The Middleman_A Novel

by Olen Steinhauer

  She flattened the pages on his desk and said, “Ben Mittag took his orders from his phone, which connected to Owen’s burner.”

  “That was in Schumer’s report, but we don’t know what they said to each other.”

  “No, we don’t. And we don’t know why, if Mittag was working for Owen, he didn’t hand over a list of safe houses rather than make us work to find them and shut them down. Owen didn’t have a reason to hide that information from us.”

  Paulson seemed to find that interesting; he rapped his fingertips on the desktop. “Maybe the theory is starting to unravel.”

  “No, it’s just a question.”

  “Do you have an answer?”

  She shrugged. “I think it was hard on Mittag, maintaining his cover. Every day he listened to arguments against people like Owen, against us. He rationalized his behavior—we all do that. He would shoot some politicians for Owen because he thought it would also help the Revolution. But he wouldn’t give away the safe houses. He tried to walk a line. Once Owen had Bishop killed, though, Mittag was probably too scared to commit to our side. So he chose the Brigade.”

  “You’re twisting yourself into a pretzel trying to explain it to yourself.”

  She wasn’t troubled by that, because Mittag’s inner life was just another loose end, one of many that no one would ever be able to explain. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, then looked him directly in the eyes. “But you know what does matter? The phone records from Owen’s burner. He didn’t just use it for calling Mittag.”

  A sly grin from Paulson. “I’m in such suspense, Rachel.”

  “He also called a number that was triangulated to your house, Mark.”

  It meant something that Paulson held on to his grin, but it no longer looked like an expression of any emotion. It was frozen there, a mask to cover up whatever was going on in his head.

  “Tell me, Mark. Which one of you ordered Sarah Vale and Lyle Johnson to execute me?”

  His expression became pained, and he licked his teeth behind his lips. Finally, he said, “Jakes was an idiot.”

  “But useful for running Benjamin Mittag.”

  Now the grin was gone. “You think I was running Mittag, through Owen? That’s insane.”

  She shook her head. “Owen was running Mittag long before you ever showed up. But you’re not an idiot. You did some investigating. You discovered what Owen was up to, then decided to put his inside man to use for some of your friends. How are your Plains Capital shares holding up?”

  “My shares?” His mouth worked the air, sputtering the word “Really?” His hands fidgeted, momentarily out of his control. “Christ, Rachel. You must think I’m a monster.”

  She wasn’t sure what she thought of him, but nothing he had said was helping his case.

  “What?” he asked her, his voice rising. “Would you rather a band of militants roam the country, blowing up shit?”

  “They never blew up a thing,” she said.

  “Because we never let them.”

  Maybe, she thought, he really believed what he’d said: Corporations are stability. Or maybe it was only about his bottom line. Was there a difference? “It doesn’t matter what I think, Mark. The optics matter, particularly for someone like you.”

  He exhaled noisily and looked around his office, at the photos of himself with politicians, with the president.

  “Maybe you want to tell me about your friends, the ones you were helping out.”

  “Maybe you’d like to go fuck yourself,” he snapped.

  She couldn’t help but smile. In the space of a few minutes he’d crumbled. It was almost too easy. She said, “And you can tell Johnson and Vale that getting rid of me—or anyone connected to this story—will only bring it out further.”

  Paulson gave her silence for ten full seconds, gradually settling down. Then: “You’ve got blackmail on your mind, Rachel. I can see it in your eyes.” He shook his head, disgusted. “What is it you want?”

  “Well, the first thing I want is for you to release Kevin Moore. And don’t touch his passport.”

  “Done,” he said, swiping his hand like an impatient magician making the unreal real. “Anything else?”

  “Your job.”

  His fist dropped to the desk like a bird shot in midflight. “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “I don’t get to choose my successor.”

  “You’ll put in a good word with the director. The president’s an old golfing buddy, right? I’ll be charming in the interview. We’ll see how it goes. The important thing is that you step down now.”

  “Are you really serious?”

  “Try me.”

  More dismal silence; then the office door opened. It was Lou Barnes. When he noticed Rachel sitting there, he went slack-jawed, then closed his mouth. Something more urgent than a disgraced ex-colleague was on his mind. “Mark, you’ll want to see this.”

  Paulson looked at Rachel, his face flushed, then got to his feet.

  They followed Barnes through a crowd of employees to his glassed-in office, where everyone was glued to his wide-screen television. The news channels were all reporting the same thing: Spontaneous demonstrations had appeared in twelve major cities, among them New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle, Detroit, Chicago, and Washington. Throngs of people filled the streets, hemmed in by tall buildings, moving slowly toward major landmarks. “None of these demonstrations has been cleared with local authorities,” said a newscaster. “The police aren’t sure what to do.”

  “Oh shit, that’s us,” someone said when the image changed, and Rachel saw that a loose crowd of a hundred or more people was standing outside the Hoover Building, with more people streaming across the street to join them.

  Rachel looked out of Barnes’s office, past the gawkers. A dozen agents stood at the windows in the front of the building, looking down.

  “They’re not saying anything,” said Barnes.

  “What?” asked Paulson.

  “No signs. Mouths shut tight. No demands. Not in any of the cities. They’re dead fucking silent everywhere.”

  “Circumnavigation,” said Rachel, remembering.

  Paulson looked very confused. “What?”

  Before he could ask again, she left the office, pushing through the crowd, and headed for the elevators.

  On the ground floor there were employees hovering near the entrance, others foolishly assuming that safety could be found by standing out of sight and whispering into their phones. She saw Nathan gaping at the windows, hand on his sidearm, and when he saw her pass he said, “Agent Proulx, I wouldn’t go out there.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, but she didn’t know if it would be all right or not. She didn’t know anything, really, because she couldn’t see into the future. None of them could.

  She pushed through the doors and stepped outside. Barnes hadn’t been lying—they were silent. A wall of mute people standing together and looking at her. Just looking. No anger, no malice, just a thousand eyes that made her feel as if, from now on, she would never be alone. It was terrifying. Her first impulse was to look away, but that made her feel ashamed, so she turned to look back at them all. It was hard, those eyes drilling deep into her, right to the center. The terror returned, and she walked hurriedly up the sidewalk. By the time she reached the end of the block, at the edge of the crowd she saw more demonstrators approaching on foot. Hundreds. Silent.

  In the distance, she heard sirens. The police were on their way.

  CIRCUMNAVIGATION

  THURSDAY, MAY 24, 2018

  1

  IT HAD been two months since she’d walked through this city, overcome by hopelessness, back to Penn Station, thinking that it was all over for her. Now it was a gorgeous day, warm without being oppressive. There was traffic, of course, and noise, and throngs of distracted pedestrians, but when she reached Bryant Park the green stretch of nature was a relief, even populated by food carts, down-and-outs distribut
ing handbills, and New Yorkers spilled all over the grass talking on their phones while nibbling on sandwiches and soy snacks. Deeper in, she saw the young people—fifteen or so—dozing under the sun beside a pile of protest signs. These days, everyone had a reason to lift a sign. She found a bench and settled down to take it all in.

  She didn’t see James Sullivan—more accurately, Milo Weaver—until he was about ten yards away, taking off his sunglasses. His suit, unlike back in San Francisco, didn’t stand out here, but she remembered those bruised, melancholic eyes, and his flakes of gray that had by now multiplied. And, she noticed, a silver wedding band. He also wore a smile. She straightened as he reached her. “Mind if I sit, Rachel?”

  She tilted her head toward the empty space beside her, and when he settled down he placed his hands on his knees. Took a deep breath. “Congratulations on the new job.”

  She had taken over the assistant directorship three weeks ago. It turned out that, when motivated, Paulson was able to convince the director of even the most ridiculous things, like moving a special agent too many steps up the ladder. “Shaking things up” was how it had been described in the official statement. These days, she found herself at the head of the table in that noisy conference room, lording it over Barnes, Lynch, and Kranowski, still in awe of how their acting skills hid their contempt.

  “Thanks,” she said, then: “You know, it took some arm-twisting with your old employers at Langley, but we’ve collected a nice dossier on you. Father: the late Yevgeny Primakov, formerly of the KGB and FSB, and then UNESCO. Two sisters, one of whom—Alexandra—seems to do legal work for you. And you: Milo Weaver, once an agent of the ultrasecret Department of Tourism. After your father died, you moved over to UNESCO before eventually dropping off the official roster altogether.”

  “Gosh,” he said, a smile on his lips. “Can’t fool the Bureau, can you?”

  He was already beginning to irritate her, so to get that smile off his face she added, “A wife, Tina, and a sixteen-year-old daughter named Stephanie.”

  Yes, that did it. The smile was gone. So she pushed on:

  “Tell me what you really do for the UN. Tell me why the UN was funneling money to Martin Bishop, beginning in 2009. He came to you, broken, in Spain. And you encouraged him to work against the US government. Without you, none of this would have happened.”

  “Well, first of all,” he said, stretching his arms out ahead of himself, “that wasn’t UN money.”

  “Whose money was it?”

  “Second of all, I didn’t encourage him. When he came to Spain he connected with a friend of mine, who called me.”

  “Sebastián Vivas.”

  Weaver nodded. “Sebastián thought I could help. Once I heard his story, and had verified it, I tried to talk Martin out of doing anything. I told him that he’d get himself killed if he went back to the States and started speaking out, particularly about what had happened in Berlin. But I couldn’t convince him. And I wasn’t going to let him go back without some kind of support. So, yes, I set him up with some income. Not to work against the US government, though.”

  “No?”

  He shook his head.

  “And somehow Bishop survived, with your money, and for eight years Owen Jakes didn’t kill him. He was under your protection.”

  “I met Jakes in a Berlin park much like this,” Weaver told her. “He understood that if Martin was hurt or killed I would turn over the evidence of the bombing to the Germans. He kept to his end of the deal, but I had no idea he’d recruited his own mole. Benjamin Mittag was a surprise.”

  It was nice to hear that this smug man could be surprised now and then. “But you didn’t keep your end of the deal,” she said. “When Bishop was killed, you didn’t tell the Germans about the bombing.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “Did you?”

  Weaver shrugged. “What makes you think the Germans didn’t already know the story? How bad do you think their forensics are? Come on, Assistant Director. They knew all along.”

  “Now you’re confusing me on purpose.”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  That was a phrase she would have expected to hate coming from his lips, but he hadn’t said it as a boast. In fact, he acted as if the complexity of his world was a point of sadness.

  He said, “The KRL had already humiliated the German government. The last thing the Reichstag wanted was for it to get out that an FBI agent had killed them, particularly when the reason was so sordid: getting the Germans to be more cooperative. All that would do was make martyrs of the KRL and encourage more radicalism.”

  She took her time, thinking through his explanation, holding it up against what she already knew. The explanation made sense to her, because like most mysteries it depended on the vagaries of human nature and a love of secrecy. That wasn’t to say she believed it; believing anything this man said felt like naïveté. She said, “This is all very enlightening, Milo, but I almost got killed trying to put together the pieces. You could have passed me something.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding like he meant it. “But this is bigger than Martin Bishop and Bureau corruption. It’s bigger than banks helping launder money. Maybe you’ve noticed: The world is moving in a worrying direction.”

  “It’s always moving in a worrying direction.”

  “That’s a matter of perspective,” he said, and flicked something off his pants. “The decline of the EU, the rise of nationalist movements all over the planet. Global fragmentation. This is bigger than Martin Bishop. It’s bigger than America.”

  “This?”

  Weaver hesitated, then: “My father once threw away his career and much of his life in order to try to make the world a better place. I’m not sure he succeeded, but I’m also not sure that mattered. The work he did gave him a reason to wake up in the morning.”

  “Is that why you’re trying to destabilize American democracy? Because you have daddy issues? Or is it to push off thoughts of suicide?”

  He grinned. “Destabilize democracy? Am I really that powerful?”

  “Look, I can see protecting Bishop, but you actively funded him. You were funding terrorism.”

  “You’re trying to get under my skin, Rachel. We both know he wasn’t a terrorist. He needed support because he had a fight ahead of him. He was going against people with limitless resources. And after what he went through in Berlin he deserved a chance. So do you.”

  Weaver reached into his jacket, took out an envelope, and handed it to her. Unsure, she opened it and found five pages of spreadsheet filled with thirty-four-digit alphanumeric codes and dollar figures in the millions.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s me helping you, Rachel.”

  “But what is it?”

  “It’s what you need to reopen and expand the investigation into Plains Capital Bank and Investition für Wirtschaft.”

  “Expand?”

  “The banks don’t matter. What matters is whose money was being laundered, and why it was being laundered.”

  “It was being laundered to avoid paying taxes.”

  He shook his head. “That’s the clean story, and it’s a pretty one—it’s enough to interrupt the money flow for a short time. The important question to ask is where the money was headed once it was cleaned.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Because I’m still figuring it out myself.”

  She refolded the pages, slipped them into the envelope, and pocketed it. She wasn’t sure what she would do with the gift. She’d learned the value of holding on to incriminating information. She’d learned how to use evidence as a bludgeon.

  As if reading her mind, he said, “You might want to just keep it for future use.”

  Though she’d thought the same thing, she said, “Why?”

  He pursed his lips. “You remember those hundred and twenty girls who were kidnapped last year in Nigeria?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  �
�I’m glad you do. A lot of people don’t. Or they mix it up with some other school somewhere else. And if that kind of horror can disappear from the consciousness of people, imagine how quickly a case against some multinational banks will fade.”

  “You’re saying I should choose the right moment, in order to inflict the most damage.”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you think I want to inflict damage?”

  He hesitated, then leaned back. Waited.

  “Maybe I think the stability of Western civilization is a little more important than a handful of lives.”

  Milo Weaver rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Some might say that caring about a handful of lives is the definition of civilization.”

  Rachel turned to look across the park to where some demonstrators were waking from their afternoon naps, yawning. Beyond them, near Forty-Second Street, Kevin Moore was watching out for her, as were seven other agents. She felt protected and at peace, free to speak her mind. “You’re full of shit,” she told him. “People like you ignore the costs of blowing up hypocrisy. My job is to make hypocrisy and corruption function as well as possible, because that’s what humans are—they’re hypocritical and weak. Rip away the hypocrisy, and there’s nothing left.”

  Milo blinked, looking across the park. She wondered if he, too, had his own heavies in reserve. He said, “You sound just like Mark Paulson.”

  She didn’t bother replying to that. “Tell me,” she said, “how much money did you funnel into the Massive Brigade?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, I hope you don’t mind wasting that much money.”

  “You think it’s wasted?”

  “Martin Bishop is food for the worms.”