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?”
Only now did Rachel realize that David had fallen asleep in his chair. He blinked, coming to.
“Can you cook up some formula?” Ingrid asked. “My boobs are running on fumes.”
He pushed himself to his feet and wandered off. Soon they heard a radio playing in the kitchen—NPR morning news. Rachel knew without being able to see outside that the sun was rising. She turned to Ingrid. “So you arrived in Lebanon, Kansas. And Martin was killed.”
“Yes,” she said, raising Clare to her shoulder and patting her back. “At the time, I wasn’t thinking about Berlin or Spain. All I could see was Ben, the fucking idiot who had ruined everything, and how he would benefit from Martin’s death. The whole movement would be his. He’d be the one giving orders. He could burn everything down as he saw fit. I was blinded by rage. It wasn’t until we’d gotten to Watertown that I remembered Martin’s story about this FBI guy—Jakes, I guess. He’d killed eighteen people in Berlin, and Martin knew all about it.”
Rachel rubbed her sore thigh, remembering what Jakes had done in Watertown. “So you thought the FBI killed him. Specifically, Owen Jakes.”
“Yes.”
Kevin stood and paced, swinging his arms to shake off the anxiety. “But eight years had passed since Berlin,” he said. “You think Jakes couldn’t have taken him out plenty of times before then? Like, before he became a star?”
It was a valid point. “Maybe,” Rachel said, “Bishop really did have a protector.” She thought of James Sullivan, watching over Martin Bishop for eight long years, even calling to warn him to flee this very house … until, in the middle of a wheat field, his protection finally failed. She still didn’t know how Jakes could have placed a sniper in that Kansas field on such short notice. And she didn’t know who James Sullivan was, or what had happened between him and Bishop in Spain. There was so much she didn’t know. She rubbed her forehead and asked, “What did you do then, in Watertown?”
When she began speaking, Ingrid switched to bouncing Clare on her thigh. “I went to the bathroom to take my vitamins, and that’s when I started to feel the walls closing in. I rushed out, ran across the field, and sat under a tree. Had myself a good cry. Look, it wasn’t just Martin. It was everything. I’d thrown away my life to join something that, in no time at all, had unraveled. I had to deal with that alone. Then I heard this guy,” she said, nodding at Kevin, “tramping through the leaves. I stayed where I was. I heard him make that call. Mother, he called her. ‘Benjamin Mittag is here.’ And then: ‘Did we do it? Did we kill Bishop?’ And I knew. This guy with a cell phone and a zip-lock bag, he was a Fed. He was responsible for everything. So, yes, once he sent me off, I tried hard and remembered the phone number from the kitchen. I found a pay phone and gave him up to Ben. It didn’t matter that I hated Ben by that point, that he’d done more damage to the Brigade than Kevin ever had. I wanted to make life hard on the people who had killed Martin and those eighteen kids in Berlin.”
When she looked at Kevin, that old hatred had returned to her face, and with the baby in her arms it was an incongruous sight. Rachel wanted to say something, to mediate between them in some way, but that wasn’t her role. She wasn’t here to comfort them but to learn as much as she could.
“Where did you go afterward?”
“East, back to Flint. I hadn’t been since high school. I still had cash from Martin’s bundle, and that lasted me a couple of months while I looked for a job. Enough to keep me in bottled water—I wasn’t going to drink Michigan lead. I found a restaurant that wouldn’t hassle me about Social Security numbers, and I thought I was doing a good job. I visited Planned Parenthood for checkups. No one knew where I was. And then—this was in late November, I was about ready to burst—my landlord called me at work and told me that two FBI agents had shown up looking for me.” She looked at Rachel. “You’ve heard of Sarah Vale and Lyle Johnson?”
Almost a whisper, Rachel said, “Yes.”
Ingrid nodded, as if she’d expected this answer. “I went back to Montana and found Dr. Hernandez. She took me through the rest of my term.” She looked down at Clare, who was starting to fuss. “David,” Ingrid called. “The formula about ready?”
“Almost!”
“So once she was born,” Rachel speculated, “you went back to David?”
She shook her head. “Kevin showed up.”
Both women looked at him, and he shrugged. “I knew she hadn’t gone home, even after the amnesty was announced. So I asked Fordham for a peek at the debriefs. This one guy from Albuquerque talked about driving Ingrid to a clinic in Montana. I followed the clues.” He looked over at Ingrid, and there was warmth in the look. “She wouldn’t be safe staying with me. That’s why we contacted David, and it turned out the Ferrises had left him their keys when they moved to Florida.”
“We know it can’t last,” Ingrid said. “Bill and Gina will come back eventually. But we were waiting for something to change. We thought that once the report was released the story might come out on its own.”
Kevin cleared his throat. “Then you showed up. Turned out you were the change.”
Rachel didn’t like the way both of them looked at her, as if by entering their lives she had brought solutions. She hadn’t. She’d simply been trying to stay alive and had been sucked into a world of conspiracy theories that, true or not, were still not verifiable. What could be done next? What could be done to save Rachel’s life, to keep Ingrid and her baby safe, and, ideally, expose the truth behind the story she’d just heard? Was that even doable? Or was it better for them all to try to relocate beyond the reach of Owen Jakes and his two smiling minions?
Christ, how had she ended up here?
She’d opened her mouth, ready to speculate on their options, when David returned from the kitchen, a towel over his forearm but no baby bottle in sight. His lips trembled from nerves, or maybe just fatigue. “The FBI just released the report on Massive.”
Rachel looked at Kevin, and Kevin said, “Looks like there’s change all over the place.”