The Directive

by Matthew Quirk

  All was not well in workspace 923. Lynch had outdone himself with the malware. As we neared her cubicle, I could see a dozen pop-ups: “Click here!” “You won a free iPad!” “Your computer has been compromised!” “Virus alert!” The printer nearby was spitting papers onto an overflowing stack in the tray.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said.

  “Hmm…” Jack said. We stepped into her cubicle.

  It was noon. The decision would be here any second, if it hadn’t arrived already, queued up in the fax waiting for her to log in with the crypto card.

  “You haven’t plugged any strange USB drives in here, have you?” Jack asked her. “Or clicked on any PDFs from someone you don’t know?”

  “No.” We knew she’d taken the bait, because we had fed it to her. He looked at her with that special derision the computer-savvy reserve for their lessers.

  “Well,” she said. “There was one that looked like a newsletter, but it wasn’t from communications.”

  While they looked over the laptop, I walked over to her purse and did a quick dip looking for the card.

  It wasn’t there.

  I waited until Jack distracted her with a detailed question, then pulled the purse open and scoured it. I’d seen RVs with less stuff inside. I shifted it one way, then the other.

  No crypto card. Through the window in the main door of the suite, I saw the guard from the front desk. He wouldn’t stop peering at me. Without that card we’d have to wait for the directive to come in, and then what? Peek over someone’s shoulder? Tackle them and take it?

  Jack looked at me, desperate: get on with it. I looked back toward the main door.

  Maybe she had already taken out the card. I checked her mouse pad: left-handed. Then I looked at her left pants pocket, where there was a contour in the fabric. It could have been a wallet.

  “I’ll check the DNS name change,” I said and pointed at her chair. “You mind?”

  She stood up. I sat down. In the confines of the cubicle, there was nothing out of the ordinary about my hip brushing past hers. I could feel the card in her pocket. On top of all my crimes, I would now probably be arrested for trying to get into the pants of this efficient young woman.

  Pickpocketing is all about attention. If you’re looking at someone’s eyes, they start to get very nervous when you’re within a few feet. Look away, though, at the focus of his or her attention, and you can get within inches without setting off any alarms.

  I stared at the screen and ran a few things from the Command prompt. It looked very technical, but I wasn’t doing anything. Then I pushed back the chair, put my hand on the desk, dropped to one knee, and checked out the Ethernet ports.

  When you’re in someone’s pocket, they’re going to feel it, so you cover the touch. In this case I pushed the chair against her as I dipped two fingers into her pocket.

  I had the card. Under the desk, I switched it with the dummy card I’d been carrying. On the way back up, I nudged the chair again and dropped the dummy into her pocket. When she did get around to checking the fax, she would get a card fault condition. By the time she sorted out why her card wasn’t working, we would already have stolen the directive and be halfway back to DC. Or in handcuffs. Or dead.

  I stood up. “I’ll check the other ports and the printer.” On my way over, I messaged Lynch: “Stop printer.”

  The guard from the front desk was now talking to someone on the phone, his attention fixed on me.

  With the card palmed, I walked over to the fax. It was in an out-of-the-way cube. The only good thing I had going in my favor was that there were no security cameras aimed directly at the fax. In the highest-security areas, where restricted information is processed, you can’t have a camera staring at the state secrets. It would give the bad guys a way to spy.

  When we were rehearsing, I had told Jack there might be a mechanical lock to deal with before we could get to the fax. I knew there wasn’t, but I had to guarantee that I would handle this part of the job myself.

  I put the card in the slot on the side of the fax.

  Please enter PIN.

  I punched in the eight numbers.

  PIN not recognized.

  That was one attempt. Three wrong guesses would lock me out. I had divined the PIN from the pattern of Pollard’s hand on the video. The last digit had been the least clear. I re-entered the first seven digits, then moved down one in the column for the last number.

  PIN not recognized.

  After all this work and all this pain, I was about to learn my fate standing in the middle of a badly lit cubicle, staring at the inky black-and-gray display of a fax machine like an intern. Whatever happened to Butch and Sundance?

  I punched the PIN in again, and for the last digit moved from a six to a nine.

  Secure access granted. 1 Fax in Queue…

  I busied myself at the Ethernet ports, trying to look like my heart wasn’t shuddering inside my chest at 180 beats per minute.

  The fax let out a high electronic screech.

  Printing…

  To my mind it was an air raid siren, but apart from a look from one of the traders, no one seemed to notice.

  Then Pollard glanced in my direction. I saw her reach down and touch her pocket.

  The fax ran on a regular phone line and could receive both normal and encrypted transmissions. It would only print the encrypted material when the card was in and the PIN had been entered. She couldn’t be sure I was receiving restricted information. And her card, she must have thought, was still safely in her pocket.

  Jack said something to her. We had practiced a half-dozen terrifying-sounding computer security breaches to tell her about that would keep her occupied. Pollard blanched and looked down at the computer. He asked her to keep watch on a progress bar while he did something on his laptop. If the progress stopped, that meant there might be a serious data breach on Fed Day.

  Heaven forbid. I watched the fax.

  The cover sheet inched out. I saw the words form: “Class I FOMC—Restricted Controlled (FR).” With every line return, every screech of the printer, I was sure the guard would come back, the real IT department would show up, the SWAT team downstairs would flood the suite with rifles drawn.

  The cover page fell into the tray. Pollard stood up. She was examining the dummy crypto card, and me.

  The text of the directive began to print. I saw it spool out, the boilerplate introduction that was always used. Through the main door, I could see the guard talking with a cop.

  “The Federal Open Market Committee seeks monetary and financial conditions that will foster price stability and promote sustainable growth…”

  We’d been made. I watched the paper crawl, an eighth of an inch at a time.

  “To further its long-run objectives, the Committee in the immediate future seeks conditions in reserve markets consistent with…”

  The main door opened. The guard stepped inside.

  I waited, watching the fax.

  And finally, I could see the numbers. I had the directive. The decision was in: they were going to keep the throttle open, keep pumping up the economy. That’s all it was: a single paragraph in a dry government memo, a single number—the funds rate—but it was enough to shake the markets to their core, to pivot the global economy. There were billions funneling through those computers over my shoulder, and whoever held this number at this moment stood to make hundreds of millions trading ahead of the announcement. Yet after all I had been through, it seemed like such a small thing for all the trouble it had caused.

  I pulled the directive out and read the next few lines. Then I dropped it into the locked bin for the paper shredder.

  “What are you doing with that fax?” Pollard asked me across the room.

  I ignored her. I needed one more second. I pulled another sheet from my back pocket, where it had been folded inside the take-out menu, and dropped that in for shredding as well.

  I glanced back. The guard st
epped out. I heard men moving fast down the hallways. Quiet time was over. Any second, the cops were going to burst through that door.

  I pulled a blank piece of paper from the fax tray, scrawled a line on it, then folded it in half.

  “Ports look good,” I said across the room to Jack. That was our code to get out.

  I started walking toward the second exit, past the empty office of the executive vice president who ran the trading desk. He was in DC; the desk manager always attends the committee meeting. That’s why I had planted my camera in his deputy’s office. I dropped the paper to the ground, then slid it under his door.

  Chapter 45

  “I’M GOING TO get another CD,” Jack said to Pollard. “Could you keep your eye on that hourglass?”

  The Federal Reserve Police were at the front door.

  We fast-walked, then all-out sprinted, for the secondary exit, and made it to the stairwell.

  “Stop!” someone shouted behind us.

  I wrenched a piece of electrical conduit off the wall and wedged it across the landing between the door and the stair. I heard the cops banging on the other side.

  We ran down one level. There were cameras everywhere. From the request-for-proposals and bids on renovations, I knew they had an access panel every three floors.

  The Reserve Police watching the monitors were world class. The cameras were bulletproof. The security contracts to fill the place with all-seeing eyes had cost tens of millions of dollars. And the wires connecting it all? They were sitting in a sheet-metal box, protected by a two-dollar wafer lock.

  We hid in a doorway. Jack pulled a keychain laser pointer from his bag and aimed it at the camera. That would blind it, but central control was sure to notice the flaring.

  “I can maybe crawl up and smash it,” Jack said.

  “Give me your bag.”

  He handed it over. I reached in, pulled the tab out of the end of the binder, and dumped my picks into my palm. I used a C rake and had the panel open on the third pull.

  “They’ll be here any second,” he said.

  There were an awful lot of wires.

  “I think the camera’s red,” I said. That detail hadn’t been in the RFPs.

  “I thought it was green.”

  “You sure?”

  “No.”

  A black dome of smoked glass housed the camera, which meant it was a pan-tilt-zoom type. An empty shell would have been just as effective a deterrent, because you never know when they’re watching. Most cameras with conspicuous blinking red lights are fakes, just as intimidating to bad guys and cheaper than the real thing.

  With the green light of Jack’s laser shining through the smoked glass, however, I could see the hardware inside slowly panning back and forth as it monitored the flight of stairs.

  I pulled the twist nut off a connection in the green wires and slowly separated the copper strands. A fire alarm suddenly shrieked and strobed above our heads. I jammed them back together.

  “Okay, red.” I pulled the red wires. The stairwell plunged into blackness. I groped in the dark until I’d managed to get them back together, then twisted the nut back on.

  “Blue?”

  “Blue,” Jack said with a nod.

  I pulled blue, and watched Jack’s laser shine through the housing. The camera stopped.

  “Which exit?” he asked.

  “Maiden Lane.”

  It was on the north side, on a floor higher than Liberty Street. We sprinted down the stairs until the muscles in my legs were on fire, then stopped at the door that led to the rear lobby where we had first entered. There were normally four police officers at the mantraps, but now it was a wall of black uniforms. Clearly the alarm had been called. We didn’t have a chance. Why was there so much extra security today? Had Bloom and Lynch called them in?

  We descended another level, to the larger, south lobby, the bank’s old public entrance. I peeked through the window. It was even worse.

  “What the hell are we going to do?” Jack asked. “The tunnels?”

  I thought through my planning, the escape work. “It’s all sealed. Heading closer to the vault will only make it worse. We have to get to the loading dock. It’s the only way.”

  “They had four cops there,” he said.

  I heard footsteps above us on the stairs, the squawk of a radio, more police. “It’s our last chance. Let’s go.”

  We went back up a level, toward the cops. I killed the cameras through the access panel, and we exited the stairwell and took a quick right into a corridor. It went straight for a hundred feet, and then turned left. Heading that way should have led us around to the loading dock.

  I could hear the door open and close once more behind us, the police closing in as we made the left-hand turn. We entered a long, wide hallway that ran toward the dock. There was only one other door, ahead on our right, set back a few feet in an alcove.

  I started down the hallway, and we had made it about twenty feet when I saw the barrel of an assault rifle poke out at the far end of the hall, between us and our exit, about two hundred feet away. Two more guns appeared.

  It was the SWAT teams, coming our way. Jack and I stopped dead and threw ourselves into the alcove. I reached up and tried the knob behind us: locked, no time to pick it. We were stuck. Any minute, either the cops or the SWAT guys would pass us and we’d be cowering in plain sight. It was over.

  The dive had wrenched the stitches in my back. I could hear the beeps and chatter on the radios of the cops following us, coming closer, about to turn the corner we had just made.

  “Whoa!” a shout echoed down the hallway from the direction of the SWAT team. “You can’t be in this hallway.”

  They had seen us. I took another look at the lock. It was probably better to give ourselves up than surprise a bunch of heavily armed crack shots in riot gear. I looked at Jack. He shook his head.

  “Federal Reserve Police!” came the voice of one of the cops who’d been following us. They must have already come around the corner and were standing close by.

  The SWATs yelled back, “This hallway has to be clear for special operations. We have a gold handoff. Didn’t you hear the comms?”

  They hadn’t seen us. They were hailing the police behind us.

  “We have a potential breach,” the cops shouted back. “Did you see anyone run down this hallway?”

  Whoever was speaking for the gold team laughed. “We’ve got eighty-five million dollars of bullion over here. Anyone running this way would be long gone. You’ll need to clear the hallway.”

  “Okay, okay.” I could hear the Reserve Police retreat. A door closed behind us, the way we had come. The police would leave us alone for a moment, but it was only because some jumpy commandos were coming our way.

  A gold shipment was rolling through. That explained the extra security and the street closings.

  I saw Jack glowering at me, as if I could have predicted this disaster. I was already on my feet, examining the lock. It was the electronic card-and-code that Cartwright had shown me how to bypass. We might make it out of this.

  But then my stomach turned. Above it was a brand-new Medeco M3, the sort you might install if you found out your $1,300 electronic lock was useless.

  We’d have been better off charging the assault rifles at the end of the hallway. The M3 is the lock of choice for government and intelligence agencies. It’s on the White House and the Pentagon. It was the direct descendent of the Medeco that had defeated me during Lynch’s tryout, three generations more advanced. It usually leads a locksmith to say “To hell with it,” put his picks down, and drill out the shear line. A break-in artist would just smash a window or call it a day.

  I didn’t have those options.

  I could feel the floor rumble as the gold rolled toward us, slowly but surely. There was no way I had time to pick this beast.

  I stabbed the LED on the card-and-code with a pick, shorted the board, and turned the handle. Then I slid a pick acro
ss the card-and-code’s bolt to keep it open so I wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. That took about four seconds.

  The gold rumbled closer. I could hear clank clank, clank clank, clank clank over and over again, like footsteps but louder, metal on concrete.

  The M3 is something of a fetish object among lockpickers because of its difficulty. On top of the mushroom, spool, and serrated pins, there were new ARX designs: harder to rotate, with false gates to throw off pickers. I had to move them all to the shear line and then set the rotation on each one to allow the sidebar to retract.

  Even if I managed those two miracles, I wouldn’t be done. Finally, there’s the slider: a third piece of brass that stops the key from turning unless it’s pushed forward to the correct position. The normal feedback that tells you when a pin has set is a thousand times harder to feel with all those extra pieces securing the cylinder. There were two trillion possible combinations of pin heights, angles, and slider positions, and only one will open the goddamn thing.

  I had to find the right one, and here’s why real-life lockpicking is hard: I had to do it through the tiny, oddly shaped keyway in the front of the lock while fear tightened my gut into a hard black ball. Imagine trying to change all the spark plugs on your car engine. With the hood open one inch. And a drunk guy driving.

  That was my task. I figured I had a minute or two until the SWATs arrived, maybe enough for a lock with only security pins if I was lucky. There would be no gimmicks or easy bypasses, just the slow, painstaking work, millimeter by millimeter, of metal on metal and the feel in my fingers. I put a light torque on the plug with my tension wrench and started setting the pin heights.

  I felt the ground shake as they wheeled the gold closer. I knew it was impossible. But I couldn’t give up.

  It took a minute to set the pins to the shear line. Step one seemed complete, but there was no way to know for sure.

  Clank clank. I could hear the footsteps of the SWAT team, hear the rattle of their gear coming closer.