Free The Directive by Matthew Quirk

fixed on the nearest marshals. One shout and I was done.
    Families stood near the courtroom doors, wearing looks of shock or quiet distress. Dozens of prosecutors, judges, and police strode by. I saw the hard plastic chairs where I’d spent so much time, saw a grandmother waiting, a kid swinging legs too short to touch the ground. Through an open door, I saw a judge taking her seat. In that moment I relived my own arrest and trial ten years before, remembered the judge staring down, the night my whole life fell apart.
    With every step, I expected to feel the hand on my shoulder, the steel on my wrists.

Chapter 12
    “YOU HAVE FIVE minutes,” Sacks said.
    I couldn’t believe he’d gone for it. “Follow me,” I said. “A public place. Just not here.”
    He nodded.
    Before he could think twice, I led him out of the courthouse and across Constitution to a stand of trees at the very end of the National Mall. We were across from the fountains in front of the Capitol.
    “Talk,” he said.
    I had to seduce this man into a conspiracy that I knew almost nothing about. I had to get inside his head, to know his motivations in order to bring him around. My brother had given me what he had learned, the rough outlines. Sacks was a typical DC workaholic, so single-mindedly focused on saving the world that he’d lost his wife. I read a lot of his speeches and white papers, all very dry and technical, but they were what passed for muckraking in his circle: arguments for raising bank capitalization requirements, reining in derivatives and prop trading.
    Jack filled in the rest. After the divorce, when Sacks actually needed money—alimony, child support—none of the banks would hire him. He’d burned his bridges trying to do the right thing. The revolving door was jammed. He played the part of humble bureaucrat, but he couldn’t stand having a roommate, a basement apartment. He thought handling billions in T-bills meant he could handle his own money in the markets. He couldn’t. And from there it was an easy fall into being checkmated by Lynch.
    What deluded me into thinking I could turn him? The guy comes to DC to try to live a decent life and do some good among seemingly respectable people, then gets lured into a crime he can barely understand, and is presently scared shitless.
    I could relate.
    “These men you’re running from,” I said. “They have sources everywhere.” I had heard as much from my brother, and it was in my interest to believe it now. “If you talk, they will find out, and they will get to you.”
    “The prosecutors can protect me.”
    “For a financial crimes case? You think they have the resources for that? This isn’t the Five Families. You regulate the banks. You know how these white-collar deals go. Six years from now, whoever’s behind all this may face a fine that amounts to a few percent of the interest they’ve made off the profits. They sign a deferred prosecution agreement, and it all goes under the rug. Are you going to hide out that whole time?”
    “How do you know all this?”
    “I’m just a boring grind, like you. My brother is another story. He was involved, facilitating. He came to me for help. He tried to go to the police. The men he was working for found out. And now they’re going to kill him, unless…”
    “Unless I go along with it.”
    I nodded. “Have they threatened you, too?” I asked.
    He didn’t answer, just gazed at the Lincoln Memorial in the distance.
    “You came to Washington to do good,” I said. “I understand. It’s what brought me here. And you work every waking hour trying to stop the everyday graft. And what do you get?”
    He looked down at the bare dirt of the Mall.
    “They grind you down,” I went on. “You try doing the right thing, and you end up losing everything you’ve worked for.”
    “What do you know about it?”
    “I’ve got my own story. That doesn’t matter right now. I know about paying the price for your principles. I know