by Dick Wolf
At last he entered the MetLife skyscraper, which had gained iconic status on account of the hawks who nested in the letters spelling out the company’s name just below the roof. He timed his entrance so that he would cross paths with the commuters arriving on the 8:04 express train from Stamford, Connecticut.
Anyone else plunging into that tide would have to be a tail.
There was no one else.
At the passageway’s midpoint, he ducked into a Citibank, joining a moderate line—a dozen or so people—waiting for the ATMs. A portly man waddled into line behind him, reading a Wall Street Journal folded into thirds the way the practiced train commuters did.
He said to Lin, “How ya doing, fellow Mets fan?”
“Happy because of last night’s game against the Orioles,” Lin said. The Baltimore Orioles played in a different league; the Mets weren’t facing them this season.
The guy groused, “I missed the seven nineteen from Stamford, had to take the seven thirty-seven.” This told Lin that the North American division chief would be in the Grand Hyatt in room 1937.
“Then you’re due for some good luck,” Lin said in acknowledgment.
The Grand Hyatt was three blocks away, two if you cut through Grand Central station. It took Lin forty-five minutes to get through the station, and another ten minutes at Modell’s Sporting Goods, just across Vanderbilt Avenue, to buy and change into a Nike tracksuit.
He exited Modell’s, turned east onto Forty-Second Street, and walked a block, passing the entrance to the Grand Hyatt before doubling back, satisfied that he hadn’t been tailed, and pushing through the door to the hotel. In the palatial, contemporary lobby, he took a tour of the men’s room for good measure, then rode the elevator to the nineteenth floor.
Meeting Dr. Jun was surprisingly anticlimactic. After Lin knocked on the door to room 1937 four times (people almost always knock three times), he found himself face-to-face with a woman who reminded him of his grandmother, licking at lips likely dehydrated from the long plane ride. Her eyes were puffy, as if from sleep (so much for the rumors that she never rested). She appeared uncomfortable in the Western business suit; at home she always wore an army uniform. She offered nothing in the way of small talk or even a greeting, telling him, “Sit.” She waved at the bench meant for suitcases by the foot of the bed.
He followed her instruction while she dropped onto the bed, her back against the headboard, oblivious to the fact she was displaying the entirety of her bony thighs—unless she was doing it intentionally, to unsettle him. In which case she was succeeding. He tried to focus on her gray eyes.
“What made you think the flash drive had the documents?” she asked.
“It was a mistake,” he said, with remorse, which, rumor had it, she liked. “In hindsight.”
She cackled. “Is it a matter of hindsight? How is it that you failed to consider that a flash drive the reporter bought when she was a student at Georgetown University, back when such drives had storage capacity for only a hundred such documents, would not be used to store the hundreds of thousands of NSA documents?”
Don’t dig yourself in deeper, he told himself. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Hoyas was a clue I overlooked.”
“After all of your spook games, you really aren’t any closer to knowing where she has them, other than not on her computer or tiny flash drive, correct?”
It dawned on him that the scolding was a good sign. She wouldn’t waste the time to do it if she planned to have him zapped.
He said, “I am afraid that, yes, that is an accurate assessment, ma’am.”
“What other intelligence service, including the one from whom the documents were stolen, would not want them?”
Play her game, he exhorted himself. “I can’t think of any, ma’am.”
“We’ve picked up chatter suggesting that at least six other services have covert operations under way targeting the Verlyn cache. Fortunately no one has succeeded yet—or at least the Pakistanis have done a good job pretending to have blundered as badly as you have. The Israelis sent a columnist from a tabloid we know to be a Mossad front. She offered the New York Times director of security, Ed Norman, one million dollars for the files, a hundred thousand up front, another nine hundred if and when he came through. Norman didn’t collect the nine hundred. Why the Israelis didn’t just ask Ms. Chay Maryland, I have no idea. Do you?”
“She seems to have no interest in material things. She’s willing to go to prison for a year and a half to keep the secret.”
“I didn’t say make her an offer. I said ask.”
Was this a test? If so, she liked to be smarter than anyone else. “I wish I could follow you, ma’am,” he said.
“This is what you will do. This is what you should have done from the beginning. You will bring her to the safe house on Mott Street and ask—interrogate her if you must. Do whatever is required in order to ascertain the whereabouts of the documents. Once you have the documents—I should say, when we have verified that you have them, and when you are given the go-ahead—you will put her in a taxi that will have an unfortunate accident. Do you understand?”
It was a good plan, Lin admitted. He nodded and stood to depart.
CHAPTER 18
Fisk had spent most of the night looking for leads and striking out, which, he thought, described the vast majority of his time at work. And in his personal life too, since his eventual return to the playing field after Krina’s death—but that was another story. Sure, every second on the case was fraught with tension, but Fisk wasn’t complaining. If anything, the strikeouts made the hits that much more rewarding. What he should have done from the start, he realized, was call the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
The NGA was based in Springfield, Virginia, in a 2.3-million-square-foot building that resembled a sleek modern ocean liner, the atrium alone big enough to fit the Statue of Liberty. The agency’s sixteen thousand employees put a $5 billion annual budget toward the production of stunningly sophisticated logistical data in support of national security. Perhaps the best example of its product came in 2011’s Operation Neptune Spear, the U.S. raid of Osama bin Laden’s secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The agency used satellite imagery to generate three-dimensional renderings of the compound, and to create freakishly accurate empirical and algorithmic-prediction-based schedules of the local pedestrian and vehicular traffic in the vicinity. The reconnaissance systems also determined the gender, height, and weight of each of bin Laden’s housemates.
In New York, the agency occupied a twenty-eighth-floor office in the World Financial Center, a suite so small and unassuming that other tenants probably concluded that the NGA on the frosted-glass door stood for the names of the principals of a boutique accounting or actuarial firm. If that weren’t enough, the lone professional at the NGA’s New York office, Roy Plummer, more closely resembled an accountant than he did a spy. He wore thick-lensed glasses, his stoop belonged to a man of twice his thirty-one years, and he had a pallor attributable to too much time spent beneath the office’s fluorescent lights. He came off as quiet too, shy to the point of diffident, and withdrawn. But that was only because he had a lot on his mind, as Fisk had come to appreciate.
“Other than a coffee machine, all an intel agency really needs these days is one decent computer,” Plummer explained, tapping the tinted glass top of the square conference table around which he, Chay, and Fisk now sat. Fisk knew from previous visits that the tabletop doubled as a computer monitor. “This system represents the digitization of what ten years ago was the combined product of seven different National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency divisions working together. Each division had its own large-format printer. Each would generate a huge printout and then run it into one central room and pushpin it to the bulletin board. The bulletin board would be the agency’s product. Now, this”—he tapped the glass—“has taken the place of the bulletin board.”
The room lights dimmed, revealing a luminous touch-sensitive keyboard
on the glass in front of him. From tiny nozzles at each of the table’s four corners rose a whitish vapor, which blended with vapor emitted by a parallel quartet of nozzles on the ceiling. The result was a pale green glowing box the size of a cube refrigerator. On its base, the surface of the table, appeared a two-dimensional map of the section of Central Park where Harun Ahmed had been killed, Fisk figured.
“A Greek named Anaximander invented this in the sixth century BC,” Plummer said to Chay.
Her eyes widened with incredulity. “The vapor screen?”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘vapor screen,’” the NGA man said with a vaudevillian display of confusion. “Jeremy, you know what she’s talking about?”
Fisk made a mental note to buy Plummer a steak dinner. He turned to Chay and said, “If we’re going to make any progress here, you need to assure us that if the topic of three-dimension vapor projection technology comes up after you leave here today, you won’t disclose your knowledge of its existence.”
She hesitated. “Okay?”
“Good,” said Plummer. “Actually, I meant that Anaximander invented the sort of two-dimensional map that you currently see on the tabletop. This one represents the two-thousand-square foot area of Central Park where the first victim was killed sometime between two and two thirty in the afternoon.” He tapped at his touch-sensitive keyboard. “Now we’ll add a dimension with the help of a proprietary Innovision aeronautical app called PHAERO that aggregates available data from that time period captured by eyes in the sky—satellites and other reconnaissance platforms, including unmanned aerial vehicles, like the RQ-4 Global Hawk drone, and manned systems, like the U-2 spy plane, which has been in service since 1955.” The map transformed from a drawing to a color photograph, springing into three dimensions, with 3-D images including a female jogger, a blue sky with wispy clouds, and, hovering above one of the trees, a disk-shaped white blur.
“The bulk of this imagery was snapped by the IKONOS satellite while it was on a routine overpass of the city at 2:09:20 P.M.,” Plummer said.
Fisk pointed to the round blur. Chay beat him to asking, “What is that?”
Plummer aimed a stylus at it. The beam of red light cast by the stylus’s tip transformed into a cursor arrow inside the vapor cube. With it, Plummer drew a circle around the blur, enlarging the white disk. As it expanded, its edges grew rounder and the color sharpened to a Day-Glo yellow.
“A Frisbee,” Chay realized aloud.
“We’re hoping to find a weaponized drone,” Fisk said.
“Not to worry, folks, we’re barely into the first inning,” said the NGA man. “Next, one by one, I’ll add any available imagery from the GeoEye satellite, which was also in the neighborhood at the time, along with any data we can get from the seventy-two satellites in Motorola’s Iridium consortium. Also I’ll mix in a couple of our own satellites.”
He hit a few keys and the three-dimensional imagery grew better defined, with richer hues. A three-dimensional image of a man’s body materialized, lying still on the running path. In contrast, two female joggers running around the reservoir were actually moving. The trees too came to life, with branches swaying in the wind. A horse lumbered around the loop, towing a hansom cab containing the driver and what appeared to be a family of four tourists, three of them apparently using their phones to record the ride.
“What you’re looking at now is a photograph that was taken by one of the Iridium birds at 2:30:44,” Plummer said. “The animation is generated by EQUIS, our Enhanced Quality Image Search. They might in reality be Olympic marathoners, but EQUIS is just rendering their motions based on averages of female joggers of their sizes.”
Chay pointed at the man lying still on the running path. “That’s the victim, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Plummer brought up a window full of numbers. “His thermal metrics are the same as the other people in the vicinity. He may have been dead a matter of seconds before the satellite passed over, or he may still be alive here—it’s impossible to know from this data alone. As for a UAV, it could have come into this part of the park during the twenty-one-minute gap between the satellite pics we have.”
“What about other kinds of images?” Fisk asked.
With a nod, Plummer returned to the keyboard. “That brings us to the second inning, incorporating data from surface cameras.” The picture sharpened again, but only slightly. “As you can see, there’s almost no surface data from that time frame.”
Fisk had expected as much. “So far the drone—or whoever or whatever it is—has been no-hitting the Department’s cameras.”
Plummer asked, “Were your camera locations part of the Verlyn leak?”
By way of reply, Fisk turned to Chay. With less conviction than usual, she said, “Not that I know of.”
“It’s spilled milk now,” Fisk said. He turned to Plummer. “What about radar?”
“Radar is in our toolbox.” Plummer went into a pianist act on his keyboard. “For Central Park, we have an amazing array of radar systems on account of the proximity of JFK and LaGuardia as well as Newark—Terminal Radar captures every plane within fifty nautical miles of a control tower.”
The upper levels of the vapor cube began to fill with objects. Fisk recognized the form of a commercial passenger jet. “Any micro UAVs by any chance?”
“The Coast Guard’s radar can give us a flying object as small as a baseball within a hundred miles of any coastline, and of course Central Park is less than a mile.” Plummer keyed in smaller objects, rendered in all of the primary colors, which proliferated in the projected sky.
“What are these?” Chay said.
“Could be birds, or kites, or baseballs, or tossed bridal bouquets, drones,” Plummer said. “Resolution and classification of small objects is extremely difficult, particularly if they’re flying at low speeds. Micro UAVs, like a quadrocopter, average about eleven miles per hour—Little League pitchers throw a ball five times that fast. Add in the clutter of trees and buildings, it’s almost impossible to tell anything about smaller objects. What I can do, though, is eliminate anything with a radar cross section bigger than an ultralight airplane and ask EQUIS to use empirical-data-based algorithms to fill in the blanks for us.” Two clicks and most of the sky clutter vanished. “As you can see distinctly, now there are birds. There’s a kite. Looks like some poor kid lost a balloon over here.”
“But no drone?” Chay asked.
“Not yet,” said Plummer. “We can enhance the photo by using even more tools. Here’s some radio signal data recorded by the FAA, here’s NORAD, here’s J-STAR, and good old AWACS. Now EQUIS will attach icons based on its best guess as to which system provided the data . . .”
Icons of cell phones popped up above each of the pedestrians. Above one of the treetops, a small black airplane icon materialized. Fisk sat bolt upright, as did Chay. Plummer followed their stares, using his stylus to outline and enlarge the icon.
“It’s just a little radio-controlled plane,” he said. “A toy. Probably too small to haul a ballpoint pen, let alone any kind of gun. But it’s possible that an algorithm-based system like this wouldn’t differentiate a weaponized UAV from an RC plane because we haven’t written UAV parameters for it yet. Frankly, this is the first time I’ve heard of anyone wanting imagery of a UAV outside of war theaters, and most of the military UAVs are way bigger than an ultralight airplane. If LaGuardia’s ground control or the Coast Guard or Homeland were concerned about a blip like that on their screens, they would basically zoom in and find out what it was in real time—or they would send up an F-16 to investigate. Probably the NGA system needs a tweak.”
“What about this tourist family here?” Chay pointed to the hansom cab on the loop. “It looks like they’re taking pictures or videos. Is there any way to access what they captured?”
Plummer gestured to Fisk to take the floor. “Once we get warrants, figure out who their carriers are, send the carriers NSLs and get the data back,” Fisk sai
d, “it’s possible. In the meantime, our options are down to what Anaximander had: we need to find a human eye witness.”
“We can still build imagery from the other crime scenes,” Plummer said.
Fisk had hoped so. Hoping now to increase Chay’s appreciation for the surveillance technology, he said, “Your choice, need to choose between canvassing the city on foot and sitting here in the a/c watching more videos.”
She flashed a smile, revealing a well of mirth beneath her hardened exterior.
Plummer went back into his pianist act, fading the Central Park scene to the vapor’s chalky-white default, then refilling it with a two-dimensional map of 435 West Seventeenth Street, victim Tameka Ann Crowley’s apartment building.
The image rose into three dimensions, morphing from drawing to photograph, then became animated, with pedestrians wandering along the sidewalks, a few trees swaying in a light breeze, and a trio of yellow cabs and a UPS delivery truck rumbling westward between Ninth Avenue and Tenth.
Again, all manner of flying objects filled the sky, until Plummer filtered out small birds and large aircraft, leaving just one object over West Seventeenth Street.
Seen from above, the object had the general shape of two rows of conjoined circles. Drawing a red loop around it, Plummer said, “EQUIS must be confused. It’s saying that this is a McDonnell Douglas MD-88, but that’s a commercial jet with a hundred-and-three-foot wingspan.”
“Could it be as simple as that it looks like the number eighty-eight?” Fisk asked.
“It’s a quadrocopter,” Chay exclaimed.
“That’s it,” Fisk said. If it weren’t just the three of them in a small, quiet room, he would have cheered.
Plummer opened an Internet Explorer window on the tabletop and scrolled through images of UAVs. “Evidently the eighty-eight shape is a foam safety hull that protects the fuselage and extends into a ring around each of the four rotors,” he said. “Without it, if the rotor blades were to brush against a streetlamp or some other hard object, the quadrocopter could experience catastrophic failure.”