The Directive

by Matthew Quirk

  “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.

  He began to speak, but I couldn’t hear him over the machinery. I squeezed closer and could just make out his voice:

  “—I don’t understand why we don’t just deal with him right now. Think about what he knows. Well, sure…but—If you say you have it covered, I’ll hold off. I can’t really talk about this here. Where? Sure. I have to check out that shipment anyway. I’ll take care of one more thing here, then I can meet you. About an hour. Sounds good.”

  He turned back. I dropped and crammed myself in between the machinery and the wall. My face was four inches from a hot pipe that stank of diesel. I couldn’t hear a thing with all the noise.

  I waited what I thought was a minute but was probably only ten seconds as I felt my heart jumping against the vest. Then I heard a door close. I eased back up, expecting Lynch to pop out from behind the next column, his coffee mug at the ready. But when I stood up, I had the basement to myself.

  He was going to meet his boss. Maybe it was my paranoia in overdrive, but it sounded like my fate might be on the agenda. He hadn’t given me nearly enough to know where he was going. I could have tried to follow him, but my Jeep was a giveaway.

  I walked over to his Chrysler. The vans gave me some cover from the security cameras. In a complex this big, the cameras on the second basement, however scary, would most likely be glanced at periodically, if that, and reviewed only if there were an incident. Though given how my day was going, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if I still managed to catch the moment exactly wrong.

  Getting inside a car isn’t very hard, but actually stealing one is another matter. Engine immobilizers took all the fun out of auto theft in the 1990s. When I was growing up, there was a magic moment for joyriding, around the time the Club came out. There were still plenty of mid-to-late-1980s cars on the road that you could hot-wire. You needed a lot of leverage to break the steering wheel lock, though, and you looked awfully suspicious walking around a parking lot with a breaking bar. But then, God bless them, drivers began strapping metal bars to their wheels for you: the Club. You’d wire the ignition, crack the lock with the Club, and all you needed was a hacksaw blade up your shirtsleeve to cut through the steering wheel and take the bar off. The whole city was your showroom. Once chip keys became standard the party ended. No more hot-wiring. Your options were carjacking or the bus.

  I needed to get in and leave no trace. Slim jims haven’t worked reliably in years, so locksmiths use the wedge technique. There were yellow bumpers on the column behind me. I pulled the hard plastic cap off one and drove it in at the top of the driver’s side door, then jammed the plastic in deeper, opening up a small space between the door and frame. I unscrewed a threaded rod from the pipe conduit running along the walls and gave it a slight bend. I angled it in past the wedge. My hand started shaking as I got the rod halfway in. If I left scratches all over his doorframe, I would tip Lynch off. I stopped, steadied my wrist, and guided it toward the door-lock button.

  It skittered off the top twice. And then I managed solid contact. The button levered down. The door locks clunked open.

  Lynch kept his car clean. I was hoping for a GPS unit that might tell me his usual meeting places, but there was nothing to find except a Best of Frank Sinatra CD and the musty trace of ten thousand cigarettes lingering in the upholstery.

  I sat there for a moment. This was my only chance. Lynch would be back any second.

  I took my cell phone out, turned off every ringer, silenced it completely. I checked it four times, and slid it under his rear seats.

  Then I locked his doors, sealed my phone in, and stepped away.

  I heard someone coming up behind me. I started walking calmly toward the exit.

  A round, middle-aged man with a nicotine-stained mustache approached me from across the garage. He was wearing a military-style black uniform, but these days everybody from mall guards on up was playing SWAT Team, so that didn’t mean much.

  As I neared him, I realized he wasn’t FBI. He was Federal Protective Service, the government’s version of rent-a-cops. Still, he had a radio, and that meant he could rain hell down on me with a few words.

  I brought my shoulders back square, my chest out, recalled every tic of posture I had learned in the navy, and strode right at the guy. I gave him a respectful nod.

  He looked at me, then dropped his head slightly in return.

&
nbsp; I walked back toward the garage stairwell, climbed two flights up, then exited into Judiciary Square. I enjoyed a second of freedom before I recalled that I was still deep in enemy territory, near the site of Sacks’s execution, surrounded by police, marshals, prosecutors, and judges. I got away as fast as I could, by walking north and taking the long way around back to my Jeep.

  Chapter 34

  I SAT IN the driver’s seat, pulled out my laptop, and went to my phone carrier’s website. I searched until I found the “Where’s my cell phone?” feature and then I pinged my phone. There it was on the map, sleeping peacefully in Lynch’s car under the field office.

  From there I drove to a neighborhood called Shaw, where my car had less chance of being recognized from the day of Sacks’s death. I parked outside a Laundromat and waited. Ten minutes later Lynch was on the move, heading west.

  I followed, staying about five minutes behind him so that my Jeep wouldn’t give me away. District traffic is dangerous enough without the need to check a laptop every twenty seconds. We drove northwest through the towns on the Maryland side of the Potomac, and soon—far sooner than you would think when coming from mid-city DC—we were driving past ten-million-dollar houses and horse farms.

  We headed for the historic estates high above the river, overlooking Great Falls. These towns—Great Falls, McLean, Potomac, Bethesda—are home to lobbyists and government contractors and are now some of the wealthiest zip codes in the country. I pressed *67 on my prepaid—which blocks your number from showing up on caller ID—then tried the phone number I’d seen Lynch dial. There was no answer.

  The land grew more rural. I passed forests and equestrian schools. Then the dot stopped. I refreshed my computer again. It didn’t move. Lynch had arrived at his destination. On a winding country road, I pulled up to within three-quarters of a mile of him.

  Through the woods from time to time I caught glimmers of the river running far below. At the end of the road, I could make out a massive stone building that looked like a former luxury hotel or resort, a hundred years old at least. The wings lay partly in ruins, backing into overgrown woods. Boards covered the high arched windows. You could just make out the green copper ornaments along the roof: Poseidons and mermaids swimming along, choked by the kudzu that covered half the building. It looked as if no one but vandals, bums, and graffiti artists had set foot in the place since the Hoover administration.

  As I drove along the rusting fence, I saw that there had been some recent improvements at the main building: a gleaming steel door and an electronic gate. Clearly a new tenant had arrived, and he was hiding something, or someone, very valuable. Two cars and two vans were parked in the long circular driveway.

  There was nothing good about this setup, but I had to find out who was behind it all, which part of my past had come back for me. I almost believed that it was Jack who was giving Lynch orders, running this game. But was my brother twisted enough to put a four-inch slice in his scalp in order to hook his mark?

  Who knows? Maybe it was the florist we fired a couple of months back.

  I drove along the edge of the property in my Jeep, bucking along a trail in the woods until I was out of sight, then parked. I pulled the pistol from where I’d hidden it under the seat and slid it into my belt.

  Graffiti and empty bottles of MD 20/20 testified to the recent clientele of the resort, but even in the back of the building, the new security regime was clear. The two wings of the hotel were just husks, but the domed central portion had been secured with steel plates over the windows and new locks.

  I made my way past overgrown gardens, empty pools, and defaced Roman statues, then crawled along a low parapet until I was close enough to dash to Lynch’s car. It was nearly dark, and there was no sign of anyone inside. I found a scrap of old molding and tried using it to wedge his door. The wood crumbled, nothing but dry rot and termite holes. I looked around for another wedge, then thought to try the door handle.

  It was unlocked. We were in the middle of nowhere.

  I sat inside and started rooting around in the back seat. My phone wasn’t there. I dug my hands deep between the cushions, took a chunk of skin off my knuckles on a bolt head, then finally felt the cold plastic.

  I eased the door shut, then ran back to the parapet.

  Around the side of the building, I found a steel door in an inside corner that offered decent cover while I worked. An American-brand padlock held it shut. It was a good lock, but still shouldn’t have taken too long. I was jumpy as hell, however, and kept false-setting the pins.

  Finally the cylinder turned. I stepped inside, following the thin beam of my keychain flashlight. The corridor was eerie. My steps echoed, and I could only just make out the contours of the wooden paneling and porcelain fixtures.

  I heard a low rumble ahead and followed it. I took one wrong turn, and my foot punched through rotten flooring and debris. As I fell I speared my kneecap on something jagged.

  I pulled myself out, then circled around. Once again the noise grew louder. A long section of wall was missing along the hallway, and I crossed through it.

  In the gloom I found a thick metal door, open a foot or so. As I stepped through, I realized I was in a strong room. There were old safes in the corner, too heavy for anyone to bother pulling out. The whole place was trimmed in Gilded Age decadence—carved columns and friezes and crashed-down chandeliers.

  I was closer to the pulsing sound now. It seemed to be coming from behind a door with an old-fashioned keyhole, the kind you could actually peep through. That meant a lever lock. Under other circumstances this might have been an interesting puzzle, but not with Lynch and his squad waiting nearby.

  I had the wrong sort of picks, which meant a nightmare of awkward angles and too much pressure. It left my fingers red and raw. I finally managed to set the levers and drew the bolt.

  When I eased the door open, the noise boomed out loud, and light flooded through the crack, blinding me for a few seconds.

  I was close, suddenly too close, and I could hear voices. The thick walls of the strong room had led me to believe I was much farther away.

  As my eyes adjusted, the scene grew increasingly surreal. I was in the rear of an old casino cage, where money was counted and swapped for chips. It was an ornate tangle of wrought iron, wood, and brass that took up one side of the gaming floor. Looking up, I saw the vaulted ceilings over the main gambling area and the dome high above me. A quarter of the ceiling had caved in, and I could see, past the wood molding and cracked frescoes, the sky turning plum with dusk. There were a few craps tables decaying on the floor. Grass grew all around them in the casino pits, with wildflowers blooming here and there. That dome must have been open for decades.

  I could hear people close by. I was shielded from their view by a counter and a safe, but through the brass bars I could see, at the far end of the floor, two glaring halogen floodlights aimed my way. There were men moving near them—maybe ten—but I couldn’t make out faces with the blinding lights behind them. Dozens of crates were stacked on the floor, towering over the heads of the men. I could see guards off to both sides, carrying assault rifles.

  The throb of the generator partly drowned out the voices, but I thought I recognized Lynch speaking. I craned my neck farther out to try to see who he was talking to, but could discern only silhouettes. I moved a little closer, and I could make out what he was saying.

  “I don’t understand why you don’t just put some fear into the fiancée. Or why you think you have him under control when he’s clearly out to get us—”

  The other speaker cut him off. “Fine,” Lynch said. “Fine. It’s your show.”

  This was the man behind it all. I crawled out farther, desperate to see the face of whoever was bent on ruining me. We had narrowed down our search for the men behind the dark money. We were close. If I could only hear the voice, I would know.

  Lynch moved a few feet. The other man remained only a shadow framed by the lights. If he wo
uld just turn, move a few feet, I could see.

  I inched out. The floorboard under my elbow creaked. I transferred my weight back. Wood cracked under my foot.

  “What’s that?” someone said.

  “There!”

  I lunged back.

  Beams of light flashed through the darkness, shot toward me. Men came running.

  Chapter 35

  I LEAPT THROUGH the door, slammed it shut behind me, turned the bolt back, and jammed a pick inside until it broke. There was a light far ahead, and I hauled ass toward it. The ruined corridor walls flashed by, a long wing of ballrooms built from stone with beautiful wood-frame ceilings. I hurdled a pile of debris. The ceilings were gone, the second floor half collapsed. I ran into the ruins. The stone walls stood high above my head.

  I’d put some distance between me and the guards when I heard a loud bang far back, then voices. Gunshots cracked. Bullets skipped off the walls, tore the air, and sent up puffs of dirt and marble around my feet.

  I ran through a stone archway held up by jack stands, then stopped. I doubled back, wrenched the supports down, then dove away, waiting for what remained of the upper floor to fall and give me cover. The stone creaked, chunks of masonry crumbled down, then nothing. Bullets sang past me. I sprinted away.

  I reached the end of the corridor. The walls rose unbroken to fifteen feet. Steel plates covered the windows: a dead end. The only way out was back the way I had come, the vault where I had kicked out the stands.

  I ran toward the shots, darting side to side. I heard cracks and settling from the stone archway ahead. Great. Now the vault had decided to cooperate. Chunks fell. I sped up straight for the passage, and rounded the corner in a flat-out sprint, arms pumping as the ceiling collapsed and the bullets slit the air.

  It all came down. I dove, then felt the stones striking my legs, my back. Maybe I hadn’t gone far enough. A cloud of dust swallowed me, coated my mouth like talc. I struggled to my knees, throwing myself forward, waiting to be crushed.