The Directive (23 page)

OUR MEET-UP
with Lynch was near Pier 11 on the East River. As soon as we cleared the cops around the Fed, I grabbed Jack’s arm.

“Give me the forged directives,” I said. We had to make the switch, then get as far away as fast as we could. We didn’t have much time until 2:15. Before Lynch and Bloom realized they had been conned, I had to warn Annie and my father and get them to safety.

“I don’t know, Mike.”

“Come on! We’ll make the switch and take them down.”

He stepped back. “I’m sorry, Mike.”

I turned, too late to get away, and saw Lynch and the man in glasses close in on me from both sides. Each grabbed an elbow and barred my arms behind my back.

“You fucking Judas,” I said to Jack.

His whole act before the heist, all that fear, must have been a ploy so I would tell him what I had planned to turn the tables on Lynch and Bloom. They knew I was going to pull something to make it blow back on them. Jack was their insurance, and once I revealed myself to him, they thought they had me covered. Only then would they let me do the job. That must have been the message Jack sent just before we went into the Fed.

“It was between setting you up and losing my life,” Jack said. “What would you do?”

I knew. I had made the same choice before the heist, when I handed Jack those papers, but he didn’t know it yet.

Lynch searched my pockets and found the directive.

As they marched me down Pearl Street, I tore into Jack some more, until Lynch clamped his hand over my mouth. I could taste and smell the tobacco on his skin. A van pulled up. They shoved us in the back.

As we drove down FDR Drive, I watched a ferry pull up to Pier 11. We U-turned, headed north, then exited toward the heliport over the East River. In the front seat, Lynch’s man rested the directive on his leg, snapped a photo with a smartphone, and sent it off.

The van stopped. They pulled me out, and we walked toward a building of gray and white stone that occupied a pier. Behind it lay a helipad. The air churned and the blades deafened us as we crossed the landing area and climbed into a small chopper. It rose and spun. The city shrank below us.

As soon as the directive went to Bloom’s and Lynch’s boss, he would pull the trigger on tens, maybe hundreds of millions, of dollars’ worth of highly leveraged trades, building a sure-thing position while the world waited to hear from the Board of Governors. After the decision went public, in less than two hours, he would collect his winnings and cash out.

“Where are we going?” I asked Lynch.

“You are a true pain in the ass, Mr. Ford. We need to keep you buttoned up until two fifteen.”

I had tried to avoid helicopters in the navy, part of my living-past-thirty strategy, but had taken a few rides. I was used to jump seats, cold metal, and five-point restraints. This chopper was kitted out like a limo, with a bar and leather upholstery and copies of
The Financial Times
neatly stowed beside every seat.

We flew over the Hudson and the stone palisades on the Jersey side. It was less than ten minutes to Teterboro. We stepped out. A hundred feet across the tarmac, a private jet was waiting. As we climbed aboard, the pilots greeted us. A stunning stewardess gave me a smile. Once we were in the main cabin, Lynch handcuffed my wrist to an armrest.

I checked them out: Smith & Wessons. Good.

If you’re planning on being kidnapped, I highly recommend a private flight. No bag check, no X-ray, no security line, shoes on and all the liquids you want, a huge seat, and a couch and bar in the back. It was a nice splurge on my way to my own execution.

We were in the air for just over an hour before we touched down at a small airport. Rolling hills stretched away on all sides.

As we taxied, I recognized the truck sitting on the tarmac. It was Bloom’s Land Cruiser.

She was waiting for us on the airfield as Lynch dragged me out of the plane.

“Oh, Michael,” she said. “We tried to warn you about being too curious. This is really a shame.”

Lynch slid a baton between my cuffed wrists and twisted it. The metal cut into my skin as he tightened the chains, growing visibly excited about the prospect of doing me harm.

“It would have been so easy if you had stayed in the dark. But now…” She shook her head.

Lynch squeezed harder.

“Load him up,” she told him. “I’ll take the other one.”

Jack walked to Bloom’s truck and stepped in. His hands were free. Lynch shoved me into the passenger seat of a black van. I winced as the thin blade hidden in my shirt placket dug into my chest just below an old scar.

Lynch took the cuff off one wrist, and I could feel a painful burn in my pinky and ring fingers as the feeling came back. I felt only a second’s relief before he slid the bracelet through the door handle, ratcheted it shut on my wrist, and double-locked both cuffs.

He took the driver’s seat. Holding the wheel with his right hand, with his left he aimed his 1911 Colt pistol at my torso. I could feel blood trickle out from the cut just under my sternum. I leaned forward, trying to hide it and keep Lynch from finding that hidden razor.

“Seems like an awful lot of trouble just to find a good spot to kill me.”

“I agree. But she works in mysterious ways.”

I picked at the stitches on my shirt cuffs, feeling for the key. My hand had never healed quite right from my last time in cuffs, when I’d broken my thumb. Finally I felt that hard cylinder of plastic beginning to emerge from the cotton.

We twisted through wooded terrain, rising and falling with the hills. From the road signs I could tell we were somewhere in Virginia.

The trees cleared, and the road went downhill. There was a long curve as we approached a two-lane bridge over a shallow river valley at the edge of a town. The span was an old-fashioned arch of stone with sidewalks on both sides and metalwork lanterns hanging from poles.

I eased the cylinder out of my cuff. The bloodstain on the front of my shirt was the size of a quarter and growing. I had two things going for me. One was that Lynch always drove, some kind of control thing. And two, he was good about wearing his seat belt. Maybe he’d been in an accident once. I looked at the wedding ring on his gun hand. Maybe he had kids.

The curve before the bridge would require his full attention. I would have no better chance. I clicked open the tab at the end of the cylinder with my fingernail. I twisted it around in my fingers and put it in the keyhole on the cuffs, then waited until he looked at the road.

It was a sweeping left turn. When Lynch looked back, I’d already taken the cuffs off one wrist and dropped the bracelet through the door handle.

He brought the gun up as he saw my hands moving. I knocked his gun arm forward with my left hand while I reclined my seat back with the lever on my right, laying it flat. The gunshot in that small space was deafening. It blew my window out in a shower of glass that cascaded over the hillside leading to the river below.

The shot was closer to his ears and had rattled him more than it did me. Leaning back, I grabbed Lynch’s gun hand with my right and twisted the wrist a hundred and eighty degrees. With my left I grabbed his seat belt, pulled it up and back over his seat near his right shoulder, and choked him hard.

His face began to turn red, then purple as we rolled onto the bridge. I was hoping he’d bring the van to a stop rather than just punching it and killing us both. He let go of the wheel with his right hand for a second, reached down, and released his belt.

I still had his gun hand tied up. As the seat belt loosened and he reached back for the wheel, I sat up and threw my left arm around his neck. I settled it into a choke, dragging him across the center console with his throat in the V of my elbow.

His face was turned to the ceiling. Neither of us could see the road.

“Brake!” I shouted. He couldn’t say anything through the choke, and given how far he’d come out of his seat I didn’t even know if he could reach the pedals. His main goal seemed to be angling the gun, which was about six inches from my face, so he could kill me. I gripped his wrist and tried to aim the muzzle away from my head.

The van must have had decent alignment, because it seemed like a long time before we veered into oncoming traffic and clipped another car.

Metal shrieked. The van skidded and bucked hard to the right, throwing us over my reclined seat toward the back seats. I let go of his gun hand for a second and reached back to brace myself.

I only succeeded in shoving the handle of the passenger-side sliding door. It flew back, wide open.

The collision knocked us away from the median. We jumped the curb and ran along the sidewalk, edging closer and closer to the railing and the long drop to the river.

I had the choke in deep. Lynch was lying half on top of me. We both faced the ceiling, far back on the tilted passenger seat, no one in control. He had no good angle to get me with the pistol now.

Lynch reached back with his right hand and drove his thumb into my eye. I twisted my head away, but suddenly neither the pain nor the gun seemed to matter.

I was slipping off the seat, toward the open door. Only my hips, pinned by Lynch’s weight, kept me inside the vehicle. The last wheel jumped the sidewalk. The van shuddered, knocking me farther out. My head was hanging upside down, past the doorsill. The bridge’s white stone parapet strobed past, coming closer and closer to crushing my head against the steel frame of the van.

I waited until the last second, dug my left arm into the choke, and groaned as I levered my torso up with every bit of strength I had. I pulled up just before the body of the van ground against the railing, raining sparks on the cement sidewalk.

We slowed, then stopped—as did most of the blood to Lynch’s brain, from the look of him. He was like a rag doll. I relaxed the choke hold, then took a deep breath. I was draped over the seat with my head resting on the sill a couple of inches from the railing. It wasn’t ideal, but at least I wasn’t dead.

On my third breath, Lynch’s body tensed. “Christ,” I muttered. He started to turn over, his gun hand now free.

He aimed the pistol at my face. I grabbed his wrist and the gun with both hands and jerked it down beside my ear as I pressed both legs hard into his waist and sent him over the bridge railing.

I looked over. We were near the end of the span, and it was only a short fall to the brush on the hill below.

I glanced up and down the sidewalk. The driver of the other car had gotten out at the end of the bridge, the way we had come. He looked okay.

I stood on the sill, holding the gun by the barrel, and let the air fill my lungs, let the cramp in my forearm relax. Lynch had a nice pistol, a Wilson Combat.

Someone was coming from farther up the bridge. I took the gun by the grip. A man approached, walking down the center of our lane.

I aimed the pistol at his head. It was Jack. He approached the van.

“Hands, Jack,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“You’re suddenly concerned about my safety? Hands, or I kill you. And you will absolutely deserve it.”

He raised them. I didn’t see any obvious signs that he was carrying. Bloom had been driving well ahead of us, but she must have seen something. She was now parked facing us at the end of the bridge, the direction Jack had approached from. I imagined there was plenty of hardware in her truck.

“I’m sorry, Mike. I had no choice.”

“I don’t care why. I’m done with you. Step back.”

“At the end of the day, I knew they would kill me and you wouldn’t. It’s as simple as that. I’m your brother, and you’re a good guy. Good guys don’t kill people.”

That last bit was actually a matter of some debate between Annie and me.

“Stop pretending you’re going to shoot me,” Jack said, and came toward the driver’s side door. I ducked down, to have a clear shot through the van.

He started to lower his hand.

“I’m going to open this door, Mike.”

“I’ll do anything to keep her safe. Don’t test me, Jack. I
will
shoot.”

“You’re a good guy, Mike. Now come out before you get hurt.”

He opened the door, leaned toward me, and filled his face with kindness.

I knew every line he might use, every gesture, every subtlety of speech to draw me back in. I’d seen them all before, whenever Jack made one of his offers. How many times had he leaned his head toward me with a sly look, a tightening of the eyes, a little roll of the fingers as he tried to pull me into the con?

I knew them because they were my father’s expressions, because they were my own. But now there was something awfully strange about his face, about those eyes the same green as mine. Probably because it was my first time seeing them down the barrel of a gun.

I centered the sights on his face. He was my brother, sure. But how many times do you turn the other cheek? Where would it end if not now? He had ruined my life once before, left me to take the fall for the job that had nearly landed me in prison so many years ago. After all the suffering Jack had put me through, how much, really, did I care whether he lived or died?

“Last chance,” I said.

He moved closer. “Come on, Mike—”

I tightened my hand. And Jack, for once, realized he had read me wrong. I saw the fear in him. I pulled the trigger. The gun jumped. My brother cried out in pain.

THE DRIVER’S SIDE
window blew out. Jack dropped beside the van, hands to his face. I crossed over to the driver’s seat. The door was still open. Jack lay on the ground.

He was screaming at me, a long string of curses, as he brought his hand down, then felt around his cheeks and eyes.

He must have thought I’d shot him in the face. And I could understand how he might take that the wrong way. I hoped Bloom would have the same impression, because I needed time.

“Stop being a baby,” I said as I reached down, covered by the open door, and pressed the gun to his head. There was a small cut on his cheek. “I shot the window. It’s a scratch from the glass. Now give me your cell phone.”

“What?”

“Your cell phone. I know they didn’t have you locked down. Where is it? I have to make some calls.”

He pointed to his pocket. I pulled out the phone, then patted his waist.

“Where’s your gun?” I asked.

“My back.”

“Roll on your face.”

He complied. I pulled a baby Glock out of an inside-the-waistband holster.

“You don’t know me, Jack. And you’re not as good at this as you think you are.” I gave him a light slap on the cheek. “I win.”

I climbed into the van, slammed the door shut, and stomped the gas. My head pressed against the seat as I shot toward Bloom’s truck. I veered left, across the double-yellow, then curved back at her truck.

I took a last look as Bloom stepped from the driver’s side door and raised her pistol, then I dropped behind the dash. I could hear the shots plinking the hood of the van.

My face smashed into the steering wheel on impact. The van skidded to the side. Red and white lights filled my vision.

The van was still running. I’d spun around 180 degrees. Bloom’s truck was halfway up the end of the parapet. I pressed down on the gas, more controlled this time, as I tasted the blood coming from my lip where it had hit the wheel.

I crunched into her rear bumper and hung her truck up on the railing, two wheels lifted in the air. Even with its high clearance, there was no easy way down from that, and I prayed this would buy me enough time to get away.

Bloom came up shooting from the brush. I reversed down the highway, botched a J-turn, and had to go up and over the curb to finish my turnaround.

The back windows and the passenger’s side mirror exploded as I pulled away, but I was putting distance between us fast. I pulled some quick turns through the houses on the edge of town, then raced downhill toward a road along the river.

As I sped away, I lifted up Jack’s cell phone. I needed to warn Annie.

Her phone rang and rang, then went to voicemail. I left the number, told her to call me immediately, that she was in danger.

I swerved down the country road, trying to figure out how to reach Annie and my father, how to get back to our house in Alexandria in time.

I tried our landline. No answer. I needed to reach her at work, but first I had to start another ball rolling. I called 911.

“What is your emergency?”

“I need the nearest Secret Service field office.”

“What is your situation?”

“I need the Secret Service. There’s a threat. Or just give me the number and I’ll call myself.”

“I’ll connect you.”

The Secret Service has 150 field offices throughout the country. You can find them in the emergency pages of the phone book. I remembered what Cartwright had said: the Secret Service does computer and bank fraud. As soon as Jack and I stepped into the Fed, we were the Secret Service’s problem, and could sidestep Lynch’s pull at the FBI. Before the job I didn’t have enough evidence to take down Bloom and Lynch and their master, but now I had them cold.

“Secret Service,” a dispatcher answered.

“I need to report a serious crime.”

“When did it happen?”

“It’s happening now.”

“Where?”

“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.”

“And who are you?”

“I’m the guy who robbed it. I need to talk to a senior agent or an SAIC.”

“What is the nature of the crime?”

“We stole the directive, the decision from the open markets committee in DC. It’s not public until two fifteen, and we’re going to inside trade on it. You have no reason to believe me; I understand. But you can call the Fed. Confirm they have a breach. It’s probably on the news by now. There’s a camera hidden behind the senior vice president’s desk in a baseball stand he received as a gift.”

“Hold please.” I heard a click. The Service deals with more than their fair share of cranks, so I expected some screening. A moment later they connected me with a new voice, an agent.

“Did you hear what I said to the operator?” I asked.

“Yes. I’m going to connect you to New York, and they can check this out.”

“Don’t. I’m already in Virginia. All of the culprits are. I’m going to give you some more info so you can check my story. Are you ready?”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a virus we planted on the computer in workspace 923. And the PIN code to the secure fax on the trading desk is 46195019.”

I heard him typing, taking it down.

“And there’s a note,” I went on, “in the office of the SOMA desk manager, the executive vice president.”

“A note?”

“Yeah. It says, ‘I just stole the directive.’ ”

“Seriously? You expect me to—”

“Just call New York and confirm.”

“Who are you?”

“No names,” I said. “But I’ll give you my address.”

He took it down. I told him to write down the trades to watch for, to confirm the insider information. And then I hung up.

I figured the Secret Service might have people not far from the address I had given them. There’s a secure site called Mount Weather in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a little over an hour from DC. It’s a bunker built into the mountainside, set to serve as the seat of government in case of an emergency. It’s where they kept stashing Dick Cheney after the September 11 attacks.

Next I called 411. I had almost forgotten it existed. I asked for Annie’s office. They put me through. The receptionist at her firm connected to her desk, but there was no answer.

Where was she? I called again, and asked for a friend of hers in the same practice group. She picked up.

“It’s Mike Ford. I’m sorry to bother you at work, but I need to find Annie. She’s in danger.”

“I don’t think she wants to talk to you, Mike.”

“Do you know where she is?” It’s never a good situation when you are consciously trying not to sound like a stalker.

“I can’t tell you. But she said she’s going someplace safe. I have to go. I’m sorry, but I can’t get in the middle of—” she started to beg off.

I hung up.
Someplace safe
. I knew where she was going. I’d told her to go there myself. And right now it was the most dangerous place she could be. It was the address I had just given the Secret Service.

I slowed, palmed the wheel, and pulled a U-turn across the double-yellow.

All I wanted to do was get away, to take her and my father, and run from the violence coming for us.

But now I had run into the fire.