The Directive: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  Someone knocked on the door. I opened it. It was Jack, flanked by the guy in glasses and the Irish guy from that first night at my brother’s town house.

  I stepped toward him. The guards moved closer, on the balls of their feet, ready to jump in if I attacked him.

  I smiled and put my arms around him. I needed help. I needed my brother.

  “Your head looks good,” I said. I could barely see the stitches under his hair. “How does it feel?”

  “It’s manageable, unless something touches it. Still a little shaky, all in all. How’s the back?”

  “Hurts like a bastard. We make quite a team.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  This whole operation had targeted me from the beginning, had pulled Jack in as a means to an end. He was collateral damage. I could let in a trace of sympathy for him. In fact, making nice with Jack was a crucial part of my plan.

  “Should we get into it?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I walked Jack over to the kitchen table, where I’d laid out floor plans for the Fed entrances and the desk. I looked over the stills from my cameras, double-checking the daily routines. The office manager hung her purse with the crypto card in it on the same hook every day. Without that card, the whole plan would fail. We had to rehearse, and I had to give Lynch some basic lessons on my malware. We would need those viruses to act up in order to get into the suite at the Fed.

  There was enough to keep us busy that Jack and I could leave most things unsaid. We filled the hours drilling the heist. It was a relief, because if I talked to him about what had happened, or even thought about it too much, I was afraid I would kill him or forgive him. I didn’t know which was worse.

  Every time the guard stepped out of earshot, Jack would lean in. “They’re not going to let us get away with this, Mike,” he’d whisper. “They’re setting us up. We need a plan. We need some way to get back at them, to get away.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just stick to this.” I pointed at the map where I had traced how we would get to the trading desk and our escape routes if something went wrong. “It will all work out.”

  He wasn’t satisfied. The next chance he had, he came back to it. “They are just going to get rid of us after.”

  “I have it under control, Jack. Don’t pull anything. You’ll only get yourself killed. Or me.”

  “But how?” he asked. The panic was clear in his eyes as we drew closer to the heist. We would hit the bank in twelve hours.

  “I’ve got it figured—” I said. The door opened. Lynch walked in.

  Jack and I straightened up.

  “What are we talking about, boys?” Lynch knew something was up.

  “Escape routes,” I said. He looked us up and down, shouted for the man in glasses to get out of the bathroom and keep a closer eye on us, then left.

  We didn’t have another chance to talk before they split us up that night. I knew Jack was up to something. I knew he would try to drag my real plan out of me. I was counting on it.

  Chapter 42

  Heist Day

  I HADN’T SLEPT at all that night, just stared out my window at the gray glow that passes for dark in Manhattan. I stepped out of bed, showered, dressed, and watched the East River cap white with the gusting wind.

  Why were they after me? The question wouldn’t leave me alone.

  You fucked with the wrong guy, Lynch had said. And as I double-checked for the hundredth time the forged directives, the tiny cylinder and blade stitched into my clothes, I finally realized who was behind all this.

  Lynch knocked on the door. We were ready. I knew I was walking into a trap, but with what I now understood, and after all that time waiting alone with the fear, I’d never felt so relieved in my life.

  We rolled out for Maiden Lane in a black van. The signs on the side said it belonged to a courier service. Lynch drove. Lynch always drove. Irish took the passenger seat. The guy in glasses was on the back bench, watching us. First we stopped at the Thai restaurant. I’d called in the order that morning.

  Glasses stepped out of the van door and ran in to pick up the food. Jack and I were alone in the back.

  The radio was on: “…and the markets are mixed on unprecedented volume as Wall Street waits to hear the results of the Fed meeting in Washington…”

  We had push-to-talk radios that we could use to connect with Lynch’s team and send two-way messages to the lookouts. There was no way to call an outside line.

  Our cover story for the first phase, getting past the perimeter, was that we were sales reps for the gym, going in to meet with Human Resources. I had a binder of promotional materials with my picks hidden in the spine.

  For hitting the desk, Jack had a laptop in a backpack. I hid the dummy crypto card and a rare-earth magnet where the DVD drive on the computer had once been in order to get them past the metal detectors.

  As we approached the Fed, Jack looked at me. He always projected a galling confidence, the certainty that no matter how far he went, or what he did wrong, he’d make it through unscathed. But in that moment, after all these years, it had disappeared.

  I’m ashamed at how satisfying it felt for me to watch it go, to see him realize that this time there would be no easy out. All that was left in him was simple fear.

  “They’re going to fuck us over,” he whispered.

  “Yes, they are. I’m not sure if we’ll take the fall or they’ll just kill us.”

  He kept swallowing over and over, his mouth dry. “I’m just going to run, or give myself up to the cops. I—”

  “Don’t. They’ll go after Annie, after Dad. We need to handle this.”

  “But I can’t. I botched everything, Mike. We’re done—”

  “It’s not over. I told you, I have a plan.”

  “What?” Jack demanded.

  “You guys are pretty fucking chatty back there,” Lynch shouted through the metal partition that separated the cab from the cargo area.

  “Just going over the last details,” I said.

  Lynch’s man came back with the food and set it down on the seat beside me. I heard Lynch say something to Irish.

  I reached into the takeout bags and checked the order.

  “Okay. Search them,” Lynch ordered.

  “Stand up,” Glasses said as he slid the door shut behind him.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Just making sure you’re all squared away,” Lynch said from the front seat. “I’d hate to have any surprises.”

  Glasses started searching Jack. They knew I’d pull something. If they found my fake directives, this was all over. I eased the papers out of the binder where I’d hidden them, and waited as he patted down Jack, poring over every bit of gear he was carrying for the heist. He had to crouch down to search, and as he came around the seat, I slipped the papers to my brother.

  Jack looked confused for a second but took them, and slipped them between the seat cushion and his leg as he sat back down.

  Glasses checked me next, feeling around my waist and in my groin and my armpits. His fingers went past my cuffs, but he didn’t seem to feel the tiny cylinder inside. As he ran his hands down my front, he passed right over the ceramic razor, but it was small enough, like a two-inch section of fretsaw blade, that only I felt it. It pricked my skin.

  “They clean?” Lynch asked.

  His sidekick looked me over again. I could swear he was staring at that razor, though it was pretty hard to be sure where his gaze was aimed. “Yeah,” he said.

  Lynch started the car.

  “We need coffees, too,” I said through the partition.

  “You just had some.”

  “For the job. I can get anywhere in that building with two cups of coffee.”

  “Fine,” Lynch said. There were four Starbucks within a one-block radius. Irish ran down the street and came back with two paper cups in a carrying tray.

  We pulled up around the corner from the Fed. The police would be on top of anyb
ody double-parking a van on that block, so we were going to stop only long enough to jump out.

  The van door banged open.

  “Don’t fuck this up,” Lynch said.

  Jack and I grabbed our gear and stepped out.

  “I’m going to run, Mike,” Jack said as we started down Maiden Lane.

  We were fifty feet from the entrance, fifty feet from the van. The police were already watching us.

  “Don’t.”

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

  “They’ll kill you.”

  “Eventually, but not here, not in broad daylight.”

  I had to tell him or else he would ruin everything. If this job went south, it would take more than me and Annie with it. They would go after my father. They would hang me with the murder on the Mall. Pulling it off and feeding them the false info was the only way I could bring them down, the only way I could win Annie back.

  And so I had to choose: After everything, could I trust Jack? Had the fear for his life finally put some honesty into him? I remembered him bleeding out in his kitchen, lying on the floor unconscious, nearly dead.

  He was my only brother. People can change. I let him in.

  “Those papers I gave you,” I said. “I can blow up Lynch and Bloom and whoever’s running them. I’m going to pull a switch. Whatever the directive says, I have a forgery that says the opposite. When we get out of this, we’ll give Lynch the wrong info. They’re going to get their faces ripped off by the markets. We’ll take them down at their own game.”

  He felt for the forgeries I had slipped him.

  “You still have them?”

  “Yes.”

  Lynch was watching us from the van.

  “Those are the only things holding off our death sentence, so hang on tight.”

  “You trust me with them?”

  “You’re the most deceitful bastard I’ve ever met, but you’re still my brother. We’ve got to do this together. We have to trust each other, Jack, or we’re dead.”

  “Thank you, Mike. God. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry.”

  “Save it.” I turned toward the Fed. If I was wrong about Jack, he would bury me. But there was one thing about Jack that I could be absolutely sure of. And that was going to save my life.

  Jack’s radio buzzed. He lifted it and tapped out a message as we walked toward the Fed doors.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Everything looks good. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 43

  FEDERAL RESERVE POLICE guarded the front doors, but there was something off. There were twice as many as usual, and a lot of them carried assault rifles and wore SWAT gear. Maybe the crackdown at the Board of Governors after Sacks’s death had been extended to New York. Maybe they were just on high alert because it was such a historic Fed Day. Or maybe they had run our Social Security numbers and they had come back sour.

  I walked up to the two cops at the Maiden Lane entrance.

  “Hi,” I said. “We have an appointment with Steven Merrill in Human Resources.”

  They looked at the bags of food, then at each other. I guess Steven shook down his fair share of people for lunch.

  I transferred the take-out order to one hand, took out my wallet, and handed over the fake license. Jack held the coffees in their cardboard tray and showed his.

  The guard radioed in. “Wellpoint Fitness?” he asked.

  I just pointed to the logo on my vest. With our lack of sleep, injuries, and red eyes, nothing about Jack and me suggested health.

  “You should come check us out,” I said. “I can send you a guest pass.”

  He listened to his radio earpiece.

  “Maybe not today.” He stepped to the side. “Reception will give you a badge.”

  We walked through the door. A guard at a desk gave us clip-on visitor badges, then directed us toward the X-ray machine. Employees streamed past toward the mantraps.

  We waited behind a pair of Italian tourists in puffy coats.

  “Next,” the guard said, and waved me forward. I stepped through the magnetometer: not a chirp. The conveyor on the X-ray machine backed up as he examined our bags.

  I stared at him nervously, like he was a judge presiding over me. He gave me an odd look back.

  Our bags emerged. The Federal Reserve cop at the end of the X-ray waved his card in front of the mantrap.

  We were in. He told us to wait for our man from HR near the elevator doors. I kept my elbows wide in my best gym-rat posture as the elevator numbers ticked down. A doughy man with a beard stepped out of the door.

  “Oh, you brought lunch,” Merrill said as he introduced himself. “I was just joking around. But thank you.” He hadn’t been joking, but I guess he was covered if they came down on him for accepting gifts. We followed him to a second-floor suite where a half-dozen heads rose like prairie dogs from the cubicles. I placed the food out on a side table near the conference room, pulled out a take-out menu from one of the bags, and put it in my back pocket.

  Merrill sat down with us in his cube and dug into a plastic take-out tray of pad prik khing. He was clearly just hearing us out for a free lunch, but still I was impressed by Jack’s gusto as he marketed our nonexistent gym. I was actually worried Merrill would want to sign up on the spot; I didn’t have the papers for that.

  As Merrill looked around for more to eat and Jack said something about Zumba, I checked my watch. Five till noon. The committee was sealing its decision as we spoke. The directive would be here soon. Time to go.

  “Well,” I said, “we can leave you some of these materials. Then I’ll call back about maybe setting up one day in the cafeteria or break room?”

  “We’ll see,” Merrill said. “They can be a little weird about vendors.” Stomach full, he was now cooling us out. He must have thought he was quite the operator.

  I stood. “Great. We’ll talk soon.” We shook hands and left.

  We took the elevators up to six, then ducked into the bathrooms that were just around the corner. We grabbed two stalls and switched out our visitor badges for the hard passes that Cartwright had mocked up from my photos. The bathroom is the one spot you’re guaranteed freedom from security cameras.

  Jack pulled the dummy crypto card out of his laptop and handed it to me under the partition. I slipped it in my pocket, then exited the stall and grabbed the two cups of coffee from the counter by the sink. I shoved the carrying tray and the gym vests we had been wearing deep into the trash.

  We walked out. Jack carried a notebook computer in one hand and the backpack in the other, looking every bit an overworked IT guy.

  On the way back to the elevators I glanced out the windows at Maiden Lane: more SWATs had arrived. They were blocking off the street at both ends. What the hell was going on?

  We took the elevator up to nine, where the trading desk was located. I hadn’t had a chance to check out the security on this floor when we had first cased the Fed. At the end of the elevator banks was a small reception area with a manned desk. It seemed like the least they could do, considering the keys to a four-trillion-dollar portfolio lay behind those doors.

  I was carrying a coffee in each hand, and Jack was looking down at his laptop. We walked slowly down the hall as we hashed out the finer points of some urgent-sounding tech nonsense. It was a stalling tactic to let a young woman go ahead of us.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll start with your BackTrack Live, and when that doesn’t work, we’ll go with Knoppix.”

  We followed her, keeping up the patter. The technique is known as tailgating, and it’s a lot easier than picking locks. You need a good excuse for having the doors held. That’s why two coffees will work as surely as a skeleton key to open any door. People are fundamentally nice, or at least afraid of confrontation and getting dressed down if they’re wrong. She held the door for a moment and glanced back at me and Jack, who also had his hands full.

  You need to look the part. She did a quick visual check that
we were wearing hard passes, and that was it. This was a relatively security-conscious place, so at least she looked. The most severe facilities try to drill a “challenge mentality” into their workers. You don’t just check the badge; you slam the door in the person’s face and make them swipe in. But like most stringent measures, that is such an off-putting hassle that people just ignore it. As long as you project an attitude of total confidence that you belong where you are, you’ll be fine. One glimmer of doubt and it all falls apart.

  She watched us enter behind her. I smiled. She gave me a nod. We were in. Even though our badges had no working chips, they had just ushered us into the heart of the Fed. That saved us the technical hassles of trying to actually clone an RFID or hack the administrator’s database to add our cards.

  I tapped out a message to Lynch: “Act up.”

  That was the last step before we took the desk. I paused, and took a deep breath. At least we were past the door.

  It opened again behind us, and an older black man with close-cropped hair stepped out. I recognized him from the desk out front.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You gentlemen work on this floor?”

  “We’re with information security,” I said.

  He tilted his head, examined our passes. You always want to backstop any fake identity: Xerox repair, FedEx, and so on. The bigger the organization the better, so it’s hard to track you down. You give any challenger a phone number and have someone answer and vouch for you. But we needed to be Fed employees for this, and if this guy checked us out internally, we were done.

  “Who called for you?” he asked.

  I looked down at my phone. “Workstation 923. It’s—”

  Jack looked at his laptop.

  “Tara Pollard.”

  He held his chin, looked us over again. “One second,” he said, and took out his cell phone. He was going to call down.

  I checked my watch. The timing was razor tight. I had sent that note to Lynch to trigger our malware, make Pollard’s computer act so strangely that our target would have to notice it, which would give us an excuse to be in the suite. If we were too early, we’d be caught out, responding to a problem that didn’t exist. Too late, and she would have already called down to IT, and when they arrived they would know we were frauds.