The Directive (21 page)

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.

“Stay right there,” he said, and began to dial. Jack shot me a panicked look.

I WAS SO
absorbed by our impending doom that I hadn’t seen the alarmed woman coming up behind us.

“Are you with IT?” she asked.

“Yes. We noticed some unusual network traffic. Are you in 923?”

“Thank God. It’s over here.”

She walked us past the man from the front desk. He closed his phone, gave us a last suspicious look, and walked toward the front door.

The pulsing heart of American capitalism was actually a bit of a letdown. It didn’t look too different from a local bank branch. A conference room with a chest-high glass partition of wood and glass filled most of the space. Seven traders sat at computers along the wall, quietly steering the fate of the economy with a few mouse clicks in between sips from their water bottles. Cubicles filled most of the floor. High arched windows flooded the room with sunlight. An older man walked over to the traders and conferred with them for a moment.

I guess I expected a chaotic trading pit with people shouting orders, signaling trades, and raining down paper tickets. But this was everything the Fed tried to be: slow and deliberate, a deep keel on the economy. It would have been interesting to see how calm things were at 2:15, when the decision went public and the markets went berserk, but I would be long gone by then.

All was not well in workspace 923. Lynch had outdone himself with the malware. As we neared her cubicle, I could see a dozen pop-ups: “Click here!” “You won a free iPad!” “Your computer has been compromised!” “Virus alert!” The printer nearby was spitting papers onto an overflowing stack in the tray.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said.

“Hmm…” Jack said. We stepped into her cubicle.

It was noon. The decision would be here any second, if it hadn’t arrived already, queued up in the fax waiting for her to log in with the crypto card.

“You haven’t plugged any strange USB drives in here, have you?” Jack asked her. “Or clicked on any PDFs from someone you don’t know?”

“No.” We knew she’d taken the bait, because we had fed it to her. He looked at her with that special derision the computer-savvy reserve for their lessers.

“Well,” she said. “There was one that looked like a newsletter, but it wasn’t from communications.”

While they looked over the laptop, I walked over to her purse and did a quick dip looking for the card.

It wasn’t there.

I waited until Jack distracted her with a detailed question, then pulled the purse open and scoured it. I’d seen RVs with less stuff inside. I shifted it one way, then the other.

No crypto card. Through the window in the main door of the suite, I saw the guard from the front desk. He wouldn’t stop peering at me. Without that card we’d have to wait for the directive to come in, and then what? Peek over someone’s shoulder? Tackle them and take it?

Jack looked at me, desperate:
get on with it.
I looked back toward the main door.

Maybe she had already taken out the card. I checked her mouse pad: left-handed. Then I looked at her left pants pocket, where there was a contour in the fabric. It could have been a wallet.

“I’ll check the DNS name change,” I said and pointed at her chair. “You mind?”

She stood up. I sat down. In the confines of the cubicle, there was nothing out of the ordinary about my hip brushing past hers. I could feel the card in her pocket. On top of all my crimes, I would now probably be arrested for trying to get into the pants of this efficient young woman.

Pickpocketing is all about attention. If you’re looking at someone’s eyes, they start to get very nervous when you’re within a few feet. Look away, though, at the focus of his or her attention, and you can get within inches without setting off any alarms.

I stared at the screen and ran a few things from the Command prompt. It looked very technical, but I wasn’t doing anything. Then I pushed back the chair, put my hand on the desk, dropped to one knee, and checked out the Ethernet ports.

When you’re in someone’s pocket, they’re going to feel it, so you cover the touch. In this case I pushed the chair against her as I dipped two fingers into her pocket.

I had the card. Under the desk, I switched it with the dummy card I’d been carrying. On the way back up, I nudged the chair again and dropped the dummy into her pocket. When she did get around to checking the fax, she would get a card fault condition. By the time she sorted out why her card wasn’t working, we would already have stolen the directive and be halfway back to DC. Or in handcuffs. Or dead.

I stood up. “I’ll check the other ports and the printer.” On my way over, I messaged Lynch: “Stop printer.”

The guard from the front desk was now talking to someone on the phone, his attention fixed on me.

With the card palmed, I walked over to the fax. It was in an out-of-the-way cube. The only good thing I had going in my favor was that there were no security cameras aimed directly at the fax. In the highest-security areas, where restricted information is processed, you can’t have a camera staring at the state secrets. It would give the bad guys a way to spy.

When we were rehearsing, I had told Jack there might be a mechanical lock to deal with before we could get to the fax. I knew there wasn’t, but I had to guarantee that I would handle this part of the job myself.

I put the card in the slot on the side of the fax.

Please enter PIN.

I punched in the eight numbers.

PIN not recognized.

That was one attempt. Three wrong guesses would lock me out. I had divined the PIN from the pattern of Pollard’s hand on the video. The last digit had been the least clear. I re-entered the first seven digits, then moved down one in the column for the last number.

PIN not recognized.

After all this work and all this pain, I was about to learn my fate standing in the middle of a badly lit cubicle, staring at the inky black-and-gray display of a fax machine like an intern. Whatever happened to Butch and Sundance?

I punched the PIN in again, and for the last digit moved from a six to a nine.

Secure access granted. 1 Fax in Queue
…

I busied myself at the Ethernet ports, trying to look like my heart wasn’t shuddering inside my chest at 180 beats per minute.

The fax let out a high electronic screech.

Printing…

To my mind it was an air raid siren, but apart from a look from one of the traders, no one seemed to notice.

Then Pollard glanced in my direction. I saw her reach down and touch her pocket.

The fax ran on a regular phone line and could receive both normal and encrypted transmissions. It would only print the encrypted material when the card was in and the PIN had been entered. She couldn’t be sure I was receiving restricted information. And her card, she must have thought, was still safely in her pocket.

Jack said something to her. We had practiced a half-dozen terrifying-sounding computer security breaches to tell her about that would keep her occupied. Pollard blanched and looked down at the computer. He asked her to keep watch on a progress bar while he did something on his laptop. If the progress stopped, that meant there might be a serious data breach on Fed Day.

Heaven forbid. I watched the fax.

The cover sheet inched out. I saw the words form: “Class I FOMC—Restricted Controlled (FR).” With every line return, every screech of the printer, I was sure the guard would come back, the real IT department would show up, the SWAT team downstairs would flood the suite with rifles drawn.

The cover page fell into the tray. Pollard stood up. She was examining the dummy crypto card, and me.

The text of the directive began to print. I saw it spool out, the boilerplate introduction that was always used. Through the main door, I could see the guard talking with a cop.

“The Federal Open Market Committee seeks monetary and financial conditions that will foster price stability and promote sustainable growth…”

We’d been made. I watched the paper crawl, an eighth of an inch at a time.

“To further its long-run objectives, the Committee in the immediate future seeks conditions in reserve markets consistent with…”

The main door opened. The guard stepped inside.

I waited, watching the fax.

And finally, I could see the numbers. I had the directive. The decision was in: they were going to keep the throttle open, keep pumping up the economy. That’s all it was: a single paragraph in a dry government memo, a single number—the funds rate—but it was enough to shake the markets to their core, to pivot the global economy. There were billions funneling through those computers over my shoulder, and whoever held this number at this moment stood to make hundreds of millions trading ahead of the announcement. Yet after all I had been through, it seemed like such a small thing for all the trouble it had caused.

I pulled the directive out and read the next few lines. Then I dropped it into the locked bin for the paper shredder.

“What are you doing with that fax?” Pollard asked me across the room.

I ignored her. I needed one more second. I pulled another sheet from my back pocket, where it had been folded inside the take-out menu, and dropped that in for shredding as well.

I glanced back. The guard stepped out. I heard men moving fast down the hallways. Quiet time was over. Any second, the cops were going to burst through that door.

I pulled a blank piece of paper from the fax tray, scrawled a line on it, then folded it in half.

“Ports look good,” I said across the room to Jack. That was our code to get out.

I started walking toward the second exit, past the empty office of the executive vice president who ran the trading desk. He was in DC; the desk manager always attends the committee meeting. That’s why I had planted my camera in his deputy’s office. I dropped the paper to the ground, then slid it under his door.