The Directive: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  “Here,” he said.

  I took it. There was a recordable CD inside and a few pages of printer paper.

  I fanned them out: still photos of me with Sacks, just before he was killed.

  “Shots of you on the scene. And those are the only copies. We destroyed the originals.”

  Those photos could end my life. It was like holding a live grenade.

  He offered me a lighter. I slid the papers and the disc back inside the envelope, then sparked the flame near the corner. Red and yellow tendrils climbed the paper. I dropped it, and let it burn at my feet. The plastic disc blackened and warped in the ashes.

  “A peace offering?” I asked.

  “Just trying to be helpful,” he said. He took the lighter back, tapped out a Winston cigarette, and lit it.

  “You can stop with the hand-holding,” I said. “I understand what’s happening.”

  It was my worst fear, that every prejudice against me would be confirmed. Lynch had everything he would need to make me a fugitive, a lowlife killer, to make Annie’s concerns, and her family’s whispers, true.

  I would do anything to prevent it. He had me cold. The only thing that would make it worse would be to lie to myself, to welcome his patronizing, to pretend this wasn’t base extortion.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “You win. You’ve got me. So what do you want?”

  I had to keep him off-guard. I had started to see a way out of this. I didn’t have the whole picture, but the traces were there, like a great idea that comes as you fall asleep and is forgotten the next morning.

  “Finish the job,” Lynch said.

  “You want the directive,” I said. “And how exactly am I supposed to steal the most closely held secret in capitalism?”

  “I didn’t say it was going to be easy.”

  “I can find another man inside that room when the decision is made. When’s the next meeting?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Next Tuesday?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll find a way. And you leave me and Jack and my family alone. And this murder doesn’t touch me. Deal?”

  He took on a pained expression. “There is one small complication. People know who Sacks is. They know he had access to that decision. He didn’t tell the prosecutors everything, but they know enough. They’re locking down everything in DC. They’re watching everyone with access to that room. There’s no way. Not after today, not after you were seen on the Mall.”

  “So you’ll kill me if I don’t make the impossible possible.”

  “New York.”

  “No no no,” I said. “That’s the hardest vault in the world.”

  “It’s no Fort Knox,” he said.

  “It has more gold than Fort Knox.”

  Lynch smiled. I gathered that was his idea of a joke. “But you’re not going for the vault,” he said. “There’s only a few hundred billion in it. The real money’s upstairs. The desk.”

  “The police probably have my house surrounded by now.”

  “You’ll be fine. They don’t have anything to ID you beyond a few very hazy sketches from the first cops on the scene. Painting yourself in blood is a little Apache for my taste, but it got the job done.”

  Let him think I was that crazy. I needed all the leverage I could find.

  Jack licked his lips. I stalled, but there was nothing to decide, no choice in Lynch’s questions. They were commands. I felt the knife once more, then stepped forward, within arm’s length of Lynch.

  “I get you the directive,” I said. “Then we’re done. I never see you again. All debts paid in full.”

  “That’s the deal,” he said.

  The only thing that felt right was burying that knife in Lynch’s throat. But he had serious resources behind him, and that would only get me killed. I had to play along, to buy time.

  “Done,” I said.

  “So what’s the plan?” he asked.

  “My plan for the impossible task you first mentioned twenty seconds ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “See if you can find me a 2004 World Series baseball, Red Sox, signed.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I have a few ideas.”

  He nodded. He seemed to like my resolve.

  “I’ll check around,” he said, and patted me on the shoulder. “Couldn’t have done it without you, Mike. Here’s something for your troubles.”

  He lifted a dime from his pocket and held it out to me. Dimes are used as messages, left on dead men as a warning against informers.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said, and walked past him.

  Lynch wanted to rope me in? Fine. His mistake. Because I was going to get to the heart of these sons of bitches’ operation, then blow it up from the inside.

  I had six days.

  Chapter 16

  I SNEEZED. A few crumbles of hashish flew off the plastic evidence bag and came to rest in a dusty corner of the room. I was in Metro PD’s evidence warehouse, a former factory in Anacostia surrounded by drug dealers’ fiefdoms. It was Aladdin’s cave: stolen goods everywhere, piled in the loading dock and spilling into the street. The drug vault was constructed of plywood, and periodically some PCP would combust in the stifling heat. The warehouse was like a forensic wheel of fortune, great for public defenders. Evidence would always get lost, and the defendants would walk.

  It was the last place I wanted to be, but I had a pro bono client I couldn’t let down. He was a good kid from Stronghold, headed for college, who’d been busted with the hash. They’d reformed the pot laws, but they didn’t apply to hash. He had been a tenth of a gram over the limit, which would bring him serious time. I checked the evidence bag.

  The police hadn’t weighed it yet, typical dysfunction. The less said about that the better. My allergies had just saved this kid eight years of his life.

  As I walked out, I was reminded of another case, one that might offer another way into the Fed. I needed to get back to Virginia. I headed for the Pentagon City Mall. I picked up some tux studs while I was there, but my real target was the Apple Store.

  I saw him before he saw me. He looked about seventeen, but he was three years older. Derek had an afro fade with a part shaved in and wore Buddy Holly glasses and the standard Apple employee T-shirt over a dress shirt buttoned all the way up to his throat. He’d grown up over in Barry Farms. It seemed like a hard place to be a nerd, but at least the computer stuff kept him indoors and safe.

  He smiled when he recognized me, but it was an uneasy look. Last time I’d seen him, we’d been facing down the prosecutor as I worked out a deal.

  He sidled over to me. “Hi, were you interested in the iMac?”

  “You doing good?” I asked quietly.

  “Great. Anything wrong?”

  “No. Don’t worry. Keeping out of trouble?”

  “Yeah. They extended my internship.”

  He started to sound more like a kid from Southeast as he relaxed and code-switched back. Derek was a great mimic. That was part of his problem.

  “John hooked you up?”

  “He did. Thanks. They don’t mind the brush with the law. Actually think it’s a badge of honor.”

  I’d represented Derek at the District Court. The kid had hacked Tajikistan’s embassy—apparently it wasn’t too hard—and somehow placed himself on a list to receive plates from the Diplomatic Motor Vehicle Program. He put them on his little souped-up Acura, thinking he could drag race around the city and park wherever he wanted. They caught him after a day.

  I thought the whole thing was hilarious. I did a lot of pro bono stuff for DC kids. The little hustlers reminded me of myself at that age. With some decent representation, I could help them avoid being chewed up by the legal system and maybe get them to stop acting like morons. The prosecutor wanted to go after Derek for cyberterrorism and a laundry list of other charges. We managed it down to a misdemeanor, expunged after two years. I was impressed with how much
trouble he could get away with from the comfort and safety of his bedroom.

  “I was wondering if you can help me with something,” I said as I checked out the computer. “I have a case, can’t talk too much about it, that involves some malware. The program takes over the computer and reports everything on it back to the hacker. The state expert is a little behind the times, so I was wondering if you could help me out.”

  “Sure,” he said. “What does it do?”

  “We’re not totally sure yet. What’s the worst thing out there?”

  “There’s some nasty stuff written in Python and C++. Records everything typed. Takes screenshots. Remote access. Remote disable. They can even record audio and video.”

  “From the webcam? What about the little light?”

  “They turn it off.”

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  His supervisor strolled by in forced-casual mode.

  “That’s one of the advantages of the Mac,” he said, a little louder for his boss to hear.

  “Can you write one of those?”

  “Hell no. You just download them.”

  He walked me over to the little bar for tech help and pulled up a website on a laptop. Ads bordered the page: pop-ups for some Russian-language shoot-’em-up game, credit card machines, teenage girls in their underwear pouting at cameras. This looked like the sketchiest neighborhood on the Internet.

  “Does it root into BIOS and Recovery?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Survives a clean wipe?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Here you go,” he said, pointing to the page. “It’s probably one of these.”

  “But what do you do with it?”

  “E-mail it. Load it up on pirate software. A lot of ways to get the payload in.”

  “How about this?” I said, and pulled a USB flash drive from my bag.

  “Sure,” he said. “But you’ve got to be careful with them. You just stick that in the computer and it is going to be diseased beyond curing. And tell everyone you give the drive to. They need to sandbox it in a virtual machine.”

  “I will. You think you could make a few? We’re in discovery, so everybody needs a copy.”

  I had a couple of old flash drives in my bag, and pulled them out.

  He gave me a suspicious look. “These are for evidence?”

  “That’s right.”

  I held the drives out to him, then waited.

  “What, you think I’m going to do it here?” he asked.

  “Wherever.”

  “This is the genius bar, man. Have some respect. Do you see that?” He pointed to the web page. “I’m not touching anything from there at work. I’ll get fired. I can probably do it tonight, though. Is there any money in this for me? Consulting fees?”

  “You’re a man of the world now, Derek. It’s about giving back.”

  He shook his head, muttered “Pro bono,” then took the drives.

  Chapter 17

  THE USB KEYS didn’t even have to work. They just had to be good enough to satisfy Lynch. He wanted my plan by that night, so I dug in on casing the New York Fed. The executive suite had been renovated in 2010, and all the bidding and contracting records were public. From the request for proposal documentation, I was able to find everything from the hardware in the president’s office down to the manufacturers of their toilets and doors.

  I spent the day making phone calls, trying to trace exactly how the directive went from DC to New York and who had their hands on it. I posed as a reporter, then a low-level researcher at the Government Accountability Office, and then a security analyst with Booz Allen Hamilton, which does a lot of government work. I said I was looking for best practices on information security, and wanted to compare notes with other agencies.

  Spoofing phone numbers is crucial, and easy. There are plenty of pay websites that will let you change your caller ID to whatever you like. Match something close to the main switchboard, and people assume you’re in-house. Hold music helps, too. I spent a lot of time on hold, and I would always record the music or the droning voices telling me my call was important. When I had someone on the line, I would say I had another call and ask them to hold, then play back the hold music from the appropriate agency. No one doubted me after that.

  During the first phone call you invariably sound like an idiot, messing up names and jargon. But if you say it’s your first day, or you’re an intern, they’ll usually guide you toward what you need to know.

  “That sounds like Form 2110. You mean the operations group?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I would say. “Do you know the direct line?”

  Maybe people at the FBI and CIA are cagey enough to challenge people outright. They will hang up and call back through the main switchboard to confirm identities. But the fact is, most people are too easily embarrassed and conflict averse to confront you directly.

  Soon enough I was calling Mary direct for a 2110 Reg E-Claim reauthorization, like I’d been working for the federal government for a decade. There’s a certain dialect I started to pick up, a tone of dark and weary humor, that identifies you as a Fed lifer.

  It was during Derek’s case that I had first heard the phrase “social engineering.” That’s the term, among tech nerds and hackers, for these methods of talking your way past security measures. It involves a lot of calling around to learn the lingo, rules, and bureaucratic structure of your target, and then using this against them. It was really just con games practiced against institutions from a safe distance, over phone and e-mail. You take the cold, irrational, infuriating rules of a bureaucracy—“This is the wrong line. You’ll have to fill out form 660-S. Come back on Tuesday. We’re open from ten until four”—and you turn it back on them. There was no trust, no familiarity among the different cogs, and that was their weakness. If you learned the procedures, the right number to call, the right name to drop, and the right phrasing for your requests, you could get away with anything.

  Working the phones was the easy part. I also needed to find some supplies that honest men don’t sell, so that afternoon I stopped by a den of thieves I’d sworn off a long time ago: Ted’s Roadhouse, longtime haunt of my father’s crooked friends and the delinquents I used to run with.

  I drove past it the first time. The Ted’s I remembered was a windowless shack by the side of the highway. It had been so weathered by age the color was hard to identify. Maybe it had been blue at some point, but when I knew it, the paint had faded to a Rothko wash of green and gray.

  But now in Ted's place there was a halfway-decent-looking joint called Ted’s Bar and Grille, with new wood trim around real-life, non-boarded-up windows.

  Had Ted’s closed down? Had some restaurant group taken it over and kept the name? I parked in the gravel and stepped inside. Gloom filled the place, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Wood paneling, an enormous fish tank, a cigar store Indian, a twelve-foot jukebox—the décor made my heart sink. The only adornment in the old Ted’s had been a blue tarp where the roof leaked. The institution I knew and loved was dead.

  But then I heard my name in a chorus of voices from the bar. A half-dozen heads turned my way, and a few figures came toward me out of the shadows like ghosts.

  Luis and Smiles and Licks: Jack’s and my old crew. Their age showed, in their bellies rounding over their belts and the used-up looks on their faces. They put their arms around my shoulders, punched me affectionately, and called for shots of Old Crow.

  “What happened to this place?” I asked.

  “Oh,” Smiles said, looking around. “Ted went in on something with Cartwright, wouldn’t say what, came into some money, fixed the place up.”

  “Is Cartwright around?” I asked.

  “In the back probably,” Luis said.

  I noticed a guy at the end of the bar staring at me, his face washed in wavering green light from the fish tank. When he saw me looking, he returned his attention to his beer.

  “Hey,” Licks s
aid. “You and Jack into something? You got a piece for us? You just say the word.”

  “What’d you hear we were into?”

  “Well, my cousin heard from a guy who saw Jack downtown, very high-class stuff—”

  “You should talk to Cartwright,” Luis said, cutting him off. He looked like his patience with his drinking partners had run out several years ago. “These guys are just fucking up some rumors they picked up secondhand.” He nodded his head toward the back door.

  “Thanks,” I said, and walked past the bathrooms, then through the kitchen. The guy who’d been checking me out headed for the front door, his hand in his pocket.

  At the door to the back office, I pulled the knob to the right, clearing the latch. I’d bar-backed at Ted’s in high school, and the lock on the door was so old and loose that the trick always worked. Ted kept everything that mattered in a safe.

  Coming into the back office, I was just about to make a joke about how, after twelve years, he still hadn’t fixed it, but any mirth I was feeling dried up when I saw two guns brandished: a shotgun in Ted’s hand and a pistol from the guy sitting across from Cartwright.

  They lowered the weapons once they recognized me. Ted calmed everyone down, then came over and clapped me on the shoulder. He had a gaunt face with a gray scruff of a beard and a nose crooked as lightning.

  “Michael Ford,” he said. “God. What’s it been? Ten years?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  “Your father’s out?”

  “He is.”

  “He never came by to see us.”

  “That’s just the terms of his probation. No association with felons unless he’s doing reentry work.” Ted seemed to take it in stride.

  Cartwright only nodded at me and said, “With you in a minute, Mike.” He sat at a card table with a Danny DeVito look-alike playing checkers. There was a good-sized stack of money lying beside the board. Cartwright watched a basketball game on a TV in the corner while he waited for his opponent to take a turn. He was drinking whiskey neat instead of old-fashioneds, which was usually a good sign he was losing money, either on the board or on the games.

  The other guy made his move, hesitantly, and then smiled. Cartwright smiled back, jumped a king backwards, and held out his hand to get paid. His opponent looked confused for a minute, and then his defeat sank in. He slid the money across. Cartwright scooped it up, then joined me near a dartboard they had set up in the back.