“Good to see you, Mike. What’s up?”
“I was looking for a camera.”
“You’ll get a better deal at the mall.”
“I’d rather go through you. A small one. Pinhole, hopefully smaller than a deck of cards.”
“They make them smaller than the button on your shirt now. I can do that.”
“And something that runs off a battery. Almost like a baby monitor, so I can pick up the signal and see what’s up inside.”
“I could work that out. Battery lasts about a week. You can set it to send in bursts. Just need a repeater nearby with a power supply.”
“How close?”
“A city block.”
“Cool. What do you think that’ll set me back?”
“All together? This sounds pretty fucking dodgy, so I’ll have to charge the I-don’t-know-nothing tax. Say six hundred. Why aren’t you just buying this off the web?”
“I’d rather it not be connected to my name.”
Cartwright took a deep breath, looked to the basketball game for solace, then cursed as the spread got away from him. He motioned for another whiskey.
“If this is a domestic matter, Mike, let me volunteer something. The answer to suspicions isn’t more sneaking around. That never ends well. It’s being straight-up.”
“It’s not that.”
“You came all the way out here for some spy shop stuff?”
“Well…that was just breaking the ice. I could use a couple of wallets, too.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, his suspicions confirmed. “Social Security cards?”
“No. Just drivers’ licenses, a few credit cards, just in case. I don’t need them to work. Just to make the licenses look more legit.”
When I was seventeen, I stole Jack’s birth certificate and went to the local DMV to get a duplicate of his license with my picture on it. It was the best fake you could find, because it was real. I thought they’d grown a little more sophisticated since then.
Cartwright took a sip and looked pained. “I hate to even mention this, Mike, because your family and I go way back, but you wouldn’t happen to be doing this on behalf of any law enforcement types?”
A snitch? I guess I could have been offended, but I was only a few years out of Harvard Law and knew a lot of prosecutors. I was a hard person for a criminal to trust, so I actually took it as a compliment of sorts that Cartwright didn’t shut me down completely.
“I’m not working with any cops,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Because then I’d have to kill you. And I’d hate to do that.”
He laughed. I joined him.
“Seriously,” he said. “I knew you as a little kid. It’d break my heart.”
I swallowed. “Understood.”
“Good. So much for that. The price has gone way up on all that stuff, Mike. ‘Interesting times.’ ”
“How much?” I asked. “I might need a few. A couple for me. One for Jack.”
“I’ll get a quote,” he said.
“I’m in the market for some practice locks, too,” I went on. I had a good sense of the hardware they were using at the Fed. “Up-to-date Medecos, some of those card-and-codes. And the whole kit: picks, shims, bypass, files, bump keys, decoders.”
“I have some here,” he said. “Some’s in storage.”
“And you wouldn’t have a lead on a Red Sox World Series baseball?”
“Like a collector’s item?”
“That’s right.”
In my briefcase I had a photo I’d found while doing my homework on the Federal Reserve. It showed the number-two guy on the trading desk at the New York Fed. A Boston native, he was an economist and therefore a stats geek. Those guys have a weakness for baseball, for endless inky rows of numbers. The photo was a head shot, fairly close-in. He was in his office, standing beside his desk. And behind him stood a row of baseballs on wooden bases. I could read some of the plaques. There was Carl Yastrzemski and Bobby Doerr. Nothing had more than one signature. A Red Sox fan: that made it easy to find my Trojan horse, a trophy he couldn’t resist. I’d gathered everything I could about this man’s background to figure out how to get to him.
“I’ll make some calls,” Cartwright said, and walked toward the end of the room. He opened a locked door and led me in to a storeroom. From a shelf he pulled down a door handle with a keypad. “These are the new Department of Homeland Security spec card-and-codes. Swiss. Thirteen hundred dollars. Eight-digit PINs and 256-bit encryption. They’re certified to withstand pick attempts for up to six hours.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“That’s only if you pick them the way the government labs expect you to. The electronics they’re cramming into hardware these days create a lot of weak links. It’s sloppy work.”
He entered 12345678 on the pad. The red LED flashed for an incorrect entry. As it did, Cartwright jammed a pick into the housing beside the flashing light. The whole thing went dark, and he swung the handle down.
“You ground the board and it opens. My fucking granddaughter could do it,” he said. “Have you been practicing?”
“Not in years.”
“Start here,” he said, pointing to the door we’d just entered. He reached onto a shelf and handed me a hook pick and tension wrench.
The lock was a six-pin Schlage. I got down on one knee in front of it, placed the wrench in, and slid the pick inside. A thrill ran through me. It felt like I was getting high for the first time in years.
With tension on the wrench, I started in on the first pins to bind. I pushed them up until I felt the slightest give in the cylinder, at the shear line, then felt the lower half of the pin go loose, no binding, no more pushback from the tiny spring above it. That meant I had a good set.
There was some commotion out front, but I was too absorbed by the lock, these old puzzles I had spent years learning to crack.
As I eased up the last pin, the cylinder spun free. The lock was open. I laughed. God, it felt good.
“Cartwright!” Someone shouted. “Cartwright!”
I turned, but it was too late. Someone grabbed me by the collar and threw me against the wall.
Chapter 18
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 t
he 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.”
Chapter 19
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.
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