The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  “So what are the odds of him ever making it back to school?”

  “One in three,” the paramedic said matter-of-factly.

  “Tell me something: How do you treat that sort of wound?”

  “By ligation—you close off the artery with a ligature. For now, though, pretty much the same as with yours, you try and clot the blood—Warthog’s on it in the other meat wagon.” Driessen used the departmental nickname for the notoriously belligerent Eunice Wortheimer, a longtime ESU veteran and, prior to that, an Army triage nurse.

  Fisk pointed to his field dressing. “This comes off in five minutes?”

  “Give or take.”

  Fisk sat up and slid off the gurney. Though he landed gently on the floor, the hip felt like it had been speared. Which was an improvement.

  The paramedic stammered. “What are you doing?”

  “I’ll be back in five minutes, give or take,” he said.

  The young man who went by Ji-Hsuan Lin lay on a surprisingly comfortable gurney. I am Ji-Hsuan Lin, he told himself once more. It was important not just to play the role, but to be Ji-Hsuan Lin, now more than ever, with the painkillers putting him at risk of babbling. His training had pushed him as close as possible to the edge, but of course, in the back of his mind, he was always aware it was training.

  The issue was, you couldn’t train away susceptibility to narcosis. It was physiological roulette. Twenty-five percent of agents unwittingly blabbed under the influence of one drug or another. The moment when the painkiller kicked in had felt like the best moment of his life, although he knew better.

  Certainly the moment they’d found him on the tracks was better. He’d lost so much blood. The average man has five liters in him.

  Think like a Westerner, he exhorted himself. The average man has 1.5 gallons of blood in him. Lin weighed 140, so he had closer to 1.25 gallons. It looked like half that much had soaked into the pant leg the jowly nurse had scissored off.

  She now packed the wound with a bright yellow hemostat. “If the police had gotten there half a minute later, you’d be on your way to the medical examiner now,” she said. Her gruff voice matched her demeanor.

  “It’s just a flesh wound,” Lin said, mustering a chuckle.

  “It’s a good thing you’re brave, because—” She was interrupted by the creak of one of the rear doors swinging outward. “What the hell?”

  Lin thought he recognized the man, who appeared to fight back a wince as he hoisted himself into the van.

  The nurse growled. “Fisk, you can’t be in here. You know that!”

  “Didn’t you get my text?” he asked.

  “I don’t like texts, especially not when I’m treating a damned patient.”

  “I need to ask your damned patient a quick question.”

  “No chance in hell.” She folded her arms over her broad chest. “Get out now.”

  Fisk appeared to soften—changing tack, Lin guessed. The cop said, “Nurse Wortheimer, I shouldn’t be telling you this.” He paused, as if having thought better of it.

  “What?” she asked, taking the bait. Fool.

  “The charming Ivy Leaguer on the gurney here has already killed four New Yorkers, and preprogrammed one of his weaponized drones to assassinate Liang Huan Ding at the United Nations today. That’s the leader of the China Democratic League, the party in China that opposes the Communists. We want to stop that.”

  Lin knew the name Liang Huan Ding. Yes, an opposition party leader in China. But he’d died years ago!

  The nurse stabbed a thumb at Lin. “This is the drone killer?” she asked Fisk.

  “No, no, I have nothing to do with that,” Lin protested. “He is either trying to frame me, or he is crazy.”

  Fisk scoffed. “Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations . . . Your team must have gotten ahold of our spooks’ playbook.”

  Topping off the Celox, the nurse said to Lin, “Relax, I get it. Fisk is clever. He was just trying to play on my anti-Communist sympathies. But he wasn’t clever enough tonight. So now he has to the count of five to get the hell out of here or he’s going to be an ex-cop.” She stretched a large pressure pad over the wound. “One . . .”

  Taking a flying step across the truck, Fisk yanked open a metal-faced drawer beneath the supply cabinets and rifled through its contents, flinging aside syringes and medication in some sort of search.

  The nurse charged him. “Asshole,” she exclaimed, clamping her stovepipe arms around his back and trying to pull him away.

  He spun away from her, meanwhile winding his right arm back as if to throw a baseball, revealing the preloaded syringe in his hand.

  At the sight of it, she gasped. “You are crazy!”

  He lunged at her, apparently sticking the needle into her shoulder and hammering the plunger, at the same time pressing a palm over her mouth to muffle her screams. She kicked, and squirmed, but he was too strong. In seconds, her body went limp, and he shook her onto the floor to the foot of the gurney, out of Lin’s sight.

  “Ketamine,” Fisk said to Lin, casting aside the spent syringe. “She’ll be out for at least five minutes.” He rose, looming over the gurney. “If you want to last that long, tell me who you are.”

  Lin was stunned, and he suspected that it had nothing to do with his general drug-induced stupor. This Fisk deserved his hard-core reputation. But he was hardly the equal of the interrogators Lin had defied in the past. Lin had taken his country’s version of the American military and intelligence officers’ SERE—Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape—course, which would have driven the Westerners to look instead for work as schoolteachers. Eight or nine days he spent in the dark pen, maybe ten—it was hard to keep track of the exact passage of time. Broiling hot, no food, no water, he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Other than the stench, his only sensation was the click of tiny insects’ feet against the cement floor, walls, and the four-foot-high ceiling. And that was before the sixteen-hour interrogation, during which they’d broken the same leg Fisk clawed at now. Lin knew that all he had to do was hold out for five minutes—Fisk had made a mistake in telling him that.

  “Okay, I am a member of the Chinese diplomatic mission to the United—”

  “Bullshit,” Fisk cut in, at the same time firing a fist, and before Lin could react, sluggish as he was, knuckles smashed his upper lip into his front teeth, loosening one of them and filling his face with searing pain. Which was nothing compared to pain from the gunshot wound—the savage ripped away the compress. The pain traveled up and down Lin’s body like an electrical current.

  Finally blood bubbled up from the hemostat, now a reddish-purple putty. “Looks like the Celox isn’t going to work.”

  Lin bit the side of his mouth to counter the pain, then lowered his head as if defeated. “MSS,” he said. Ministry of State Security.

  “More bullshit!” Fisk thumped the wound.

  Blood jetted out of it. Every last cell in Lin’s body ached. A hot, acidic vomit flew up his esophagus and out of his mouth, spilling down his chin.

  “Our MSS person told one of our guys they’ve never heard of you,” Fisk said. “There are a thousand-something Ji-Hsuan Lins in China, but you’re not one of them.”

  Lin felt his body temperature dropping. Plummeting. His vision began to blur. His systems were failing. Death had entered the room, and it frightened him more than anything ever had, more than he’d imagined anything ever could. He doubted that he would be able to stall much longer. But he tried. “Of course they said that,” he said, each syllable sending a flare of pain into his skull. “I’m an NOC. Means you rot if you’re caught.”

  “I know what nonoperational cover means.” Glancing at his reflection on one of the mirrored supply-cabinet doors, Fisk rubbed the blood off the tip of his nose, then ran his fingers through his hair.

  Was he leaving now?

  Yes, the interrogators fractured Lin’s right fibula in a training session. They break one of everybody’
s bones. You know that going in. For which reason, Lin realized now, no training course could adequately simulate a life-or-death proposition. This was a real life-or-death proposition. He had believed he would die for the cause. He’d been wrong.

  Lin, whose real name was Ryang Yong, found himself saying, “Ryang Yong, DPRK,” and then admitting that he was an officer of the State Security Department—the North Korean spy agency.

  Flying a false flag as China?

  Yes, in order to get the Verlyn material.

  Why?

  It had not been his place to ask. But he speculated now: “Knowledge is power.”

  Then blackness devoured his consciousness.

  No sooner had the North Korean spy lapsed into unconsciousness than Fisk became aware of Nurse Wortheimer stirring on the floor behind him. As he turned around, she reached for the open cabinet door, evidently to support her weight as she tried to get up.

  Fisk bounded over. “Hell of an acting job, Eunice,” he said, helping her to her feet. “I thought I’d actually knocked you out.”

  Wortheimer laughed. “In your dreams, ace.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Manhattan Plastix on Canal Street sold a variety of plastic products—sheet rubber, foam, stair treads, hoses, tubing, and floor tiles—and did a side trade in random items including cell phones, televisions, laptop computers, textbooks, and infant formula.

  The single common denominator of these products, Blackwell suspected, was their provenance: they’d “fallen off the back of a truck.” As far as computers went, for him, stolen was the best kind because the user was that much harder to trace. Outside the store, while rummaging through a carton of high-grade Ray-Ban knockoffs among the quick cash sale items, he discussed a new Hewlett-Packard laptop with one of the proprietors’ nephews.

  Two minutes later, three hundred-dollar bills lighter and wearing a new pair of sunglasses in spite of the rain—they’d been a gift from the nephew—Blackwell walked away from the store with the new computer tucked under his arm. He turned uptown at a stretch of Sixth Avenue that he knew had a plethora of drugstores.

  In the smallest, oldest, and dingiest drugstore—chosen because it appeared the least likely to have any sort of cameras, he paid another hundred, in small bills this time, for a prepaid American Express card. Which would put him back in the business of tracking Fisk.

  A few blocks further up Sixth Avenue, he took his new purchases into the Jefferson Market Library, a nineteenth-century red-brick assembly of steeply sloped roofs, gables, and other Gothic bells and whistles; Blackwell liked it for the free wireless. Lucking into a carrel in the crowded reading room, he bought himself—or rather, Cameron Milner, whom he concocted on the spot—an eighty-nine-dollar-per-month membership to DataBanq, a private investigators’ resource that leveraged some thirty billion public data sources, including millions that were difficult to obtain otherwise, like voting records, bankruptcies, liens, and judgments. DataBanq also had thousands of proprietary databases, an aggregation of supposedly private social network information. But DataBanq’s special sauce was the data it shouldn’t have had.

  Log onto DataBanq and you’ll get the impression that it is a respectable organization, along the lines of the Legal Aid Society, dedicated to helping investigators solve cases. In fact, Blackwell knew, the company was a one-man shop, the one man being a forty-something ne’er-do-well who, practically overnight, turned his computer skill and the basement of his father’s Milwaukee office-supply store into a multimillion-dollar business. He paid top dollar for the data equivalent of items that had fallen off trucks—motor-vehicle records, personnel files, medical records, drug prescriptions, utility bills, credit-card statements, airline reservations. No ten sites put together were as useful. Blackwell would have happily paid $890. Or, in this case, tonight, ten grand.

  But—shit—DataBanq turned up nothing recent on Fisk, no record of recent financial transactions connected to his Social Security number, no expenditures, no withdrawals, no digital contact with friends or family members.

  Fugitives left more of a trail than this guy.

  Which left Blackwell back at square one, an old-school stakeout. Square zero, really. He knew Fisk was going to work; getting the proprietary address of NYPD Intel had been child’s play and he’d staked it out, not in person but with Koolcams—camcorders concealed in what appeared to be empty, discarded packs of cigarettes—placed early in the morning in braided steel city-street trash barrels so that they captured twelve hours of activity. Fisk hadn’t shown up in the footage. Probably he had a covert way in and out. For all intents and purposes, the guy was working in Fort Knox.

  In desperation, Blackwell entered Jeremy Fisk as a search term on Google, and a recent news article turned up, straightaway:

  WHY THE NEW YORK TIMES HELD THE DRONE KILLER STORY

  By Chay Maryland

  Published: July 1, 2015 16 Comments

  NEW YORK—Following the shooting death of retired schoolteacher Walter Doyle in Battery Park late Tuesday night, the New York Times came into evidence that the killer, going by the pseudonym Yodeler online, had employed a remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicle. The paper made an editorial decision to hold back the story so as not to compromise NYPD Intelligence leads on the case. As a measure of checks and balances, this reporter has since accompanied Detective Jeremy Fisk on the investigation.

  Blackwell stopped reading, sat back, and allowed himself to exhale. Finding Fisk, he thought, would now be as easy as finding the reporter.

  CHAPTER 31

  While Wall Street teetered, another New York City investment was rolling—literally, Blackwell reflected. Taxi medallions, the licenses that owners were required to fasten to the hoods of yellow cabs operating in the city, were now going for $800,000, an increase of 150 percent over ten years. Blackwell had been playing the stock market over the same period of time. New York taxi medallions had outperformed his portfolio by . . .

  Best not to do the math, he thought.

  With a booth to himself on the upper level of a two-story McDonald’s in midtown—enjoying a Big Mac, a chocolate shake, and free wireless—the hit man returned his attention to the website of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, the municipal organization that sold the medallions. He input the user name and password of a cabdriver he’d met. The guy had been more than happy to trade Blackwell his log-in information for a pair of hundred-dollar bills.

  That $200 quickly started to look like one of Blackwell’s better investments of late: he accessed the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s proprietary traffic tracker, where medallion owners could keep tabs on their $800,000 cars in real time. Not only was each cab equipped with a transponder; each time a driver picked up a new fare and keyed in the destination, you could access that information on the traffic tracker.

  Accordingly Blackwell was 98 percent sure that Chay Maryland had just gotten into a cab at the corner of West Twenty-Fifth Street and Tenth Avenue, about thirty blocks south of the McDonald’s. He was 100 percent sure that her iPad, whose IP address he’d scored using Twitter Tracker, was in the cab—a Toyota Prius, according to the traffic tracker. Earlier this evening, via her iPad signals, Blackwell had been able to track Chay to a parking garage on West Twenty-Fifth, which was also a crime scene right now, according to his police scanner app, and not just any crime scene: an army of emergency responders was present. Fisk’s latest case, Blackwell figured. To find Fisk now, Blackwell hoped to learn where Chay was going next.

  With a tap at the Prius taxi icon on the traffic tracker, the destination input by the cabbie appeared in a pop-up window: 121 East 74th Street New York, NY 10021. Blackwell clicked the address. Another window opened, offering a satellite view of a tree-lined stretch of East Seventy-Fourth Street. Building number 121 was one of several brownstones. Blackwell hurried out, leaving his empty Big Mac container and half-finished shake on the table. His rental car was parked at a meter on East Fifty-Ninth Street, a block away. H
e would drive to East Seventy-Fourth to meet Chay. If Fisk was along for the ride, great. That would save Blackwell a lot of time. If Chay were by herself, not bad either. He would use her to bait Fisk.

  Madison Avenue glowed red and white as rain-slicked asphalt reflected the brake lights and headlamps. Most of them, thought Fisk, belonged to cabs returning residents home from evenings of theater or opera or similar tedium. From across the backseat of the Toyota Prius taxi, he took in Chay’s lithe form silhouetted against the blur of neon bar and restaurant signs. He was pleased that she’d asked him to escort her to the FBI safe house. He wanted to be with her for reasons that had nothing to do with her security. For now, though, her security was paramount.

  “And what about your phone?” he asked, part of a checklist of potential vulnerabilities.

  “I pried the battery connector from the socket on the logic board,” she said. “I have a Mossad source in Brooklyn who insists I do this every time I meet with him. It’s getting to the point that I don’t have to pry the battery so much as flick at it.”

  “Very good. How about that computer tablet you were using at the Bureau—is it Wi-Fi enabled?”

  “The iPad? Yes, it has Wi-Fi, but it’s not mine. It’s one of the loaners from the bullpen at the Times.”

  “Have you checked your e-mail or anything on it?”

  “Yes, but unless Twitter has also been infiltrated by the North Korean State Security Department . . .”

  “Better safe than the other thing, right?”

  She withdrew the tablet from her bag. “Do you know how to disable the signal?”

  “It’s a piece of cake,” he said. When she handed it to him, he added, “After you spend an hour and a half learning how to do it from one of our tech guys.”

  Her laughter made him feel as though he’d sunk a three-pointer.

  He began the complex procedure of neutralizing the iPad by inserting one of his apartment keys between the top edge of the display assembly and the rear panel assembly. Then he used the key to pry the two pieces apart.