“He was going to kill the girl,” she finally managed.
Toby sighed loudly, as if that were a weak argument.
Was it? Was there an argument to be made for sacrificing a little girl so that a full-grown woman would survive a little longer? She remembered Layla gasping for breaths that wouldn’t come, her legs kicking spastically on the sticky packed earth. Not even enough breath for her to scream in pain.
“It’s funny,” Toby said.
“Funny?”
“Well, no. Horrible. Of course. But I’m thinking of how easy it is to manipulate these kids. To convince them of anything. Ever since 9/11 they’ve been ready to gobble up any conspiracy to make sense of the world. The rich are their enemies, the government too. You can get them to turn their hacking talents on some banks, or even convince them to commit murder. For some bleeding-heart ideal. So fucking naïve.”
She noticed how he spat those last words. These kids, the ones Rachel had spent the last months living with, truly disgusted him. “Well, Peter thought the same thing. But it didn’t work, did it? They didn’t murder the family. He did.”
“But it almost worked.”
“He’d drugged them.”
Toby rocked his head noncommittally, then pulled the bolt on the door and pushed it open. That dirty light from the solitary bulb glowed from below, and the foul smell mushroomed out. Toby patted his nose and said, “Whew,” before starting downstairs. Rachel followed, watching the previously hidden bald spot on the back of his head. When they reached the bottom she was struck by how peaceful everything looked on this side of the expensive wines. A million-dollar wall to hide the gore.
“This way?” Toby asked, pointing to the left.
“Either side.” She followed as he marched to the left and around the end of the rack and then paused, taking in the scene. Close to them lay Gary, doubled over in the last jerk of his death agony. Further to the left, lying on their backs, Grigory and Jelena Orlov. To the right, near the far wall, Layla was splayed on her back, arms out, close to Peter’s demolished face. The Colt was still in his death grip. And so much blood, everywhere.
A flash as Toby took a snapshot. Rachel blinked.
“Wait,” Toby said, turning to her. “Where’s the kid? Where’s Marina?”
“Upstairs,” she told him. “I carried her to one of the bedrooms. She can’t wake up to this.”
“Right,” he said, nodding. “She’s well and truly out?”
“I’d say we’ve got a couple more hours, at least.”
Watching where he stepped, he made his way over to Grigory Orlov and looked down at the face. “Yeah, that’s Orlov all right. Saw his picture a lot when he fled here, even talked to him once at a party.”
“About what?”
Toby hesitated, remembering. “The only thing exiles like him talk about: Vladimir Putin. The end of Russian democracy. All the billions they used to have.”
She watched the way he stared at Orlov’s face, a hint of judgment before he raised his camera for another shot. “What are we going to do, Toby?”
He squinted at her. “Well, we’re going to maintain your cover, right? Make sure there’s nothing to connect you to this place. I’ll have to take Marina Orlov somewhere—that’ll be up to headquarters.” He squatted by Orlov’s midsection, then pulled back the lapel of his jacket. It was stiff and heavy. “First I need to collect their documents.”
“Here,” Rachel said as she took Orlov’s wallet from her own jacket and tossed it across the room.
Toby caught it, said, “Thanks,” and began rummaging through Orlov’s jacket for more.
Rachel stepped over to Peter’s body. She crouched and reached into his pants pockets, touching that familiar and cold body, and discovered a wallet and a flip-phone. In the wallet she found his Veritude business card, some credit cards, and a driver’s license, all under the name Peter Kožul. Then she remembered earlier, when they’d just arrived. He’d kissed her deeply, asked where Nathan was, and as he brought them inside told them he had a quick call to make. She opened the phone, and it bleeped.
“What’s that?” Toby said, looking up from Orlov’s bloody jacket.
From the phone’s menu, she selected RECENT CALLS. “Nothing, I’m just checking his—” She stopped, seeing the list of calls Peter had made and received. At the top of the list, the most recent, was a number that was familiar to her. Familiar because it was the same number she had committed to memory months ago and dialed when she had discovered the Orlov family lying in this basement.
Despite the fatigue and the thickening haze of PTSD, this single piece of evidence scraped away the fog, just for a moment, leaving bare a small set of known and suspected facts that reshaped themselves like an impossible MC Escher drawing that made no sense even though it was, in its own way, real.
Peter had called Toby, because they were working together.
Toby was the FBI’s local Russia expert.
Peter was not a Serb. He was Russian.
Back to the start: They were working together. Which was why Peter had known Rachel’s name.
Which led to a final question that she could not yet answer: Where did that leave Marina Orlov?
She looked up just in time to see Toby rising to his feet and stepping toward her, and her body reacted before her mind could, turning and launching itself toward the space between the wall and the wine rack just behind her. She slipped on the bloody floor but didn’t fall, regaining her balance as she caught the rack with her hand and swung around it as Toby shouted, “Wait!” Then a bang sounded, followed by shattered glass and cracking wood.
She ran straight to the stairs, hearing a loud crash and Toby’s curse as he, too, slipped on blood but fared less well. She took the steps two at a time and burst into the hallway, then slammed the door shut, her fingers searching by feel until she found the dead bolt and ran it home. As she turned to run off another shot sounded, and wood cracked from a bullet slamming into the door. One more shot made it through and hit the far wall.
By then, though, she was running through the living room, past the spray-painted slogans, back into the foyer and out into the fresh morning light, past Peter’s Volvo and Layla’s Subaru, to Toby’s Mercedes. She jerked open the driver’s-side door and reached in, checking under the seat and in the glove box. She was searching for a gun—for anything that might help her. Another shot rang out inside the house, muffled by the thick walls.
The why was beyond her now. She didn’t have time to put anything together. The only thing that mattered was that Toby, her emergency contact, was her enemy, and if she fled now in order to save her own life, then the girl sleeping upstairs would not survive the night.
Under the steering wheel she found a latch and popped the trunk, because that was where she would hide a spare gun if she were him. Gravel scattered under her feet as she ran around and ripped open the trunk.
And stopped.
The trunk was full. Full of a shape under a dirty blanket. She took a breath, knowing she didn’t have time to collect herself but needing the moment anyway. She grabbed a corner of the blanket and pulled it back quickly, the way, when she was a child, her father would remove her Band-Aids. She looked down into the open, dead eyes of Nathan, who yesterday had been weeping into his beer because of a broken heart. Dried blood was crusted on his neck, and his shirt was thick with brown blood. He’d been shot through the chest.
More gunfire from inside the house. Toby cursing.
If she’d had more time, her own heart would have broken. Pitiful Nathan’s search for love had ended here, in the trunk of a Mercedes in wine country. It was fucking unfair.
When she covered him again, she noticed a dark glint in the deepest part of the trunk, just beyond Nathan’s body. She leaned over him and grabbed it—it was a heavy shotgun. A Mossberg pump action, pistol-grip stock. She pumped it once and felt the satisfying shudder of the cartridge entering the chamber.
12
“Co
me home,” Bernard said. “Just come home.”
Rachel, leaning against her wall, eyes closed, said, “This is my home.” She knew how obtuse she sounded, but just because he’d taken a last-minute red-eye to come sit by her side didn’t mean that she had to treat her boss with kid gloves.
She opened her eyes finally and looked at him sitting in the too-small desk chair. He’d aged in the three months since she’d left D.C., his wiry hair gone white around the ears, his paunch taking on an air of permanence, his thick spectacles somehow thicker. But whatever he saw in her was more disturbing. “By rights you should be dead, Rachel.”
“So should that girl,” she told him. “But she’s not.”
He adjusted his glasses and sighed, then looked around her little Mission apartment, unimpressed. She was on her mattress, but not out of disrespect—she just didn’t have any other furniture. Not yet.
He said, “She’s fine, by the way. As fine as she can be. We found an aunt in Montreal who’ll come pick her up.”
“He worked for them,” she said. “He was a plant, wasn’t he?”
“Toby? Seems so.”
“Did they turn him in Moscow?”
“Maybe,” he said, his voice trailing off. “I suppose we’ll never know now that you’ve killed him.”
“But you’re investigating it.”
Bernard pulled at his lip. It was the classic Treptow tell—the man could never hide his anxiety.
“Bernard…”
Another tug. “There’s nothing to investigate, is there? In a couple hours the cleaners will show up to get rid of the bodies. Another crew will repaint and replace all the important things. I’m not sure how we’re going to explain the expenses, but that’s someone else’s problem. Kožul’s story about a Chinese firm buying the house—that, at least, was true, but I doubt we’ll get any trouble from them.”
“And Kožul’s name?” she asked, feeling like she shouldn’t have to be pressing him for information.
He opened his hands in a display of ignorance. “I just know that whoever paid him to do it this way knew a thing or two. Either we buy that these kids did it, and case closed. Or we don’t buy it, and we’re too embarrassed to let the truth get out—that we can’t protect political exiles inside our own borders. They knew we’d clean it up for them.”
“And my cover,” she said.
“There’s that,” Bernard said, nodding. “Toby blew your cover. So, really. The only thing to do is come back to D.C.”
That was the rub, and Rachel knew it. Over three months, she’d just scratched the surface of the subject she’d crossed the continent to study, and to go back empty-handed felt like the worst possible outcome—worse, even, than the deaths of well-meaning but unruly innocents in the Sonoma countryside. That vision she’d had over her divorce papers, of a project that might very well make her professional name and give her a fresh sense of purpose, was too compelling to give up on.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“What?”
“It doesn’t matter if the Russians know who I am. As long as they don’t know I killed Peter and Toby, I don’t care if they know what I’m doing here.”
Bernard took off his glasses and frowned at his knees. “I suppose that’s doable. But once we clean up the house—”
“Don’t clean it,” she cut in.
He put back on his glasses. “Don’t?”
She shook her head. “Don’t.”
13
“On the house,” said Beth, her voice soft and hesitant. She gave Rachel a lopsided smile and set the glass of red on the sticky table. Around them, the colored lights of eternal Christmas filled the Roxy, but only a few customers had come to drink. It was still too early, and after the cops had raided the place last week a lot of regulars were staying away.
“Thanks,” Rachel said.
“Mind if I sit a sec?”
“Knock yourself out.”
Beth settled across from her. She’d swept her hair over to try and cover the half she’d previously shaved. “How you holding up?”
Rachel took a long breath, wondering what kind of answer she would give if she were an honest person. Might she tell this bartender that a week ago she’d taken a shotgun out of a car and, in a fury that was less professional than she would later admit to her boss, found Toby kicking open the cellar door and shot him right in the chest? Well, it didn’t matter, because she wasn’t an honest person.
“It’s hard,” she told Beth. “I had no idea they were capable of that.”
That, of course, was what had appeared in the newspaper. Three self-proclaimed revolutionaries had raided a vacation home in Sonoma and killed an entire family, then, apparently in a dispute, each other. Rumors of a suicide pact had not been verified.
Beth shook her head. “You’re lucky you didn’t go out there with them.”
“They didn’t invite me.”
“Well, don’t take it personally.”
Rachel shot her a grin. “Look, I don’t mind political action. I just don’t need a lot of crazy in it. That was a wasted effort.”
Again, Beth smiled, but it was a twitchy smile, unsure of how to set itself.
“Wrong target,” Rachel said. “Go after Russians? They’re not the ones making our lives hell right now, are they? How about Silicon Valley? I could throw a rock and hit a better target.” She shook her head. “I’m sick of dealing with amateurs. I need to connect with people who know how to sack Rome.”
She could hear Beth swallowing, and watched her rise. “Look, I gotta get back.”
“Sure,” Rachel said, realizing that she’d gone too far, and was scaring off the girl.
But Beth didn’t leave yet. She put her hands on the edge of the table and leaned close, her voice lowered. “I know people who aren’t amateurs.”
Rachel measured the girl with her eyes. Beth’s mousy features were made hard by the intensity of her stare, and Rachel knew that she’d found what she’d hoped for: a gatekeeper. “They know the deal?”
“They know how to sack. They know how to pillage.”
“Really?”
“Want an introduction?”
“I’d love one,” Rachel said.
She watched Beth return to the bar and speak with a heavy, bearded man in an army coat and glasses. The man slowly turned to look in Rachel’s direction.
Read on for an excerpt from The Middleman, coming August 2018
Copyright 2018
The Brigade
Sunday, June 18, 2017
1
Kevin Moore leaned against the counter at Sushi Taka. He counted the rings in his spicy tuna roll—one, two, three—thinking of architecture. Then he went about the ritual: the trimming of the chopsticks, the laying on of ginger, the measured smear of wasabi. The flavor was appealing, but nothing special, not to his palate, yet he had eaten so much of this food since moving to the West Coast a year ago that by now the ritual was second nature. The joy he took in eating sushi was one of form and not content; this realization felt like something important.
He shifted his gaze to the window in front of him—watching, like always. A few minutes ago, he’d seen a homeless guy urinate against the bland office building across the street, turning to face the wall as if by this show of modesty no one would notice. But San Francisco residents had seen far worse—hadn’t everyone?—so no one bothered him. By the time Kevin’s phone vibrated beside the tray, number unknown, the homeless guy was long gone, and there was nothing to interrupt the steady Sunday trickle of tourists, vagrants, and hookers.
“Hello?” he said into the phone.
“Time to go, George,” said a male voice.
The office building blurred. “Really?”
“Now,” the caller said, then hung up.
Kevin blinked until his sight cleared, the hazy distance coming into focus again. He wasn’t scared, not really, because he’d been waiting weeks for this moment. Each morning, walking to the Office De
pot in the Potrero Center where he stocked shelves and tried to be patient with customers, he’d carried in him the weight of knowing that this could be the day. It had never been, though, and after a while he’d begun to wonder if the day would ever come. Maybe Jasmine and Aaron had been full of hot air, posers in a city of posers, and all his time here would turn out to be a waste. And now …
No, not fear. Anxiety, yes, but not fear.
He lifted his phone again and scrolled through contacts: MOM. He typed, Off on trip with friends, let you know when I get back. xx. Send. Then he took out his wallet and removed his MasterCard, the Virginia driver’s license he’d never gotten around to changing, and even his library card, but he held onto his debit card. He brought everything to the trashcan and dropped in his soiled tray, the empty cup of miso soup, the cards, and his phone. As they disappeared into the darkness, an involuntary sigh escaped him. Though he knew better, he’d grown attached to the phone that had been pieced together in some Chinese sweatshop. The truth was that Kevin Moore loved the modern world even when he loathed it.
The trashcan lid snapped shut. It was accomplished.
He walked casually over to traffic-clogged Montgomery and south toward Market, past the grand columns of US Bank, and at the ATM emptied his account of $580. He pocketed the cash, then found a trashcan at the corner of Pine. Good-bye, cruel world—in went the debit card. He looked around, wondering if anyone had spotted his madness, but no one stared. Like a man pissing on a wall, people had probably seen this sort of thing before. They’d seen worse.
What was unexpected, though, was the feeling of lightness that overcame him. The anxiety fell away as he walked deeper into his day. A phone and a bunch of cards. So simple. Yet with a few deft moves he’d become unmoored. Who, now, was to say his name wasn’t George? Who could say if he was a rich man or a poor one? Who, really, could say what he was? I’m a NASA scientist, he could say. Or: I’m a cop. The only thing he wasn’t allowed to say was I’m a revolutionary seeking to bury all this modern sublimity.
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