The Directive (25 page)

“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 with 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?”

“We can make this win-win.” I thought back to Bloom’s words after she’d kidnapped me from the shower.

“The cops are after all of us,” I said to Clark. “Bloom’s after me and will probably be after you once she finds out you bet wrong. Your clients are going to kill you once they realize their money’s gone.”

“What’s the point?” Annie asked.

“It’s good,” I said. “I can work with it. The cartels. Bad guys. We need a bargaining chip. That’s great.”

“Great?” Clark started toward me, his rage breaking through. Annie stepped between us.

Larry was a banker. Bankers don’t go to jail anymore, and I could use that. What we needed was a deal.

“These clients. You want protection from them?”

“There’s no protection from them. Nowhere in the world. You’d need—”

“An army,” I said. “The US has a pretty good one.”

I thought for a minute. “There are two ways this can go. You can run or you can try to fight the feds. If the law doesn’t get you, the killers will. But there’s a third way. You know about billions in dirty money. You know about bigger fish. Take that leverage. Make a deal. They’ll protect you.”

The Secret Service trucks fanned through the circular driveway. Clark’s security strode out to stall the agents.

“That’s the Secret Service,” I said. “I tipped them off. They were watching your trades. They know all they need to know. Cut a deal.”

“What do you want out of it?”

“Call off Bloom and her goon.”

“I can’t stop them. This has gone far beyond anything I asked for. They’re off leash.”

“Where are they?” I asked. “Can you call them?”

“In the garage,” he said.

“Which one?”

He pointed toward the east wing of the house. They must have been waiting for Clark’s guards to hand me over. Security didn’t need to deliver me to Lynch to die. I was going to do it myself.

“WHERE ARE YOU
going, Mike?” Annie asked as I walked down a side hall.

I looked out the window and saw the Secret Service agents in their raid jackets moving toward the house.

“Go to the police,” I said.

“I’m coming with you.”

“It’s safer—”

“I’m coming with you.”

We walked toward Clark’s garage, although that term might give the wrong impression. Picture a luxury car showroom. I looked through the window in the door that led to the garage. Past the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, past the 1955 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing, past the 1940 Plymouth Super Deluxe, sat Bloom’s old Land Cruiser with deep gashes in the metal from our run-in at the bridge.

“Wait here,” I said to Annie. “Please. No arguments. I’m just going to talk to them. If anything happens, run to the agents. You’ll be safe there.”

“Fine.”

I opened the door and stepped inside. Lynch had been waiting. He raised his pistol as soon as I set foot in the garage. I lifted my hands as Bloom walked toward me, her gun at her side. This wasn’t in their playbook: me walking in here on my own, unguarded.

“I want to talk,” I said. “I have an offer I think you’ll like.”

“This isn’t a negotiation, Mike,” Bloom said.

To appease her, I needed Larry Clark to cooperate with the authorities. We could take down his very bad people. By cutting Bloom in and letting her take credit for busting Clark’s clients, I could give her enough to leave me alone. I could taste bile rising in my throat as I contemplated the compromise, but it was the only way to buy my safety.

This plan had sounded a lot smarter in my head by the front door than it did out loud here in the garage as I stared down two guns, my shirt damp with sweat.

“You’ve heard the news?” I asked.

“I did.”

“Then we have a lot to talk about.”

“You blew up our position. You wrecked my car. You knocked me into a ditch. I’m unhappy. Lynch is
very
unhappy.”

“We’re all screwed,” I said. “I tipped the Secret Service. They’re here. Clark can’t pay you. He’s talking with the agents now, and I have to say he’s looking squishy. I think he’s going to cut a deal. Do you want to be the first out of this clusterfuck or the last?”

Rule number one in crime, as in politics, is to always be the first to move when everyone starts selling everyone else out.

“I’m not too worried about that,” Bloom said. “You can’t take me down, Mike.”

I thought through the interested parties: the FBI, DC Metro, Virginia State Troopers, the Secret Service, Fed Police, the SEC, the DEA, the US Attorney for DC, and the District Attorney for New York. Not to mention the Foreign Service and intelligence people who would take an interest in the clients laundering money through Clark’s funds. It was a long list of very ambitious people, all out to make their careers with a case like this.

Bloom would face a lot of heat. She knew the game, but this was beyond her. That’s why I’d had to go through with the heist, to catch Bloom and Clark red-handed, to create such an intractable mess that no one, not even Bloom, could clean it up.

“No, I probably can’t take you down,” I said. “But this has gone bad enough that I can at least take your knees out. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma. We all make nice, or we all hang. You’d at the very least end up having to give up all your extracurriculars, to go straight, on your best behavior, begging for pats on the head from all those patronizing old men on your board.”

I could see that got under her skin.

“Say what you have to say,” she said.

I moved closer to her. Lynch barked at me to stop. After I let him search me, I moved forward, stood whispering-close to Bloom.

“The whole thing’s going south. Do you know who Clark’s investors are? Why he was bankrolling this insane job?”

“I have some ideas.”

“He’s going to flip to the Secret Service. I’ll do you a favor. Say the whole heist was some undercover job. Say you were investigating him. You were after his clients, the dirty money he was laundering. It’s cartels, it’s foreign intelligence, Iran, sanction money. It’ll be a goddamn field day for you. They’ll carry you down Pennsylvania Avenue on their shoulders, and you’ll be able to get away with anything you want from now on. You need me. I’ll say what you need me to say. Broker this thing between Clark and the feds. You be the hero. I don’t give a shit, so long as we have a truce and you leave my family alone.”

She turned her head slightly and thought about it. “We could have that conversation,” she said. “Grow the pie.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, my lips to her ear.

“One condition. Nonnegotiable. Lynch goes down for the murder on the Mall.”

“That’s a tough sell,” she whispered.

She tapped her fingers on the truck as she thought through it.

“I like how you played this, Mike,” she said. “Very creative. Tell you what. I won’t kill you right this second. I’ll put out a few feelers. Are the feds here?”

“Out front. The driveways are covered.”

She nodded. “We’re not too far apart. I’ll have a few words with the agents on my way out.”

“Do we have a deal?”

“You’ll know soon.”

She walked past Lynch and said something I couldn’t hear. He lowered his gun and looked as downcast as if she’d taken away his ball. They climbed in the truck, circled around, and drove out an open bay of the garage.

The door back to the house opened.

“Mike!” Annie said. “They’re coming!”

I walked back into the house. The agents were already inside.

A man and a woman in Secret Service windbreakers strode up the hall toward us.

“I’m the one who called,” I said and lifted my hands over my head. “She had nothing to do with this.”

The agent cocked her head at me. “What is your name?”

“Michael Ford,” I said.

“Michael Ford?”

“That’s right.”

She conferred with the other agent. I heard “Holy shit” and something about the Fed.

“Are you armed?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Lie on your stomach. Slowly. Spread your arms away from your body.”

I dropped a knee, then lay on the floor.

“Now cross your ankles and turn your wrists so your palms face the ceiling.”

This procedure is called a felony stop, reserved for the most dangerous suspects. When it comes to getting taken in by the police, it’s the royal treatment.

She circled to my side while the other agent covered me.

“Lift your left hand off the ground,” she said. I raised it, awkwardly, six inches off the floor. In one sudden movement, she swept down, turned my wrist, wrenched my arm back, knelt on my shoulder, and snapped the cuffs on. She pulled my right arm behind me and finished the job.

They dragged me to my feet and started walking me between the marble columns of Clark’s hall. I kept my head up. I’d never looked more like a guilty criminal, because I had finally done the honest thing.

I gave Annie a half smile. “I’ve got them right where I want them,” I said.

“I’ll talk to my father. He’ll turn.”

She walked with me to the driveway. Other agents were questioning Clark as he stood beside a truck. I met his eyes, and he gave me a slow nod.

They shoved me into the back of another Suburban. “I love you, Annie,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Love you.”

We rolled down the long driveway. Out my window I could see Bloom and Lynch. She had her arms crossed, talking to a captain as if she were just another cop. And Lynch, the FBI man, was in his element, leaning back against a truck.

As I passed, Bloom turned, looked to me, and held an index finger across her lips.