The Directive by Matthew Quirk Page B

then cursed as the spread got away from him. He motioned for another whiskey.
    “If this is a domestic matter, Mike, let me volunteer something. The answer to suspicions isn’t more sneaking around. That never ends well. It’s being straight-up.”
    “It’s not that.”
    “You came all the way out here for some spy shop stuff?”
    “Well…that was just breaking the ice. I could use a couple of wallets, too.”
    “Uh-huh,” he said, his suspicions confirmed. “Social Security cards?”
    “No. Just drivers’ licenses, a few credit cards, just in case. I don’t need them to work. Just to make the licenses look more legit.”
    When I was seventeen, I stole Jack’s birth certificate and went to the local DMV to get a duplicate of his license with my picture on it. It was the best fake you could find, because it was real. I thought they’d grown a little more sophisticated since then.
    Cartwright took a sip and looked pained. “I hate to even mention this, Mike, because your family and I go way back, but you wouldn’t happen to be doing this on behalf of any law enforcement types?”
    A snitch? I guess I could have been offended, but I was only a few years out of Harvard Law and knew a lot of prosecutors. I was a hard person for a criminal to trust, so I actually took it as a compliment of sorts that Cartwright didn’t shut me down completely.
    “I’m not working with any cops,” I said.
    “Good,” he said. “Because then I’d have to kill you. And I’d hate to do that.”
    He laughed. I joined him.
    “Seriously,” he said. “I knew you as a little kid. It’d break my heart.”
    I swallowed. “Understood.”
    “Good. So much for that. The price has gone way up on all that stuff, Mike. ‘Interesting times.’ ”
    “How much?” I asked. “I might need a few. A couple for me. One for Jack.”
    “I’ll get a quote,” he said.
    “I’m in the market for some practice locks, too,” I went on. I had a good sense of the hardware they were using at the Fed. “Up-to-date Medecos, some of those card-and-codes. And the whole kit: picks, shims, bypass, files, bump keys, decoders.”
    “I have some here,” he said. “Some’s in storage.”
    “And you wouldn’t have a lead on a Red Sox World Series baseball?”
    “Like a collector’s item?”
    “That’s right.”
    In my briefcase I had a photo I’d found while doing my homework on the Federal Reserve. It showed the number-two guy on the trading desk at the New York Fed. A Boston native, he was an economist and therefore a stats geek. Those guys have a weakness for baseball, for endless inky rows of numbers. The photo was a head shot, fairly close-in. He was in his office, standing beside his desk. And behind him stood a row of baseballs on wooden bases. I could read some of the plaques. There was Carl Yastrzemski and Bobby Doerr. Nothing had more than one signature. A Red Sox fan: that made it easy to find my Trojan horse, a trophy he couldn’t resist. I’d gathered everything I could about this man’s background to figure out how to get to him.
    “I’ll make some calls,” Cartwright said, and walked toward the end of the room. He opened a locked door and led me in to a storeroom. From a shelf he pulled down a door handle with a keypad. “These are the new Department of Homeland Security spec card-and-codes. Swiss. Thirteen hundred dollars. Eight-digit PINs and 256-bit encryption. They’re certified to withstand pick attempts for up to six hours.”
    “Jesus,” I said.
    “That’s only if you pick them the way the government labs expect you to. The electronics they’re cramming into hardware these days create a lot of weak links. It’s sloppy work.”
    He entered 12345678 on the pad. The red LED flashed for an incorrect entry. As it did, Cartwright jammed a pick into the housing beside the flashing light. The whole thing went dark, and he swung the handle down.
    “You ground the board and it opens. My fucking granddaughter could