by Dick Wolf
They sounded like soldiers to him: calm, self-possessed. He could tell from the sound of the ambush that these two Swedes had military training, as opposed to being amateur goofballs who’d taken up jihad because they were bored with their jobs in IT.
His phone was in the car, too, charging. But it didn’t matter. Zero cellular service here in the ass end of nowhere. Mary Rose had a satellite phone, didn’t she? He needed that phone as much as he needed a handgun.
He saw the colors reappear, vague against the white. Under even sparse tree cover, their visibility would improve dramatically. Fisk tightened his grip on the broken plastic window scraper and took off running through the trees. The snow cover was more shallow here, around a foot deep. He expected gun reports at his back yet heard none.
He felt something expanding inside him, something he had experienced a half-dozen times before in his life but had never been able to put a word to. The threat of imminent death has a way of uniquely focusing the mind.
CHAPTER 2
After the episode with Magnus Jenssen, the NYPD had mandated that he attend counseling sessions. Not only because he had been in a violent confrontation—what the department called a “major incident”—but because his partner and girlfriend had been murdered. In a case like that, counseling was mandated.
Fisk had talked to the counselor about the episode, about racing through the tunnel to stop Jenssen, who was strapped with several kilograms of C-4 explosive, a trigger hidden inside a cast wrapped around his left arm.
“You know, Detective Fisk,” the counselor had said, “there are a lot of people who might say what you did was crazy. How would you respond to that?”
“I was just doing my duty, Doc,” he said.
Dr. Rebecca Flaherty was a redhead, not the brassy orange kind, but a darker, autumn red. She was very attractive, and Fisk thought that was part of her power, sitting there like an ideal, someone beyond reproach. She tilted her head and looked at him. “Well, that’s obviously bullshit,” she said. “Are you contemptuous of the process or of me?”
Fisk’s eyes widened. She had him.
“Now tell me how you really felt?” she asked.
Fisk closed his eyes. Part of his resistance to this process was having to go back there at all, even for answers. “It felt amazing.”
She held her expression in check, but there was no way she absorbed that without the mental equivalent of a deep breath. “Care to elaborate?”
“You ask me how I felt, and you insist on the truth. It felt amazing. It was the right thing to do. No equivocation. No choice, really. I had to do it. To go all out. All or nothing. And something else.”
A tiny smile licked at the corner of her mouth. “Go on.”
“I thought I was going to win. Check that. I knew I was going to win.”
“Knew this how?”
That, he had no answer for. “I just did. I suppose . . . what’s the alternative? If I lose, I’ll never know it. I’d be obliterated. So no recriminations. No ‘Aw, shucks.’ Either I’d succeed, or nothing. Look at it this way. What if I did fail? What if I got blown up along with a lot of innocents and some glass and steel? And this is my little dream-state afterlife.” He shrugged. “Same result.”
“And same pain,” she said.
Fisk nodded. Dr. Flaherty was good indeed, and he was willing to open up now. “A lot of pain. She is gone. Were she to walk in the door right now, then I’d know I was dead. Or dreaming.”
“And would you prefer that?”
“Not that I have a choice . . . but sometimes. Absolutely sometimes.”
Dr. Flaherty shifted in her chair. She was wearing a business suit with pants. The chair made no noise as she moved in it. “Mightn’t I be her, were this some sort of afterlife episode?”
“Very likely,” said Fisk. “But if you’re going to ask me to speak to you as though you were my dead girlfriend . . .”
Dr. Flaherty was already waving that off. “No, no. Just trying to draw a line between fantasy and reality.”
“I know the reality,” said Fisk. “All too well. The bottom line is that when I ran toward Jenssen, I felt pure. That’s the best way to put it. Clean. Pure. That sprint through the tunnel? At the time, it was pure hell. But now looking back, I think it was the best feeling I’d ever experienced. Following the worst feeling I’d ever experienced.”
Dr. Flaherty brushed back her hair, which had fallen over one eye. “And how do you feel now? On that register, from what you describe as a peak experience to the lowest moment perhaps of your life.”
“Now?” said Fisk. “Right now?”
“Generally. These days.”
Fisk crossed his arms. The air conditioner hummed, raising little bumps of gooseflesh on his arms. He held the counselor’s gaze because it seemed important to do so. This process was akin to a polygraph, except instead of a lie detector, he was sitting with a truth detector.
He was stumped.
She said, “You’re trying to cook up the answer that gets you back to work the fastest.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“This is not a place to censor yourself. Everything we say is completely—”
“Confidential, right.” Did she believe that? “Something is going in my permanent file, something that could affect the rest of my career. I like my career. I don’t want any liabilities.”
“Such as?”
“Such as getting a lift out of putting myself in harm’s way. I’m not blind to how that can sound. Like I’ve lost it. Like I might go looking for those kinds of moments again. Chasing that ‘peak experience,’ as you so aptly termed it.”
She nodded. Was she interested in his concern now? “What would you like to have in your file?”
“It’s not what I want, it’s what they need. ‘I felt frightened. But I thought I had a shot at taking down a very bad man. I just wanted to do my job and save lives.’ Unquote. Like the experience humbled me, but I’m better for it somehow.”
“That’s not the truth?”
“I honestly think it’s too early to tell. But I don’t want to feed any half-baked revelations to that douche bag desk jockey captain in Human Resources down at One Police Plaza. Because that guy has never truly laid out for one.”
“Laid out?” Dr. Flaherty smiled coolly, leaning back in her caramel-leather-upholstered chair. “Interesting terminology, Detective. Because the literature says there are two kinds of people who react the way you did in the face of extreme danger. Top-performing athletes. And sociopaths.”
Fisk made an interested noise and crossed his legs. “I had a pretty good jump shot back in high school,” he said. “Just never got the NBA height, or the NBA legs.”
“So if you’re not an elite athlete . . . ?”
“I’m an elite cop,” said Fisk. “Or trying to be. Look, I think what this all boils down to is, can this detective before you do the job he did before the traumatic thing happened. In layman’s terms, there it is.”
She waited to see what he was going to come up with next, either dig a deeper hole or climb out and brush off his hands.
Fisk said, “I think the people of New York City will be better off with me inside the department than outside of it.”
CHAPTER 3
Fisk emerged from the trees, having traced a wide arc through them. Two killers on his trail, probably armed with AK-47s and who knew what other guns. Fisk had a sharp piece of plastic.
He was out of the tree cover and back into the maelstrom of snow. He was circling back toward the Jeep. At least, that was his hope. Had the snow let up a bit? He thought it had. Good for his visibility, but worse for him because now he was more visible, too.
Where was the road? Every facet of topography was smoothed over by the snow. They had been turning the Jeep’s engine on every twenty minutes or so for a few minutes of interior heat, but now he didn’t even have that sound to aim for.
Then he saw the snow craters. Faint, filling up quickly with
freshly fallen snow, but there was a twin pattern, he could see it now. Faint skateboard-sized impressions: huge footprints.
That was why he had not heard the sound of the Swedes approaching.
They were on snowshoes.
He tried to match their stride, sweating through his North Face parka, but moving with renewed energy now that he felt he was on the right track. He checked behind him. Still no sign, but he knew they were there.
A broad hump appeared up ahead. Fisk paused before the snow-buried Jeep, steam from his huffed breath obscuring his view. Then he went at the windows with his forearm, clearing it in a broad swipe.
Holes in the cracked glass. The driver’s door open.
He checked the pulses of his comrades, because that was protocol, though it was clear there was no need. All had been sprayed with gunfire and dispatched with bursts to the head, execution style. The dash was cracked, the radio shattered, the smell of cordite hanging in the car. They had been ambushed at close range. Fisk suspected that not one of the agents’ sidearms had even cleared their holsters.
Stuffing was blown out of the backseat, such that Fisk wasn’t certain his Glock was gone until he searched. But it was gone. So was the satellite phone.
Fisk circled to the rear hatch, which had been left open. The ATF agent’s long guns were gone, no AR, no 870. Maybe they had hurled them away into the deep snow. Perhaps if he hunted around in the woods long enough he might find them. But he had no time.
Desperate, Fisk ran around to the front again. He felt under the dash. Sometimes cops screwed holsters to the firewall to hold a backup gun. But there was nothing there—no spare under the seat, no snubbie in the glove compartment.
Nothing.
Think. What did he have? The scraper.
What else?
Footprints.
Fisk looked around. He tried to remember the road in from I-87. There were more trees in the opposite direction, he was certain.
He looked at the dead agents one last time. He needed to make a noise. The anguish that came out of him was real.
“NO!”
No echo. His voice expanded into the snow, which quickly blanketed it like everything else.
But the Swedes must have heard it.
Fisk tightened his grip on the ice scraper and took off away from the Jeep, at an angle from the trees, away from the circle of footprints. These had to be easy to follow. He had to make certain that the Swedes didn’t give up on him and head back to their transpo rendezvous. They were moving faster than he was, thanks to their snowshoes. They were closing the gap. He let the images of the dead feds chase him into the snow, along with the Swedes.
One burst of gunfire shook him. He felt no displacement of the air around him, so the rounds never came anywhere close, but he didn’t want them shooting at him yet. He pushed himself as hard as he could, adopting a gallop-style gait that got his legs into and out of the snow as quickly as possible. And he never looked back. Gunfire would tell him if he was in range or not.
A roadside line of trees emerged out of the snowy curtain, a forward column of soldiers awaiting him. Fisk almost fell into the first black trunk, coughing into his sleeve so the sound would not carry. He pulled off his coat, and steam lifted from his soaked henley.
He stumbled several feet into the woods and found a low branch. The dark blue of his parka would stand out starkly from the snow. He hung it gently from a splinter on the branch.
Fisk hurried about ten yards away and dove headfirst into the ground cover. He used his empty hand to push more snow over his blue jeans and his green shirt, covering his knit cap as best he could.
The snow started to soak through his clothes immediately. In about one minute, his extreme body heat was gone, the sudden temperature change making him lightheaded. He lay as still as he could, slowing his breathing. Surprise was his only chance.
And then, suddenly, there they were. Vague colors moving through the snow curtain. Twin gray-black shapes. He heard the soft crunch, crunch, crunch of the snow beneath their flat shoes.
Then a voice of warning.
And burst after burst of gunfire.
Fisk could not help but flinch. His parka danced on the branch.
And then, just as he’d hoped, the snow plummeted down from on high once again. It landed hard on him and all around, falling with the force and weight of dozens of heavy down comforters. His view was blocked and his hearing muffled. He had not expected quite that much snow.
He hoped the parka was also buried.
His scraper hand was near, and he picked away at the snow before it hardened, creating first some airspace around his head, then carefully reaching out, trying to poke open a hole to see through.
He stopped and listened. A soft mutter of whispered conversation. A disagreement between the two men, perhaps. Who would go first, or who would take point.
Impossible to tell. Fisk felt the snow weighing on his legs and back. He rolled a bit back and forth so as to create a buffer of space, and so he didn’t get packed in there beyond escape.
Again, he went still. He heard faintly the soft shushing noise of someone sliding through the snow as quietly as they could. He cleared more space in front of him and the snow above it settled into the void—and then his hand was free.
He pulled it back immediately. He could see. Not well, but well enough to watch the two Swedes advance. They were already at the area where they presumed him to be buried and dead.
One was near the mound. He was exploring it with his boot, the muzzle of his AK-47 aimed and ready.
The other one was the flank. He was shockingly near, just a couple of yards away, his back to Fisk.
Fisk pushed up out of the snow. It seemed to take forever in his head, speed at war with silence, and the crunching of the parting snow roared in his ears like artillery explosions.
He was on the near Swede as the man turned. Fisk buried the dagger edge of the broken scraper in the side of the man’s neck, just above the shoulder. He pulled out the blade fast, uncorking a spray of blood, and went for the Swede’s rifle.
Fisk twisted it from the falling man’s grip. The Swede had let out a strange cry, and his partner—spooked—fired a burst into the mound, thinking it the source of the threat.
Fisk barked at him. The man froze. Fisk had one boot on the Swede bleeding out below him.
Fisk barked again. Fisk spoke fluent Arabic—his mother was a Lebanese Christian—but the only language available to him at this moment was his native tongue. What he said, he wasn’t even certain. But the other Swede heard the murderous rage that translates fluently across language barriers.
He had hunted terrorists long enough to know that the chances of this guy winding up unarmed and spread-eagled with his hands clasped behind his head were slim verging on none. And on the one hand, that was fine. Fisk was ready to light this guy up for what he’d done.
On the other hand, nobody had any intel on where the bomb was supposed to be detonated, or by whom.
The guy was waiting. Maybe praying. Fisk barked at him again, and the Swede wheeled around.
Fisk opened up, firing on the man’s hands as he swung the AK around. He shredded the man’s forearms and saw sparks play off the chromium-plated chamber.
The rifle popped out of his hands, sinking muzzle down into the bloody snow.
The man stood staring at his arms and hands, howling in pain.
Below Fisk, his partner’s strength was fading, the arterial flow slowing to a dull pulse. He had pulled off his balaclava, exposing a short, strawberry blond beard, rimed with ice. The man’s blood was warm against Fisk’s pant leg.
Fisk felt him check out beneath his boot, relaxing into a lifeless heap.
“La ilaha illa Allah, Mohammadun rasulu Allah.” It was the other Swede. His howling had turned to praying. He was trying to chant his pain away.
Fisk rushed up to him and chopped him on the back of his head with the butt of the AK, just enough to put him down.
He cut open the man’s coat with the blade. In the inside pocket, Fisk found a small, stainless steel vial, carefully machined, about the dimensions of a small bottle of aspirin.
Fisk squeezed the vial in his fist. No sense of victory. No sense of achievement.
He pocketed the vial and tossed the ruined coat aside. No coats for anybody now. He pulled the Swede up by the collar of his thick sweater, and with him began the long march back to Champlain.
CHAPTER 4
July 23
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico
2.7 miles from the U.S. border
Ramon’s uncle stopped what he was doing. Ramon followed the man’s eyes—dark beneath his New York Yankees baseball cap—to a spray of bright red hibiscus flowers in the bushes next to the Palacio Municipal.
A tiny bird, hovering in the air. Brilliant feathers glinting in the pallid light of dawn. It darted back near Ramon for an instant, close enough that Ramon could hear the sound of its tiny wings thrumming, just barely audible over the sound of the men screaming.
“See it hover,” said Ramon’s uncle, marveling at the bird. He was a small, compact man, with an expression of earnest concentration on his face. He was one of those men, Ramon noted, who took up very little space. The Zetas around the plaza, the ones now pulling naked corpses out of a stake-bed GMC and throwing them onto the ground, were generally loud, bullying men. Not Ramon’s uncle.
He noticed things like birds. They were beautiful to him, or at least, in his world, rare. But they also came as signs. Omens. And Ramon’s uncle paid great attention to them.
Not all of the bodies were corpses: not yet. Several of the people lying in the back of the truck were still alive, howling piteously now, begging for their lives, but mainly making a lot of noise.
Twenty armed Zetas occupied the square in front of the long white colonnaded government building that lined the west side of the Plaza de Something-or-Other. (Ramon’s uncle had told him the name of the town square, but Ramon had already forgotten it.) The government building had rounded arches running along the entire front, such that it looked like a cheap stucco version of a Roman aqueduct. Most of his uncle’s men were lounging around smoking, their AR-15s hanging from their necks on black nylon slings. Some wore bandannas over their faces, others balaclavas. But not all of them. They didn’t seem overly concerned about being caught. And the masks were sweaty in the early morning heat.