The Directive (22 page)

“I’M GOING TO
get another CD,” Jack said to Pollard. “Could you keep your eye on that hourglass?”

The Federal Reserve Police were at the front door.

We fast-walked, then all-out sprinted, for the secondary exit, and made it to the stairwell.

“Stop!” someone shouted behind us.

I wrenched a piece of electrical conduit off the wall and wedged it across the landing between the door and the stair. I heard the cops banging on the other side.

We ran down one level. There were cameras everywhere. From the request-for-proposals and bids on renovations, I knew they had an access panel every three floors.

The Reserve Police watching the monitors were world class. The cameras were bulletproof. The security contracts to fill the place with all-seeing eyes had cost tens of millions of dollars. And the wires connecting it all? They were sitting in a sheet-metal box, protected by a two-dollar wafer lock.

We hid in a doorway. Jack pulled a keychain laser pointer from his bag and aimed it at the camera. That would blind it, but central control was sure to notice the flaring.

“I can maybe crawl up and smash it,” Jack said.

“Give me your bag.”

He handed it over. I reached in, pulled the tab out of the end of the binder, and dumped my picks into my palm. I used a C rake and had the panel open on the third pull.

“They’ll be here any second,” he said.

There were an awful lot of wires.

“I think the camera’s red,” I said. That detail hadn’t been in the RFPs.

“I thought it was green.”

“You sure?”

“No.”

A black dome of smoked glass housed the camera, which meant it was a pan-tilt-zoom type. An empty shell would have been just as effective a deterrent, because you never know when they’re watching. Most cameras with conspicuous blinking red lights
are
fakes, just as intimidating to bad guys and cheaper than the real thing.

With the green light of Jack’s laser shining through the smoked glass, however, I could see the hardware inside slowly panning back and forth as it monitored the flight of stairs.

I pulled the twist nut off a connection in the green wires and slowly separated the copper strands. A fire alarm suddenly shrieked and strobed above our heads. I jammed them back together.

“Okay, red.” I pulled the red wires. The stairwell plunged into blackness. I groped in the dark until I’d managed to get them back together, then twisted the nut back on.

“Blue?”

“Blue,” Jack said with a nod.

I pulled blue, and watched Jack’s laser shine through the housing. The camera stopped.

“Which exit?” he asked.

“Maiden Lane.”

It was on the north side, on a floor higher than Liberty Street. We sprinted down the stairs until the muscles in my legs were on fire, then stopped at the door that led to the rear lobby where we had first entered. There were normally four police officers at the mantraps, but now it was a wall of black uniforms. Clearly the alarm had been called. We didn’t have a chance. Why was there so much extra security today? Had Bloom and Lynch called them in?

We descended another level, to the larger, south lobby, the bank’s old public entrance. I peeked through the window. It was even worse.

“What the hell are we going to do?” Jack asked. “The tunnels?”

I thought through my planning, the escape work. “It’s all sealed. Heading closer to the vault will only make it worse. We have to get to the loading dock. It’s the only way.”

“They had four cops there,” he said.

I heard footsteps above us on the stairs, the squawk of a radio, more police. “It’s our last chance. Let’s go.”

We went back up a level, toward the cops. I killed the cameras through the access panel, and we exited the stairwell and took a quick right into a corridor. It went straight for a hundred feet, and then turned left. Heading that way should have led us around to the loading dock.

I could hear the door open and close once more behind us, the police closing in as we made the left-hand turn. We entered a long, wide hallway that ran toward the dock. There was only one other door, ahead on our right, set back a few feet in an alcove.

I started down the hallway, and we had made it about twenty feet when I saw the barrel of an assault rifle poke out at the far end of the hall, between us and our exit, about two hundred feet away. Two more guns appeared.

It was the SWAT teams, coming our way. Jack and I stopped dead and threw ourselves into the alcove. I reached up and tried the knob behind us: locked, no time to pick it. We were stuck. Any minute, either the cops or the SWAT guys would pass us and we’d be cowering in plain sight. It was over.

The dive had wrenched the stitches in my back. I could hear the beeps and chatter on the radios of the cops following us, coming closer, about to turn the corner we had just made.

“Whoa!” a shout echoed down the hallway from the direction of the SWAT team. “You can’t be in this hallway.”

They had seen us. I took another look at the lock. It was probably better to give ourselves up than surprise a bunch of heavily armed crack shots in riot gear. I looked at Jack. He shook his head.

“Federal Reserve Police!” came the voice of one of the cops who’d been following us. They must have already come around the corner and were standing close by.

The SWATs yelled back, “This hallway has to be clear for special operations. We have a gold handoff. Didn’t you hear the comms?”

They hadn’t seen us. They were hailing the police behind us.

“We have a potential breach,” the cops shouted back. “Did you see anyone run down this hallway?”

Whoever was speaking for the gold team laughed. “We’ve got eighty-five million dollars of bullion over here. Anyone running this way would be long gone. You’ll need to clear the hallway.”

“Okay, okay.” I could hear the Reserve Police retreat. A door closed behind us, the way we had come. The police would leave us alone for a moment, but it was only because some jumpy commandos were coming our way.

A gold shipment was rolling through. That explained the extra security and the street closings.

I saw Jack glowering at me, as if I could have predicted this disaster. I was already on my feet, examining the lock. It was the electronic card-and-code that Cartwright had shown me how to bypass. We might make it out of this.

But then my stomach turned. Above it was a brand-new Medeco M3, the sort you might install if you found out your $1,300 electronic lock was useless.

We’d have been better off charging the assault rifles at the end of the hallway. The M3 is the lock of choice for government and intelligence agencies. It’s on the White House and the Pentagon. It was the direct descendent of the Medeco that had defeated me during Lynch’s tryout, three generations more advanced. It usually leads a locksmith to say “To hell with it,” put his picks down, and drill out the shear line. A break-in artist would just smash a window or call it a day.

I didn’t have those options.

I could feel the floor rumble as the gold rolled toward us, slowly but surely. There was no way I had time to pick this beast.

I stabbed the LED on the card-and-code with a pick, shorted the board, and turned the handle. Then I slid a pick across the card-and-code’s bolt to keep it open so I wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. That took about four seconds.

The gold rumbled closer. I could hear
clank clank, clank clank, clank clank
over and over again, like footsteps but louder, metal on concrete.

The M3 is something of a fetish object among lockpickers because of its difficulty. On top of the mushroom, spool, and serrated pins, there were new ARX designs: harder to rotate, with false gates to throw off pickers. I had to move them all to the shear line and then set the rotation on each one to allow the sidebar to retract.

Even if I managed those two miracles, I wouldn’t be done. Finally, there’s the slider: a third piece of brass that stops the key from turning unless it’s pushed forward to the correct position. The normal feedback that tells you when a pin has set is a thousand times harder to feel with all those extra pieces securing the cylinder. There were two trillion possible combinations of pin heights, angles, and slider positions, and only one will open the goddamn thing.

I had to find the right one, and here’s why real-life lockpicking is hard: I had to do it through the tiny, oddly shaped keyway in the front of the lock while fear tightened my gut into a hard black ball. Imagine trying to change all the spark plugs on your car engine. With the hood open one inch. And a drunk guy driving.

That was my task. I figured I had a minute or two until the SWATs arrived, maybe enough for a lock with only security pins if I was lucky. There would be no gimmicks or easy bypasses, just the slow, painstaking work, millimeter by millimeter, of metal on metal and the feel in my fingers. I put a light torque on the plug with my tension wrench and started setting the pin heights.

I felt the ground shake as they wheeled the gold closer. I knew it was impossible. But I couldn’t give up.

It took a minute to set the pins to the shear line. Step one seemed complete, but there was no way to know for sure.

Clank clank.
I could hear the footsteps of the SWAT team, hear the rattle of their gear coming closer.

I took out a thin wire with a right-angle bend at the end to start playing with the rotations, feeling for the faintest possible give while trying not to screw up the up-and-down set on each pin.

I cleared from my mind the images of Jack and me, lying here in our own pooling blood, two up-and-coming fitness sales professionals who had met a bad end. I cleared from my mind the vision of Annie in the courtroom gallery as I was found guilty of a long list of crimes culminating in Sacks’s murder. I cleared from my mind the image of Lynch standing behind me again, shutting his eyes in anticipation of the gore as he pressed the gun to my skull.

And I cleared the sidebar.

Clank clank.
God it was loud.

“They’re right here,” Jack whispered in my ear.

I could hear the SWAT team’s breath, feel the vibrations from the gold shaking in my fingers, threatening the balance I’d managed inside the brass labyrinth of the Medeco.

I should have been elated by the sidebar’s release, but something was wrong. I could still feel it binding. A pin had dropped, or had tricked me the first time around. One by one, keeping just the right tension on the wrench to hold everything in place, I tried them all again. It was number four in a false set.

“Okay,” I heard a voice say. “Let’s do a quick count.”

He started tallying the bars. He sounded as if he was right next to me.

Jack crouched. Sweat matted his hair, and I could see the ugly cut Lynch had given him. He went through the picks and took a W rake in his hand. The W looks like a saw blade at the end. He held it like an ice pick. Terrific. We could give some poor clerk a puncture wound while the guards filled our bodies with NATO rounds. I didn’t mind ruining my own life, but on top of it I was going to get an innocent man hurt because I was too incompetent to play out my own crook fantasy.

The clerk kept counting.

I eased pin four up a click and then another, feeling my way past the serration to find the real shear line. The cylinder gave the subtlest motion. The pin resisted my pressure, stronger now, surer. I had it. But the rotation was now off. I held everything steady, picked up my right-angle wire, and felt along the bottom of the pins.

“All here,” the clerk said. They started toward us.

The fluorescent lights threw their shadows across me and Jack.

Jack rose onto the balls of his feet.

I pushed the slider forward, slowly, until it clicked. The cylinder spun. I eased the door open.

I forgot the pick I had left across the bolt of the card-and-code. It fell. I reached for it as it rotated slowly through the air toward the hard floor.

They would hear it. They would know.

Jack was already there. He snatched it inches from the ground.

I grabbed his shirt and hauled him through the doorway behind me. I threw the door closed. At the last second before it slammed, I stopped it, held the bolt back, and eased it gently into the frame.

All I could hear in the dark was our breath. I knew the direction we had gone put us closer to the far end of the loading dock. My eyes adjusted. I could make out the contours of the room in the glow of a few LED lights. There were benches along both walls and a huge balance scale in the middle of the room.

I heard a key in the doorway behind us.

We were in the count room. No wonder it had a Medeco on the door. They were coming in to double-check the gold.

“Hide,” I said. Jack and I threw ourselves onto shelves under the tables. I lay on a lumpy pile of plastic packages. An odd smell, like an old penny jar, drifted up.

The door opened. Light flooded the room.

“I’LL JUST GRAB
them,” I heard the clerk say. He clomped into the room. The door shut behind him. All I could see was his black comfort shoes with metal caps strapped over the toes. The vault keepers wore them so that gold bars wouldn’t shatter their bones if dropped.

Clank clank
.

The shoes moved toward me, reminding me absurdly of a knight. Jack and I were staring at each other, looking and feeling totally exposed. In the light, I could see what Jack and I were lying on: bundles of currency.

The Fed distributes $550 billion a year in cash. Money goes into straps of a hundred bills, then bundles of ten straps, then bricks of four bundles shrink-wrapped together. Finally there are cash packs made of four bricks—16,000 notes—bound together in thick plastic, as big as a microwave.

I was reclining on a hard bed of tens of millions of dollars. Next to my head lay transparent plastic bags with tamperproof openings that were full of used currency stained red and black: blood.

The clerk started singing a pop country song as he shuffled his legs a foot and a half from my face.

The Federal Reserve banks handle contaminated currency. While reading everything I could about the place, I’d seen the video about it on their website, with the same droning narrator and 1980s actors from the vault video. They all seemed remarkably calm, given the subject matter:
So you have a blood-soaked hoard of cash…

The Fed will swap it out for clean money and then destroy it.

I saw the vault keeper’s hand come down with a clipboard. He was looking for something. I heard the rustle of papers.

That gave me some time to examine our options. This was a strong room. I figured it was for temporarily holding cash from the loading dock that was in transit to the vault. We had come through a door on one side, and there was another door on the opposite end of the room, marked with an exit sign and secured by another Medeco. But now, at least, we were inside, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to get out of a strong room than it is to get in.

From what I knew of the layout, that door would lead us to the loading dock, where armored cars parked for transfers. With all the money in here, there were sure to be some heavily armed guards watching it from the outside, even with another Medeco on the exit door. If we somehow survived this SWAT team, we still couldn’t just waltz out.

But that door was our only shot.

The clerk hit the chorus, lost the words, tried a few different arrangements, then settled on humming. “Here you go,” he said to no one. He opened the door and stepped back into the hall.

“Just a few things to sign,” he said. “Then we can weigh.”

The door closed behind him. We only had a few seconds until they would come back.

“The backpack!” I said to Jack.

He tossed it over as I stood and went for the exit to the loading dock. I drew back the bolt, then pulled the rare-earth magnet and slapped it to the frame over my head. I didn’t want a screaming alarm announcing our exit, and the magnet would keep the sensor from tripping.

I opened the door six inches, glimpsed through, then stepped out. Jack picked up the backpack and followed.

I could hear the door on the other side of the strong room open as ours closed.

We stood in the rear corner of the garage, at the end of a short hallway. The garage and loading docks were all inside the building perimeter. Two vehicle entrances led to Maiden Lane.

An exhaust duct thrummed above our heads. SWAT team members covered both exits. An armored truck idled loudly in the bay. There was no way past them, but we couldn’t go back.

I listened to the air rush by in the ducts above our heads.

“The money, Jack.”

“What?”

I turned to face him. He played dumb.

“You’ve been giving me that look since I was three,” I said. “I’m not buying it. Whatever you took, I need it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re a thief. You were just lying on about thirty million dollars. Don’t bullshit me. They have the serials. They bagged it already. It’s worthless.” I didn’t know if any of that was true, but this last part I was sure about: “If you don’t hand it over, we’re dead.”

One of the guards stepped into our line of sight. We pressed ourselves against the wall, but if he looked our way he would see us. Jack pulled out a plastic bag full of hundred-straps. It was half a million dollars, give or take, some stained with blood.

I put my hand out. “I trusted you, now you trust me.” He looked at the money once more, then handed it over.

I pulled the tape off the ductwork over our heads and bent out the thin galvanized steel. I could feel the air rushing in. I tore open the bag, peeled the strap off a bundle, and dumped it in, then another, then another.

Jack’s eyes filled with horror.

“What the—”

Maybe he thought I’d finally cracked, or turned into some sort of potlatch radical. But soon he heard the shouts near the entrance. His eyes opened wide, and he started tearing the bundles apart and throwing them in after mine.

We were two blocks from Wall Street, the capital of American greed. I was counting on one thing to save us: that the bankers hustling down the sidewalks, with their cuff links and contrasting collars, weren’t above chasing a little dirty money.

Cash streamed through the ducts and flew out the vents above the garage. A dye pack exploded and boomed further down the duct.

Jack started to move. I held him back.

After a few seconds, you could hear the beginning of the free-for-all. “Stay back!” a cop yelled.

“Holy shit!” someone on the street shouted. “Those are hundred-dollar bills!”

The police and SWAT teams fanned toward the entrances. We crept along the wall. The street scene absorbed all their attention.

I didn’t know why they should be upset. Washington had just voted to keep propping up the economy. Jack and I were doing our small part to expand the monetary supply, same as the traders upstairs, though I think our approach was a lot more fun.

We could see Maiden Lane. The notes whirled and flipped through the air like autumn leaves. The crowds chased them down, stuffed them into their clothes. The police tried to hold them back, and here and there I could see that the cops weren’t above snagging a hundred or two for themselves. They needed to keep the mob at bay, to keep people from rushing in, so two guys in white button-downs trying to get out weren’t their top concern.

We hit the sidewalk and turned away from the main action.

The cold wind spun the bills into cyclones, lifted them high between the office towers, plastered them against the stone facades. I stepped through a brown puddle. Ben Franklin looked up at me through the murk.

It was beautiful. Secretaries, shawarma guys, bike messengers, bankers, tourists, movers, cabbies, all snatched hundreds from the air, bundled them to their chests, laughed and fought in the middle of the street.

Only two seemed not to care. Jack and I wove through the crowd, walking fast toward quieter streets, toward freedom.