The Directive: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  Chapter 35

  I LEAPT THROUGH the door, slammed it shut behind me, turned the bolt back, and jammed a pick inside until it broke. There was a light far ahead, and I hauled ass toward it. The ruined corridor walls flashed by, a long wing of ballrooms built from stone with beautiful wood-frame ceilings. I hurdled a pile of debris. The ceilings were gone, the second floor half collapsed. I ran into the ruins. The stone walls stood high above my head.

  I’d put some distance between me and the guards when I heard a loud bang far back, then voices. Gunshots cracked. Bullets skipped off the walls, tore the air, and sent up puffs of dirt and marble around my feet.

  I ran through a stone archway held up by jack stands, then stopped. I doubled back, wrenched the supports down, then dove away, waiting for what remained of the upper floor to fall and give me cover. The stone creaked, chunks of masonry crumbled down, then nothing. Bullets sang past me. I sprinted away.

  I reached the end of the corridor. The walls rose unbroken to fifteen feet. Steel plates covered the windows: a dead end. The only way out was back the way I had come, the vault where I had kicked out the stands.

  I ran toward the shots, darting side to side. I heard cracks and settling from the stone archway ahead. Great. Now the vault had decided to cooperate. Chunks fell. I sped up straight for the passage, and rounded the corner in a flat-out sprint, arms pumping as the ceiling collapsed and the bullets slit the air.

  It all came down. I dove, then felt the stones striking my legs, my back. Maybe I hadn’t gone far enough. A cloud of dust swallowed me, coated my mouth like talc. I struggled to my knees, throwing myself forward, waiting to be crushed.

  A heavy stone hit me in the small of the back. I stumbled. I was going to get buried alive in this creepy pile. Some kids playing manhunt would find my bloated blue body months from now. I kept going, half crawling. The dust stung my eyes. The falling rubble eased. I ran, crashed into a wall, groped my way forward blindly.

  The air cleared. The walls tapered down into piles of stone. I felt dirt beneath my feet as I ran, jumped a low pile of stone, and started across the grounds toward the fence.

  Someone with a rifle must have arrived at the party, because the bullets were moving closer, indicating the practiced hand of a marksman taking his time to correct for distance and the cold wind coming off the water.

  Over my shoulder I could see muzzle flares in a high window.

  I ran, and saw ahead of me a last chain-link fence and then the wooded descent to the river. I jumped up, grabbed the links, and started climbing.

  A bullet sparked off the fence by my head. I threw myself over the top. The twists of chain link tore at my ribs as I went over. I lost control and landed hard on the other side, driving my knee into my chin and dazing myself for a second.

  A hill dropped off to my left as I kept on.

  Before I heard the crack of the gunshot, I felt it hit me, like a twenty-pound sledge crashing into my lower back. I tumbled forward, whipping my head against the ground at the last second. I managed to get my feet below me, but by then the descent was too steep. I was sliding through dirt and leaves. My gun fell from my waistband, tumbled away. I took a roll and landed on my back.

  I groaned. The world went red, shot through with stars and sparking lights. I fell end over end down a ledge, and came to on my stomach in a gully.

  I wasn’t far from the river. There was no sign of my gun. I limped through the trees toward where I’d left my car. As I came around a bend in the water, I saw my Jeep. Thank God. I might make it out of this. I started to run, but the pain in my back flared, crippling me. As I drew closer, I saw figures ahead, flashlights scanning. They’d found my car.

  The lights panned through the woods. I ducked behind a tree and waited for them to pass.

  I turned and started back down the river, tearing through brush, pain arcing up my back with every step. There was nothing for miles but the men trying to kill me. As I mucked through cold standing water, I saw headlights coming down a trail. I threw myself down in the mud and waited. Minutes passed. Spiders crawled from the leaves near my ear. Something that felt like claws skittered over my legs. I held on.

  The car stopped. Flashlights crossed the field, lit up the wet earth around my head. I buried my face, tried to breathe out of the corner of my mouth.

  I don’t know how long I lay like that, feeling the insects crawl down my collar, the mud seep into my ear.

  The lights moved on, flashed back once more. The car engine growled. They left.

  Three-quarters of a mile down the river I came across an old bait shed, closed for the season. In the creek behind it there was a skiff, abandoned and half full of brown water. I clambered in and pushed out toward the river. I let the current take me away as I collapsed on my back, staring at the stars in that cold soaking mess.

  I felt the blood flow from my lower back, felt the warmth mingle with the filthy water. I knew that I had been shot. I had to hope they would peg me for dead, and pray they weren’t right in the end.

  It was a wide, calm section of the river. The boat ran into a snag of trees. I pushed it off with my foot. Then an eddy caught me and took me to shore on the far, Virginia side.

  I made my way through the freezing water by the bank. I seemed to be in some kind of county park. As I trudged up the hill, I felt the heat from my blood as it spread down my buttocks, my leg.

  I reached back and felt the vest with my fingers, traced the hole in the plate. The bullet had gone through.

  The trail led to a rural road. I fished out my cell phone. Water was beaded on the screen, but it still worked. I tried Annie. No answer. I was about to call my dad, but that was a last resort. If he didn’t make it home in time for his parole curfew call, he could be sent back.

  I could have knocked on someone’s front door, but they would have been justified in answering it with a shotgun. I looked every bit the escaped murderer.

  I started to feel faint, and tripped over my feet a couple of times. This was getting bad fast. I had to take a break. I stepped into the cover of the roadside trees and sat down with my back against a log.

  I needed an ambulance. I was about to call for one when I remembered that they report all gunshot wounds. I couldn’t bump into the cops with this. I lay on my back, breathing slowly and deliberately. I’d never felt so tired, or so cold. My eyes closed and I slumped over.

  The pain and the damp and the chill seemed not to matter anymore. Unconsciousness came over me like a veil. I let the darkness in.

  Chapter 36

  BELLS RANG. I don’t know if they would have done the job of waking me on their own, but as I lay half conscious on the ground, a fat, cold drop of rain landed in my ear. I came to with my teeth chattering. The bells were the shrill digital ring of my cell phone. I lifted myself onto the log, hunched forward.

  I had to keep moving.

  I answered the phone as I tried to stand.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Mike?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Emily. Emily Bloom. I wanted to check in on how the meeting went. Are you okay? Is this a bad time to talk?”

  “A bit of trouble,” I croaked. “You aren’t up around, I don’t know, I guess I’m near Herndon?”

  The pain made it hard to breathe. Every word came out as a groan.

  “You sound awful. Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  I didn’t want to drag her into this, but I preferred not to die of politeness. “Thank you,” I said.

  “Just give me an address.”

  I looked myself up on my phone’s GPS and read it out to her.

  While I waited, I called my dad.

  “Hey,” I said, doing my best to sound like one of the living.

  “What’s up, Mike? Jack okay?”

  “I haven’t checked. I was wondering about
that doc that you and Cartwright know. The veterinarian.”

  “Macosko?”

  “Can you give him a call, see if I can stop by there tonight?”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m fine. I just need something stitched up.”

  “What? Go to the damn ER. You’ve got insurance.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I got, just a little bit, I got shot.”

  “You can’t get a little shot, Mike. What the hell is going on?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it later. I can’t talk now. But in the meantime, can you get Macosko, see if I can come in? Please?”

  “I’ll come get you,” he said. He was at least a half hour away.

  “I have a friend coming. I’ll give you a call if there’s any trouble.”

  For a second I could only hear breathing, then my father relented. “I’ll call him.”

  I tried to stay conscious, but I started to go dark again, despite the rain. I woke, blinded by headlights.

  It was Bloom. She wanted to know what had happened, how I’d gone from the field office to bleeding out on the side of a county road, but I didn’t have the strength to get into it all now. She dumped out a large Neiman Marcus shopping bag from the back seat, tore the sides, and laid it on the passenger seat.

  “You mind if I just rest?” I asked. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but it’s been a tough day.”

  “Sure. Hospital?”

  “No,” I said. I checked my messages and gave her an address off Lee Highway.

  A half mile off the main drag we pulled up to a storefront with a lighted sign that read “NoVa Veterinary Clinic.”

  The vet was a friend of Cartwright’s. I think the doc owed him, for gambling or some other sins. He served as the go-to for injuries you’d prefer not to explain to the police. I’d first heard about him because of the trouble my father and I were in a while back with my old boss.

  The bleeding was slow but steady. The pain had died down some, or I’d just grown used to it. I started to hope that maybe the bullet hadn’t gone through, that the mess in my back was just a result of the force of impact. When I had tried to pull the vest off, the pain made me pass out again, so I was still wearing it.

  Macosko met us in the lobby, carrying a mug, wearing sweatpants and a flannel shirt.

  “Shot?” he asked me as he pulled the tea bag out and tossed it in the trash.

  “I think it hit the vest.”

  “Mmm hmm,” he said. He walked past the receptionist’s desk. I followed. A few dogs snapped their teeth against the doors of their cages along the wall. He sat me on a metal table. The place looked nicer than the last hospital for people I’d been in.

  Macosko undid the Velcro on the vest and lifted off the front.

  I ground my teeth together.

  “That okay?”

  “Uh huh.”

  He tugged the back of the vest gently away from my spine, testing it.

  I let out a few choice obscenities.

  “I see,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Behind-armor blunt trauma. What shot you?”

  “A rifle, I think.”

  He prepped a hypodermic and slid it into a vein in the hollow of my elbow.

  “You’re going to want that,” he said as he dropped the plunger. A pleasant, woozy feeling drifted through me.

  He lifted some gauze with a pair of forceps and told Bloom to grab the shoulders of the bulletproof vest. All the Velcro was hanging free.

  “Pull it when I say,” he said. “Ready?”

  She grabbed it.

  “Go.”

  She yanked it away. I felt as if someone had jammed a flaming Roman candle through the flesh of my back. I groaned low in my throat and gripped the edge of the table. Something clinked against the tiles behind me. I looked over to see a deformed rifle slug skitter across the linoleum and under a cabinet.

  I felt warmth spill down my back as Macosko jammed the gauze in the hole left by the bullet. That burned worse than the original tug. I was too tired to grunt anymore, so I just clenched my teeth, and redoubled my grip on the table’s edge.

  “Did it go through?” I asked.

  “Yes and no.” He looked through his reading glasses at the wound. “A case like this, it enters, but not too deep, and brings the vest material with it. It’s sort of like a magician stuffing a handkerchief into his fist. You’re lucky I see a lot of GSWs. Most docs would assume it went right through, open you up and spend a couple hours doing a laparotomy and poking around in your abdomen looking for it.”

  He slapped the table, indicating I should lie on my stomach. I complied, slowly. He set to work stitching up my back.

  “This isn’t nearly as bad as it looks.”

  He almost sounded disappointed. Bloom came back with the slug and took a second to examine it. “Looks like a five five six. You’re lucky you’re alive. These tumble.”

  The stitches took another ten minutes. I sat up, and Macosko gave me some pills. I looked at the bottle.

  “These are for dogs,” I said.

  “It’s all the same stuff,” he said. “Will help with any mange, too.”

  “Are you the wife?” he asked Bloom.

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s none of my business.” He started loading his autoclave. “But this one—” he pointed to me “—has a pony’s worth of oxycodone in him. Keep a close eye for the next eight to twelve hours. He should be fine, but Lord knows I’ve been wrong before.”

  Bloom walked me outside. With the bullet out and the drugs in, I felt like a new man.

  “So I take it the meeting didn’t go as planned?” Bloom asked as we stepped into her truck.

  “No,” I said. “I just need to get home and lie down.”

  “Annie there?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re coming with me. Doctor’s orders.”

  Chapter 37

  I WOKE AND nuzzled my cheek against cool sheets and a mattress more comfortable than anything I’d ever slept on. It sure wasn’t mine.

  On the dresser, I saw family snapshots: skiing in the Alps, riding horses in what looked like Montana, a Stanford graduation. All featured Emily Bloom.

  I let out a long, quiet “Oh no.”

  Last night was a haze. What had I done? When I rolled over I barked in pain, but found, fortunately, that I was alone. I lay there and took in the bedroom, all perfectly arranged. I couldn’t imagine a real person lived there; I felt as if I’d conked out in a Restoration Hardware. Last night grew clearer in my mind. I slowly pieced together the events, the shot, and why I was sleeping in a strange woman’s bed.

  Bloom opened the door.

  “Morning,” she said. “You want some coffee? Vicodin?”

  “Both. God bless you. Sorry I put you out. I should have slept on the couch or something. Did I pass out?”

  “You earned the bed. Don’t worry about it.”

  I sat up and swung my legs to the ground. I was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of Bloom’s sweatpants.

  “Should you be moving around?”

  “I feel pretty good, considering. A lot of it was just having the damn thing in there, not knowing how bad it all was.”

  She’d slept in the living room and checked in on me every few hours. A bag of bagels and coffee from Dean & DeLuca sat on the kitchen counter.

  “All right,” she said. “What happened?”

  “The good news is that I got very close to finding out who is after me and my brother. The person at the top.”

  “Who is it?”

  “That’s the bad news. I don’t know. I keep going over it in my head. There are a few cases I have going now that could be related, a few guys I tangled with in the past.”

  “Are you being cagey? You can trust me, Mike.”

  “I genuinely don’t know. It must be this ant
icorruption work. If I can get to my files, I can narrow it down, maybe get some audio.”

  “You were close enough to get shot. I guess that’s something. You want to talk it through?”

  “Everyone who learns about this case seems to end up in the hospital, or the morgue, or the vet’s office, so I’ll save you the details.”

  “Are you still going to the feds?”

  “That’s how last night started. They have sources everywhere.”

  “Lasseter?”

  “Above Lasseter. But don’t say or do anything. They kill informants. I’ve seen them do it. Promise me.”

  “Of course. So what’s next?”

  “Can you take me home?”

  We pulled up to my street in Bloom’s truck. My clothes from yesterday, caked in river muck and blood, sat in a trash bag between my feet.

  Even through the narcotics, my back was screaming. As we approached my house, I saw familiar cars: a 1950s Bentley, a Lexus convertible. They belonged to Annie’s grandmother and her aunt.

  A white windowless van—to my mind, the preferred ride of kidnappers—was parked in my driveway. If Lynch and his higher-up knew that it was me at the casino, they would come after me with everything.

  My hand went to my knife, and then I saw a waiter in a white shirt and black pants, ferrying an empty tray from my backyard to the van.

  He emerged with a bunch of hors d’oeuvres with toothpicks sticking out of them. We parked in front of the house. Bloom stepped out of the car at the same time I did.

  “You might be a little shaky,” she said.

  “I’m okay,” I said. Despite the pain, I was able to get around pretty well.

  When I turned back to the house I saw Annie on the front porch. I thought she wasn’t getting back until tonight, but I may have had that wrong.

  If I had known she would be home, I probably wouldn’t have rolled up to the house after being out all night with the woman I swore I wasn’t sleeping with. And I definitely wouldn’t have worn the clothes I got from Bloom: a threadbare girls’ Catholic school T-shirt and red sweatpants.