The Directive: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  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.

  I took out a thin wire with a right-angle bend at the end to start playing with the rotations, feeling for the faintest possible give while trying not to screw up the up-and-down set on each pin.

  I cleared from my mind the images of Jack and me, lying here in our own pooling blood, two up-and-coming fitness sales professionals who had met a bad end. I cleared from my mind the vision of Annie in the courtroom gallery as I was found guilty of a long list of crimes culminating in Sacks’s murder. I cleared from my mind the image of Lynch standing behind me again, shutting his eyes in anticipation of the gore as he pressed the gun to my skull.

  And I cleared the sidebar.

  Clank clank. God it was loud.

  “They’re right here,” Jack whispered in my ear.

  I could hear the SWAT team’s breath, feel the vibrations from the gold shaking in my fingers, threatening the balance I’d managed inside the brass labyrinth of the Medeco.

  I should have been elated by the sidebar’s release, but something was wrong. I could still feel it binding. A pin had dropped, or had tricked me the first time around. One by one, keeping just the right tension on the wrench to hold everything in place, I tried them all again. It was number four in a false set.

  “Okay,” I heard a voice say. “Let’s do a quick count.”

  He started tallying the bars. He sounded as if he was right next to me.

  Jack crouched. Sweat matted his hair, and I could see the ugly cut Lynch had given him. He went through the picks and took a W rake in his hand. The W looks like a saw blade at the end. He held it like an ice pick. Terrific. We could give some poor clerk a puncture wound while the guards filled our bodies with NATO rounds. I didn’t mind ruining my own life, but on top of it I was going to get an innocent man hurt because I was too incompetent to play out my own crook fantasy.

  The clerk kept counting.

  I eased pin four up a click and then another, feeling my way past the serration to find the real shear line. The cylinder gave the subtlest motion. The pin resisted my pressure, stronger now, surer. I had it. But the rotation was now off. I held everything steady, picked up my right-angle wire, and felt along the bottom of the pins.

  “All here,” the clerk said. They started toward us.

  The fluorescent lights threw their shadows across me and Jack.

  Jack rose onto the balls of his feet.

  I pushed the slider forward, slowly, until it clicked. The cylinder spun. I eased the door open.

  I forgot the pick I had left across the bolt of the card-and-code. It fell. I reached for it as it rotated slowly through the air toward the hard floor.

  They would hear it. They would know.

  Jack was already there. He snatched it inches from the ground.

  I grabbed his shirt and hauled him through the doorway behind me. I threw the door closed. At the last second before it slammed, I stopped it, held the bolt back, and eased it gently into the frame.

  All I could hear in the dark was our breath. I knew the direction we had gone put us closer to the far end of the loading dock. My eyes adjusted. I could make out the contours of the room in the glow of a few LED lights. There were benches along both walls and a huge balance scale in the middle of the room.

  I heard a key in the doorway behind us.

  We were in the count room. No wonder it had a Medeco on the door. They were coming in to double-check the gold.

  “Hide,” I said. Jack and I threw ourselves onto shelves under the tables. I lay on a lumpy pile of plastic packages. An odd smell, like an old penny jar, drifted up.

  The door opened. Light flooded the room.

  Chapter 46

  “I’LL JUST GRAB them,” I heard the clerk say. He clomped into the room. The door shut behind him. All I could see was his black comfort shoes with metal caps strapped over the toes. The vault keepers wore them so that gold bars wouldn’t shatter their bones if dropped.

  Clank clank.

  The shoes moved toward me, reminding me absurdly of a knight. Jack and I were staring at each other, looking and feeling totally exposed. In the light, I could see what Jack and I were lying on: bundles of currency.

  The Fed distributes $550 billion a year in cash. Money goes into straps of a hundred bills, then bundles of ten straps, then bricks of four bundles shrink-wrapped together. Finally there are cash packs made of four bricks—16,000 notes—bound together in thick plastic, as big as a microwave.

  I was reclining on a hard bed of tens of millions of dollars. Next to my head lay transparent plastic bags with tamperproof openings that were full of used currency stained red and black: blood.

  The clerk started singing a pop country song as he shuffled his legs a foot and a half from my face.

  The Federal Reserve banks handle contaminated currency. While reading everything I could about the place, I’d seen the video about it on their website, with the same droning narrator and 1980s actors from the vault video. They all seemed remarkably calm, given the subject matter: So you have a blood-soaked hoard of cash…

  The Fed will swap it out for clean money and then destroy it.

  I saw the vault keeper’s hand come down with a clipboard. He was looking for something. I heard the rustle of papers.

  That gave me some time to examine our options. This was a strong room. I figured it was for temporarily holding cash from the loading dock that was in transit to the vault. We had come through a door on one side, and there was another door on the opposite end of the room, marked with an exit sign and secured by another Medeco. But now, at least, we were inside, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to get out of a strong room than it is to get in.

  From what I knew of the layout, that door would lead us to the loading dock, where armored cars parked for transfers. With all the money in here, there were sure to be some heavily armed guards watching it from the outside, even with another Medeco on the exit door. If we somehow survived this SWAT team, we still couldn’t just waltz out.

  But that door was our only shot.

  The clerk hit the chorus, lost the words, tried a few different arrangements, then settled on humming. “Here you go,” he said to no one. He opened the door and stepped back into the hall.

  “Just a few things to sign,” he said. “Then we can weigh.”

  The door closed behind him. We only had a few seconds until they would come back.

  “The backpack!” I said to Jack.

  He tossed it over as I stood and went for the exit to the loading dock. I drew back the bolt, then pulled the rare-earth magnet and
slapped it to the frame over my head. I didn’t want a screaming alarm announcing our exit, and the magnet would keep the sensor from tripping.

  I opened the door six inches, glimpsed through, then stepped out. Jack picked up the backpack and followed.

  I could hear the door on the other side of the strong room open as ours closed.

  We stood in the rear corner of the garage, at the end of a short hallway. The garage and loading docks were all inside the building perimeter. Two vehicle entrances led to Maiden Lane.

  An exhaust duct thrummed above our heads. SWAT team members covered both exits. An armored truck idled loudly in the bay. There was no way past them, but we couldn’t go back.

  I listened to the air rush by in the ducts above our heads.

  “The money, Jack.”

  “What?”

  I turned to face him. He played dumb.

  “You’ve been giving me that look since I was three,” I said. “I’m not buying it. Whatever you took, I need it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re a thief. You were just lying on about thirty million dollars. Don’t bullshit me. They have the serials. They bagged it already. It’s worthless.” I didn’t know if any of that was true, but this last part I was sure about: “If you don’t hand it over, we’re dead.”

  One of the guards stepped into our line of sight. We pressed ourselves against the wall, but if he looked our way he would see us. Jack pulled out a plastic bag full of hundred-straps. It was half a million dollars, give or take, some stained with blood.

  I put my hand out. “I trusted you, now you trust me.” He looked at the money once more, then handed it over.

  I pulled the tape off the ductwork over our heads and bent out the thin galvanized steel. I could feel the air rushing in. I tore open the bag, peeled the strap off a bundle, and dumped it in, then another, then another.

  Jack’s eyes filled with horror.

  “What the—”

  Maybe he thought I’d finally cracked, or turned into some sort of potlatch radical. But soon he heard the shouts near the entrance. His eyes opened wide, and he started tearing the bundles apart and throwing them in after mine.

  We were two blocks from Wall Street, the capital of American greed. I was counting on one thing to save us: that the bankers hustling down the sidewalks, with their cuff links and contrasting collars, weren’t above chasing a little dirty money.

  Cash streamed through the ducts and flew out the vents above the garage. A dye pack exploded and boomed further down the duct.

  Jack started to move. I held him back.

  After a few seconds, you could hear the beginning of the free-for-all. “Stay back!” a cop yelled.

  “Holy shit!” someone on the street shouted. “Those are hundred-dollar bills!”

  The police and SWAT teams fanned toward the entrances. We crept along the wall. The street scene absorbed all their attention.

  I didn’t know why they should be upset. Washington had just voted to keep propping up the economy. Jack and I were doing our small part to expand the monetary supply, same as the traders upstairs, though I think our approach was a lot more fun.

  We could see Maiden Lane. The notes whirled and flipped through the air like autumn leaves. The crowds chased them down, stuffed them into their clothes. The police tried to hold them back, and here and there I could see that the cops weren’t above snagging a hundred or two for themselves. They needed to keep the mob at bay, to keep people from rushing in, so two guys in white button-downs trying to get out weren’t their top concern.

  We hit the sidewalk and turned away from the main action.

  The cold wind spun the bills into cyclones, lifted them high between the office towers, plastered them against the stone facades. I stepped through a brown puddle. Ben Franklin looked up at me through the murk.

  It was beautiful. Secretaries, shawarma guys, bike messengers, bankers, tourists, movers, cabbies, all snatched hundreds from the air, bundled them to their chests, laughed and fought in the middle of the street.

  Only two seemed not to care. Jack and I wove through the crowd, walking fast toward quieter streets, toward freedom.

  Chapter 47

  OUR MEET-UP with Lynch was near Pier 11 on the East River. As soon as we cleared the cops around the Fed, I grabbed Jack’s arm.

  “Give me the forged directives,” I said. We had to make the switch, then get as far away as fast as we could. We didn’t have much time until 2:15. Before Lynch and Bloom realized they had been conned, I had to warn Annie and my father and get them to safety.

  “I don’t know, Mike.”

  “Come on! We’ll make the switch and take them down.”

  He stepped back. “I’m sorry, Mike.”

  I turned, too late to get away, and saw Lynch and the man in glasses close in on me from both sides. Each grabbed an elbow and barred my arms behind my back.

  “You fucking Judas,” I said to Jack.

  His whole act before the heist, all that fear, must have been a ploy so I would tell him what I had planned to turn the tables on Lynch and Bloom. They knew I was going to pull something to make it blow back on them. Jack was their insurance, and once I revealed myself to him, they thought they had me covered. Only then would they let me do the job. That must have been the message Jack sent just before we went into the Fed.

  “It was between setting you up and losing my life,” Jack said. “What would you do?”

  I knew. I had made the same choice before the heist, when I handed Jack those papers, but he didn’t know it yet.

  Lynch searched my pockets and found the directive.

  As they marched me down Pearl Street, I tore into Jack some more, until Lynch clamped his hand over my mouth. I could taste and smell the tobacco on his skin. A van pulled up. They shoved us in the back.

  As we drove down FDR Drive, I watched a ferry pull up to Pier 11. We U-turned, headed north, then exited toward the heliport over the East River. In the front seat, Lynch’s man rested the directive on his leg, snapped a photo with a smartphone, and sent it off.

  The van stopped. They pulled me out, and we walked toward a building of gray and white stone that occupied a pier. Behind it lay a helipad. The air churned and the blades deafened us as we crossed the landing area and climbed into a small chopper. It rose and spun. The city shrank below us.

  As soon as the directive went to Bloom’s and Lynch’s boss, he would pull the trigger on tens, maybe hundreds of millions, of dollars’ worth of highly leveraged trades, building a sure-thing position while the world waited to hear from the Board of Governors. After the decision went public, in less than two hours, he would collect his winnings and cash out.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Lynch.

  “You are a true pain in the ass, Mr. Ford. We need to keep you buttoned up until two fifteen.”

  I had tried to avoid helicopters in the navy, part of my living-past-thirty strategy, but had taken a few rides. I was used to jump seats, cold metal, and five-point restraints. This chopper was kitted out like a limo, with a bar and leather upholstery and copies of The Financial Times neatly stowed beside every seat.

  We flew over the Hudson and the stone palisades on the Jersey side. It was less than ten minutes to Teterboro. We stepped out. A hundred feet across the tarmac, a private jet was waiting. As we climbed aboard, the pilots greeted us. A stunning stewardess gave me a smile. Once we were in the main cabin, Lynch handcuffed my wrist to an armrest.

  I checked them out: Smith & Wessons. Good.

  If you’re planning on being kidnapped, I highly recommend a private flight. No bag check, no X-ray, no security line, shoes on and all the liquids you want, a huge seat, and a couch and bar in the back. It was a nice splurge on my way to my own execution.

  We were in the air for just over an hour before we touched down at a small airport. Rolling hills stretched away on all sides.

  As we taxied, I recognized the truc
k sitting on the tarmac. It was Bloom’s Land Cruiser.

  She was waiting for us on the airfield as Lynch dragged me out of the plane.

  “Oh, Michael,” she said. “We tried to warn you about being too curious. This is really a shame.”

  Lynch slid a baton between my cuffed wrists and twisted it. The metal cut into my skin as he tightened the chains, growing visibly excited about the prospect of doing me harm.

  “It would have been so easy if you had stayed in the dark. But now…” She shook her head.

  Lynch squeezed harder.

  “Load him up,” she told him. “I’ll take the other one.”

  Jack walked to Bloom’s truck and stepped in. His hands were free. Lynch shoved me into the passenger seat of a black van. I winced as the thin blade hidden in my shirt placket dug into my chest just below an old scar.

  Lynch took the cuff off one wrist, and I could feel a painful burn in my pinky and ring fingers as the feeling came back. I felt only a second’s relief before he slid the bracelet through the door handle, ratcheted it shut on my wrist, and double-locked both cuffs.

  He took the driver’s seat. Holding the wheel with his right hand, with his left he aimed his 1911 Colt pistol at my torso. I could feel blood trickle out from the cut just under my sternum. I leaned forward, trying to hide it and keep Lynch from finding that hidden razor.

  “Seems like an awful lot of trouble just to find a good spot to kill me.”

  “I agree. But she works in mysterious ways.”

  I picked at the stitches on my shirt cuffs, feeling for the key. My hand had never healed quite right from my last time in cuffs, when I’d broken my thumb. Finally I felt that hard cylinder of plastic beginning to emerge from the cotton.

  We twisted through wooded terrain, rising and falling with the hills. From the road signs I could tell we were somewhere in Virginia.

  The trees cleared, and the road went downhill. There was a long curve as we approached a two-lane bridge over a shallow river valley at the edge of a town. The span was an old-fashioned arch of stone with sidewalks on both sides and metalwork lanterns hanging from poles.