by Dick Wolf
Chay said, “But he’s already killed someone without any provocation.”
“That’s why we want to catch him. To do that, we first need to buy some time.”
Evans nodded. “It would be good to be able to bring in the NCAVC.” He meant Quantico’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, part of CIRG, the Critical Incident Response Group. CIRG provided support for investigations on serial crimes by deploying specialized analysts.
“They could be useful,” said Fisk. But on cases like this, it wasn’t a matter of gaining time for reflection. He wanted impetus—to get Yodeler reacting to his moves, if possible surprising the killer. From his reactions, Fisk could glean information, whether it was that the guy was proficient in the use of burner phones or that he was a communist. The more back-and-forth they had, the more Fisk would learn about him. The challenge was to get into Yodeler’s mind and to adopt his thinking process.
“What do you have in mind?” Weir asked in the same tone he probably used when the neighbors’ kids rang his door to sell him magazine subscriptions he didn’t want or need. A decade of turf battles had made him averse to even yielding the floor.
“For that, I need to take this off the record,” said Fisk, turning to Chay.
Chay looked to her editor, who nodded emphatically.
Fisk said, “We handle Yodeler the same way we do a hostage taker. The value of the press covering these cases is inestimable, if the press and law enforcement cooperate. There was a case in Guatemala recently where kidnappers were publicly shamed into releasing a hostage, who was a doctor who devoted her practice to the poor. Actually she wasn’t, but that’s how the media played it. A misplaced story can anger the bad guys. So, in the interest of keeping the body count down . . .” Fisk turned to Norman. “Can you publish an edited version of Yodeler’s comment?”
“Edited how?” asked the security man.
Eyeing the comment on the screen, Fisk said, “Cut everything except how the jogger story is yet another part of the campaign of propaganda and disinformation, designed to suppress dissent and gain the trust of our citizenry. Leave in that he’s decided to dismantle that trust for the greater good of the citizens of America.”
Weir grumbled, “Makes him sound like a loony tune.”
“He sounded like that to begin with,” Fisk said. “But if we do it this way, in his mind he’ll have gotten some of his message out. We’ll have acquiesced, which is the old hostage negotiation secret: fool him into thinking that he’s imposing his will on us, that he’s holding all the aces. Then we post a comment to his comment, from, say, ‘Yodelerfan1.’ We ask him what else he wants. He can tell us via the comments box or—so he gets the sense he’s making progress—a dedicated e-mail address. Or we let him choose the venue. Because we’re just trying to do the best we can under enormous difficulties to give him exactly what he wants.”
Evans considered this. “Then what?” he asked.
“We wait by the smartphone for him to respond. If he does, great, it’s a negotiation, a protracted negotiation in which we achieve the position where he’s reacting to our moves rather than vice versa, meaning he’s not shooting people in New York chosen at random or otherwise. Meanwhile we’re sneaking up on him.”
Evans looked to Weir. With the exception of Chay, everyone looked to the senior case agent, with what Fisk hoped he correctly perceived as an air of solicitation.
“I can’t authorize this myself,” Weir said. “I gotta run it past the ASAC and the SAC.” This meant submitting a written request for approval to the assistant special agent in charge as well as the special agent in charge—which, in Fisk’s experience, was as close as it came to getting a yes from the Bureau.
CHAPTER 7
Worst-case scenario, Fisk thought, he could read Evans and Weir’s report later; cumbersome FBI reports were near the top of the list of certainties headed by death or taxes. Exiting the Times Tower now, headed for the crime scene, gave him the feel of stepping into fresh air—someplace other than New York that, in fact, had fresh air.
He was always surprised how much came to light at the scene, like eyewitnesses who come forward well after the scene has been processed, sometimes ashamed at not having come forth sooner, always with useful information. And if the scene didn’t teach him something about the killer, it would be a first. Getting a fix on the perp was usually the most difficult part of the early chapters of an investigation.
A block later, he’d bought himself a new cell phone replete with five hundred minutes, activated the line, and used it to get himself out of reporting to the office for a couple of hours. Alternating between checking for surveillance and avoiding oncoming pedestrians while glancing at bits of the initial NYPD detective’s report on his phone, he made his way up Seventh Avenue to its intersection with Central Park South.
Passing the row of hansom cabs on the park side, he caught a mix of the sales pitches by drivers to passing tourists. He also spotted three separate groups posing by horses for photos. He suspected he’d grossly underestimated the number of amateur photographers the CCTV cams would record in a week here.
Entering Central Park, he turned right onto the lower loop, presumably the same route Harun Ahmed had taken. It was closed now to vehicular traffic, as it had been at the time of the shooting. The city’s chalky air, heavy with concrete and exhaust just moments ago, grew redolent of flowers and trees. The clamor of thousands of vehicles and millions of rushing Manhattanites dissolved into the more leisurely chatter of parkgoers accompanied by the buzz of their bike chains and Rollerblade wheels and the trill of countless birds, all of it seemingly in sync with the waltz rising from the carousel’s Wurlitzer. Thus it seemed to Fisk as if it took no time at all to walk to the crime scene.
The scene itself had already been processed and released and thus reverted to an unremarkable stretch of gravel and dirt through the woods. If he were sure of anything, it was that the crime-scene investigation unit had literally left no stone unturned here. In 2006, when he was working a homicide case in Alphabet City’s East River Park, a trace of anomalous soil the crime-scene team bagged turned out to be from the nearby baseball diamond and led to a conviction of a spectator at a softball league game there. In this case, however, he had a strong sense that the minutiae were obstructing the investigation, distracting from a critical piece of the puzzle.
But what?
As he’d been trained, he cast a mental grid over the death scene, then he walked each of the lines, occasionally stepping aside to let a jogger pass.
He saw no trace of blood, no body outline, nothing to suggest that Harun Ahmed had been gunned down here. He focused on the shadows speckled by light in the few spots where the sun managed to breach the canopy of trees. The crime-scene photos hadn’t given him a sufficient appreciation of the extent of these trees. These oaks and elms, at the height of leafiness, posed too much of an impediment for a sniper.
Unless the guy had made his nest in one of them. It was hard to believe, though, that no one in Central Park saw or thought anything of a man with an assault rifle climbing into a tree.
Staring up the trunk of the nearest elm, Fisk speculated that if a sniper had wanted to conceal himself in one of the branches, he could have climbed up at night, when this area of the park was empty. On the plus side for the hypothetical sniper, the area wasn’t covered by a CCTV camera. Climbing the tree would be tricky, though. Those in the vicinity offered sheer trunks—no branches or other footholds—for a good twenty feet from the ground. Still they could be climbed, but Fisk saw no evidence that they had been, at least no unnatural indentations or scuff marks in the bark.
In any case, Yodeler would have needed to know Harun Ahmed’s jogging route to take him out here, and unless the killer planned to spend several days in the sniper’s nest, he needed advance knowledge of when Ahmed ran. As Fisk had gathered in his quick read of the detective’s report, the super at 122 Central Park South said Ahmed only ran on days that both the weather an
d his willpower permitted. So Yodeler could have made an educated guess, especially if he’d conducted pre-op recon. Or he might have gambled. But either way, if Yodeler had good enough intel to predict Harun Ahmed would run along this tiny path, he had to know that the doorman opened the door to the lobby hundreds of times a day at 122 Central Park South, offering a clear shot at him from the park directly across the street, or a car parked parallel to the park. You could make an argument that few New Yorkers presented as easy a target as Ahmed. So why here?
The answer could be that Yodeler had indeed been gunning for anyone. Although rare, it would hardly be the first act of random violence in New York City. But why in this problematic location? And how was it that no one saw him?
For most people, finding a single dollar bill can turn a lousy day around. For Walter Doyle, the magic number was fifty.
In the two years since retiring as the head of Stuyvesant High School’s mathematics department, the sixty-nine-year-old had been supplementing his pension by searching for lost change. Tourists in the United States handled cash more often than they were accustomed to when at home, and in the process they each lost an average of eighteen cents per day.
And nowhere on earth, by Doyle’s reckoning, did tourists lose as much change as here at Battery Park, Manhattan’s twenty-five southernmost acres that included the gamut of outdoor park activities as well as a full restaurant, dozens of other food vendors, several famous sculptures, and the Castle Clinton, the two-hundred-year-old sandstone fort that had originally been a cannon battery. But the main attraction was the ferry across New York Harbor to Liberty Island—the ride coming only after tourists had waited for an hour plus in the hot sun and paid cash for drinks and snacks and items like foam Statue of Liberty crowns. In the vicinity of the ferry dock, Doyle had found a hundred dollars or more here on forty-seven different days. (Three times, he’d even found hundred-dollar bills—experiences that were bittersweet because he pitied the people who’d lost them.)
It was ten o’clock now, and shaping into the sort of day that made it worthwhile for Doyle to come to Battery Park even when he found no money. It was warm, but not too warm, with the sun transforming the Hudson into a mosaic of blues and greens, the trees and lawns at peak verdure, and Castle Clinton shining like a castle out of a fairy tale. Better still, hundreds of enchanted tourists stood on line for the ferry.
He also saw two of his “colleagues,” Archie and Roberta, sweeping their Fisher Gold Bug Pro metal detectors over the lawn where a yoga class had just wrapped up. Good, thought Doyle. That left him exclusive access around the Battery Place benches, where, between seven and nine, Wall Streeters nursed coffees from the carts, savoring nature before having to trudge off to windowless trading floors.
Now, shoving off, the last of the coffee and pastry cart vendors waved to Doyle. It was prime hunting time.
As Doyle started toward Battery Place, a strong gust off the Hudson raised the breakfast debris from beneath the benches—the usual spent napkins, disposable cup lids, wax-paper wrappers. Much of the litter lodged in the row of arborvitae shrubs along the back wall of the castle. Doyle thought he spied the corner of a bill protruding from the leaves. That unique stiffness of the blend of linen and cotton was unmistakable even through his declining trifocaled vision. He fought the urge to run to it, reluctant to draw attention to his find.
Fortunately, no one else was even in the vicinity. When Doyle was thirty feet from the bill, a bit of breeze swayed the shrub, causing the ink on the uppermost corner to glint from black to green, in turn giving him an exhilarating jolt. The most remarkable of the security features on the recently redesigned hundred-dollar note was the Treasury Department’s proprietary color-shifting ink, black when viewed from some angles, green when seen from others, the result of multifaceted metallic flakes mixed into the ink.
As he knelt to collect his prize, he felt a stinging blow to his left shoulder blade. A sharp, stabbing pain, as though he’d been speared. He pitched forward into the shrubbery, which should have felt sharp and scratchy. He should have felt the branches scraping into his flesh—but he did not.
And then the shrubbery seemingly engulfed him, and after a moment everything went still and silent and black.
CHAPTER 8
Ji-Hsuan Lin wasn’t really a student. Nor was he actually named Ji-Hsuan Lin.
He was an intelligence officer who had been sent on a mission to New York twenty-one months ago. Attaining the key to the American economic intelligence services network firewall could provide his service access to everything worth having in the Department of Commerce’s 1.8-million-square-foot headquarters in Washington, which would be the greatest intel “get” since the Enigma machine.
In the short term, having the run of Willoughby’s lab would allow Lin to penetrate the New York Times firewall, which Willoughby had designed. Within twenty-four hours of the paper’s report of leaked NYPD Intel documents last month, the FBI captured the leaker, Manhattan-based NSA systems analyst Merritt Verlyn. However, the Bureau failed to locate the thousands of valuable classified documents Verlyn had stolen and had yet to upload to WikiLeaks. Lin would not fail. National security reporter Chay Maryland, who had reported only on the first batch of NYPD documents, had the document cache, probably just sitting on her hard drive.
Citing freedoms guaranteed to the press by the U.S. Constitution, she refused to cooperate with the FBI or the U.S. attorney prosecuting Verlyn. Lin was unsure who the bigger fools were, Maryland or the framers of the Constitution. In any case, if he had his way, she would turn over the documents to his people without ever realizing it.
Ji-Hsuan Lin—or the young man who went by the name Ji-Hsuan Lin—believed that he would be awarded an intelligence medal—along with financial security for the rest of his life—if he succeeded in penetrating the New York Times firewall. Although the notion of assaulting a firewall existed only in Hollywood productions. In reality, firewalls function like a ticket taker. To get the requisite material for his ticket, Lin needed an hour to himself in Willoughby’s secure lab.
First he needed to gain admission to Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Science Building at Broadway and West 120th Street, an austere blue-gray steel tower that housed science lecture halls as well as laboratories and offices dedicated to as many as twenty classified military and intelligence research projects at a given time. Usually getting in was a simple matter of pushing through a revolving door and into the lobby, the most notable feature of which was an absence of security guards—not even the half-asleep senior citizen checking IDs whom the university posted at the entrances to dorms or the campus grocery store.
Tonight the lobby was utterly deserted. On his way to the elevators across the skating rink of a white marble floor, Lin reflected that with just a few helpers here, he could take down the entire U.S. economy overnight.
For now, the fourth floor, the location of Willoughby’s lab and offices, presented his first obstacle. Stationed at the entrance to the main corridor, 24/7/365, there was a security guard. The guards, employed by the Pentagon, were glorified rent-a-cops. The exception was nights, when retired army colonel “Hawk” Griffin, manned the position. Sure enough, when the elevator doors hissed open, Lin found himself the recipient of Hawk’s laser stare and half expected to see red dots on his body. The guard stood, as usual, despite the table and chair in the elevator landing, his gun hand hovering atop his belted holster. He’d added just two pounds to his sinewy frame in the forty years since he played tight end at West Point.
Lin knew that Hawk wouldn’t hesitate to unload his Beretta M9 on a foreign spy. If anything, the guard lived for that opportunity.
In a gravelly baritone, he said, “Ji, howya doin’?”
“Very good, Hawk. How you?”
“Better than I deserve, buddy.” Hawk flashed a Texas-size smile. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of working tonight instead of watching the Mets game.”
Lin had no taste for ba
seball, but he’d studied it—he’d even endured a game in person at Citi Field—so that he and Hawk might bond over the New York Mets. “I feel bad. Matt Harvey pitch for us. I hope to finish in time to see final innings.”
“You best hustle, then, partner.” Hawk waved him in.
Lin made a show of hurrying down the hall until rounding the corner to the western corridor. The lab area was still and silent other than the occasional keyboard click from behind one of the closed doors. Light from the overhead panels caused the gray walls to shimmer purple.
Stopping at the lab known as DC2—Distributed Computing and Communications—he unlocked the door to the antechamber using a common cut key like that to the front door of a typical house. This was another example still, he thought, of the seeming disinterest in security on the part of the Interdisciplinary Science Building planners, even though the building had opened in 2010, when retina and iris scanners had long since become security standards in comparable private facilities in other countries.
Americans were far too trusting.
Stepping inside, he swatted on the lights, revealing a generic comp-sci room with a pair of swivel chairs and flat panel monitors on three long tables, everything facing the whiteboard on the front wall. Unlike most labs, however, there were no windows. Odder still, on close inspection, you would see that the cottage-cheese ceiling tiles were suspended from a sheet of Plexiglas. The Plexiglas continued down the wall, disappearing behind the wall paneling, then continuing under the floor, forming a case around the room.
The result was a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, essentially a vault designed to keep electronic signals from escaping. Even the electrical current was filtered. The six computers were networked to one another, but there was no Internet. Data could exit the lab only on disks or drives. Stealing the key to the New York Times would be a matter of copying a TCP—Transmission Control Protocol—packet onto a flash drive. The problem was that in doing so, Lin’s every action would be recorded. Every keystroke was logged here, and it was a fair assumption that everything else was recorded by concealed security cameras.