The Directive by Matthew Quirk

woods, covering me.
    “He helped me out, Mike,” Jack said. They stood about thirty feet away. “The police were watching the area. I couldn’t have gotten the car out without them. He just wants to talk.”
    I carefully slid the knife into my back pocket with the handle out, ready to draw. Lynch moved closer.
    “What happened to Sacks?” I asked.
    “He died a half hour ago,” Lynch said. “And for that I’m sorry. No one likes bloodshed. But it was a complex situation.”
    “It’s really not. He was going to talk, so you killed him.”
    “He was about to take you down with him, too, Mike. Don’t forget.”
    He walked up the dirt ramp and held out an envelope.
    “Here,” he said.
    I took it. There was a recordable CD inside and a few pages of printer paper.
    I fanned them out: still photos of me with Sacks, just before he was killed.
    “Shots of you on the scene. And those are the only copies. We destroyed the originals.”
    Those photos could end my life. It was like holding a live grenade.
    He offered me a lighter. I slid the papers and the disc back inside the envelope, then sparked the flame near the corner. Red and yellow tendrils climbed the paper. I dropped it, and let it burn at my feet. The plastic disc blackened and warped in the ashes.
    “A peace offering?” I asked.
    “Just trying to be helpful,” he said. He took the lighter back, tapped out a Winston cigarette, and lit it.
    “You can stop with the hand-holding,” I said. “I understand what’s happening.”
    It was my worst fear, that every prejudice against me would be confirmed. Lynch had everything he would need to make me a fugitive, a lowlife killer, to make Annie’s concerns, and her family’s whispers, true.
    I would do anything to prevent it. He had me cold. The only thing that would make it worse would be to lie to myself, to welcome his patronizing, to pretend this wasn’t base extortion.
    “I’m listening,” he said.
    “You win. You’ve got me. So what do you want?”
    I had to keep him off-guard. I had started to see a way out of this. I didn’t have the whole picture, but the traces were there, like a great idea that comes as you fall asleep and is forgotten the next morning.
    “Finish the job,” Lynch said.
    “You want the directive,” I said. “And how exactly am I supposed to steal the most closely held secret in capitalism?”
    “I didn’t say it was going to be easy.”
    “I can find another man inside that room when the decision is made. When’s the next meeting?”
    “Tuesday.”
    “Next Tuesday?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I’ll find a way. And you leave me and Jack and my family alone. And this murder doesn’t touch me. Deal?”
    He took on a pained expression. “There is one small complication. People know who Sacks is. They know he had access to that decision. He didn’t tell the prosecutors everything, but they know enough. They’re locking down everything in DC. They’re watching everyone with access to that room. There’s no way. Not after today, not after you were seen on the Mall.”
    “So you’ll kill me if I don’t make the impossible possible.”
    “New York.”
    “No no no,” I said. “That’s the hardest vault in the world.”
    “It’s no Fort Knox,” he said.
    “It has more gold than Fort Knox.”
    Lynch smiled. I gathered that was his idea of a joke. “But you’re not going for the vault,” he said. “There’s only a few hundred billion in it. The real money’s upstairs. The desk.”
    “The police probably have my house surrounded by now.”
    “You’ll be fine. They don’t have anything to ID you beyond a few very hazy sketches from the first cops on the scene. Painting yourself in blood is a little Apache for my taste, but it got the job done.”
    Let him think I was that crazy. I needed all the leverage I could find.
    Jack licked his lips. I stalled, but there was nothing to decide, no choice in Lynch’s questions. They were commands. I felt the