The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  Locating Fisk was even easier, thanks to the leaks of his Social Security number, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name. There wasn’t much about the detective that wasn’t available online now. While still in Miami, Blackwell was able to hack Fisk’s Diner’s Club credit-card account, and found the purchase of a prepaid cell phone prior to the card’s suspension following a suspicious purchase of a $2,200 Les Paul electric guitar. He then tracked the prepaid phone to Hell’s Kitchen thanks to one of the myriad mobile locator services available online (you have to pay $4.95 per locate with the purchase of a $19.95 monthly plan—and you have to check the box promising that you weren’t using the service in conjunction with any illegal activities). Last night, during a couple of McDonald’s stops on the drive up from Miami, he determined that Fisk had been crashing in an industrial building in Hell’s Kitchen, the Manhattan epicenter of hostels, illegal residences in commercially zoned buildings, and other cheap crash pads. A quick bit of Internet digging said that the developer who owned Fisk’s building owned nine others in Hell’s Kitchen.

  It was a sound investment strategy, Blackwell thought. You buy a run-down factory or warehouse cheap and with zero down payment thanks to various urban economic development programs, then you spend next to nothing running it thanks to Con Ed’s Project Appleseed. Meanwhile you collect 100K in rent each month under the table. And five, ten years down the road, when you have to make good on your urban development commitment and renovate the building, you’ve got the cash several times over. And after you renovate, you sell the place for millions, all of which is profit. His mistress’s statuary benefited from a similar deal from the city of Chicago. Decaying buildings are fine for casting plaster statues and lawn art, desirable even, because a place where you do that sort of work is going to get trashed no matter what. Blackwell hadn’t thought of it as an investment initially, but rather a place to launder money. But now he was making a handsome profit there because other than cheap labor and even cheaper plaster, the business had virtually no expenses. Plus he’d gotten Franciszka out of the deal—although that was in jeopardy on account of the broken jaw, the second time it had happened. She’d been in his face again the night before he left for Miami. Of course he couldn’t give her any details about his trip, for her own good, but she wouldn’t shut up. The weird thing was, he’d barely hit her this time.

  He parallel-parked his rented Toyota Something-or-Other, a piece of shit. In real life, he alternated between a Porsche Cayman and a 1955 Mercedes-Benz CLS, the one with the gull-wing doors. On the job, though, the goal always was to blend in. It was also a goal of his to surveil the hell out his marks before striking, for a week or more, to learn their schedules, their routes, their susceptibilities. Like so many other guys, the DEA mole had had a weakness for the fairer sex. All it had taken to get him out of the safe house and to the kill room was a scrawny chick from a low-rent escort service willing to pose as a tourist staying nearby. Plus Blackwell had given her an extra fifty bucks.

  Fisk would be cagier. Of that Blackwell was sure. With thirty-five dollars sent via PayPal to a Park Avenue messenger service, Blackwell had already learned that Fisk hadn’t stayed at the Sutton Place apartment since the bungled hit. The Diner’s Club statement showed that the detective had spent a night at a private club in midtown that provided hotel rooms to members and guests, then a couple of nights at a Hampton Inn. And after that, he went black, no doubt worried that someone like Blackwell would show up to finish what the Mexicans had started at Sutton Place. Procuring a burner phone using a traceable method of payment had been Fisk’s one mistake. Pros like him make mistakes, but not often. If he were to realize this one, he would move again, in which case it might be weeks before Blackwell tracked him down again, so success tonight was critical.

  It was almost midnight. There were still enough people wandering the streets that Blackwell wouldn’t stand out in any way—he was fairly average in appearance, and forgettable by design. He had time for a quick scout of the place Fisk was staying in, a dilapidated World War I–era building, originally a factory of some sort, like so many of the buildings around here.

  Getting into this one through the front door required a sturdy numeric lock. Windows were a possibility, though he could count on window alarms on the first three floors, probably the roof too. Blackwell might also talk his way in, or, if that failed, let Smith & Wesson do the talking for him. The problem with any of these entries was that once he was inside, he would know nothing of the layout, other than, thanks to the mobile location service, that Fisk was on the third floor, facing east, near the uptown corner. Fisk would then have a hell of a home field advantage. But the location was also Fisk’s susceptibility. The guy was a pro, but he was on the run, which means off balance, easier to take down.

  The industrial building had massive windows, ten feet high, lots of them, dating to a time when the sun was the best means of lighting a room. Anyone staying in a place like this would want curtains or blinds, even if they weren’t worried about someone popping them through the window. Otherwise they were guaranteed to be woken at sunup each and every day. Looking up now, Blackwell ascertained that Fisk hadn’t installed blinds yet, though he’d improvised, affixing a sleeping bag to the steel window gate.

  If ever a job called for popping a scope on your rifle and taking a shot, Blackwell thought, this was it.

  He returned to the shit Toyota, opened the trunk, and took out a racquet bag, which contained a Mark 14 Mod 0 rifle with a collapsible stock that he’d brought on the trip for this sort of contingency. He proceeded to the building one down from Fisk’s, a forgettable, pollution-browned, yellow-brick tenement. Residential, fortunately. Getting in required hitting enough buttons on the front intercom panel—three—until a resident bent on sleeping decided anything was better than hearing more of that damned buzzer.

  Blackwell entered a worn lobby consisting of a narrow corridor leading to the stairs. On one side was a row of mailboxes, all of them locked except for 3W’s, which was missing its hatch—but not the sticker advising the mailman of the previous resident’s forwarding address.

  The assassin climbed the stairs and rang 3W’s bell just in case. No answer. He slipped on a pair of cotton gloves and quietly went to work on the lock with a torsion wrench and a feeler prong. Sometimes this took five minutes. Sometimes it didn’t work at all. This time he heard the faint snap of the bolt leaving the doorframe in about forty-five seconds.

  The apartment was hot and smelled of dust. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Nowhere better for that than Manhattan, with all the street light. It took five seconds. As expected, the place was vacant but for a few chairs and a bookcase that must not have been worth the effort of transporting anywhere.

  The lone bedroom had a chair missing one arm and a radiator. This was all Blackwell would need. He approached the window from the side, peering out, and, through an alley full of misty streetlight, found Fisk’s crash pad. The light inside formed a halo around the sleeping bag.

  Blackwell popped the rifle together and set it onto his bipod, positioned on the radiator cover. The shot ought to be a lay-up, he thought. No obstructions save the sleeping bag. Through the ample, exposed windowpane to either side of the sleeping bag, he could see his target, sitting alone in a beanbag chair, watching TV and picking at a guitar.

  Blackwell cracked the window in the borrowed apartment. Then, dropping to a kneel in front of the radiator, he positioned the barrel. Shooting at a downward angle complicated matters far more than people thought: gravity could severely mess with a shot traveling three thousand feet per second. But not from this distance. The hardest part would be pulling the trigger. He leaned into the stock’s cheek piece and squinted against the scope, still warm from the trunk, giving off a slight whiff of exhaust. He found the back of Fisk’s head centered almost exactly within the crosshairs.

  Rather than draw attention with the laser range finder, Blackwell used the mil dot reticle in the s
cope to find the range—a mere sixty-one feet. He zeroed the scope, took a deep breath, and let the air out in small increments, the idea being to hold his lungs empty at the moment of the shot.

  Finally he focused on Fisk, whose minimal motion took him in and out of the crosshairs. Anticipating the target’s behavior is integral to a precise shot, Blackwell knew, and took it into account.

  He readied his index finger by the trigger—he would squeeze straight back with the ball of the finger to avoid jerking the gun sideways. To minimize barrel motion, he would fire between his heartbeats.

  As usual, a calm enveloped him. It’s a one-of-a-kind rush, to have this power over another person’s life, he thought, when he noted that Fisk’s hair was shaggier and darker than it had been in the photos. A disguise element? Also Fisk didn’t look quite as sturdy as usual. And his sharp features were softer, beyond the powers of a disguise kit.

  Because Fisk hadn’t made a mistake. Wouldn’t have, in hindsight. Blackwell cursed himself for failing to figure it out from the moment he saw the guitar. This guy at the other end of the scope had purchased the guitar using the Diner’s Club card he’d lifted from Fisk—yeah, a shiny electric Les Paul. Shit.

  CHAPTER 17

  That same night Lin slept in the safe house in Chinatown. Or, rather, he tried to sleep.

  His service rented the little apartment in the name of Han Zhijun, a young woman who three years ago had been hit by a bus around the corner, on Canal Street, permanently disabling her. She was subsequently institutionalized in upstate New York. If you’re going to appropriate an identity, you can’t do much better than hers, particularly for use in smuggling female agents in or out of the United States: Han Zhijun wasn’t going anywhere. She wouldn’t notice.

  Lin decided to spend the night here because Chinatown was one of the best places in the world to detect surveillance, and come dawn, he would need to run the SDR—surveillance detection route—of his life. He also loved this place. Not because it was comfortable or luxurious. The furnishings were sparse and old, the carpets threadbare. Typical safe house, in other words. And it smelled strongly of the salted fish drying in the sun on the neighboring rooftops—typical Chinatown. What’s more, the bed in the single bedroom was large, but worn to concavity, probably before Lin’s service acquired it, probably left out for trash collection.

  Nevertheless Lin jumped at opportunities to stay here because of the respite from his cover. Although he had his own spacious apartment near the university, on 118th and Riverside—and it was quite well-appointed thanks to a fellowship his cover story had won him—he was on guard there. Eternally, it seemed. He had to play the role of Ji-Hsuan Lee, the country-bumpkin-turned-computer-prodigy, always, even when he slept—wearing earplugs because the din of the city kept the “country boy” awake. Even when there was no conceivable reason that anyone could be watching him, he had to operate as if they were. With its external cameras and myriad other countersurveillance measures, the safe house allowed him to breathe freely.

  But not tonight.

  Lin couldn’t sleep in spite of a deep well of self-relaxation techniques. No matter which way he lay or turned, he soon felt an urge to roll over.

  The North American Division chief was unhappy; that was putting it mildly. Chay Maryland’s personal computer had proven worthless from an intelligence standpoint, and the Hoyas flash drive worse than worthless: in a rush to get another one to swap for it, the agency had decided on a course of action beginning with sending a diplomat from the embassy in Washington to Georgetown University’s bookstore to buy a drive, then getting the woman on a plane—a private plane—to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to deliver it. Once swapped, Chay’s drive had yielded documents that Lin’s people initially suspected were from Verlyn, disguised using sophisticated steganographic techniques: the drive purported to contain only a personal diary that the reporter had kept since she was a girl, begun using a now-defunct software known as MacWrite. After the cryptologists and computers at HQs were flummoxed, the service reached the conclusion that the drive was what it appeared to be, Chay’s means of safekeeping her diary. And although an exhaustive chronicle, nowhere did it mention the Verlyn documents.

  The window for obtaining the documents was now closing, said Lin’s division chief, who didn’t trust the usual electronic commo for planning the next step. Or maybe that was just cover, Lin thought now, lest he run for fear they would erase him tomorrow.

  No wonder he kept finding himself staring at the water stains on the ceiling, so dark that they were obvious even with the lights out. Of course the lights from the neon-happy Mott Street could get past any blind, let alone this tattered one. He drew the drapes, plunging the room into blackness. Then got back into bed.

  And still didn’t sleep.

  A while later, he struck upon the idea of the bottle of antianxialitics he kept on hand, in the medicine cabinet, to quell the occasional agent’s panic. The recommended dose was one tablet. He took three.

  He awoke in the morning, as usual, just seconds before the alarm sounded, and astonishingly refreshed. He showered, got into his business suit, and sprayed the same stuff into his hair as did the other Asian yuppies who lived on this stretch of Mott, along with whom he would commute to work, or so it would appear.

  All of its one-way streets, pedestrian alleys, and subway stations made Chinatown the foremost SDR zone in the city. Your surveillant has little choice but to fall in step behind you here, Lin reminded himself as he slid on a pair of eyeglasses with “rearview mirrors”—strips of mirrored film adhered to the inside of the lenses in order to give him a look at who or what was behind him. And if your tail is white, he’s that much easier to see among all the Chinese.

  Shoving open the heavy steel-cage-encased lobby door, Lin stepped out of the onetime tenement house. A sharp dawn highlighted the hundreds of pieces of litter, another category in which Chinatown had no rivals in the city. Everything was still, as quiet as it got downtown, just the whir of fans and the rumble of early traffic coming in from Long Island and New Jersey.

  Mott Street remained asleep save for a couple of taxis and one of the city sanitation trucks that never seemed to make more than a dent in the mounds of black bags on the sidewalks here. A watcher would have stood out against the contiguous garish-colored façades. Lin didn’t put it past the FBI to use surveillance UAVs, though, like the $200,000 Black Hornet Micro, essentially a high-performance stealth helicopter reduced to the size of a moth. The slats on the decorative safe-house window shutters concealed sensors that could detect radio transmission in the range such electronic surveillance systems would conceivably use—900 MHz to 2.52 GHz. Lin’s phone (a five-thousand-dollar knockoff of the CIA Birdbook devices that couldn’t be tracked) remained silent, meaning the sensors had detected no threats.

  As he turned west onto Canal, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. The McDonald’s was busy. Always was. The salty aroma of the hash browns enveloped him, and made his mouth water. He proceeded to the 1 train. In search of a tail he hoped he would fail to find, he would take several subway rides, and walk at least a mile in the train tunnels, and several miles on the sidewalks. Along the way he planned to shop for clothing—he would go into a tourist boutique in Penn Station and leave in a new outfit, through the back exit.

  Like a commuter, he hurried down the stairwell, then into the subway station via a humid tunnel with smog-grayed white-tile walls that amplified the sound of his steps, his breaths, and, it seemed, his accelerated heartbeat.

  He was alone other than the sanitation worker using a mop to move the filth around the turnstiles, an old man with gaps in his teeth that defied the abilities of the FBI’s Costume Department. Even so, Lin might have maintained his circumspection, but he’d seen the guy here before often enough to establish his authenticity.

  Two more men entered the tunnel at its midpoint and followed him toward the platform, both Asian American yuppies, both of them glancing at their phones while t
hey walked.

  FBI agents? Why chance it?

  At the end of the tunnel, Lin turned onto a near-empty platform just as an uptown-bound 1 train shrieked into the station. No one got off. Using the rearview mirrors, he watched the two yuppies diverge, boarding cars of their own and, seemingly, entering worlds of their own.

  Lin darted into the lead car, boarding just before the doors banged shut, meaning anyone following him would be obvious. He saw no one. The lights flickered as the train launched into a tunnel lit red by traffic signals that the conductor disregarded. Among the dozen other passengers were suits—bankers and lawyers who would take the 7 or the Times Square Shuttle over to Park Avenue.

  Lin etched each one into his memory. If he were to see one of them again this morning, he would abort the meeting. The exigency sharpened his senses.

  A few minutes later, the subway pulled into the Times Square station and the doors snapped open. He hesitated as long as he could before making his move. Finally stepping onto the platform, he regarded the mirrored film to find no one following him, no one muttering into a lapel mic, no one doing much of anything.

  He climbed up to the street, walking against traffic on Seventh Avenue, coming to a standstill suddenly midway up the crowded sidewalk between Forty-Second and Forty-Third Street and waving, as if to hail a cab. This was a timing stop, to see if anyone behind him halted or shifted behavior abruptly.

  Again, all clear.

  It was a ten-minute walk across Forty-Sixth Street to the tunnel through the MetLife Building that allowed for commuters to get to and from Grand Central. Zigzagging the midtown grid, turning randomly and making sure no one else was turning, Lin spent two and a half hours getting to the MetLife Building, changing along the way into a T-shirt with a New York Mets logo.