The Directive by Matthew Quirk

which does a lot of government work. I said I was looking for best practices on information security, and wanted to compare notes with other agencies.
    Spoofing phone numbers is crucial, and easy. There are plenty of pay websites that will let you change your caller ID to whatever you like. Match something close to the main switchboard, and people assume you’re in-house. Hold music helps, too. I spent a lot of time on hold, and I would always record the music or the droning voices telling me my call was important. When I had someone on the line, I would say I had another call and ask them to hold, then play back the hold music from the appropriate agency. No one doubted me after that.
    During the first phone call you invariably sound like an idiot, messing up names and jargon. But if you say it’s your first day, or you’re an intern, they’ll usually guide you toward what you need to know.
    “That sounds like Form 2110. You mean the operations group?”
    “Oh, yeah,” I would say. “Do you know the direct line?”
    Maybe people at the FBI and CIA are cagey enough to challenge people outright. They will hang up and call back through the main switchboard to confirm identities. But the fact is, most people are too easily embarrassed and conflict averse to confront you directly.
    Soon enough I was calling Mary direct for a 2110 Reg E-Claim reauthorization, like I’d been working for the federal government for a decade. There’s a certain dialect I started to pick up, a tone of dark and weary humor, that identifies you as a Fed lifer.
    It was during Derek’s case that I had first heard the phrase “social engineering.” That’s the term, among tech nerds and hackers, for these methods of talking your way past security measures. It involves a lot of calling around to learn the lingo, rules, and bureaucratic structure of your target, and then using this against them. It was really just con games practiced against institutions from a safe distance, over phone and e-mail. You take the cold, irrational, infuriating rules of a bureaucracy—“This is the wrong line. You’ll have to fill out form 660-S. Come back on Tuesday. We’re open from ten until four”—and you turn it back on them. There was no trust, no familiarity among the different cogs, and that was their weakness. If you learned the procedures, the right number to call, the right name to drop, and the right phrasing for your requests, you could get away with anything.
    Working the phones was the easy part. I also needed to find some supplies that honest men don’t sell, so that afternoon I stopped by a den of thieves I’d sworn off a long time ago: Ted’s Roadhouse, longtime haunt of my father’s crooked friends and the delinquents I used to run with.
    I drove past it the first time. The Ted’s I remembered was a windowless shack by the side of the highway. It had been so weathered by age the color was hard to identify. Maybe it had been blue at some point, but when I knew it, the paint had faded to a Rothko wash of green and gray.
    But now in Ted's place there was a halfway-decent-looking joint called Ted’s Bar and Grille, with new wood trim around real-life, non-boarded-up windows.
    Had Ted’s closed down? Had some restaurant group taken it over and kept the name? I parked in the gravel and stepped inside. Gloom filled the place, and it took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Wood paneling, an enormous fish tank, a cigar store Indian, a twelve-foot jukebox—the décor made my heart sink. The only adornment in the old Ted’s had been a blue tarp where the roof leaked. The institution I knew and loved was dead.
    But then I heard my name in a chorus of voices from the bar. A half-dozen heads turned my way, and a few figures came toward me out of the shadows like ghosts.
    Luis and Smiles and Licks: Jack’s and my old crew. Their age showed, in their bellies rounding over their belts and the used-up looks on their faces. They put their arms around my