The Directive (20 page)

IN THE EMPTY
apartment I sat down at the computer, a ThinkPad. The log-in screen asked for my fingerprint. I held the power button down and rebooted it into the recovery mode. From there, using the Command prompt, you can modify files on the main operating system.

If you press Shift five times on a Windows machine, a utility called Sticky Keys will run. It’s a feature for people with disabilities that helps them hold down keys like Control. It’s also a security hole.

From recovery, I replaced the Sticky Keys program on the main system with cmd.exe. When I restarted the guy’s computer and faced that log-in screen, I just pressed Shift five times. Instead of Sticky Keys, it gave me a command line on his main operating system. From there, it was a single command to reset the password.

Once I was in, I went online, logged into my Dropbox folder, and pulled up two forgeries I’d been working on since I’d first discussed the switch with my dad. I had modeled them on past Fed directives. They matched the format and language of the official documents, right down to the letterhead and the “Class I FOMC—Restricted Controlled (FR)” printed across the top.

I needed those fakes to make the switch. One directive told the desk to hit the brakes and shut down the special programs that were pumping up the economy. The other said to keep the throttle wide open.

I downloaded an open-source photo-editing program and started playing with the filters until I found one that made the pages look like bad photocopies. Once I had the grainy-fax look down, I went to Google Image search, found some scans of faxes, and started clipping numbers from the time stamps. I pasted them onto the top of my forgeries so they appeared to have come in at 12:05 p.m. on Tuesday, when the directive would be sent to New York.

I printed out both versions of the directive. Now, no matter what the committee did, I could slip Lynch and Bloom a forgery that said the opposite. They would bet exactly wrong, and I would blow up their position.

Of course, that meant I would have to pull this heist and steal the real directive first.

I printed out another copy of each version, just in case. As the last page spooled out of the printer, I heard the elevator doors down the hallway.

I trashed everything I’d put on the computer and shut it down. I could hear the apartment’s rightful occupant working the lock as I pulled my printouts. I ran out onto the terrace just as the front door opened. I only managed to shut the sliding door partway.

I hid to the side, but I was visible from about half of the apartment. I heard the TV come on,
SportsCenter,
and ventured a look inside. With the lights on, all he could probably see was his own reflection, but still I felt exposed. I eased the door shut centimeter by centimeter, waiting for a squeak to give me away, for the man to find me out here.

I probably shouldn’t have worried. I glanced inside. The guy was on the couch, eating a burrito out of his hand while reading from a thick sheaf of legal documents. I saw him bite the foil, grimace, tear it away, and continue. Half my friends from law school were like this: holed up in some extended-stay or corporate apartment across the street from the court or the doc review warehouse, clocking twenty-two hundred, twenty-five hundred hours a year, working every waking minute, sleeping four hours a night. The guy probably wouldn’t have noticed if I’d sat down next to him and helped myself to his chips and guac.

I may have been in mortal danger, but at least I wasn’t an associate anymore.

I folded the papers over once and put them in my back pocket. Steadying myself against the wall, I planted a foot on the railing and stepped on top of it. I hooked the fingers of my left hand into the brickwork and pivoted on top of the railing. I leaned back into the void, left hand on the brick, then pressed my right against the terrace ceiling.

My foot started to shake like the needle of a sewing machine.

I started to lose my balance. I pulled forward with my right hand and brought my left hand up to grab the terrace floor above me. My full weight dragged my right fingers back toward the fall as I pressed up with my toes and clamped my left hand onto the cement above.

I eased my right hand upward to a better grip, then walked my feet up the bricks of the wall and hooked my foot between the railing and the floor of my own terrace. I was in agony from the wound on my back. I hoisted my hips up to the edge. From there I walked my hands up the railing, planted my feet on the terrace’s edge, and pushed myself over.

As I sat down and caught my breath, I could hear knocking on the front door of my apartment.

The guard stepped in and looked around nervously. I rapped on the glass. He walked over, slid open the door, and stuck out his head.

“The chief talked to your guys. The stuff’s not going to be ready until tomorrow morning.”

“Okay.”

“It’s freezing out here,” he said.

“Cabin fever. Can you bring me a copy of a book called
Locks, Safes, and Security
from down the hall?”

“Yeah. You coming in?”

“In a minute.”

He looked at me like I was nuts, and slid the door shut.

I sat back against the brick, touched my bandage, and hissed. I must have opened up a few stitches. I had what I needed to blow up Lynch and Bloom, but I’d missed my chance to call Annie.

My father dropped off the package the next morning. The man in glasses brought them to the door. The ID badges looked fine. They would definitely pass a quick visual inspection.

“There were these, too.” He held up a black leather case: the picks.

I put my hand out.

“You only touch them under adult supervision.”

“Fine. Grab me a couple of locks for practice, then: the Schlage Everest and the ASSA V-10.”

He came back with the lock cylinders ten minutes later and handed them over with the picks.

“I counted those, so don’t try to pull anything.”

I sat at the table and opened the pouch. There were fifteen picks and tension wrenches inside. I double-checked the pouch. No sign of any blade or handcuff key.

Had they found them?

As I looked more closely at the picks, I noticed a tiny symbol stamped in the steel that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. It was a cannon crossed with a hammer, the maker’s mark for Ford Steel. The metalworks had been in my family for generations, until it was cheated away from my father. Fighting back against the man who ruined him was what started him doing cons. The date was 1976. These must have been some of the last pieces ever made at Ford Steel. I could always tell my father’s work. They were beautiful, hand ground and polished.

I felt the hard plastic handles. They seemed odd, cheap and out of place.

As spectator sports go, lockpicking is slightly less exciting than ice fishing. After I’d worked the cylinders for about twenty minutes, the guy in glasses started playing a video game on his phone.

That gave me time to look more closely at the handles on some of those picks. I put my fingernail into a seam on the plastic at the end of a double-ball pick and pressed in. The plastic slid back. It was a cap. I eased it off and tilted the pick down. A thin blade slid out of a perfectly formed hollow in the plastic. I felt the razor. It wasn’t metal, probably ceramic. I let it fall to the floor, then slipped it under the edge of the rug with my foot.

I started examining the other picks and found a barely visible seam on the handle of a wafer-lock pick. I slid the plastic cylinder all the way off the metal part of the pick. It was a short barrel, about an inch long, and once I had it off I noticed a square plastic tab, about three by four millimeters at the end that I could push out from the cylinder. It was a handcuff key. The other end of the cylinder had two notches, enough to get something in there to twist it, a fingernail or a pin or a blade. Handcuff keys are more or less standard in the United States. If my dad had the tolerances right, this would open any of the majors: Smith & Wesson, Peerless, ASP, Winchester, Chicago.

The old man had learned a lot during his time away.

I pulled the handcuff key part off, slid the remainder of the handle down, and capped it. It looked like the rest of the picks. I dropped the key on the rug and slid it underneath, alongside the blade.

With my contraband hidden, I turned back to my locks, mostly to keep myself distracted from the fact that I was going to rob the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then, most likely, be executed.

I managed to pick the sidebar on the ASSA. The Everest was still giving me trouble. That was fine. My get-out-of-jail-free tools under the rug were the only thing that mattered.

After two hours, the guard called lunchtime and collected my picks and locks. He brought in some deli sandwiches. Once I was alone, I tied my shoelaces near the rug edge, putting my body between my hands and the places where Bloom was most likely to have stashed a camera. I palmed the blade and key, and went into the bathroom. Bloom’s people had brought me a few changes of clothes. I picked out some of the threads on the shirt I was wearing, then slipped the blade into the front button placket and the key cylinder inside the cuff.

I looked over my forged copies of the directive again: two versions, two copies each. I was ready for New York.

BLOOM PUT US
up—though I guess “imprisoned” is the right word—in another corporate suite in Manhattan. It was
American Psycho
deluxe, with glass, chrome, and black leather furniture and a monolith of a TV commanding the whole room.

The phones didn’t work. The doors were locked from the outside, and even if I managed to get through them, there were guys with guns at both ends of the hall in case I needed a tuck-in.

Not that I wanted out. I had nothing left except revenge. I was going to claw into the heart of Bloom’s operation and detonate. I couldn’t wait for the heist to begin.

Bloomberg News was on. The main story tonight, as it had been for the past week, was the Federal Open Market Committee meeting in Washington and whether the dissenting Fed presidents would manage to shut down the easy-money efforts.

Someone knocked on the door. I opened it. It was Jack, flanked by the guy in glasses and the Irish guy from that first night at my brother’s town house.

I stepped toward him. The guards moved closer, on the balls of their feet, ready to jump in if I attacked him.

I smiled and put my arms around him. I needed help. I needed my brother.

“Your head looks good,” I said. I could barely see the stitches under his hair. “How does it feel?”

“It’s manageable, unless something touches it. Still a little shaky, all in all. How’s the back?”

“Hurts like a bastard. We make quite a team.”

“Sorry about that.”

This whole operation had targeted me from the beginning, had pulled Jack in as a means to an end. He was collateral damage. I could let in a trace of sympathy for him. In fact, making nice with Jack was a crucial part of my plan.

“Should we get into it?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I walked Jack over to the kitchen table, where I’d laid out floor plans for the Fed entrances and the desk. I looked over the stills from my cameras, double-checking the daily routines. The office manager hung her purse with the crypto card in it on the same hook every day. Without that card, the whole plan would fail. We had to rehearse, and I had to give Lynch some basic lessons on my malware. We would need those viruses to act up in order to get into the suite at the Fed.

There was enough to keep us busy that Jack and I could leave most things unsaid. We filled the hours drilling the heist. It was a relief, because if I talked to him about what had happened, or even thought about it too much, I was afraid I would kill him or forgive him. I didn’t know which was worse.

Every time the guard stepped out of earshot, Jack would lean in. “They’re not going to let us get away with this, Mike,” he’d whisper. “They’re setting us up. We need a plan. We need some way to get back at them, to get away.”

“Don’t worry about it. Just stick to this.” I pointed at the map where I had traced how we would get to the trading desk and our escape routes if something went wrong. “It will all work out.”

He wasn’t satisfied. The next chance he had, he came back to it. “They are just going to get rid of us after.”

“I have it under control, Jack. Don’t pull anything. You’ll only get yourself killed. Or me.”

“But how?” he asked. The panic was clear in his eyes as we drew closer to the heist. We would hit the bank in twelve hours.

“I’ve got it figured—” I said. The door opened. Lynch walked in.

Jack and I straightened up.

“What are we talking about, boys?” Lynch knew something was up.

“Escape routes,” I said. He looked us up and down, shouted for the man in glasses to get out of the bathroom and keep a closer eye on us, then left.

We didn’t have another chance to talk before they split us up that night. I knew Jack was up to something. I knew he would try to drag my real plan out of me. I was counting on it.

I HADN’T SLEPT
at all that night, just stared out my window at the gray glow that passes for dark in Manhattan. I stepped out of bed, showered, dressed, and watched the East River cap white with the gusting wind.

Why were they after me? The question wouldn’t leave me alone.

You fucked with the wrong guy,
Lynch had said. And as I double-checked for the hundredth time the forged directives, the tiny cylinder and blade stitched into my clothes, I finally realized who was behind all this.

Lynch knocked on the door. We were ready. I knew I was walking into a trap, but with what I now understood, and after all that time waiting alone with the fear, I’d never felt so relieved in my life.

We rolled out for Maiden Lane in a black van. The signs on the side said it belonged to a courier service. Lynch drove. Lynch always drove. Irish took the passenger seat. The guy in glasses was on the back bench, watching us. First we stopped at the Thai restaurant. I’d called in the order that morning.

Glasses stepped out of the van door and ran in to pick up the food. Jack and I were alone in the back.

The radio was on: “…and the markets are mixed on unprecedented volume as Wall Street waits to hear the results of the Fed meeting in Washington…”

We had push-to-talk radios that we could use to connect with Lynch’s team and send two-way messages to the lookouts. There was no way to call an outside line.

Our cover story for the first phase, getting past the perimeter, was that we were sales reps for the gym, going in to meet with Human Resources. I had a binder of promotional materials with my picks hidden in the spine.

For hitting the desk, Jack had a laptop in a backpack. I hid the dummy crypto card and a rare-earth magnet where the DVD drive on the computer had once been in order to get them past the metal detectors.

As we approached the Fed, Jack looked at me. He always projected a galling confidence, the certainty that no matter how far he went, or what he did wrong, he’d make it through unscathed. But in that moment, after all these years, it had disappeared.

I’m ashamed at how satisfying it felt for me to watch it go, to see him realize that this time there would be no easy out. All that was left in him was simple fear.

“They’re going to fuck us over,” he whispered.

“Yes, they are. I’m not sure if we’ll take the fall or they’ll just kill us.”

He kept swallowing over and over, his mouth dry. “I’m just going to run, or give myself up to the cops. I—”

“Don’t. They’ll go after Annie, after Dad. We need to handle this.”

“But I can’t. I botched everything, Mike. We’re done—”

“It’s not over. I told you, I have a plan.”

“What?” Jack demanded.

“You guys are pretty fucking chatty back there,” Lynch shouted through the metal partition that separated the cab from the cargo area.

“Just going over the last details,” I said.

Lynch’s man came back with the food and set it down on the seat beside me. I heard Lynch say something to Irish.

I reached into the takeout bags and checked the order.

“Okay. Search them,” Lynch ordered.

“Stand up,” Glasses said as he slid the door shut behind him.

“What?” I asked.

“Just making sure you’re all squared away,” Lynch said from the front seat. “I’d hate to have any surprises.”

Glasses started searching Jack. They knew I’d pull something. If they found my fake directives, this was all over. I eased the papers out of the binder where I’d hidden them, and waited as he patted down Jack, poring over every bit of gear he was carrying for the heist. He had to crouch down to search, and as he came around the seat, I slipped the papers to my brother.

Jack looked confused for a second but took them, and slipped them between the seat cushion and his leg as he sat back down.

Glasses checked me next, feeling around my waist and in my groin and my armpits. His fingers went past my cuffs, but he didn’t seem to feel the tiny cylinder inside. As he ran his hands down my front, he passed right over the ceramic razor, but it was small enough, like a two-inch section of fretsaw blade, that only I felt it. It pricked my skin.

“They clean?” Lynch asked.

His sidekick looked me over again. I could swear he was staring at that razor, though it was pretty hard to be sure where his gaze was aimed. “Yeah,” he said.

Lynch started the car.

“We need coffees, too,” I said through the partition.

“You just had some.”

“For the job. I can get anywhere in that building with two cups of coffee.”

“Fine,” Lynch said. There were four Starbucks within a one-block radius. Irish ran down the street and came back with two paper cups in a carrying tray.

We pulled up around the corner from the Fed. The police would be on top of anybody double-parking a van on that block, so we were going to stop only long enough to jump out.

The van door banged open.

“Don’t fuck this up,” Lynch said.

Jack and I grabbed our gear and stepped out.

“I’m going to run, Mike,” Jack said as we started down Maiden Lane.

We were fifty feet from the entrance, fifty feet from the van. The police were already watching us.

“Don’t.”

“Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“They’ll kill you.”

“Eventually, but not here, not in broad daylight.”

I had to tell him or else he would ruin everything. If this job went south, it would take more than me and Annie with it. They would go after my father. They would hang me with the murder on the Mall. Pulling it off and feeding them the false info was the only way I could bring them down, the only way I could win Annie back.

And so I had to choose: After everything, could I trust Jack? Had the fear for his life finally put some honesty into him? I remembered him bleeding out in his kitchen, lying on the floor unconscious, nearly dead.

He was my only brother. People can change. I let him in.

“Those papers I gave you,” I said. “I can blow up Lynch and Bloom and whoever’s running them. I’m going to pull a switch. Whatever the directive says, I have a forgery that says the opposite. When we get out of this, we’ll give Lynch the wrong info. They’re going to get their faces ripped off by the markets. We’ll take them down at their own game.”

He felt for the forgeries I had slipped him.

“You still have them?”

“Yes.”

Lynch was watching us from the van.

“Those are the only things holding off our death sentence, so hang on tight.”

“You trust me with them?”

“You’re the most deceitful bastard I’ve ever met, but you’re still my brother. We’ve got to do this together. We have to trust each other, Jack, or we’re dead.”

“Thank you, Mike. God. I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry.”

“Save it.” I turned toward the Fed. If I was wrong about Jack, he would bury me. But there was one thing about Jack that I could be absolutely sure of. And that was going to save my life.

Jack’s radio buzzed. He lifted it and tapped out a message as we walked toward the Fed doors.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Nothing. Everything looks good. Let’s go.”