The Directive: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  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.”

  Chapter 20

  I RACED HOME and found Lynch in his car, parked around the corner from my house, reading the newspaper. The man with glasses was in the passenger seat. I tapped on the window. He rolled it down.

  “What’s your sign?” Lynch asked.

  “What?”

  “Come on.”

  “Capricorn.”

  He lifted the paper. “ ‘Today’s new moon may mark the beginning of a grand adventure. Many will be traveling to exciting places, which could ultimately change their life.’ Sounds auspicious,” he said. “Get in.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I found your baseball.”

  I stepped into the car. We crossed the river and headed south as Lynch peppered me with questions. I told him about getting eyes in the suite first, and everything I had learned about the procedures for getting the directive from DC to New York on Fed Day.

  He didn’t say anything, just nodded slowly as he judged my progress. We drove past Bolling Air Force Base to a desolate part of Southeast. He pulled into a large yard of gravel and sand surrounded by marsh. A few commercial fishing boats rusted out on jack stands or lay on their sides.

  “Follow me,” Lynch said as he stepped out of the driver’s seat.

  “I’m not getting a sports memorabilia vibe from this place,” I said.

  “First things first,” Lynch said, and led me toward a two-story building with an observation deck on top, some kind of decommissioned yard office. His partner stayed with the car, watching over us.

  Lynch stopped at the front door, pulled out his pistol, and cocked the hammer back.

  He pointed to the door. “The Fed uses the same lock,” he said, and checked his watch. “You have four minutes.”

  I knelt down and looked at the lock, a Medeco. I had the picks from Cartwright, but this lock, while an older design, was one of the most difficult ever made.

  To open it, I had to raise six high-security pins, designed with serrations and false sets to throw off lockpickers, to the correct height. That was the easy part. Medecos are such bears because once you have picked the pins to the correct height, you then have to rotate them around a vertical axis to the correct orientation. The pins have notches on their sides that, when lined up, allow a piece of brass called a sidebar to retract and let the cylinder turn freely.

  “That’s impossible,” I said, and turned back. “I need a—”

  Lynch held it: a thin wire with a ninety-degree bend at the end. In theory it would let me rotate the pins.

  “So this is a tryout?” I asked.

  “We can’t send an amateur in.”

  “By all means, don’t. I am an amateur,” I said. “And I don’t want the job. You’re not giving me a lot of incentives here.”

  “You’re ours either way. Do your best. If you don’t check out, you become expendable.”

  “I’d need ten minutes even under the best of—”

  He raised his pistol. The flare from the muzzle blinded me. The gunshot was deafening that close. My ears rang. I took a stumbling step to one side. Gravel rained against the cement walls of the office. Lynch lowered the gun.

  “Three minutes and thirty seconds,” he said. “Don’t waste my time.”

  “Forced entry?”

  “Strictly bypass. No damage. No trace.”

  The picks were top-of-the-line Southern Ordnance models with comfy plastic handles. I hated expensive picks. They were like driving a Mercury Sable. I didn’t have the second-skin touch I needed for a lock like this. I’d never picked anything this hard, not even close. This was like going from flag football to the NFL.

  I placed a tension wrench in the keyway and put some pressure on as I felt around with the hook pick. It took a while to get the basic layout.

  “Two minutes thirty seconds.”

  To deal with the security pins, I overset them deliberately, eased way off on the tension wrench, and began to lower them one at a time.

  “Two minutes.”

  I worked it back to front and thought I had three pins set, but it was impossible to know for sure with a lock that complex.

  “One minute,” Lynch said. He stepped behind me and held the gun to his side.

  Expendable, like Sacks, I thought, and remembered the scene on the Mall. That didn’t help. Sweat soaked my shirt despite the cold air. My heart pounded, too hard, distracting me from the feel in my fingers.

  There was no give, that subtle movement of the cylinder to tell me I had the pins at the right height and could move on to work the sidebar. Something was wrong. I kept the tension on and started over.

  It was the fifth pin.

  “Thirty seconds,” Lynch said.

  I worked on it but I was lost, groping blind, unable to tell the real shear line from all the misdirection. There was no time. I had to start with the rotations and pray I had the heights right. I put the wire in.

  “Twenty,” Lynch said. I heard the grave
l crunch behind me. He was standing over me where I knelt.

  “Ten seconds,” he said.

  My hands started shaking. I could feel the lock seizing, the sets falling, all my work lost.

  “Five.” He pressed the muzzle to the back of my head. I fumbled with the wire. My hands were trembling too much to do anything.

  “Zero.”

  I felt the muzzle of the gun dig into the back of my skull. He tightened his grip.

  “Click.”

  He didn’t fire. He reached his hand forward and rested it on mine on the tension wrench. Then he moved to the side, the gun aimed at my eye.

  “Step back,” he said.

  He seemed to know what he was doing with that wrench. I stood up and moved a few feet away, my eyes fixed on the gun.

  Slowly he let the pressure off the wrench. I could see the focus in his eyes as he felt the pins fall back into place. A skilled hand could tell how many I’d set. Those pins would decide my fate like a jury.

  He pressed his lips together as he considered my work. His hand tightened up on the gun. His thumb slid up and engaged the safety.

  “Five, maybe six pins,” he said. “No way to tell on the sidebar.”

  He holstered the gun. “You need it under four minutes or you’re a dead man on Fed Day.”

  I shoved him. “You point a gun at me again and I’ll kill you, I swear.”

  His sidekick moved closer. Lynch waved him back. “You think this is scary?” he said. “Wait until the real job. This is tough love, Mike. The Federal Reserve Police won’t give you a second chance. They’ll put two bullets in your brain.”

  The fear left a taste in my mouth like I was sucking on a penny. I took a minute to calm down. As much as it infuriated me, Lynch was right. This wasn’t a game. That lock had beaten me. And if I failed when it mattered, I would end up dead or in prison.

  “So I walk?” I said.

  “For now,” he said. “You need a practice lock?”

  “I’m set.”

  “Keep me happy, Mike. Then you and your people will be fine.”

  “I’m going to case the Fed.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “With Jack.”

  “Good,” he said. He gestured to his partner, who came over with a thick roll of cash. Lynch counted out a stack of fifty-dollar bills and placed it in an envelope.

  “Any supplies you need?”

  “It’s taken care of.”

  “How’s your little law practice going?”

  “Just great,” I lied.

  “What did I pay you last time?”

  “Ten cents. But I didn’t take it, and I’m not taking that.”

  He held the money out. “I don’t want you to think this is extortion,” he said.

  “Yeah. God forbid I think you’re some kind of criminal. Keep your money.”

  “I pay my men. I pay them well. You’re taking it,” he said, and held it touching my chest. “I’m not going to let you fuck this up by doing it on the cheap.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t trust men I don’t own.” The other man took out his pistol. Lynch folded the envelope over once and tucked it in my jacket pocket.

  “Tomorrow, after New York, you tell me how you’re going to get the directive.”

  So much for rope-a-dope. There would be no stalling him, no games. The minute he lost faith in me was the minute he came after everything I loved.

  He left me with the man in glasses and stepped away to check his phone. He carried two on his belt. Right now he was on a basic flip model like my prepaid. I’d seen him use it before, and it always seemed to be for orders about this job.

  “Time to go,” he said.

  Chapter 21

  WHEN I ARRIVED home, Annie was on the cordless phone in the living room.

  “Dad. Dad…” She was talking loud, trying to get a word in and failing. “It’s a little late for that. The wedding is only a few weeks away.” Clark had been doing a lot of international travel recently, back-to-back trips to the Middle East and South America.

  The wedding planning was getting tense. It was becoming clear that the Ford and Clark clans would explode when mixed. Annie and I had had a two-day standoff over the hotels. I wanted to be near my father and family, but they couldn’t afford the hotel Annie’s grandmother picked out. And the Clarks wouldn’t set foot in a place that offered a free breakfast.

  My father’s enthusiasm was another issue. He had just given me a couple more names for last-minute invites. After all that time inside, he was eager to get the family back together. Unfortunately, half his guests were deceased or incarcerated. He seemed to think that his share of the guest list was gross, not net, so he kept tacking on names when his first tries couldn’t come, which was driving both me and Annie nuts. “I think there may be a cousin…” he would say, and ransack a drawer looking for one of my mom’s old address books.

  No wonder this call from Clark had her on edge. “Fine,” Annie said into the handset, not bothering to hide her anger. “I’ll have them send it to the lawyers.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye. As I approached the living room, I expected her to be upset. What I didn’t expect was to see her hurl the phone against the couch as hard as she could. I caught it as it ricocheted toward the hardwood floor.

  “God,” she said. “Have you ever felt like you could kill somebody?”

  I leaned my head to the side. I had, actually, and then some. It was an odd question considering everything Annie and I had been through.

  “Sorry,” she said. “It’s my fucking father.”

  I considered the option. “If we killed him it’d save us a meal, but we’d probably have to fit somebody else for a tux. So call it a toss-up. I’ll leave it to you. What’d he do this time?”

  “It’s him and my grandmother. They’re changing everything. It’s so over the top. I think they want to make it so expensive that I’ll feel indebted, over a barrel. I just don’t have time to deal with it anymore. And now I have to go to Palo Alto for work.”

  “When?”

  “Flight’s in an hour.”

  She’d just won a major intellectual-property case. That’s what the managing partner had taken her to the Cosmos Club to talk about. He wanted her to take the strategy national.

  There was an invoice from Oscar de la Renta on the desk in front of her: the wedding dress. Thank God I couldn’t see the price.

  “Next time he gives you a hard time, tell him you don’t need his money.”

  “Hon,” she said, “this is getting pretty expensive. Are you sure?”

  I had an envelope from Lynch in my pants pocket so thick with cash it was hard to sit down.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. Is there something else, though? Your dad’s been pulling that move for a while.” She had said something on the phone about lawyers.

  “He’s giving the vendors a hard time.”

  “Is he trying to change the terms?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

  I looked at the table and saw marked-up contracts. “The refunds?” I asked.

  She let out a long breath. I guess I’d found her out.

  I started laughing. “In case you call it off?” I said, and shook my head. “Hedging his trades.”

  He could have just been worried about it getting rained out. The last time we were at his place, Clark had actually toned down his open contempt for me to more of a simmering disdain. He dumped me off with the dog trainer, and I’d spent the afternoon hanging out with the hounds. Maybe he’d given up. He must have known that the wedding was going to happen either way. I liked to think that I had earned some respect by rejecting his money in New York.

  “It’s his job,” Annie said.

  “Fine. I’ll take the other side of that bet.” I said. “You?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, and hugged me around the waist. “I shouldn’t be so hard on him.”
r />   “I think you’re actually going easy on the guy.”

  “Not that. I’m starting to wonder if he’s sick or something. Last time I was home, he just didn’t seem right. He was really down, low-energy. And when we were at the country place, he was in his office on the phone, and when he came out, he looked like all the life had gone out of him.”

  “Maybe he got some bad news in the markets.”

  “No,” she said. “He thrives on that stuff, loves fighting back, doubling down, going to war.” She walked to her suitcase and started throwing clothes into the laundry basket and restocking clean ones. The case was always packed these days.

  “My dad has a few more tack-ons,” I told her.

  “How many?” she asked.

  “Four,” I said. “Down in Floyd County.”

  “God. Who can we sit them near?”

  I looked over the seating plan on the side table as if it was a map of a minefield, then back at Annie. “No one,” I said.

  She shook her head. “See if you can figure it out,” she said. “I have to get to Reagan.”

  “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “You were out late,” she said. “Jack?”

  “No. Work. I’m in the weeds, and then Mark Phillips kidnapped me for drinks.”

  “How’d that go?”

  I thought about it. “I think we’re finally moving in the right direction.”

  “Great,” she said. “You’re in a good mood.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. You seem very, I don’t know, vital.”

  “Thanks.”

  I thought I was a wreck after my run-in with Lynch, but who knows? One of the upsides of Annie moving up at work was that she was almost too busy to pay attention to my comings and goings. And when wedding planning grew to be too stressful, I could soothe my nerves with my new hobby: robbing banks with a gun to my head.

  I had some suspicions about why I might seem so full of pep, but I didn’t want to examine too closely the idea that some part of me was actually enjoying this stuff. And with a main client gone and a thick stack of dirty money in my pocket, it seemed more and more that I was, as Larry Clark liked to claim, nothing but a criminal.