The Directive (16 page)

THE WASHINGTON FIELD
Office of the FBI was in Judiciary Square, next door to the US Attorney’s Office from which I had unwittingly lured Sacks to his death.

I drove a route along the Metro Red Line on my way down, doubling back over bridges and turning randomly until I was certain I’d cleaned any tails.

The pressure was getting to me. A white floater crowded my vision, building with a pain behind my eye, and in every black sedan I swore I saw Lynch smiling back at me.

I parked four blocks away from the field office and cursed myself for driving my car again instead of taking Jack’s. Up the block, I saw a patrol car with cameras mounted on the hood and trunk moving slowly down the street. The District is the home of the automated license-plate reader, cars that rove the city recording every vehicle. It takes some of the fun out of cat-and-mouse on the two-hour zone limit, but today it might tie me to Sacks’s death.

I’d brought my pistol from home. I stashed it under the passenger seat before I stepped out. The field office looked like a giant gray crypt with a green tinge to the stone.

I paused as I came around the National Building Museum, a massive pile of red brick that looked like a turn-of-the-century warehouse. I thought I recognized a car across the street, a Dodge Charger, but this is cop-land, and there were dozens of that model.

I slowed down as I walked through the museum parking lot, across the street from the FBI office. It was another paranoid Lynch sighting. Just in case, I ducked behind a truck. As I peered around the corner, there was no mistaking him. He cupped a cigarette against the wind, lit it, and took a drag.

At least now I wouldn’t feel like a crazy person for wearing body armor. This whole setup was turning into a sickening rerun of Sacks’s death outside the courthouse. I waited for Lynch to get on the far side of the truck so I could run back the way I’d come, but when I looked that way, I saw Lynch’s partner, the guy with glasses, coming toward me.

I moved through the lot. They were on the northern sidewalk. I hid behind a van and waited. My appointment was in three minutes. I couldn’t run without them seeing me. I glanced over. They were talking on the street. I counted down the seconds.

I saw an older woman walking between the cars in my direction, so I straightened up and started pretending to check my phone, trying not to look like a hunted man.

The van behind me beeped twice and its lights flashed. She had just clicked her key fob. I shot her a half smile, checked the gap, and dashed behind another car. The next time I looked over, Lynch and his man were walking south. They would see me in a few seconds. I inched around the car, keeping it between us, and once they had gone around the corner of a building, ran back toward my car.

I called Lasseter, my FBI contact, once I was three blocks away, standing under a huge Chinese archway covered in dragons and pagoda roofs.

“It’s Michael Ford,” I said.

“Are you here?” he asked.

“I’m nearby. There are men watching the entrance.”

“Of course there are.”

“No. The people you’re investigating. They must be watching for witnesses.”

“This is the heart of US law enforcement. If you think—”

“Jonathan Sacks,” I said. All it took was that reminder of what had happened to their last source.

“Where are you?”

“Chinatown,” I said. “Can we meet away from the office?”

“I’ll send a car. He’ll bring you into the garage. No one will be able to see.”

“Calvary Baptist. The red-brick church,” I said. “Eighth and H Street. I’ll be standing on the steps.”

I paced on the corner until a black Chevy Tahoe with tinted windows pulled up. The driver leaned out the window. “Michael Ford?”

“Do you have some ID?” I asked.

He showed me his credentials. I stepped inside. It went against every instinct to get into the back seat of a cop car. He drove around the corner, behind the field office, then pulled into the underground garage. Lasseter was waiting as I exited the elevators. There was a permanent vertical crease above his brows.

“Mr. Ford,” he said, measuring the extra bulk in my chest and back. “Is your attorney here?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Suit yourself,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We walked down the office corridor. It was all white walls and beige partitions. Challenge coins decorated the cubicles. A few agents had nameplates in English and Arabic script. Older guys with muscle gone to fat filled the place, alongside a few younger men and women in fighting shape. It was cell-phone-holster heaven.

He led me through a bullpen office and then down a long corridor to an open door with a sign beside it that read “Interview 3.”

I stopped. It was clearly set up for interrogation.

“You have a conference room or anything?” I asked.

“No.”

I had no choice. I went into the box. Three hard plastic chairs stood around a cheap-looking desk. It was less grim than the rooms I had seen at a lot of cop stations, but the U-bolt screwed into the desktop didn’t look all that reassuring.

He slammed the metal door closed with a clang. I was starting to feel more and more as if walking into the arms of the law was a major misstep.

Lasseter sat opposite me and put a coffee mug down on the table. There was a chair to my right that was usually used later in interrogations, when they started crowding in, getting into the suspect’s face.

I was wearing the vest under a zip-up sweatshirt. Thanks to the near miss with Lynch, the shirt underneath was soaked with sweat.

“So, do we do this like a proffer agreement?” I asked.

When you have what defense attorneys like to call “exposure”—i.e., you’re guilty—you can make a proffer. You arrange one magic meeting called a Queen for a Day to go spill to the district attorney about what you know and what sort of deal you want. They can’t use any of it against you later in court, unless you contradict what you said during the proffer.

“Queen for a Day?” he said. “That would be the, uh, prosecutor’s area. This is more under the confidential informant rules. My supervisory agent wanted to sit in anyway. He’s really handling this case. You can ask him about that. So, what do you have?”

I didn’t know where to start. At Jack’s the first night? Covered in blood on the National Mall? At Bergdorf Goodman?

“You want anything to drink?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” I looked in his mug and saw that it was full of water.

I took a deep breath. “I have some information about a crime that I believe is going to be committed. And some crimes that have already taken place. Unfortunately, I’ve become involved—”

There was a knock on the door.

“Sorry,” he said. “One second.”

He opened the door, and one of my ghosts walked in. For a second I wasn’t concerned, because my mind had been screwing with me all day.

But when the ghost spoke I knew this was all for real.

“Thank you so much for your help,” Lasseter’s supervisor said. “We want to do everything we can to nail these guys who are after you.”

My tongue just scratched across the roof of my mouth, dry as a file.

It was Lynch, or, as I gleaned from the hard pass on his belt, Supervisory Special Agent Daniel Waters.

“MICHAEL FORD, IS
it?” Lynch said as he reached across the table to shake my hand. My own seemed to rise on an invisible string to take his and move up and down with it.

“What’s the scoop?” he asked.

“I…well…”

Lynch was excellent in the role. He tilted his head, looked at Lasseter then back at me.

“You know what, Paul,” Lynch said. “Why don’t you go help Sue with those photos. It might be a little more relaxed for Mr. Ford without two lugs crowded in here.”

Lasseter nodded and left.

Lynch locked the door behind him. He double-checked the camera to make sure it was off, then came around and thumped me on the chest.

“A vest, Mike? You worried about something?”

“My house? My brother?” I said. “You crossed a line.”

“And what are you going to do about it? Now that crying to the teacher is out, I don’t see a lot of options for you.”

He sat down next to me, reached into a briefcase, and pulled out a laptop. “Down to business. I’ve been watching your peep show.”

He typed a few things, drummed his fingers on the table as he waited, then turned it to face me. “What do you see?”

“The desk at the New York Fed.”

“I see squat,” he said. “Unless they send the directive by acting it out with a game of fucking charades in the middle of the office. I’ve given you enough leash. No more stalling. Just tell me, how are you going to get it?”

“How do you even manage to hold down a job like this?” I asked. “You’ve been up my ass for four days.”

“I’m retiring.” He waved his hand back toward the office. “This place used to be Candyland, then Mueller came in. Now the Eagle Scouts are running the show. I’m done. They probably think I’m out playing golf, counting down my days until the pension kicks in. I’m moonlighting, have a nice second career all set. Once you see how your hundredth rich asshole gets away with murder, you start to realize you’re playing for the wrong team.
Your
future, however, is not so sunny. There’s only a day left until you have to head to New York to stage for Fed Day. So I want to hear some answers, or else I’ll start cutting the people you actually like.”

“This isn’t about the Fed,” I said. I remembered Jack’s accusation at his house: that somehow I was the target from the beginning. “Why do you have such a hard-on for me in particular? For wrecking my life?”

“I don’t know, Ziggy. Maybe you fucked with the wrong guy. I just do what I’m told. This is business. It’s about the Fed. You hurt your brother and you’re going to get yourself hurt, because you’re wasting your efforts on everything but the one thing that matters: get me the directive. So tell me, come Tuesday, how you will get the job done? That’s all.”

“I have badges,” I said.

“They work?”

“Not the electronics, but that’s fine. I have an appointment. I have the access control and interior security down. I can get into the suite.”

“And then what? Ask extra nice? This is the grail of market-moving data, restricted at the highest level.”

“I can get into the suite, and then I can get it from the office manager. She must be the one who’s cleared for it. I’ll just get in there, and…”

“Wing it?” he laughed. “So what’s it going to be?” He rested his hand on his hip. I could see his 1911 pistol holstered on his right side, beside an expandable baton, and his two phones clipped to the front of his belt. “Annie or your father?”

“Don’t even say their names.”

“Their names? That’s the least bad thing I’m going to do. But I’ll let you pick. You’ve got to learn to take this seriously, and clearly your brother isn’t the most valuable piece of leverage. So choose.”

“No.”

“I’ll do both if you don’t pick. So you’re doing the one a mercy. You’re a real hero.”

“Don’t do this”

“I didn’t picture you for the begging type.”

“Please!” I said.

He sneered. “Come on, Mike.”

I threw myself on my knees at his feet. As much as it nauseated me to kowtow to this guy, I needed the cover. On my way down, I slipped his flip phone out of its holster. As he pushed me back, I palmed it. Someone was giving him orders, and they were coming through that phone. With it, I could find out who was behind Lynch.

“Have some self-respect,” he said. I sat back down and slipped his phone into my pocket. “My sympathies aren’t what they used to be. So which one?”

“Me,” I said. “I’ll take whatever punishment is due.”

“On top of what you already owe?” He shook his head. “Doesn’t work. I can’t kill you; you’re getting those numbers on Tuesday. I can come close, though. It’s admirable, I guess, though I think you’re going to regret it. People always imagine they’re so tough. In a few minutes, you’ll be begging for me to go after the others.”

He put his laptop on a metal shelf on the wall next to the desk.

“You’re going to work me over in the middle of an FBI office?” I asked.

“There’s great soundproofing.” He looked around on the shelf. “They’ve let the lawyers dial everything back since the 9/11 stuff calmed down.” He pulled a thick stack of papers off the shelf.

“Interrogation policies and practices,” he said. “They make us take an exam on this every six months, like schoolkids.” He handed it over to me. When I reached for it—lawyer’s instinct, I guess—he came up fast from underneath it with a pair of handcuffs and slapped one around my wrist. Then he hit me hard in the stomach with the baton and pulled me across the desk by the cuffs. The metal dug hard into the bones of my forearm. He ratcheted the open bracelet shut through the bolt on the desktop.

He spun the desk around so I was spread across it on my stomach, feet in the air. He hit me again, at the base of my skull, dazing me. Then he cuffed my ankle to something. I couldn’t get up, couldn’t turn over. I was laid out on top of the desk like a roast.

He lifted up the interrogation manual. “This is all about how I have to Mirandize you, and hold your hand if you get scared, and get your lawyer coffee just how he likes it.”

He shoved my bulletproof vest up, laid the manual on my lower back, then stepped back. He let the baton extend to its full length, and brought it down hard on the papers.

“Besides being a good way to hide some cuffs, I find it’s a great way to bang up someone’s organs without leaving too much bruising.”

I grunted. It hurt like hell, but I’m pretty good with pain. What really worried me was a feeling of profound unwellness in my insides, like he was pulping something important.

He wheeled back and brought the baton down again like he was splitting wood.

I groaned. Something was definitely not right in there. I stared at the wall, at Lynch’s laptop on the metal shelf, anything to take my mind off the injury.

But some things are impossible to ignore. I felt cold water splash onto my pants, and then pressure on a very sensitive area. I looked back. I couldn’t see, but I quickly figured out that he was using Lasseter’s mug like a garlic press, slowly crushing my nuts against the table.

“Wait a minute!” I said, and looked straight ahead at the shelf.

He levered it down. “Thinking of a family, Mike? Because it’s easy to do some permanent damage here.”

I howled. It hurt my ears as it echoed in the box.

“Wait!”

“Not happening.” He pressed down again, with both hands this time, nearly lifting himself off the floor.

I screamed. “No! The video. Go back.”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“That’s ’cause you’re fucking killing me! The camera! Look!”

He walked over to the laptop. “What?”

“Go back.”

“How do I do that?”

“The little thing at the bottom.”

“If you’re just trying to get out of this, Mike…”

“Press the goddamn button.”

He rewound the video. I was panting and sweating from the pain blooming through my groin. My face was pressed against the cold desk. On the screen, a woman walked up to a fax machine, inserted a card into a port on the side, then typed in something.

“So she’s sending a fax? You think that’s going to save your balls?”

“It’s a crypto card,” I said. “That’s a secure fax.”

“A fax?”

“Yes. It’s NSA-encrypted, STE standard. Have you ever dealt with a bank? They fax everything. The desk was using a chalkboard for securities quotes until the late nineties. The directive has to go in writing, signed. They fax it. What time did that happen?”

“Two thirty,” he said.

“They must have been the staff economist’s reports, to get ready for Fed Day. They’re Class I Restricted. That’s it. Can you see the numbers she typed, the PIN?”

“The keyboard’s a little small.”

“Look at the pattern.”

He squinted at the screen.

“I’m getting a six, maybe a five.”

“Let me up, I can figure it out.”

He hesitated.

“That’s the way in. I can get it. Just let me up.”

He freed my ankle carefully, ready to club my brains out with the baton. I came around the table and watched it, again and again. There were eight digits. I had determined six, and I was close on the other two.

I called Lynch over. “Look close,” I said. “Is that a three or a six?”

I knew it was a three. While he peered at the screen, I pulled his phone from my pocket and looked through it. No messages. No numbers. He must have purged the history every time.

“You should have pointed that out before I got started.” He collapsed the baton. I slipped his phone back in my pocket before he could see it.

“I just saw it.”

The one thing scarier than Lynch’s skill with violence was how easily he dropped it, like a surgeon putting down a knife.

“So what?” he asked.

“We can make the malware we already have installed in the suite act up, then come in posing as IT, check out the fax, and get the directive.”

“How do you get the crypto card?”

“I can snag it. See?” I pointed to the screen. “She put it back in her purse, hanging in the cubicle. That’s easy to pick up.”

He weighed that option for a moment. I found his doubt about my pickpocketing skills pretty rich, given I had his phone in my pocket. Still, feds take those crypto cards seriously. If you lose one, you call a number anytime day or night and agents are at your house in fifteen minutes.

“That might work,” Lynch said. He pointed to the chair next to the desk.

“I think I’d rather stand,” I said.

“Oh, right.”

“What else do you have to do?” he asked.

“Just work on that PIN, play with the video, and nail it down. My guy is printing up a couple of badges so we’ll be able to move around once we’re past the perimeter. We need rehearsals, more contingency planning on escape routes.”

“You understand what happens if you step out of line again?”

“I do.”

He leaned across the table to undo the cuff on my hand. While he was working the key, his phone started to buzz in my pocket. Any second now he’d hear it and realize it was stolen.

I winced and crumpled over, pretending the injuries he’d just caused were acting up. That bumped our bodies together, my hip against his waist, long enough to cover my movement as I slid the phone back into the holster. That’s the key to picking pockets: covering the criminal touch with some larger accidental press. I stayed bent over, free hand on my groin, while Lynch put away the cuffs.

He checked the phone, looked down at it, then at me.

“Speak of the devil,” he said. “You can take a minute to get yourself together. Lasseter will be around. Lesson learned?”

I was walking bowlegged as a cowboy, eyes shut against the pain. “I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.”

“Good. Stay close to home. Don’t do anything weird. We’re heading up to New York on Sunday to stage.”

Lynch carried his flip phone in his hand, checking his messages as he walked toward the stairwell.

As I headed toward the elevators, I watched him walk through a heavy fire door that led to the stairs on the other side of the office. I slowed my pace to see which direction he went, then took the elevator down a floor and moved through the offices below, back toward the stairs to follow him.

In the box, Lynch had switched in a second from gelding me to letting me walk. It wasn’t a sudden attack of conscience. I was disposable, and I knew it.

My father had been right. They weren’t just going to let me pull this job. They must have known I would try to turn it back on them. As soon as I handed over that directive, I was done. They would either let me take the fall or just kill me outright. I had to know who was on the other end of that phone. I couldn’t walk into a trap.

Everyone on the floor below had badges in plain sight. The only exceptions were the men and women in raid jackets—blue FBI windbreakers. I was wearing a bulletproof vest and walking like John Wayne. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to look the part. I grabbed a jacket off the back of a chair and held it draped over my arm, obscuring most of my waist, where most of the workers wore their badges.

I wasn’t exactly impersonating a federal law enforcement officer, but as I thought through what I would do when challenged, that distinction started to sound pretty weak.

No one stopped me. I was just your average suspected murderer strolling through the relevant FBI field office a few hundred yards from the crime scene. It was a fifty-yard walk to the stairwell, but with all that law around, it felt like one of those nightmares where your goal keeps moving farther and farther away as you move toward it.

I entered the stairwell and started down, careful not to overtake Lynch. At the second basement I heard a door close just ahead of me. I peered out and saw him walking through the mostly empty lower level of the parking garage, the phone in his hand as he turned a corner. His car was parked at the far end. There were only a few vans nearby.

I eased the door shut behind me and hugged the concrete walls, hiding behind columns, trying to get close enough to eavesdrop on him.

He stopped beside a chugging piece of machinery inside a steel cage. I crept to the other side. I watched him dial, and traced the path his fingers made. Certain things—patterns on keypads, log-ins, and codes—stick in my mind. I’d spent a lot of time practicing it once, when I was younger, and the habit has never left me. I had the number, or most of it. I entered it into my phone.