The Directive (14 page)

I WAITED FOR
a break in traffic, then caught up with her as she strode into the lobby of the Four Seasons.

“Just one favor,” she said. “Then I’ll set you up with Lasseter.”

She had me on the hook and she knew it. “Fine,” I said.

She watched the elevators for a moment, frowned, then hurried back outside, nearly crashing into a guy in a suit as she exited the revolving door. I followed her down to the C&O Canal. It’s a quiet place at night. Only a stone’s throw from the madness of M Street, you can almost pretend you’re in the country. We passed another couple out strolling.

As we crossed a footbridge, I noticed someone walking away: a solidly built South Asian guy with an earpiece snaking inside the jacket of his suit. He looked a lot like the man Bloom had bumped into outside the lobby.

Bloom waited for him to round the corner, then approached the back of the hotel overlooking the canal. She gave me a look that I didn’t like at all.

“I got a note about my friend, who’s staying here. I had hoped to surprise him, so maybe you can help me get in.”

“I’ll talk to the front desk.”

“They’re really pains in the ass about this kind of thing here.”

“Let’s go back to the lobby. Maybe we can ride up in the elevator.”

“He’s in the terrace suite. It’s all key-controlled. Special access.”

“Can you call him? Surprise him downstairs?”

She was already examining the back of the building.

“So you can pick locks?” she asked.

“No no no.”

“But you can.”

“Well, I could. Some of them, sometimes. But that requires picks and willingness, and I don’t have either.”

She looked toward a side door on the rear corner of the building, next to a set of exhaust fans concealed by bushes.

“He’s right upstairs. It’ll be great.”

“We’ll get arrested.”

“I know the head of security for the whole chain. It’s fine.”

“Then call him up.”

“No time.”

“There’s a camera right there,” I said.

She took her keys out and shined a little laser pointer on the wall next to the camera, then aimed it square into its eye.

I guess she knew that trick. I stepped over and peered at the lock.

“Sorry, Emily. I’m in enough trouble already.”

She clicked her tongue. “That’s a shame. It’s getting a little late to call my man at the FBI,” she said, shaking her head. “What about a credit card?”

“No. There’s this thing called a deadlatch—just trust me. Shimming decent locks hasn’t worked in a hundred years.”

“How about this?” she reached into her purse. Her light wavered away from the camera.

I steadied her hand. “Keep your eye on that, huh?”

She came up with a bobby pin.

“In theory I would need two pins, and it still wouldn’t work.”

“I only have one.”

“Then surprise your friend with some flowers or send up some champagne.”

“I don’t think your heart’s in this, Mike. I thought we could help each other.”

We’d now left quid pro quo territory and arrived at straight coercion. I sighed and looked down at the bobby pin.

“You don’t have any foil, do you?”

“No.”

I looked around. “Even better.” There was some on the exhaust unit. I leaned over and pulled off a piece. She wasn’t going to quit until I gave her a show, so I would appease her for a minute and then we could move on.

The aluminum tape was slightly thicker than the sort of foil you’d find in a kitchen. I flicked open my knife and cut a section about an inch wide and two inches long, then folded it over lengthwise. I cut six slits in the foil, close together, which left five little fingers sticking out of the top. Each was about the width of a notch on a key.

Using the bobby pin, I slid the aluminum strip into the lock so the fingers lined up with the pins, then pressed them all the way up. I put the tip of my knife in the cylinder, twisted it, and then starting shaking the whole thing like a guy holding a live wire.

This wasn’t a finesse job. Bloom watched with growing skepticism.

A lot of locksmiths don’t bother picking. That gets you in only once. Instead, they do something called impressioning. When you pick a lock, you lift each pin to the correct height. Impressioning works the other way. You lift them all the way up and slowly let them push down to the right height.

When I twisted the knife, the cylinder turned and bound the pins. As I shook it, the stuck pins would push the little fingers cut in the foil down to the correct height, hit the shear line, then push no more. Unlike picking or raking or bumping locks, when done well it leaves no trace for any forensics. It not only gets you in, when it’s done with the proper tools—a soft key blank and a file—it leaves you with a working copy of the key.

I didn’t expect it to work at all, but as I explained the basics of it, I hoped it would sound good enough to get Bloom to leave me alone.

I jerked this jury-rigged mess around for a minute. There was no magic release, no turning of the cylinder.

“Well, so much—” I started to say, then stopped. I heard keys jingling: a guard. “We need to go,” I whispered. I relaxed my hand on the pin. The knife twisted. The cylinder turned. The lock was open. I’d never been so unhappy to succeed.

“Nice,” Bloom said.

As the rattle of the guard’s keys moved closer, there was no place to go but in. She stepped through, grabbed my arm, and dragged me behind her. I pulled the foil out and shut the door. We were in a stairwell. Bloom climbed to the fourth floor, then listened at the door. She raised her finger for me to wait.

Thirty seconds later she eased the door open, and I caught a rear view of another Asian guy in a sack suit as he passed us in the hallway. He appeared to be carrying in a shoulder holster on his left side and something on his belt.

I wanted to ask why armed men were guarding this surprise party, but Bloom was already moving. We followed him at a distance, passed a housekeeping cart, then waited at the corner until he disappeared from sight. Bloom strolled up to a hotel room door with a card lock on it. She laid her hand on the handle.

“Is your friend inside?” I asked. “Just knock.”

“Have you ever
been
to a surprise party?”

“Not like this,” I said. I just wanted to get the hell out of the hallway and away from any hidden cameras and private security.

“You need a coat hanger or a strip of metal or something,” I said, and started looking around. Standard procedure for hotel doors was to reach under the bottom with a long wire, grab the handle from the inside, and let yourself in.

“We should get out of here,” I said. I turned back to see Bloom dip a card into the reader, then turn the handle.

She waved me through. We were in a suite that seemed to go on forever, with a wall of French doors opening onto a terrace. The lights were hidden like stars in the ceiling. Dark wood paneling covered every surface. It was the nicest room I’d ever been in. I paused. It even
smelled
expensive, the faintest trace of green tea and ginger.

I didn’t know what most alarmed me: that this was no surprise, that Bloom had her own break-in chops, or that this crafty woman had just cornered me in a hotel room after a couple of drinks.

“Who are those guards?”

“Nepalis. Supposedly ex–British Gurkhas,” she said and rolled her eyes. She advanced through the suite, methodically checking rooms. “Don’t worry about them, though. Sheikh and oligarch types like to use them as security teams. It’s all window dressing. Though they do have these knives that are like a foot long.” She grimaced. “Theater. It’s the kind of thing Naiman goes for.”

“Can we call your contact now?” I said. I was done. It wouldn’t take much to play a lost hotel guest and just walk down to the lobby and get away from here as quickly as possible. “Because I’m going to get—”

Going.
But I didn’t have a chance to finish. Bloom put her hand over my mouth, then pulled me toward the bedroom.

I could hear the elevator doors chime down the hall. Bloom killed the lights, and we waited in silence as the footfalls of at least three people approached. The door to the suite opened.

When the rightful occupant of the room hit the lights, he found Bloom sitting in a wingback chair, facing him, looking totally relaxed.

“You’re dead,” Bloom said, beaming.

And here was his security detail: four of them, not particularly large, but steely looking and frightening enough even without the pistols drawn and the jackets pulled back to uncover the knives on their belts: long and gleaming, like heavy machetes with a mean-looking forward bend in the blade.

To my eyes, the oligarch looked like a union plumber who had won the lottery. His hair was thinning and styled into a mullet with short bangs. He had on some sort of shimmery shirt under a four-button black suit. Russian or maybe Central Asian, he had a brutal look about him, and two days’ growth on his chin. He was the last person on earth I would have wanted to tangle with, even without the killers behind him.

He walked up to Bloom, and his bodyguards surrounded her chair.

The man in the suit, who I gathered was Naiman, stood for a moment, deep in thought, while his guards grew increasingly jumpy.

“Very good, Bloom,” he said finally, with a light accent. “You win. Send the papers over.”

Bloom stood and shook his hand. He spent a moment talking to the Gurkhas, calming them down from the looks of it, as a few other members of his entourage entered the suite. A woman in perilously high heels appeared and offered us drinks.

“We have to stay for a bit, accept the hospitality,” Bloom whispered. “Let him save face. Can you hang for a minute? I’ll go call Lasseter. Promise.”

I relented. Naiman was actually a pretty charming guy, and he started up with some stories about the Soviet army and the invasion of Afghanistan.

Bloom excused herself, and I found her a moment later on the terrace, on the phone. “Terrific. No. Thank you,” she said. “Give my best to Bev and the kids.” She hung up.

“The Gurkhas don’t seem too happy with you,” I said.

“Well, he can hang on to them for show, but he’ll go with Bloom Security for his private detail from now on.”

“You had a bet going with him?”

She nodded.

“Maybe you can let me in on the secret next time we co-conspire.”

“That’s no fun,” she said. “I talked to Lasseter.” She wrote a number on a business card and handed it to me. “Three p.m. Washington Field Office. You know where that is?”

“I do. That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s it.”

“And you’re sure—”

“Just as sure as I was when you asked the first time. You can trust him, Mike.”

“Thanks. I have a feeling my lockpicking 101 talk was unnecessary.”

“I did need to get past the exterior door. They were watching the elevators, and my lock guy was an hour away,” she said. “First time I’ve seen the foil trick.”

“You lifted the card when you bumped into the guard outside?”

“I figured I’d take a stab at Naiman while he was here. And part of me just wanted to kick your tires.”

“Don’t look at me that way,” I said.

“What way is that?”

“Whenever someone looks at me that way, it doesn’t take too long until they offer me a job.”

She clinked her glass against mine. “The night is young.”

We took our leave, and I walked her back to her office. As I said goodbye, the atmosphere was charged with that first-date feeling of readying yourself for the kill that—and this is probably just in my case—is ten times more thrilling than any break-in. We head-faked each other twice as I came in with a handshake and she started for the hug, and then again with roles reversed.

Nothing had happened, unless you count a few felonies. And as far as Annie was concerned, I had done nothing wrong, just dinner with a business associate and an exchange of favors. But as I drove home and touched my lips, dry from red wine, why did I come away feeling as guilty as if I had just killed somebody?

I ARRIVED HOME
late. Annie was asleep upstairs. I knew that going to the law was a dangerous move and that Lynch was watching my house. I went upstairs to my office, logged on to my bank, and double-checked that I was paid up on my life insurance. I pulled a lockbox down from the closet and took out my pistol, a Heckler & Koch I’d picked up from Cartwright during the mess with my old employer. I hadn’t touched it since then.

I stripped it and cleaned it, then put an empty magazine in and checked the action. I ejected the magazine, loaded it, and was about to slide it back in when the door handle started to move.

I put the gun in an open drawer as Annie stuck her head in.

“Mike?”

“Could I get a little privacy?” I snapped at her as I blocked the drawer with my body.

“Fine,” she said, and shut the door.

I cursed myself. All this criminal garbage was getting to me, coarsening me. Brilliant move: yell at her because
I
was acting like a sketchy asshole.

I put the magazine in and put the gun back in the box. I locked the office door on my way out. She wasn’t in the bedroom. I headed downstairs.

“Hon?” I said.

I looked around the kitchen: my dishes were stacked in the sink, some were on the table beside a pile of mail, wedding business that I hadn’t opened yet. One of the downsides of moving up in the underworld is you don’t have a lot of time to do your chores.

Annie was sitting at the kitchen table in her robe with a grim look on her face, going through the mail, slitting each envelope with an old Swiss Army knife. CNN played quietly on the TV in the living room.

“We need to talk,” she said. “What’s up with you?”

“At St. Elmo’s? Stupid joke. I’m sorry, and upstairs, I don’t know. Bad day. I just needed a moment to myself. I shouldn’t have been such a jerk about it.”

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are there police watching the house?”

“No—wait. Did you see police watching the house?”

“Driving by a couple of times. Is
someone else
watching us?”

“It’s fine.”

“In what world is that fine? You’ve got the blinds down all the time. Did you go to New York while I was gone?”

She pointed to a receipt from Duane Reade I had left on the table.

“It was last-minute, for business.”

“You didn’t mention it?”

“When would I? I hardly see you,” I said. I was getting frustrated, and turning it back on her. It felt satisfying for a half second in a childish way, but I immediately realized it was a mistake.

“There’s no easy way to do this,” she said. “I am just going to ask straight out. Are you sleeping with someone else?”

“What? No! Why would you even ask that?”

“I saw you tonight with a woman at the Four Seasons.”

“That was Emily Bloom. I told you I was going to get help, to go to the police about my brother. She was connecting me.”

She thought for a second. “Tuck’s Bloom? Jesus. I’ve heard about her. Doesn’t she live in town? The hotel is a strange place for an appointment, Mike.”

“Were you spying on me?”

“Don’t do that. I was there with my dad, for dinner.”

Every break was going bad for me. “Nothing is going on. She has an FBI contact I’m going to talk to tomorrow about my brother. I walked her to the hotel to meet a friend. I’m trying to make sure this Jack stuff doesn’t end up hurting us.”

“Are you? Because it looks like you’re having a lot of fun. You always talked about how your brother would roll into town and get you sucked into something. I mean, look at you, Mike. You’re snapping at me. You’re out every night. You’re hiding things.”

“He’s my brother, Annie. I can’t just let him get hurt, say it’s not my problem. It’s different this time.”

“Different this time? Do you hear yourself? You sound brainwashed. Are you following him back down that path? Is he setting you up for something? Conning you again?”

“That’s not it at all, Annie.” I stepped closer to her.

“Are you sure? Think hard about it, Mike. You’re not just screwing around because you’re tired of all this, because you miss the old risks, because you’re bored with everything, with me? Just tell me the truth.”

On the TV, the news brought up a photo of Sacks. “Police say they are making progress in the brazen daylight murder of a Washington economist last week.”

I held up my hand, trying to hear. “Can you be quiet?” I asked.

“Be quiet?” Annie was very level-headed, very patient, but I recognized in the cold timbre of her voice that I had finally succeeded in pissing her off beyond all repairing. It was my tone: I might as well have told her to shut up.

“No,” I said. “Not like that. I just wanted to hear something on the news. For a case.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? In the middle of this?”

“Sorry. Things are a little tough for me right now. Please don’t make me out as some sort of frustrated thug. I get enough of that from your family.”

She threw up her hands. “You just pulled a knife on a guy at St. fucking Elmo’s.” She took a deep breath. “I’m not mad. I wish it were only that, Mike. It’d be a lot easier. But no. I’m thinking very hard about all of this. Listen to me. Really listen. You know me. I don’t like theatrics. I’m not going to scream at you, not going to make ultimatums. But this wedding, it’s taken on a life of its own. It’s getting too big to fail.”

I would have preferred screaming to Annie’s slow, deliberate talk, the boardroom voice that suggested shrewdness and calculated strength. She sounded as measured as a hostage negotiator.

“So this is the last exit,” she went on. “I hope it’s like you say. But I’m worried I’m losing you, or that you’re freaking out and trying to run away, to get out of this. We can talk about it, Mike. Just don’t lie to me.”

“No. That’s not it at all.”

“Last chance,” she said.

“Annie. About Jack—”

She slammed her palm down on the table. I saw her grit her teeth in pain. A bead of blood grew on her finger where the Swiss Army knife had cut the skin. I stood to help her.

“I’m fine,” she said, watched it for a moment, then dabbed a red stain on an envelope. “This isn’t about Jack, Mike. It’s about us.” She pushed back her chair. “You know what? I’m exhausted. I don’t think I can do this now. We can talk more in the morning.”

We were both burned out on too much work and too little sleep.

“I can explain all this, Annie. It’s going to be okay.” I followed her as she walked toward the landing.

“I think I’d like to be alone.”

“Sure. I’m sorry, sweetheart. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Fine.” She shook her head, then marched up the stairs.

I cleaned up the kitchen, then went upstairs. My pillow was sitting outside the bedroom door. Things would be better in the morning. I could clear this up. I grabbed the pillow, went to my office, and folded myself up on the loveseat.

I woke from a night of fitful sleep around six a.m. Annie was still in bed. I left my office and went to the bathroom. Then I heard a bang from downstairs. I waited, listening, then heard it again. As I came down the stairs, I saw that the front door was open. I was certain that I had locked and bolted every door and window in the house. I’d been particularly good about security recently.

I went to my office and pulled my pistol from the lockbox. I locked the door behind me and headed downstairs. The front and back doors were wide open, swaying with the cold spring gusts and slamming into their frames. I worked the house room to room, following the gun to see if anyone was still inside.

It was clear.

I walked outside. Maybe the neighbors had a problem with a guy in boxers and a robe circling his property with a drawn pistol. Right now I didn’t care.

Whoever had broken into the house was gone. I went back in.

“Annie?” I said as I took a second look around the first floor.

No reply. The kitchen was empty. So was the bedroom, the sheets shoved aside where she had slept.

“Hon?” I said, louder now.

No answer.

I stepped back into the hallway. My office door was now unlocked and open.

“Annie?” I said.

Still nothing. I could feel the blood rise in me. Everything seemed brighter, clearer, with the adrenaline. I sidestepped toward the door, pistol at my side, then stepped into the office.

Annie was standing over my desk, holding a lock pick and tension wrench in her hand as she looked over everything I had assembled for the Fed job: schematics of the ninth and tenth floors, office directories, mock-ups of fake ID badges, wallets with credentials bearing my face and other men’s names, an open box of ammunition, dozens of locks and break-in tools, and a particularly nasty-looking knife.

She turned and faced me. “What is all this, Mike?”

I hid the gun by my side, stepped over, and slid it deep onto a shelf, out of her sight.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked.

“Trying to figure out what the hell is going on with you.”

“Did you open the downstairs doors?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” She put the pick and wrench down. Then she reached for the knife, flipped the blade out, and twisted it under the light.

“This isn’t about cold feet at all, is it?”

“No, it’s not,” I said.

I looked more closely at the pick Annie had been carrying. It was the one I’d tossed when the cop had followed me to the house.

“It’s really not too hard,” she said, looking back at my office door. “Just scrape it back and forth in there, huh?”

“With the rake pick, sure.”

“You have a right to your own space, but I had to know. You never locked doors before. After everything last night, I woke up this morning and you were gone.”

“What did you expect to find?” I asked. Everything between us seemed calmer now.

“I don’t know. Worst case: some infidelity trophy room, matchbooks and receipts, a second e-mail account, a second cell phone.”

I took one of the prepaid cells I used to keep in touch with Lynch from my pocket.

“I have one, but it’s not for sneaking around behind your back.”

“Is this what you’ve been up to?” she asked as she pored over the security diagrams, the photos of the different locks and computers at the Fed. “Where you’ve been disappearing?”

I could have played up being offended by the violation of privacy, but I deserved it. I’d been acting shady for days, hiding things from her. I was surprised to feel more relieved than anything else. I needed someone to talk to.

She lifted up a forgery of a Fed document I had been working on. “This is for a break-in,” she said, and laughed. “Oh, Jesus. Maybe it would be better if it
were
another woman. What are you doing?”

I leaned over to the computer and started some music playing just in case anyone was listening.

“The men who are after Jack. They’re going to kill him unless he does a job for them. They’re putting pressure on me to help.”

She lifted up the license in the name of Thomas Sandella and looked at my face staring back.

“So Mike Ford, who may seem like a cool customer but is deep down a total control freak, is just helping out, taking a back seat to his brother who’s never done anything right?”

“I’m not going to go through with it, but I had to keep them thinking I would, go through the motions long enough to blow the whistle on them.”

She looked over the diagrams.

“What’s the job?” she asked.

“I don’t want to implicate you, Annie. If you were in front of a grand jury—”

She leafed through some of the renovation contracts. “New York Fed?” she said. “You’re kidding.”

“I wish.”

“Is Jack hustling you, Mike?”

“I thought so at first, but these guys will kill him.”

“Kill him? Come on.”

I couldn’t fool her, and I didn’t want to. I had to come clean.

“That murder on the Mall. I was there. The victim was part of it; he was trying to go to the authorities. They killed him right in front of me. If I don’t play along, they might try to hang it on me. The man at the coffee shop is the ringleader. That’s why I flipped out on him. They’re watching me.”

“You wanted a little excitement. I guess it’s working out for you.” She stepped back. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“To keep you safe, to keep you out of it.”

She raised one eyebrow, and may as well have put me on the rack.

I leaned against the desk. “Well, let’s say your significant other comes to you and tells you some people are making him out as a murderous thug. He swears it’s not true, and you give him the benefit of the doubt. That’s mighty cool of you. But then, after everything we went through, if I were to come back a second time with a similar story, you would be a hundred-percent justified if you started to wonder, ‘Hey, what’s the deal with this guy? Maybe I can find someone with better luck when it comes to capital crimes.’ ”

“That day,” she said. “The violence…it messed me up for a while, and I never want to see you like that again. But I dealt with it. So be yourself, just don’t kill anybody. That ought to give you enough room to maneuver. I figured out a long time ago that I’m not marrying a normal guy. It’s what I signed up for. Be straight with me. I don’t scare easily.”

“I know. That’s part of the reason I didn’t tell you. I was worried you would wade in.”

She looked over my notes on the Fed computers. “Are you trying to hack them?”

“Annie, you don’t want to be an accessory.”

“That’s only if I help you.” She pointed to the papers. “The secure terminals would probably be air-gapped, not connected to the public Internet. They have their own networks. And it’s all two-factor authentication, at least. You need the crypto card and the PIN.”

“How do you know?”

“From when I was at OMB.”

“Do you have a clearance?” I asked.

“Maybe. I’ve got my own mysteries, Mike Ford.”

“What level?”

“I’m not supposed to talk about it.” She smiled.

“I’m going to the FBI this afternoon. This ends today.”

“Your date with Bloom went well?”