The Directive: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  “So Dad told me you’re between things now, or working for yourself,” Jack said.

  “Yeah. My own firm.”

  “If you ever need any work or help, just let me know. I haven’t forgotten all the times you bailed me out. I owe you big, Mike. It’s the least I can do.”

  That almost sounded like charity, which galled me. But I kept my temper in check. All Jack knew was that I was drinking malt liquor and rotgut whiskey and taking public transportation. To someone who didn’t know the world I’d come from—learning at the knee of DC’s most powerful fixer—the idea of a thirty-year-old having a nice little political shop where his only job was to pull strings sounded pretty far-fetched. Jack hadn’t seen me since I was a navy recruit with a fresh arrest who’d only barely avoided prison. God. He might have thought I had come here to shake him down.

  “Thanks. I’m all set.”

  “And this girl. Annie? She sounds amazing from what Dad told me. Where’d you get engaged?”

  “Tuscany.”

  He whistled.

  “It was the least I could do,” I said. “She’s great. Hilarious. Crazy smart. Calls me on my bullshit. Makes me a much better guy. I’m nuts about her, man. So I don’t mess around when it comes to the romance stuff.”

  “I’m so happy for you, Mike.” He looked at me for a moment as if he really meant it, then turned and checked his recipe. He had laid out a dozen ingredients in small glass bowls.

  The dining room table was set for two at the opposite ends. There was a charger under each dinner plate. It looked like a spread from Gourmet, except for the can of Steel Reserve beside my wineglass. Waste not, want not: I cracked the beer and topped it off with a splash of Old Crow.

  “To brothers,” I said, and lifted my drink. Jack looked at his sparkling water in distaste.

  “Actually,” he said, “pour me one of those.”

  “You sure?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. It can’t be as bad as I remember.”

  I walked over to the counter, fixed him a drink, then handed it to him. We raised our cans and sipped. He came up with eyes shut tight and mouth in a grimace.

  “Jesus. It’s worse,” he gasped, knocking his fist against his chest. We both started laughing. I was glad we were feeling so chummy. It would give me a chance to go behind his back before he could go behind mine. Trust, but verify: it was due diligence time.

  Chapter 5

  I’D CHECKED OUT his recipe, and the last fifteen minutes looked slightly less complicated than a mitral valve replacement. That was my chance. As Jack started toasting peanuts, I pressed the volume control on my phone down until the ringer switched to vibrate and it buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and apologized to Jack. Bent over the pan, he barely noticed. I answered it with a “Hi, sweetheart” and headed upstairs to take the call.

  I had one advantage when it came to scoping out Jack. I’d spent the better part of my youth tagging along with, eavesdropping, and spying on the guy, so I had a good sense of his hiding habits. How else would I have kept myself stocked through adolescence with high-powered fireworks and old Playboys? I checked under the mattress in his bedroom, mostly for old times’ sake, and found nothing.

  I tapped on the closet walls: no false panels. That left the dresser. It was solid oak, very heavy, but I managed to pivot it eighteen inches away from the wall without making much noise. In high school Jack had used a hole punched in the sheetrock behind his dresser to hide his contraband. He would put the goods into a bundle, tie a string to it, lower it into the space between the walls, then tape the string just inside the hole. There were probably still a half-dozen M-80s sealed up in the walls of the apartment building where we’d grown up.

  His setup these days was a fancier variation on the theme. There was a section of sheetrock behind the dresser that pulled away to reveal two high-end biometric safes. The top one had a powder-gray steel door about four feet wide and two feet tall. That usually meant guns. It was big, too; he could have fit a squad automatic in there. But there was no way I had time to get into either right now.

  As I searched, I kept up my end of the imaginary wedding conversation I was using as a cover. “Sure. Whatever color chairs you want…”

  It made for a nice juxtaposition as I took stock of the dangers Jack was concealing in this cozy house. The safe on the bottom was smaller, with an eighteen-inch-square door, a Group 2 combination lock and relocker. It probably cost about $1,200. In my experience you didn’t buy equipment like that to keep your birth certificate dry. It usually meant a lot of jewelry, money, or drugs. Or maybe the guy was just a security freak. We’d grown up around enough thieves that the habits were ingrained.

  I managed to get the dresser back in place, then went to the closet and started checking his belts. In his teens, Jack carried a piece-of-shit Raven Arms .25, one of the classic Saturday night specials. He mostly used it for plinking cans but wasn’t above sticking it under someone’s jaw if things got hairy. He always carried inside-the-waistband on his strong side, so I knew what to look for.

  The closet kept up the same story as the rest of the house. A half-dozen suits hung there, nice stuff: Zegna, Brooks Brothers, and so on. The wider belts, the ones you’d wear with jeans, were about two inches shorter than the thin ones you’d wear with a suit. And on most of those thin belts, I found what I was looking for about six inches to the right of the buckle: a contour worn into the leather from a holster, a decent size, maybe a .40. Jack had moved up to a bigger caliber, and whatever work he was involved in, it meant wearing a good suit over a concealed weapon. He sure as hell wasn’t just punching investors’ names into Accurint to see if they’d been kiting checks.

  I heard a phone ringing downstairs. I rifled the desk drawers, going through the usual office detritus, until I found a black card, the shape of a regular credit card but three times thicker, with copper contacts on the bottom and four glassy rectangles on the front.

  It was electronic, but I couldn’t fathom what it did. As I turned it over in my hands, I accidentally pressed one of the rectangles with my thumb. An LED in the card began flashing, tinting the dark room red in a complex pattern.

  After a moment it stopped, and as I tried to figure out what I had just done, Jack’s laptop screen blinked on with a similar pattern of white flashes. A command line appeared, code scrolled down the screen, and then, across the middle of the display, a message appeared: “Fingerprint not recognized.”

  I stepped in front of the computer and started to sweat. I didn’t want there to be a record of me poking around up here. A second later a light turned on beside the webcam built into the top of the display. My face appeared on the screen.

  The computer let out three loud beeps.

  Scanning…authentication failed, the display read.

  Please wait while we contact a representative.

  My heart pounded. I dropped the card back in the drawer and slid it shut.

  Jack probably heard it. And now I would look like the thief. I waited for the knock on the door, the totally justified accusations. None came.

  It was odd. The food should have been done. He should be looking for me by now. I heard the sounds of blinds dropping downstairs, of furniture moving.

  I walked to the top of the stairs.

  “You should just stay up there,” Jack said.

  I took a step down, looked across the living room, and discovered where that Glock .40 had gone. Jack held it raised in his right hand.

  “Don’t come any closer!”

  Now that was the brother I remembered.

  Chapter 6

  ANNIE HAD DONE a good job hiding her concern when I told her I was going to meet up with Jack tonight. I knew she had a few worries about my old life, but I think she understood that it would be good for me to reconnect with him, have someone I could talk to, square things from the past.

  “Go, see your brother,” she’d said.

  She and I had moved in together four months befo
re, though we’d barely spent a night apart over the past year. We lived in a quaint neighborhood in Alexandria called Del Ray, all 1940s bungalows and throwback main street shops. It was just across the river from the capital, and I was glad, after the scandal, to have put a little distance between me and Washington. We’d thought about trying a new town, but it was nice to be near my father now that he was out. My family had fallen apart when I was a kid, and I finally had a few pieces of it back. That was part of what drew me to Jack.

  Annie gardened. I mowed the lawn. There were always some folks stopping by to chat with us as we sat on our porch. I would have the neighbors over for barbecues—an orthodontist on our left and a tax attorney on the right—nice enough people, if a little dry. They liked to talk about QuickBooks and bond funds.

  Some nights Annie and I would open a bottle of wine, climb through a dormer window, and watch the stars and lunar eclipses from our roof. We’d hide notes in each other’s bags. I’d get to court, face down a federal judge, and open my case to find “Thanks for last night, counselor” scrawled on a Post-it.

  But something wasn’t right. Ever since the madness at my last job, ever since that one awful moment at the end, there had been a distance between me and Annie. It’s one thing when your fiancée hears you, after fifteen minutes on hold with Comcast, groan “Jesus, I could kill somebody.” But things take on a much different cast when you say that in front of a woman who has actually seen you standing over the body of a man after you took his life. She told me she understood that I had no other choice, but she never quite forgot. I’d catch her watching me sometimes with something like suspicion, and I knew it was still on her mind, maybe feeding those doubts about me that her dad had planted.

  She wasn’t the only one who didn’t like to think about the day I was forced to face down our former boss, Henry Davies. I felt fine enough, for the most part, but every so often—when I was trying to sleep, or riding home on the Metro—I would remember his face, like it was right in front of me, or picture the photos of his grandkids on his desk, or feel his fingers clawing at my wrists.

  From the work I had done at our old firm, even after all the bloodshed and the hard work of cleaning up the scandal, I had a reputation around DC as a competent political fixer. I was glad to leave behind the hard-core black bag stuff I’d learned at my last job. I could afford to pick and choose clients, for now at least, to take only the cases that let me sleep well at night and still cover my overhead. It was nothing like the money I was used to, but it was enough. You don’t find much better bargains than the ones you make with the devil. And if I really believed in the cause, occasionally I might use a trick I’d picked up from my old mentor: only a light touch, a little leverage, or perhaps absentmindedly failing to correct the impression that I knew someone’s secrets.

  With her mother gone, Annie’s grandmother—with her posh accent and coin-purse lips—had stepped in and was driving Annie crazy in the run-up to the wedding. It was the Clarks’ chance to show off their class and wealth to the wider world. The perfect day. The perfect daughter. The perfect life. And if the wedding and the need to make me a proper, respectable man with no sharp edges was starting to get to me, it wasn’t Annie’s fault.

  At the house, some nights I would watch the red glow of the numbers on the alarm clock, listen to the sleepless dark. Eventually I’d step out of bed, careful not to wake Annie, and leave the warmth of that body I loved so well. I’d walk down to the porch or just stand in the backyard, watching the sky, ignoring the bite of the cold spring air. I was afraid there was something out there, as basic as gravity, pulling me out of this peaceful home into the night.

  I hoped Jack would understand, that we could help each other out. That’s what had brought me out to his house tonight.

  But this was not what I had bargained for.

  I laughed and shook my head as I came down the stairs at Jack’s house. I’d been dragging my feet on choosing a best man, and Annie must have known it was because a little part of me hoped to have my brother up there beside me, the past forgotten, everything in its place. Jack would just have to stand there and hand me a little box. How badly could he screw that up?

  Here was my answer: Jack had pushed an armchair up against the front door. He stood to the side of the front window, peeking out the blinds, a bead of sweat running down his temple. I could see into the open kitchen, where the noodles were congealing in the pan. It was a nice interior scene, carefully arranged and suggesting a title like: “Waiting for someone to come kill me.”

  I ignored Jack, walked over to the range, and tried some of the pad thai.

  “This is great,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he replied, without looking away from the street.

  I sat on the couch and placed two bowls of noodles on his coffee table. I offered Jack one. He looked at me blankly, didn’t say anything. I twisted some onto my fork.

  “I’m in trouble, Mike.”

  “Really?” I said with mock surprise.

  He nodded, then glanced at the pistol.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, looking at the gun. “I was going to ask about that. I hope it’s not for me.”

  “No.” He went on in a monotone. “I was working a job as a courier, and I started to wonder if maybe this wasn’t just about security, if someone was playing both sides. I was worried I’d end up taking the fall for something big, someone getting hurt, you know? So I started looking into the people who’d hired me.”

  “Were you maybe thinking of fleecing them?”

  “Just covering my ass. And it was big. These guys are serious. I got scared, tried to beg off a job. The people behind it, maybe they found out I was digging. Whatever it is, they’re after me now.”

  “So the gun,” I said, nodding. “Any chance these bad guys are due to stop by tonight?”

  “Maybe. They just called. They could come for me any second. They’re saying I owe them. They’re setting me up—”

  “How much?”

  Jack looked up at me, startled. “What?”

  “How much did they say you took?”

  “I didn’t take it, Mike. They’re setting me up.”

  “I know. But how much?”

  “It’s not about the money, Mike, they said I messed up some plan. They said I had to make it right or they’d hurt me.”

  “Get to the point. How much do you need?”

  He took a drink from a bottle of water he’d placed on the shelves.

  “The payment was sixty-five thousand,” he said. “But I gave it back to them. That didn’t settle it. They said it was too late, that I botched everything and I’d have to do the job myself now. But I’m trying to stay straight. I swear I didn’t take anything, Mike. I didn’t want to tell you about it, get you involved. They jumped me yesterday on my way from the Metro. Worked me over in the stomach. It was bad. They said if I didn’t give them what they wanted, they were going to really mess me up, send me to the hospital.”

  “Huh,” I said. “So they beat you in the one spot that doesn’t bruise much.” It’s a handy technique for enforcers who don’t want to leave marks, and for liars who don’t have any. “Go to the cops.”

  “I wanted to. I tried asking around. They must have found out somehow. They said they’d kill me if I did.”

  “Of course,” I said, and had another bite of pad thai.

  “I think they’re just trying to scare me off for what I know, make me disappear.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  “Mike,” he looked hurt. “I don’t want to run anymore. I just want to live my life. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “So what, you need to buy your way out? Pay them for the job you messed up?”

  “I’m not asking you for anything, Mike. I just need somebody to talk to. I need a way out of this, and I’m so goddamned scared I can’t think straight. Maybe you could help me expose what they’re up to. Outthink them somehow. I mean maybe I could make up what they lost on the j
ob. I’m not sure if they’d go for that, or how much it’d cost.”

  The soft sell. Jack still had his touch.

  “Who would I make the check out to? Or I guess cash is better with shadowy types like this.” I patted my pockets, looking for a checkbook or wallet.

  “Seriously?” Jack asked.

  “Of course not,” I said, and put my bowl down. “You’re not getting any money out of me, man.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d given him a second chance and he was pulling something like this.

  “You know, Jack—”

  Bright lights shone through the blinds. Then came the chirp of tires. The slamming of doors. Loud voices. All the stage dressing for an old-fashioned shakedown. It sounded like three men. Jack had really gone all out.

  “Right on time,” I said.

  “Mike, you should get out of here. Do you have a gun?”

  “I don’t need a gun, Jack.”

  I stepped toward him so I could get a good look at his eyes, the size of his pupils, to see if he was using.

  “So what’s this massive plot you stumbled across?” I asked.

  A fist pounded on the door.

  “Get away from the window,” Jack said. He retreated to the kitchen and took cover behind the counter that separated it from the living room.

  I watched the doorknob shake, then heard the rattle of metal scraping inside the deadbolt: someone raking the lock. Any self-respecting arm-breaker would have just knocked the door in, but these fellows happened to be interested in preserving property. Interesting.

  I went to open the door.

  “What are you doing, Mike? These guys don’t joke around.”

  “You’ve done this before, Jack,” I said, shaking my head. “You’ve literally done this same setup before, where the bad guys come to beat you up for doing the right thing, and I have to pay them off. Tampa, I think. Do you even remember? I gave them eight hundred bucks.”

  “Mike. You’ve got to believe me.”

  I was about to lay out a whole heartbreaking speech about how I’d given him another chance, come here to ask him to be my best man, and now this. But I was too disappointed and angry to even get into it.