condescending smile crept into his face once he’d gotten a good look at her—after so many days and miles her jacket was wrinkled and soiled, while the blouse and long skirt she’d borrowed from Mackenzie’s closet barely fit her. “Let’s go to the bar,” he said. “Darker there.”

  “What a gentleman.”

  “You said you wanted privacy.”

  Sam knew the staff by name, and as a rear table was being cleared they ordered drinks. When they settled down into the plush booth, Rachel feeling the full weight of her exhaustion, Sam furrowed his brow. “Don’t tell me we’re friends again, Rachel. Don’t shatter my entire worldview.”

  “I’d never do that,” she said, trying to appear comfortable with all of this. “I just want to give you a story. If you’re interested.”

  “I’m always interested.” He reached into his pocket and placed a spiral notepad and a fountain pen on the table. “But is this going to be business as usual? A little tantalizing fact followed by silence, maybe some innuendo?”

  She smiled at him. “Hope you haven’t made other plans. This is going to take some time.”

  Again, the furrowed brow, but he was interested. He opened his hands. “For you, Rachel, all the time in the world.”

&
nbsp; Their drinks arrived. An old-fashioned for him, a Cosmo for her. They both took sips, but she tried not to drink too fast. She didn’t want to fall asleep in the chair.

  He put his hands together, prayerlike, and touched his lips. “Shoot.”

  She’d had to take mental notes during the hour-and-a-half drive from Waynesboro in order to organize her thoughts—keeping track of the various players, noting inconsistencies, and constructing it so that the evidence came before the sudden, and radical, conclusions. Sam listened in a strikingly professional manner, breaking in only to ask for clarification. He took notes. He probably went through thirty pages over the space of two hours, and when she finished he sighed and dropped his pen, then rubbed his eyes.

  “So?” she said after the silence had gone on long enough.

  He rocked his head, maybe wondering if he could trust anything she’d said. “You know, don’t you, that I’ll have to call the FBI for comment. And soon, if I want to make tomorrow’s show.”

  “I hope you do,” she said. “Just make sure you’re not calling your other Bureau source.”

  He grinned. “You guessed it?”

  “Owen Jakes was the only way you could have learned of Bishop’s death that quickly.”

  He seemed very pleased by her detective work; then he signaled for two more drinks. As the waiter headed to the bar, Sam said, “You know you just threw the shit into the fan. Even if you change your mind right now, I’m going to follow up on all of this.”

  “I’m betting on it, Sam. If you don’t, I’m a dead woman.”

  14

  SEBASTIÁN VIVAS insisted on paying for Kevin’s flight out, but there was a catch: The Spanish government would only pay to return him to where he’d come from. Namely, London. So by Sunday he was back in Mattie’s spare room, having bought a ticket to JFK for Monday morning. That evening, he drank beer with her and Elijah, the TV muted in the background. He listened to Mattie’s stories about life in the islands before she married and moved to England. “There was no time there, you see? Morning, day, night was all we knew. The food—it came off the trees. Here? Every little second, they measure it. Your food comes from boxes. And always: money, money.”