The Directive (9 page)

A MAN STOOD
over me, glaring, the veins in his neck and forehead plump with anger.

“Hey, Dad,” I said.

I deserved it. He’d caught me in the act with a pick and wrench, the sort of thing that had ruined his life and nearly ruined mine.

I looked around the room. “Some of these guys, Dad—you’ll break parole.”

“You’re worried about
me
getting in trouble?”

“I don’t do soaps,” Cartwright said before he walked back toward the main room. He did, actually. All those guys had been sitting around card tables in the backs of restaurants and delis, hatching plots all day every day for about forty years with the TV on in the background. They would break your wrist if you tried to switch off
The
Young and the Restless.

My dad let me go, stepped back, and took a deep breath.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

“How’d you know where I was?” I asked as I stood up.

“A friend called, said you were looking for trouble.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Then what is it?” he asked and stepped closer, as if to tower over me. He’d been away a long time, and always seemed to forget that I was bigger than he was.

“It’s Jack. He’s in trouble.”

“Bad?”

“It could be. I’m just giving him technical advice, nothing heavy.”

“I have to ask: is he scamming you?”

“I thought so at first, then I watched these guys work him over. He’s on the level. They told him—You know what? Don’t worry about it. He’s got it under control.”

“What’d they say?” he asked.

I knew he’d get it out of me eventually. “That they would kill him. He needs to steal some inside info. Tipping.”

“
Kill
him?”

“They’re serious, Dad. Trust me.”

Since the shooting on the Mall, every time I shut my eyes to think or to sleep I saw the same image: Sacks trying to speak but no words coming, just a sucking hole in his lung. I didn’t feel like explaining why I was so sure, so I left it at that.

“What’s the job?”

“White collar. Nothing too crazy. Financial.”

“I’ve worked a lot of paper. Who are you after?”

“You’re not going within a mile of this. I went through hell to get you out. I’m not going to get you tossed back in.”

“Technical advice, huh?” he said, looking down at the pick in my hand. “I don’t think so. What’s the target?”

“The Federal Reserve Bank in New York. They’re going to steal the directive, get the committee decision before it’s public.”

“The New York Fed? That’s impossible. They’ve got the heaviest vault in the world.”

“We don’t want the gold. We want the desk.”

“We?” he said. He rocked back on his heels. “Mike, come on.”

He looked at me closely, searching me out. You can never lie to a con man. It made being his kid particularly tough.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked.

“They’re after me, too. It comes back on me if Jack bolts. Or we don’t pull it off. They know about Annie.”

He swung. It came out of nowhere. I thought he was going to knock me out, but he pivoted on his toe and sent a tight right hook into the stacked bags of flour next to my head. They wheezed white dust out of the corners.

“If
they
don’t kill him,” he said, “I will.”

“You can get in line behind me. Except he says he was trying to stay straight. That’s why they’re after him. He wouldn’t play ball.”

“So what are you doing? You’re not going to break into the goddamn Fed.”

“No. Just rope-a-dope long enough to figure out how to make the whole thing blow back on the guys who are threatening us.”

“Who?”

“He told me to call him Lynch, though I’m sure that’s not his real name. Drives a black Chrysler. He’s got vampire teeth, real thin, about six one.”

My dad shook his head. “Why didn’t you ask me for help before?”

“I’m not getting you involved, Dad. I’m keeping the whole thing at arm’s length. I’m just doing surveillance at this point, getting eyes inside the target, very low risk.”

“Break-in?”

“No. Everything has a camera on it these days, so I’m trying a few things to get a look inside the suite. Actually…” I said, and thought about it for a second. “Can you do some milling for me?”

My dad had a decent shop set up in his garage. I knew this because whenever I went to his house, he dragooned me into a several-hours-long home improvement project. The last time I’d ended up on my back in an eighteen-inch crawl space holding a hot copper pipe as he worked the blowtorch and dripped molten solder onto my forearm.

“Depends on what you need done,” he said.

“A display stand for a baseball. I’ll show you a photo. I need you to hollow out the wooden base.”

“That’s no problem. What for?”

“You’re better off not knowing. I’m going to go up soon, sort out the perimeter and access control. If these cameras work out, we’ll have some images of the interior layout to figure out the target setup.”

“You’re not going in, though?”

“No. If anyone goes, it’ll be Jack. But no one’s going to go.”

“How hard did these guys come at you?”

“Hell-bent.”

“I don’t like it. Why are they so particular about you? For all they know, you’re a citizen, an amateur.”

“I guess they heard about what I did to get out of the last mess.”

“Still, what’s their endgame? You think they’ll let you just pull the job and be done with it? Does that make any sense? After they threaten your family? You don’t piss off someone like that and expect to cool them out by the end.”

“You think it’s a setup?” I said. I’d been wondering the same thing myself, going through the angles. I’d made an enemy with every case I took on. I went after the money, the corruption. I had systematically pissed off the most powerful people in Washington. It was easier to figure out who
didn’t
have a reason to screw me.

“It could be,” my father said. “You always have to know who you’re working for. That’s rule number one. Or else you could be walking right into a trap. Never bet in another man’s game.”

“That’s why I’m hoping to turn it back on them.”

“They’ll get the committee decision early?”

“That’s their plan.”

“But how much do stocks even pop on that? It’s not like a merger, where one company will jump a hundred percent.”

“It’s going to move markets for sure. This meeting is a big one. The analysts are all mixed on what the Fed will do. The regional presidents are divided. No one knows if they’re going to hold the gas down or slam on the brakes.”

“Still, that wouldn’t account for more than a single-digit jump. Is it worth the risk?” he asked.

“Things have changed. Any idiot with a 401k and a Schwab account can buy a triple-leveraged ETF and short the Dow with a single click. There are derivatives on everything.”

Dad had done some white-collar cons before he went away, only going after people who deserved it, but they were nothing compared to the everyday mischief that passes for finance today.

“So they must be leveraged like crazy,” I said. “It’s smart. You go all-in, leverage it all five- or tenfold, even more. The markets don’t have to move all that much, and there is so much activity you’re not going to get hit for insider trading. Everyone has an opinion on inflation and interest rates.”

My dad squinted a little, thinking hard. “Which means if they bet wrong, you can blow them up.”

“I just give them the wrong numbers,” I said.

He shook his head. “Sounds great. But you have to steal them before you can switch them, and that’s suicide. And you just told me you’re not going in. This is fun to throw around in a backroom with the other bullshit artists, but think about your life, think about Annie. Just go to the police.”

“They have the police wired.”

“The DC cops?”

“I don’t know, exactly, but I know they’ve killed whistle-blowers before. These guys are very professional and very well financed. Jack was thinking of talking. That’s why they went after him. I have a few leads on people I know who might be safe to talk to.” I thought of Emily Bloom again.

“That’s all you should be doing right now. I love your brother. I’d trade my life for his, but I’m an old man. And family’s family, sure, but Annie’s your family now, too. You busted your ass to tear yourself away from all this no-class garbage. Don’t get involved. Don’t throw your life away for him.”

“They’re threatening everything I have, Dad. I’m doing this to keep that life.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “You think if you can figure out in five minutes how to turn the tables on them, to rewire this so it blows up in their faces, that they haven’t seen it, too? Something stinks here, Mike. Don’t go near this thing. And don’t even think of dabbling until you know who’s behind it. Until you know how they’re trying to fuck you over. That was my mistake. And it cost me sixteen years of my life.”

“Switch the numbers,” I said. “You shifty old bastard. I love you.”

“Don’t even think about it, Mike.”

I was trapped. Lynch had left me with the choice between losing everything or undertaking a suicide mission. Even if I somehow managed to pull it off, they’d probably let me take the fall or just kill me outright. But now I saw a way out. All I would have to do is break into the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, steal the best-protected piece of economic data in the world, and outgun Lynch at his own game, under his nose.

“Seriously,” my father said, “if you don’t know who you’re working for, you’ve already lost.”

“I’ll find out,” I said, then dragged my hand back through my hair. “God. How does this stuff always find us?”

He lifted a tool that looked like a small chisel from Cartwright’s cache. It was an antique graver, used for making printing plates, and also for forging currency and bonds.

“Don’t think you play pretend with this, just go through the motions and find an easy way out,” he said. “It finds us because we love it, Mike. That’s what scares me. It’s in your blood.”

BACK IN MY
car, I picked up my phone to call Lynch. I was up against my deadline. He could come by my house any minute. I needed to keep him happy to keep my name away from that murder.

I lifted my prepaid, but my legit cell phone next to it was impossible to ignore. The LED was flashing, and there were a dozen notifications on the status bar. Before I could check them, it started ringing.

It was Annie.

“Hey, sweetheart,” she said. “The photographer just called. Are you on your way? You didn’t forget, did you?”

“No. Just stuck in traffic.”

I had forgotten the deposit, which meant I would have to mow through sixteen miles of traffic. As I sped along the Beltway, my phone lit up with messages from one of my clients, the man who covered a decent chunk of my overhead.

He was in town, and suggested, in an increasingly insistent series of texts and e-mails, that I meet him at a cocktail spot near Mount Vernon Square. I’d already blown him off, and I couldn’t afford to anger this guy. He was temperamental enough as it was.

After I dropped off the check at the photographer’s, I tried Lynch on the way downtown. No answer.

My client Mark was upstairs, waiting for me at a table, wearing a power suit, breaking the first rule of “new, hip” DC. You can’t afford any of the new places—the craft cocktails, the reclaimed wood furniture, the farm-to-table restaurants—unless you’re fully in hock to the corporate world, but you’re supposed to at least change into some hipster garb before you go out.

I sat down. Mark had no inside voice, and soon he was upstaging the bartender’s long speech on the history of punch.

Mark had cashed out of some dot-com thing, and now split his time between Los Gatos and New York. He’d grown bored as a tech investor and was trying to buy his way into politics. I steered him to where he could do the most good, getting to the root of corruption, stemming the money that led politicians to worry more about their next fund-raising check than their constituents’ needs. He supported some of the dark-money work, but there wasn’t enough glamour in it for him. He was always pushing back. He wanted easy wins, headlines, scalps.

He couldn’t understand why the causes he and his friends all agreed on were not getting traction in Middle America. Was it bad faith among the voters? Republican brainwashing? It never occurred to him that he was just out of touch, or that people might reasonably disagree. His new thing was giving out quotes to the press where he would say he couldn’t believe no one had drafted him to run for Congress or thrown him an ambassadorship.

“If only you could force people to vote their interests, you know?” he said.

I was thinking of telling Mark that that approach hadn’t worked out so well for my friend Robespierre, but I refrained. My phone buzzed in my pocket.

I glanced at the prepaid. It was a message from Lynch: “Time’s up. What have you got for me?”

“Could you excuse me for a second?” I asked Mark. He didn’t like that one bit, but I cut away before he could voice it. I called Lynch back from near the entryway.

“You forgetting your deadlines?” Lynch asked.

“I’ve been working my ass off. I’ve got something for you. Can we meet later?”

“I’m right by your house. You need to give that side yard some attention. People are going to figure out that deep down you’re trash.”

“It’s on my list,” I said. “I’m not home.”

“Pity. Annie’s back from her run. She looks lonely.”

“Don’t you dare,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

Mark looked furious as I walked back to my seat. The bar was tiny, and quite a few people were giving me dirty looks. It was as if I had taken a phone call while waiting in line for communion.

“I have to go,” I told him.

“We’ve only had one drink.”

“It’s an emergency. I’m sorry.”

“You have seemed sort of distracted recently, Michael. I don’t know if I’m getting one hundred percent from you.”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“No, we can’t. I don’t think you’re giving me the amount of respect I am due. I might have to reevaluate our relationship.”

Jesus, he never gave a straight answer.

“Are you firing me?”

“If you walk out now, I fear it may come to that.”

I felt relief more than any angst about being done with this guy.

“I’m leaving,” I said, and laid a twenty down on the bar. “So thanks for your business.”