The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  “This is really excellent stuff, Detective Fisk,” said Pole with too much gratitude. “If the suspect were in fact using such a device, that would be considerable ‘leakage’—insight into his psychology that we can glean from his methodology. Sketching a profile of such a killer really does require a complex blend of art, science, and psychology, and it can be especially useful in cases like this where the evidence is lacking.”

  The shrink was right about one thing, Fisk thought: the evidence was lacking.

  He left at the first possible opportunity.

  He found Chay in the lobby, studying the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted board. Quietly fuming.

  Fisk decided he preferred her doggedness to the dissembling he had experienced upstairs.

  “Let’s go get some evidence,” he said.

  There’s never been a better time to be a sniper,” said the onetime Army sharpshooter Pete Peavy as he ushered Fisk and Chay out of his company’s reception area and toward his office. “Take this one job I did back in 2000, when we were in Sierra Leone. I had to lie in full camo in cold, rank muck for the better part of three days, sometimes having to stay so still that the leeches had the run of me—and took full advantage of it. Today I could do the same job from my house in East Hampton, thanks to these guys.” He tapped the cartoon painted on the wall above the receptionist’s desk, a trio of badass anthropomorphic warplanes. It was the logo of his UAV start-up, Flying Robots, LLC.

  “What exactly can they do for a sniper?” Chay said.

  It was for this information, Fisk thought, that they had come to Tribeca.

  “I’ll try and show you,” Peavy said, leading them down a long corridor that, like the reception area, was lined with bamboo rods. In rows on the walls were framed action photos of surfers, all autographed—Duke Kahanamoku, Kelly Slater, Laird Hamilton.

  The beach theme matched Peavy’s laid-back appearance, which was purely cosmetic, Fisk thought. On the inside, his friend was filled to capacity with a desire to compete, or, specifically, to win. Fisk hadn’t been surprised when Peavy went, in just two years, from a lowly instructor at a little Krav Maga studio on the Lower East Side to the proprietor of eighteen state-of-the-art self-defense training centers in New York, New Jersey, and Tel Aviv. It was just a matter of time, Fisk thought, until Peavy laced a tie through the collar of one of his signature Hawaiian shirts and rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange to open trading on the day of the Flying Robots initial public offering.

  “People think what we do here is on the cutting edge.” Peavy ran his hand along a glossy white polyurethane surfboard, mounted on the wall. “But the truth—between you, me, and any NSA folks listening—is that there’s nothing being done here, or in the whole commercial UAV industry for that matter, that wasn’t already done forty years ago.” He stopped before the lone still photo, a black-and-white seated portrait of a relatively somber man in a suit, his dark hair slicked back in the midcentury business fashion. “Now this here is the man!”

  It was a blowup, Fisk guessed, of a faculty photograph from a midcentury university course catalog. There was no autograph, just a printed label on the base of the frame: DR. FOSTER.

  “The inventor of parasailing?” Fisk guessed.

  “Way bigger, bro. Dr. John S. Foster was the physicist who ran the Livermore National Lab, the federally funded nuke research place. At home, in his spare time, he dabbled in remote-control airplanes, for fun. Until one day in 1971, he said to himself, ‘Hey, this little hobby of mine could be turned into shit that’s more effective against the enemy than the nukes I work on at my day job.’”

  “Is that a direct quote?” Chay asked blithely.

  “Yeah, verbatim,” said Peavy.

  She smiled, apparently taken with him, which should have pleased Fisk. For some reason, it rankled him.

  Peavy went on: “So what Doc Foster did was he stuck a lawn-mower engine into the fuselage of a radio-controlled fixed-wing plane that had a little push propeller in back—the kind that looks like a desk fan. A little trial and error and he had himself a system that could stay in the air for two hours, with a payload of twenty-eight pounds.”

  “Can a sniper operate a UAV?” Chay asked.

  “That depends on the sniper.” Peavy pushed open a door to a spacious office that continued the seaside theme, patio furniture substituting for the traditional appointments, but with a two-story ceiling. “Have yourselves a deck chair.”

  Fisk and Chay each sat, and Peavy dropped into a seat behind the slatted table that served as his desk. From its lone drawer, he produced what appeared to be a pair of mirrored Wayfarers and slid them on. Sheepishly, he said, “The specs are a little gimmicky, sorry, but the model I’m going to show you is the one we use for sales presentations—as our marketing guy likes to say: ‘Whistles and bells sells.’”

  He clicked a button on his desk, and with a hiss, a panel rolled up into the far wall like a garage door. Peavy cocked his head and out rolled a miniature version of a familiar-looking stick figure of an aircraft, with fixed wings spanning about five feet. “This here is basically a one-tenth-the-size version of General Atomics’ MQ-1, which you know as the Predator, which is the Elvis of UAVs. The Predator was developed in the nineties for recon. Then, one day, a U.S. Air Force general said, ‘Dudes, this is amazing, I can see the enemy’s tank trying to sneak up on us. Any way I can use the drone to blow the tank up?’ So the Air Force stuck on a couple of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. And that worked great, so they built a bigger version, the Reaper, which has about seventeen Hellfires and a pair of five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs. Now it’s just a matter of time until we have stealth fighter drones and bombers that can deliver nukes.”

  Peavy tilted his head. As if in response, the miniature Predator whirred toward him on the floor.

  “This is our current bestseller, Yona, which is the Hebrew word for dove. Yona can cure what ails you with a couple dozen rocket-propelled grenades or, if you’re into bullets, a modified M230 chain gun.”

  Fisk hoped Yodeler had nothing like Yona. “How do you launch it?” he asked, thinking that the launch might require considerable open space, which would significantly limit Yodeler in a city like New York.

  Peavy sat against the edge of the table. In sync, the drone bucked. “I’ve used my driveway out on Long Island for a runway. It’s a hundred feet and change. Ideally you’d need a couple hundred feet. Yona’s designed to take off from an offshore oil-rig deck—we’re going for the petro-security market.”

  “What if a sniper wanted to deploy it in an urban theater?” Chay asked.

  “Say, this urban theater?” Peavy indicated the window behind him and its view of rooftops rising toward midtown.

  Chay looked to Fisk, who said to Peavy, “Sure.”

  “It would be easy enough to launch here; any old sidewalk or street will do as a runway.”

  “And what about operating Yona?” Chay asked.

  “What used to be known as the ‘ground station’ now fits into a book bag,” Peavy said. “You connect it wirelessly to the glasses or a phone, so you can see what your UAV sees, and it moves the way you do. To fire, you push a button.” He pointed to one of the buttons on the eyeglass frame by his right temple. “With a twenty-mile radius, Yona effectively makes all five boroughs your sniper’s nest. And because target acquisition is so much easier when you’re using a flying robot, a sniper mission that used to take five, six days in the field is now something you could do while you eat lunch at your desk.”

  “And what if you wanted your whole op to be black?” Fisk asked.

  “That makes it harder, because Yona, just like the Predator and all the rest, is controlled by radio or, for shorter range missions, Wi-Fi. So figuring out where someone has launched from and landed and everything in between is like playing connect the dots with his signals after the fact. If you don’t want anyone to be able to do that, you could disguise your radio signals. Or you could get a UAV that’s small an
d slow enough that, in a crowded city, its signals would make it look like just another cell phone.”

  “How would you get a UAV like that?” Chay asked.

  “Go to any shopping mall. Here . . .” Peavy took off his glasses, set them on his desktop, then crossed the room to a file cabinet. From it, he removed an aircraft with a black plastic fuselage the size and shape of a papaya mounted on a crossbeam, the four ends of which held a rotor. “This here is a quadrocopter—also known as a quadcopter. It’s basically a multirotor helicopter that is lifted and propelled by four rotors; they’re also available as hexacopters and octocopters—six rotors, eight rotors. You can get a quad in any hobby shop. Spend more than two hundred bucks, you’ve been had. It has vertical takeoff and landing, so you don’t need any runway at all.”

  “And what if you wanted to weaponize it?” Fisk asked.

  “This baby could deliver a lightweight grenade or a small gun.” Peavy flicked one of the black plastic rotor blades, which was about five inches long.

  “How do you fly it?” asked Chay.

  “I’ll let you try it for yourself.” Peavy fished a cell phone from his board-shorts pocket. “What video-game apps do you play?”

  Chay shrugged. “Text messaging.”

  Peavy turned to Fisk, who shook his head. “Nothing since Coleco stopped updating their handheld basketball game.”

  Peavy laughed. “I’d heard there were a couple of you out there.”

  He set the quadrocopter on the floor and flipped a tiny switch on the fuselage. Light beamed from the base of each rotor, casting bright red circles on the slate-gray carpet.

  “The quad’s using lasers to get her bearings,” he said. One by one, the lights turned from red to green. “So, older pilots, other folks who aren’t into apps, it can take those people a week to get the feel for fly-by-phone. But my five-year-old niece, because she plays an app called Doodlebug, like most of her friends from kindergarten, she just took one look at this . . .”

  He showed Fisk and Chay the face of his phone, which displayed the drone’s view of the carpet with the now-green dots. To the side of the footage were sliders for UP/DOWN and LEFT/RIGHT and a steering-wheel icon.

  “. . . And she could fly this quadrocopter without a hitch.”

  He tapped the wheel, setting the rotors into motion accompanied by shrieks like that of a hand vac, then dragged the up/down slider upward with his thumb, causing the drone to take flight. He released the slider, halfway up, leaving the quadrocopter in a hover seven feet from the floor.

  “The quad’s got an accelerometer, so it does what my body does.” Peavy raised his voice to compete with the blenderlike rotors. He spun around, turned the phone end over end, and then stood still. Like Yona, this quadrocopter moved in sync with him, rotating and then somersaulting before returning to a hover. “It can literally turn on a dime, unlike a fixed-wing craft. And there’s no worries about going too slow and stalling. This system would be perfect for the sniper in your urban theater.” He tapped again at the controls and the drone floated to the carpet, landing smoothly, the rotors slowing to nothing. “The thing is, if it’s going to carry anything more than a popgun, you’re going to need a model with more oomph.”

  “Where do you get oomph?” asked Chay, her playfulness gone.

  Fisk saw that she too was now immersed in the hunt.

  “That kind of UAV is more of a specialty item, but nothing you can’t order on the Web and have at your house the next day—with free shipping—for six, seven hundred bucks,” Peavy said. “There’s a model called the Specter that Domino’s has been using to deliver pizzas. A pizza weighs about three and a half pounds including the pizza box. So let’s say the Specter’s max payload is four pounds. I’ve never heard of anyone weaponizing a quad, but if you did, low recoil would be the key if you want to be able to get off a second shot, let alone stay in the air. As long as your range is sub–three hundred yards, you could start with, say, a basic low-end Bushmaster—the Superlight Carbon weighs five and a half pounds. If you take off the Bushmaster’s furniture—the grip, the stock, the rail system—and then replace its barrel with a ten-and-a-half-inch pencil barrel, you could get it down to three and a half pounds. Hell, a little custom work and you could just as easily send up an AR.”

  Chay swallowed a gasp. “An AR-15?” she asked as if merely curious.

  “Sure. Or something that shoots a five-point-seven-mil cartridge would still have enough bite. Heckler & Koch’s MP7 would do it for you.”

  Fisk said, “If you’re on the ground, how would you get the AR-15 to fire?”

  “That’s nothing,” Peavy said. “There are a dozen apps, like Ultimate Sniper, that sync the ballistics calculator on your gunsight to any cell phone. The app lets you correct for prevailing wind direction and speed, temperature, humidity, air pressure, all that. You could get a kit from any RadioShack or hobby store to build a little actuator to adjust the barrel and to pull the trigger.”

  Fisk was unnerved by the ease with which Yodeler—or anyone—could acquire such a system. This was what he had come here to find out, though. Rising to go, he said, “Now we know what to look for.”

  Chay remained seated. “I have one more question.” She turned to Peavy. “If a sniper were using a quadrocopter with an AR-15, what sort of countermeasures could you employ?” She always asked open-ended questions, Fisk had noticed, the sort that netted insights and additional information, and she had a chess player’s talent for thinking several moves ahead.

  Peavy thought for a few seconds before answering. “You’d best take him out first.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Evans spent several minutes getting his laptop computer connected properly, projecting Yodeler’s new e-mail on the screen in the smallest of the three NYPD Intel conference rooms. Never mind, Fisk thought, that the message could be read just fine on the phones of everyone present—Evans, himself, Weir, Dubin, and Chay. Or that they all had already read it.

  “Okay, here goes nothing,” Evans said. With a flourish, he double-clicked the track pad, projecting the decrypted Hushmail.

  HELLO DETECTIVE FISK:

  DO YOU TAKE ME FOR AN IMBECILE, WITH THE ENTRY-LEVEL STALL TACTICS? EACH DAY MR. VERLYN REMAINS IN CAPTIVITY SHALL MEAN ANOTHER SACRIFICE.

  YODELER

  Weir said, “Good thing we haven’t pissed him off.”

  Which was a version of I told you so, thought Fisk. “It’s fine. He’s engaged. It’s not like he was good-natured before.”

  Only Dubin laughed, the way chagrined parents convey to a guest that their child had been trying to be amusing.

  “So why are we here?” Fisk asked.

  Dubin had convened the meeting, hoping to, as he put it, “help.”

  “Primarily, we want to discuss our response to Yodeler,” said Evans.

  “Naturally,” Dubin said.

  Fisk could have easily written Yodeler back from the sidewalk outside Flying Robots, LLC, where he’d first read the e-mail. But he was obligated to first get input from Weir and Evans. And he still needed them. He admitted, “The dialogue with Yodeler isn’t working—”

  Weir cut in. “You think?”

  Fisk ignored the barb, continuing, “Isn’t working if you presumed his response was going to be surrender and a plea for forgiveness. Maybe Yodeler breached his tradecraft to write while full of piss and vinegar, using all caps. If not, the goal is still to buy time. So what we might do is tell him that the U.S. attorney may be amenable to adjusting Verlyn’s terms of custody, say, to house arrest—or maybe, ‘home confinement with travel restrictions,’ because that sounds better.”

  Weir looked to Dubin. “Have you been in contact with the U.S. attorney?” By which he meant, What the hell are you doing talking to the U.S. attorney behind our backs?

  Dubin smiled Fisk’s way. Not really an expression of pleasure or amusement, Fisk knew. “No, wouldn’t talk to him without you.”

  Fisk said to Weir, “But he may be
amenable. Worst case, it takes Yodeler an hour to get a new burner phone and go to Penn Station or wherever he goes to read the message, and it takes him the same amount of time or more to compose and send a response. That’s time he’s not working on sacrifices.”

  He was surprised to see Chay nodding her accord. One of the things he’d learned at the Farm—the CIA-run field-officer training base just outside of Williamsburg, Virginia—was that a mere nod of corroboration by a second party almost always causes the target’s trust-governing synapse to fire. And approval from a woman is almost twice as effective on the Weirs and Evanses of the world, which is to say: men.

  Indeed Evans appeared impressed. He looked to Weir. “Flagpole?”

  “As long as we red-team it,” Weir said, in turn looking to Dubin, probably because he sensed that Fisk would try to spike the red team. In which case Weir was right. In red-team sessions, the Bureau brought together an assortment of agents and analysts and specialists and tried to see things from the adversary’s perspective. While that could be valuable, Fisk thought, in this context, “red team” was a euphemism for more sitting around pontificating.

  “Can’t hurt,” Dubin said. Which was more politics. Or maybe too many years out of the field had softened him.

  “Great,” Fisk said. He meant it too. The red team would convene in the SCIF at the JTTF, meaning Chay would be excluded. He would claim something came up, precluding his attendance. And something would definitely come up. Unencumbered by meetings and his shadow, he might just get some work done tonight.

  The Cartel ought to make a donation to the Online Foundation to Support Whistle-Blowers, thought Blackwell.

  Last week, he’d been able to find the Drug Enforcement Agency’s mole hiding in a safe house in Miami thanks to a leaked law-enforcement-expenditure form listing the dummy corporation the DEA had used on a previous sting operation in Key Biscayne, a cigarette-boat dealership. The same dummy corporation paid the utilities bill at the safe house.