The Directive: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  Or that’s what they assumed. And my only strength in all this was that they really had no idea who they were dealing with. Annie thought she knew me. So did Jack. So did Bloom.

  But they had a lot to learn.

  “Now, Mike. Or she dies.” Bloom spoke so confidently.

  “Please.”

  For once, she was rattled.

  “Sorry?”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  She swallowed and pressed the button on the radio. I could hear the faint static on the open channel. “We’ll kill her.”

  “Will you?”

  I could see the muscles tense in her forearm, the doubt creep into her eyes, but that was it. No command. No shot.

  “You want her to die?” Bloom shouted.

  “I see right through you, through all this.”

  She lowered the radio.

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll take that as confirmation of who you’re working for.”

  “Annie, run!” I yelled. “He’s got a gun!”

  I stepped toward Bloom, steadied my gun with both hands. She spoke into the radio to Lynch: “Forget the woman. Get back here.”

  Now that she had lost her leverage on me and we were in a fair fight, Bloom didn’t seem so excited about our standoff.

  Lynch ran away from Annie’s car, toward me and Bloom.

  “Hey! You broke my—” I heard Annie shout after him. She followed him slowly in her car. “What are you doing in the middle of the road? Are you all right?”

  As she moved closer, my face-off with Bloom came into full view. Annie stepped out of the car.

  “Mike? Is that—what the hell is she doing here? Is that a gun?”

  “Run!” I shouted.

  She paused, then jumped back into her car. I saw Lynch hesitate as she started the engine, unsure whether to cover Bloom or keep Annie under control. I moved toward him, training my gun at his head.

  “I’m the one you want,” I said.

  He turned back to me. That gave Annie a chance to hit the gas and throw the car through a U-turn. The wheels spun out in the dirt on the side of the road and kicked gravel our way. She straightened out the car and the engine revved high as she shot away.

  Lynch and Bloom had me covered. I didn’t like the new math.

  “Now put the gun down, Mike. It’s really a pain in the ass to kill you in the middle of a public roadway. Play along and we’ll take it easy on you.”

  I watched Annie disappear around the curve. Of course I wanted her to get away. I was happy to give myself up to save her. But I could have used a half-second of hesitation, a wistful backward glance, maybe even an “I won’t forget you” before she left me behind with the killers. Just something for old times’ sake.

  “Okay.” I pulled my finger out of the trigger guard, grabbed the barrel of the gun with my left hand, and raised both arms.

  “On the ground,” Bloom said. “Then step away from it.”

  I complied.

  “Hands on top of your head. This way.”

  They walked me back down the road, Lynch in close with the gun and Bloom covering me at a distance. I could see her truck hidden in the woods on the opposite side of the road.

  “It’s a shame, Mike. I was really starting to enjoy all this cat-and—”

  The blasé tone she was aiming for lost some of its punch as the tail end of her remarks were swallowed up by the sound of an engine with the throttle wide open. It was a solid 3.5-liter V6 that I kept in good shape. Annie had gone for the six-speed manual in the Accord. She liked driving. The car didn’t look like much, but it roared like a jet as it bore down on us.

  The impending crash distracted Bloom and Lynch. I had time to take two giant steps toward the side of the road.

  They could have shot her, but that would have left them with no time to get out of her way, so they dove off the road on Annie’s passenger side and landed in a ditch choked with weeds. I threw myself onto the asphalt on the driver’s side.

  Annie skidded to a halt just past us. Bloom and Lynch started climbing out of the ditch, guns in their hands. I sprinted for Annie’s rear door, threw it open, and jumped in.

  She had a Kabuki look: face white, eyes wide, breath coming fast.

  “Go go go!” I yelled.

  I could see she was pretty tuned up. She slammed it into reverse and flew back past the entrance to the estate. I could hear glass tinkling, then something shatter as she hit the brakes hard and turned up the drive toward the house. Shards littered the floor mats. I recognized Annie’s centerpieces. They must have crashed when she stopped short for Lynch.

  “Not that way.”

  She looked at me in the rearview.

  “You’re not giving orders. Understood?”

  I sat on the center of the rear bench, leaning forward, my arm resting on the passenger seat. Halfway up the winding driveway, Annie stopped the car. She looked in the rearview. There was no sign of Lynch and Bloom in pursuit.

  Maybe they were scared of the small army of security guards that roamed the estate, but I didn’t think so.

  “Thanks for coming back,” I said.

  “I didn’t come back for you. I came back for those two.” She gestured with her head toward the roadway where she’d left Bloom and Lynch. “They fucked with the wrong woman.”

  She turned and looked at me, saw the blood staining my shirt, my eye scratched and red from Lynch’s gouging. I thought maybe she would finally see that I had done all of this to hold off the threats against her. She grabbed the sides of my head, pulled me forward, and gave me a long desperate kiss, then let me go. I started to smile, almost in tears with relief, and then she struck me, hard, across the face.

  I fell back.

  At least she hadn’t left me for dead. It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was a start.

  Chapter 50

  IT WAS 2:13.

  “We’ve got to get out of here. Annie, it’s—”

  “One more word and I’m handing you back to your girlfriend,” she said as we wound up the driveway. Attack dogs bounded alongside the car.

  I had started to suspect it at the shower, but only since this morning had I been certain. Who was rich enough to bet tens of millions of dollars on the directive, to afford a mercenary like Bloom, to orchestrate all this? Who hated me that much? Who would be so hell-bent on setting me up as a criminal, on driving me away from Annie?

  We pulled to a stop near the columned entrance.

  “We’re going inside.” Annie killed the engine and then stepped out. “The security people will take care of whoever that was back there.”

  I followed her along the white stone of the driveway, asking her to come back, to reconsider.

  The dogs, silent except for their panting, shot toward me.

  “Hutz!” Annie yelled. They sat, ten feet away with their black eyes fixed on me, slowly opening and closing their jaws and drooling. Two security guards stepped out from side entrances and flanked us.

  Annie climbed the steps.

  “Annie, don’t,” I said. “You’re in danger. That’s the only reason I left with her that morning at the house. If I hadn’t, they were going to kill you. They’ve been trying to set me up as a fall guy. They forced me. It was all against my will.”

  “Enough, Mike. I’m so tired of it.”

  “They shot me, Annie.” I lifted my shirt to show the rust-stained gauze on my lower back. “That’s why I was out all night.”

  “God.”

  “I was trying to protect you,” I said. “We need to go. The man behind everything, the man who set me up—”

  The front door opened before I could finish. Lawrence Clark stepped onto the porch, crossed his arms over his chest, and planted his thick legs like Atlas.

  “It’s your father, Annie,” I said. “He’s a killer.”

  I held out my hand to her. “Let’s go.”

  “Annie,” Clark said and moved toward her. “Come inside, dear. Jesus Christ. Does he have a gun?” />
  I still had the 1911 in my belt. “Wait,” I said.

  “He’s behind that murder on the Mall, Annie.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was all your father. He’s stealing the Fed decision before it goes public. He’s trading on it. That man on the Mall found out, so he was killed.”

  “How do you know all this, Mike?” Annie asked.

  “Because I stole it for him. Today, in New York. He was working through middlemen, coercing me, threatening Jack and me. It was all so he could have the numbers and I would take the fall. He was trying to keep us apart.”

  “What are you talking about?” Annie asked.

  Clark let out a laugh. “He sounds very trustworthy. Now, Annie, come inside before this man hurts you.”

  Every room in that house had a TV, all constantly tuned to Bloomberg News. Clark never had a conversation without half his attention directed toward the markets.

  It was 2:15.

  He glanced back inside to look at the TV just off the main foyer. The volume was way up, as you might expect when you had a few hundred million riding on the day’s headlines.

  “And we’re hearing from the lockup that the FOMC statement might be a few minutes late,” the broadcaster said. “I don’t recall this ever happening before. Let’s go to Jonathan Maurer in Washington.”

  Standing just inside the door, Clark turned back toward us, then nodded to his guards. They pulled their sidearms and closed in.

  I drew mine.

  “Are you going to shoot me too, Mike?” He shook his head in disgust. “This is the man you were about to marry,” he told Annie. “Take a good look at him.”

  She did. She’d seen me kill before. It had always felt like a bad dream remembered, an airless space, a break in our real lives. Yet here I was again, on the doorstep of her family home, drawing a gun on her father.

  Reflected in the glass beside the doorway, I could see my haunted face, see the blood staining my teeth. Clark was winning. I looked every bit the killer Annie feared.

  “Come inside, dear.” He held out his hand to her.

  He wouldn’t get rid of me in front of her, but if she went inside and left me alone with his guards, I was done. They would take me and hand me over to Lynch. Bloom would spin the story until all that was left were lies: that I had killed Sacks, that I was nothing more than a criminal.

  Annie took a step toward him, then hesitated, looking back and forth between her father and me.

  One day I had asked her if she would still love me if it meant losing everything. “Of course,” she’d said.

  Things change. She moved toward her father. Then she spoke. She wasn’t seeking protection. She was looking for answers.

  “Who were you arguing with on the phone, Dad?”

  “What?”

  “Last week in your office. You were shouting at someone. I’d never heard you sound so afraid. Who was it?”

  “I don’t remember that, Annie. There’s no time. Please, love, come over here.”

  “Tell me about Barnsbury,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tell me how you built a billion-dollar fund so quickly when the markets had seized up.”

  “Please, Annie.”

  I kept my mouth shut, let her mind work. I must have planted the seed with the accusations at the shower, reinforcing some of her lingering suspicions.

  “Tell me why we had to leave London so quickly when I was young,” she said.

  I didn’t need to convince Annie of anything, and I probably couldn’t have if I tried. She made up her own mind, and clearly, she had done some homework.

  “Mom said she’d tell me one day. But she never had the chance. So please, just tell me the truth.”

  “Annie, I swear to you. He’s lying. Look at him, for God’s sake.”

  The guards wavered. They wouldn’t do it with her present. Her doubts were the only thing keeping me alive.

  “Mike,” she told me, “put the gun down.”

  “That’s right, dear,” Clark said.

  I took my finger off the trigger, held the pistol in the air. Her father grinned. He was going to win.

  “I’m not leaving him,” she said to Clark.

  “Now, Annie, listen!” he said, but then the news broke through on the TV.

  Chapter 51

  “THE FEDERAL OPEN Market Committee has released its statement. Despite the growing dissent on the board, the Fed has recommitted to measures to stimulate the economy—”

  Clark walked over to the TV. “That’s not right,” he said. Annie was stunned as she watched him walk away from her fate and an armed standoff to check his stocks.

  He changed the channel to Fox Business.

  “—decided on more of the same at what was certainly a contentious Fed meeting today—”

  CNBC: “—keep the money flowing. They’re not taking away the punch bowl anytime soon.”

  “They have it wrong,” he said.

  Annie looked toward me.

  “I told you, Annie.”

  The reality sank in. Clark knew I had beaten him. He came roaring back across the foyer.

  “I’ll fucking kill you,” he growled. “What did you do?”

  In the distance, I could see Black Suburbans speeding down the road toward the house.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Bad tip?”

  “What’s going on, Mike?” Annie asked.

  “Why don’t you tell her?” I said to her father.

  Clark stepped toward me, fists balled at his side, ready to strike. It would have been worth taking a knockout shot to demonstrate to Annie who the real lowlife was here.

  “Annie,” I said, “you should go. This could get bad.”

  “They had you covered,” Clark said. “You couldn’t have switched it.”

  I had absolute faith in Jack in one important respect: that he was absolutely untrustworthy. This was valuable in its way, like knowing a man who can always pick the losing team. Once you account for it, you’re home free.

  I knew that Lynch wouldn’t let me pull the job without having his own man watching me to make sure I didn’t screw them over. That was Jack. I knew he would betray me just as surely as I knew the three-card-monte man back in New York was going to switch in the losing card if I picked the ace. Jack had pretended to lose his nerve before the heist in order to get me to confess my plan. Once I’d given him the papers I needed to accomplish the switch, Lynch and Bloom could relax. They had me covered, had foiled my attempt to make this blow back in their faces.

  But I erred on the side of caution when pulling the job, always have. I had two copies of the forged directives. I hid the second set in the take-out menus as Lynch’s men searched me. When I let Jack in on the switch, I was playing him back at Bloom and Lynch. After Jack refused to help me swap the papers, they believed the directive I was carrying was the real thing.

  But it was a forgery I had switched in. I shredded the true directive and replaced it with a copy saying the Fed would do exactly the opposite of its real plans. Clark had bet one hundred percent wrong.

  “It’s gone,” Clark said, and started rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s all gone. I’m a dead man.”

  “What are you talking about, Dad?”

  “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

  He walked in a small circle, eyes fixed on the stock ticker running along the bottom of the TV screen. Clark was an apex predator. He lived for these sorts of risks. He had the will to make instant decisions that could bankrupt him or earn him billions, the spine to double down when his bets started to turn against him so he could fight back from the brink.

  He looked into the empty space of the grand foyer as he calculated. He stepped over to a narrow marble table, lifted a two-foot-high bronze sculpture of a horse, and with one arm heaved it at a tall mirror. Broken glass rained onto the floor.

  He rested his hands on the table and looked down.

  “Get out of here, Annie,” he said. “Leave me wi
th him.”

  “No, Dad. What do you mean, you’re a dead man?”

  “Get out,” he said.

  I looked back outside. The Suburbans had pulled into the end of the driveway. From the antennas, I took them for government-issue. The Secret Service was coming for us.

  “That wasn’t your money, was it, Dad?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Whose is it?” Her voice seemed to calm him down a little. I didn’t say anything, just stood by, ready to jump Clark if he tried anything.

  “Bad people,” he said. “Very bad people.”

  “Who?”

  “The fund had a few tough years. Everyone did. But the men who gave me their money didn’t care. I had to make it back or they would kill me. I needed a sure thing. We were leveraged twelve to one. But now it’s gone. All of it. The last eighty million. We were all in.”

  “What are you talking about?” Annie asked.

  “They’re going to kill me. You think I would do this for fun? I was going to lose everything. The house. Your trust. My life. I had no other choice.”

  I watched as more black trucks arrived. We were surrounded.

  “Who, Lawrence?” I asked. He was always traveling in the Middle East, in South America. He’d grown his fund far faster than any honest man could have with honest money.

  “Bad people.”

  “Who?”

  “Cartels,” he said. “Certain Iranian gentlemen. If this had worked, if I could have made it to the third quarter, I could have been back on top. The strategy was fine. It was the fucking execution.”

  He massaged his cheek and cast a strange, unfocused gaze on me. I didn’t know if he was going to break down or, now that he’d lost it all, go for broke and kill me on the spot.

  The law was coming, and my hands weren’t clean, no matter what my intentions had been.

  I thought I saw a way out with Clark, but even if I managed that hurdle, Bloom and Lynch might still kill me pro bono, for their own reasons. I knew too much about them. The Suburbans rolled up the driveway, closing in on the house.

  “There’s a way,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”