The Directive

by Matthew Quirk

“What?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re backing out?”

  “You are. I can’t let you risk it. I’ll take care of it. Go home.”

  “I can’t let you do this on your own,” I said.

  “I’ve got this, Mike. It’s my fault. We didn’t really talk, so I never got a chance to tell you, but I’m so goddamned proud of you, everything Dad told me about. I never shut up about it. My brother graduating from college, then going to Harvard, for Christ’s sake. My buddies probably thought it was part of some con.” He laughed and leaned forward, his left forearm on the wheel.

  “But when I was down it gave me hope, Mike. That I could change. That I could straighten myself out. So thank you. You’ve got a great girl. You’ve got a good life, a decent life. I can’t let whatever’s wrong with me fuck that up. So go home.”

  I took a sip of coffee, listened to the mechanical whine of the wipers flicking back and forth. “Thanks, Jack. But that’s why I’m doing all this. Everything I have worked for is on the line. I can’t stand back and let you take the lead on fixing it. No offense or anything. I hear you, and I appreciate it. I played my part in screwing this up, too. And now it’s on me. I’m going to take care of these guys. I’m going to keep the life I earned. Sometimes you have to get your hands a little dirty to stay clean. Let’s go.”

  We headed for New York. I needed to know exactly what happened on Fed Days—when the committee in DC makes its decision—and who gets their hands on the directive between DC and New York, so I started dialing the follow-ups from my social engineering calls.

  The answer, I learned, is precious few. The directive was the best-protected piece of government information outside of national security. That made sense. A quarter of a percentage point change in a single number from the directive, the Fed’s target interest rate, could turn the global economy on a dime. Designated “Class I FOMC—Restricted Controlled,” it was limited to a handful of people outside the Fed boardroom on a strict need-to-know basis. The senior vice president, my Red Sox fan, was one of them. Despite everything I learned, I couldn’t figure out what means they used to transmit the information from DC to New York.

  Jack had been working on his own schemes. “I think New York’s a mistake, Mike. They must get the directive over to Treasury down in DC, right?”

  “They walk it over,” I said.

  “That’s what I was thinking,” he said. “So what if we posed as the recipients, like a dummy office or something?”

  “So we just have to break into the Treasury and set up a fake office without anyone noticing?”

  “Not that exactly, but like that. Or if we get the real courier in trouble, plant a gun on him before security or something, and we pose as another courier and they give it to us to protect it.”

  “That is some awful Gilligan’s Island–caliber shit you’re coming up with right now.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “I know. It’s terrible. I’m all blocked up.”

  Jack was off. He’d never played for stakes this high.

  We arrived in Manhattan a little after noon and parked in a garage on Pearl Street. Jack pulled the hood on his raincoat up and cinched it down over his face, then pulled a newspaper from his bag.

  I stepped out of the car. We’d driven straight through. My legs were so stiff from the ride I walked like I’d been at sea for two weeks.

  “You have anything sketchy in your bag?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Leave it here. Anything you wouldn’t want a cop to find on you.”

  He emptied it into the glove box: a set of picks, pepper spray, a blackjack, and an automatic knife.

  “That’s everything?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  As we headed toward Maiden Lane, we walked under construction scaffolding. I started making an inventory of the trucks and normal inhabitants of this neighborhood—the movers and mechanical contractors, the deliverymen and bankers.

  We turned toward Ground Zero, the Federal Reserve, and the New York Stock Exchange. Now it was fear more than anything else that was making my legs wobble. Between the bank security, NYPD, and video cameras staring down from every corner, this was, with the possible exception of the White House, the most secure patch of real estate in the United States.

  Jack held the paper over his face. It wasn’t raining hard enough to merit that. I grabbed it and threw it in the garbage.

  “But the cameras,” he said.

  “You look like a nut. Don’t draw attention to yourself.”

  I was glad we’d made it up here by lunchtime. I had a list of targets I wanted to hit. We bought a couple of hot dogs and coffees from a vendor on Liberty Street and watched the crowd flow past, jostling us.

  The Fed is a fortress rising eighteen stories above street level. Black wrought-iron gates and huge blocks of limestone and sandstone project strength and, above all, impenetrability.

  I noticed the surveillance nests high up on the bank’s corners.

  I handed Jack my cell phone. “Think tourist,” I said. We circled the building as Jack snapped photos. I had rooted my phone and deleted the shutter noise so we could shoot photos surreptitiously.

  Viewed from the air, the building was essentially a long wedge, getting wider as it ran east to west. On the south side, on Liberty Street, there was a main door that led into an ornate lobby. On the north side, on Maiden Lane, there was a crashproof loading dock and a well-trafficked employee and visitor entrance. Each entrance had at least two cops posted. Every time they looked at me I felt as if I was staring back at them from a wanted poster, with all the details of Sacks’s murder printed under my face.

  The Fed had been well guarded around the clock since it opened ninety years ago. While I was making my social engineering calls, a former economist there told me an anecdote. The Fed is only a couple of blocks from Ground Zero, and on 9/11, they had to evacuate. Eventually, out of safety concerns, even the Federal Reserve Police were called off. Only then did they realize that there were no locks on the doors, and a smith was dispatched to install some so they could leave the place unmanned for the first time since 1924.

  Jack took his own cell phone out and carried it in his hand. He was talking too much, which usually meant he was nervous. Two postal service workers trundled a cart up the sidewalk and guided it into the Fed loading area with no credentials check, just a nod to the cops.

  “Bingo,” Jack said.

  I shook my head. “They’re known quantities. It’s too complicated, and then how do you get in once you’re in the dock?”

  “The bar around the corner,” Jack said. “I’ve been there. The bathroom’s three floors down. If we could get into some of the tunnels, get over to the Fed basement somehow—”

  I saw a woman approaching. She was Tara Pollard of Murray Hill, the office manager on the trading desk. I’d pieced together photos of the staff of the president’s office, the press shop, and the trading desk, all the most likely candidates to have access to the directive before its public announcement.

  She must have gone out for lunch today because she was coming my way with a Styrofoam takeout container. I checked her badge. It was helpful that the Fed labeled their employees for me.

  “Stay here,” I told Jack.

  I walked toward her, eyes down against the rain, reached into my pocket and palmed the USB drive in my left hand. Her purse looked zipped shut, but a side pouch hung halfway open.

  I brushed past her and dropped it in. As a pickpocket, it’s a lot easier to give than to receive.

  “What was that?” Jack asked after I circled back.

  “Not now,” I said.

  “Where’s the suite we need to get to?” he asked. “The turret? That’s where I’d be.”

  A tower stood out at the east end of the Fed. As I checked out the crenels, I thought the architects might have taken the fortress idea a little too far. It looked like they could defend the place with bows and arrows.

/>   “The president is on ten. The desk is on nine.”

  “So these tunnels,” he went on. “I found some old maps on the web, construction stuff from when they built it.”

  “Shut up,” I said. Jack looked at me angrily until he noticed the cop walking by. I waited for him to pass.

  “The vault’s eighty feet down, Jack, below the subway. It’s on the bedrock. It’s three stories of solid steel, weighs two hundred and thirty tons, and is surrounded by steel-reinforced concrete. They lowered it down to the bottom, then built the building around it. The whole infrastructure of New York City is sitting on top of it. Any breach and one button seals it air- and watertight within twenty-five seconds. Maybe tunneling through the bathroom at TGI Fridays isn’t the way to go.”

  Getting into buildings was my specialty. Jack’s strength was sneaking past people’s suspicions.

  “How are you going to get inside, then?” he asked, looking a little wounded.

  “First things first,” I said and took my phone.

  We had already learned everything we could about the perimeter from outside, and anyone I needed to check out during the lunch rush had already gone back in. Catty-corner from the Fed there was an overpriced sandwich shop that billed itself as a patisserie.

  I walked in, told Jack to order something, and headed for the restroom. I’d checked the place out in advance. It was close enough to the Fed and had free Wi-Fi. Both were crucial. I stood on a toilet and lifted the ceiling tiles.

  From my bag I pulled out a small black box with an antenna on the side and placed it above the tiles. For power, I hooked into a junction box for the bathroom ceiling fan. This was essentially a wireless repeater. It would pick up the over-the-air signal from a camera inside the Fed, then send it back out over the Internet. I could watch the feed from anywhere on the web.

  Our next stop was a delivery service. I’d already boxed up the baseball and had picked up the display stand from my father that morning. His milling was as good as ever, even though the Ford Steel Works had been shut down for almost thirty years. The base had been hollowed out for a camera and a backup battery, but there was no sign of any modification. The lens was invisible, hidden behind the drilled-out dot in the i of “Series.”

  Inside the box was a gift receipt I’d backdated a few weeks and a nice note from a Professor Halloran at the University of Chicago. He had been the lead author on several of the senior vice president’s early papers in graduate school and was a fellow baseball geek. That made him a plausible giver for my Trojan horse baseball, which would soon take up its rightful spot, aimed directly at the senior VP’s computer and broadcasting everything he read back to me.

  “What about the thank-you note?” Jack asked. “Or if he calls this professor?”

  “Halloran died last week,” I said. I’d been poring over the SVP’s résumé and the obituaries for two days, searching for the right candidate. The phone and e-mail address on the invoice led back to my dummy accounts, if he had any other questions.

  “Cute,” he said. “But you still haven’t gotten inside. You going to do this all by remote control?”

  I wished I could, but at some point I had to put my ass on the line. That time was now.

  Chapter 23

  I HANDED JACK a paper printout and a wallet full of forged credentials. He looked at the sheet. It was an e-ticket for the Fed tour. We walked toward the Federal Reserve Police guarding the Maiden Lane entrance. They’re a formidable group, all required to certify on pistol, rifle, and shotgun twice a year at the Fed’s range. Most qualify as experts.

  They looked at the tickets first, and then at our fake IDs. The guard looked back and forth between my face, my license, and my face again.

  He waved me in.

  My eyes darted around the lobby, calculating the possibilities for beating security on the day of the heist. The employees walked into mantraps opened by RFID badges. This place was going to be just as bad as I had feared. Mantraps look like futuristic telephone booths, with two doors that open on opposite sides. A higher-security version of a turnstile, mantraps isolate people so that only one at a time can enter as his credentials are confirmed. Some actually check your weight to prevent two people from going through, or lock you in if your ID doesn’t scan.

  Jack and I turned to the right. Visitors walked through a metal detector and bag X-ray before going to the traps. It was pretty standard security, typical of courthouses, though these guards were better armed.

  Jack went through the security screen first, then I cleared the metal detectors. He stepped into an elevator with the rest of the tour just before the doors closed. The guard pointed me toward the mantrap and another scanned a card to allow me to pass.

  “Go with them,” he said. I followed three women to the elevators and glanced down at their badges. Everyone wore credentials on plastic badge-holders clipped to their waists or on lanyards around their necks.

  The RFID technology was a relief. Most feds were moving toward smart-card badges encrypted by the NSA, which as a practical matter were impossible to crack or clone. RFID is much easier to hack, but I probably wouldn’t even have to go that far. I had some other tricks in mind. I was holding my phone in my hand, and as we entered the elevator, I snapped a couple of shots of the badges up close.

  The women exited on three. What the hell, I thought, and pressed ten, the president’s floor. It worked. There was no key control for the elevators, another good sign. Still, it was a stupid move. As I rose toward the heart of the Fed, I wouldn’t have a plausible story if I were challenged.

  The car stopped and the doors opened on ten. There were no guards at the elevator banks. Once past the guns and the guards and the mantraps, it was just an office, full of bankers and economists, people who don’t have security in their bones the way they do at the Pentagon or the CIA.

  There were doors at either end, also on RFID, and I could see a manned reception area behind them. I stepped out, dropped a thumb drive, and kicked it along the floor. It came to rest near the suite’s door. Then I turned and stepped back onto the elevator. The doors closed. I pressed one and began to descend.

  I exited into the old public area of the bank, a room of high vaulted ceilings and beautiful wrought-iron cages where once the public could come in to buy and redeem bonds. Now it was a museum of finance where they parked visitors until the tours began. I found Jack just before the program started.

  Gathered around a rotating gold bar on display behind twelve inches of glass, we listened to a genial South Asian guide dispel some of the more notorious myths about the Fed. Jack watched the gold bar go around and around.

  I was more interested in cataloging the closed-circuit cameras and the visitor badges I spotted on a few people who were filing out past us. People on the tour had no badges, so they were easy to spot if they broke away from the group. Other visitors—contractors, friends, and family—received a red temporary badge. That’s what I would need.

  We circled back to the elevators, passing through the main lobby on the south side of the building. There were four cops outside, two more at the guard desk. I watched as more people with temporary visitor badges exited the elevator. They had no escorts, no one to make sure they left the building after they were sent down.

  That would give me an opening.

  The group of tourists was large enough that they split us into two elevators. “Just press E and hold it,” the guide said.

  That was all it took to get to the vault, five floors down. In my mind I’d conjured up something out of Get Smart: door after impregnable door, each with technology that was squirrelier than the last. But there was no special key. We just dropped, then stepped out into a claustrophobic basement corridor. I could barely pay attention to the educational video that played on the wall. It sounded as if it was narrated by the same guy who’d done the health videos in my seventh-grade sex ed class.

  My focus was squarely on the narrow hallway and, forty feet away, the
largest gold reserve in the world. Our guide kept a close eye on us as she told us to put away our phones and warned us not to take any photos, notes, or sketches. We moved toward the vault.

  Chapter 24

  TAKE A LOOK at the money in your pocket, any bill. Printed across the top you’ll see that what you’re actually carrying around is a “Federal Reserve Note.” The Fed is the reason your dollars are worth anything.

  The Fed spends a lot of time debunking conspiracy theories, as you might expect from an institution that was founded on a private island by a cabal of New York bankers to control the US economy. That is the literal truth. It gets better. The place was called Jekyll Island.

  There hadn’t been a US central bank for most of the nineteenth century, and the economy kept going through dangerous boom and bust cycles. Finally, after the panic of 1907, the bankers were fed up. J. P. Morgan was tired of having to single-handedly orchestrate the bailout of the American economy, so he rounded up a bunch of New York money men and politicians. Under cover of night they left the city on a private railroad car from a little-used platform. They secluded themselves on an island off the coast of Georgia, and refrained from referring to each other by name in order to prevent the servants from leaking their purpose as they hammered out what would later become the Federal Reserve System. Some bankers later pretended they were opposed to the plan, so it wouldn’t seem like too much of a sweetheart deal as Congress wrangled over it.

  As a result, the Fed is by design very friendly to large New York banks. When the committee in DC decides what interest rates should be, they can’t simply dictate them to the banks. They decide on a target interest rate, and then send the directive to the trading desk at the New York Fed to instruct them about how to achieve it. The traders upstairs go into the markets and wheel and deal with the big banks, buying and selling Treasury bills and other government debts, essentially IOUs from Uncle Sam. When the Fed buys up a lot of those IOUs, they flood the economy with money; when they sell them, they take money out of circulation.