The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  Forty blocks later, as the taxi slowed on approach to Seventy-Fourth Street, he had succeeded in de-routing the Wi-Fi antenna through its channel in the speaker assembly. He asked the driver to continue past Seventy-Fourth Street, go to Seventy-Sixth. His plan was to have the driver turn back downtown via Park Avenue before dropping them off on that side of Seventy-Fourth. The address he’d given the driver when they first got in—121 East Seventy-Fourth Street—was chosen at random. He didn’t know what was there. Probably a brownstone. He had seen no reason to let the TLC log the real address of an FBI safe house. The purpose of going past Seventy-Fifth, the actual location of the safe house, was reconnaissance.

  The taxi slowed for a red light at the intersection of Madison and Seventy-Fifth, permitting Fisk an extended look at the safe-house block, to his right. To his eye, the block was a still life. He also used God’s Eye. DOM-CAM 75EMAD, the nearest NYPD cam, showed nothing out of the ordinary on the block.

  After directing the taxi driver back downtown, Fisk was given one more angle onto Seventy-Fifth. Again, okay.

  Finally he and Chay were dropped at the dummy address on the equally quiet and mostly dark Seventy-Fourth Street. Taking inventory, he saw no one in the cars in the vicinity.

  Starting onto the sidewalk, heading back toward Madison, he heard someone get out of a car parked behind them. Odd. The gentle way the person closed the door, as if trying to make as little noise as possible, set off Fisk’s internal alarms.

  He spun around, meanwhile drawing his reloaded Glock, coming to a stop so that his back was against Chay’s, so that his body shielded hers from the man seventy-five feet away on the sidewalk—a sturdy middle-aged Caucasian with thick-framed glasses, a baseball cap pulled awfully far down his forehead, and a .22 tipped with a sound suppressor in hand. Burned into Fisk’s mind, if not his muscle memory, were the five most common outcomes in this situation:

  1. You die.

  2. You spend a long time in the hospital.

  3. You try to run away.

  4. You shoot, prompting the other guy to retreat.

  5. You shoot, injuring or killing him.

  Fisk fired three times.

  The first shot flew past the guy, the report scaring unseen pigeons into flight from between the curb and a parked car and resounding off the wet street, cars, and buildings.

  The second shot appeared to shear the button off the top of the guy’s baseball cap, raising a puff of fibers into the cone of light cast by a streetlamp, but no more.

  The third round stung his gun, sparking the suppressor as he aimed it and pressed the trigger, costing him his grip on the weapon. The report sounded like a dry cough.

  His bullet tore into a few leaves on the bough over Fisk’s head, sending particles drifting to the sidewalk. He took a step backward, positioning himself between Chay and the gunman to give her much more protection against the next shot.

  But there was no next shot. The guy lost his hold on the silenced pistol altogether, and it clattered to the sidewalk before bouncing into the dark gap between the curb and the front tire of a parked Jeep. If he tried to recover it, he’d be a sitting duck. Not surprisingly, he turned and sprinted in the opposite direction.

  Fisk started after him. One step into the pursuit, he knew that it was over. It felt as though his hipbone had exploded in the vicinity of his earlier wound. He tried to ignore it, but his body simply wouldn’t permit him to proceed, and he fell forward, face first. Still he got off another shot at the shooter, but missed by a wide margin, taking out more leaves and a side mirror on a parked car. He hit the concrete, his free hand breaking some of the fall, his jaw absorbing the brunt of it.

  Chay scrambled to him. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” he said, trying to appear that way as he struggled to his feet.

  “Do you think he tracked me by the bloody iPad?” Although the temperature was close to seventy, she was trembling.

  “Maybe at first. But the only way he could have gotten this address was from the taxi driver, after the driver logged the dummy destination into his system.” It was well known in the Department that with thirty thousand active drivers able to access the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s traffic tracker, and even more ex-drivers still in possession of the log-in info, the site was practically open to the public. Because the man had been shooting to kill, as opposed to trying to snatch Chay, Fisk couldn’t dismiss the possibility that he had been the target. “He might have been a representative of my friends at the Cartel.”

  She looked around, bracing, it seemed, for another attack. “I don’t see how it’s safe anywhere on the grid.”

  Actually, he thought, she would be okay in almost any hotel. Just check in under an alias. Either the Department or the Bureau would deploy watchdogs.

  He said, “I know of a place that’s off the grid.”

  Chay said, “Does it have beer?”

  CHAPTER 32

  Fisk ushered Chay into darkness. At night, especially this late, with only a smattering of lights still on in the surrounding buildings, stepping into the new apartment had the feel of embarking on a spacewalk.

  “Where are the lights?” she asked.

  “Here.” He pulled the Pelican flashlight from his pocket and clicked on its low beam, which he aimed at the cube fridge. “There’s also a light in there.”

  She knelt and opened the door, the bright light snapping on and forming a halo around the six-pack of Brooklyn Lager, of which five bottles remained. She drew out two of them. “Don’t suppose you have a bottle opener?”

  “Right here.” He tapped the adjacent counter.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  He took one of the bottles and laid it on the countertop so that the edge crimped the underside of the bottle cap. He gave the bottle itself a sharp tap. With nowhere to go but off, the cap flew into the darkness, landing with a jangle that echoed in the vast, empty room, of which Fisk said, “Sorry, the interior decorator and I haven’t been able to find a time to sit down yet.”

  He led her to the small round table and its pair of folding chairs, the only furniture save for the TV and the inflatable bed—that there was just the one bed, he knew, would be an issue for later.

  With the Pelican balanced on its base, serving as a candle, they sat at the table and recapped the events of the day. Quickly they finished their Brooklyn Lagers. Chay found her way to the kitchen and returned with two more bottles.

  “The opener,” Fisk reminded her.

  “It’s okay,” she said, retaking her seat and crossing her legs. “I’ve got this one.” She took up one of the bottles and wedged the bottle cap into the underside of her chiseled calf muscle, giving her a hold on the cap’s teeth. She applied pressure, meanwhile twisting the bottle, bringing three tiers of sinew in her forearm into play. And off popped the cap.

  Fisk had thought this method of opening a bottle the stuff of urban myth. Amazing. It made him hard.

  After she uncapped the second Brooklyn Lager, in the same fashion, he raised his bottle to toast. “Here’s to your origin story.”

  She held her bottle back. “Because this is the Second Beer?”

  “Will you tell me where you’re from now?”

  “I’m going to need one more thing from you first.”

  “Now what?”

  “This . . .” She leaned closer to him and kissed him on the mouth. And didn’t back away. Her breath tasted like Brooklyn Lager, and her scent—a fragrance of flowers with a trace of peppermint in combination with a long summer day’s worth of salty perspiration and New York City emissions—was intoxicating. To keep it coming, Fisk laced his arms around her back and drew her closer. She slid from her chair and onto his lap. She was firm in the right places, and soft in the right places, and he set about exploring them all. Ever the investigator, so did she, with caresses and kisses. His hip flared with pain. Small price to pay, he thought. They proceeded slowly and gently. But inevitably, fueled by the release of
pent-up feelings and desires, the intensity ratcheted up, forcing them beyond the limits of the folding chair.

  “Do you want to see the bedroom?” he asked.

  “There’s a bedroom?”

  “Actually, we’re already in it, but if you want to see it . . .” He took up the Pelican and swept the beam along the floorboards, toward the bed.

  They raced that way, unbuttoning, unbuckling, unsnapping each other, and leaving a wake of tossed clothing before plunging onto the mattress. They made love at a sprint, both of them ravenous, and it seemed concerned that, at any moment, another attack or drone strike would forestall them.

  The next morning, that’s exactly what happened.

  CHAPTER 33

  Still in bed, Fisk and Chay turned on the TV to watch one of the rebroadcasts of the Today show. They saw the beginning of the attack the way millions of other Americans had. The hosts—Al Roker, Matt Lauer, and Savannah Guthrie, seated in a row at their elevated news desk—turned around and stared in mystification through their window onto Rockefeller Center, where the crowd of spectators was bolting en masse, many of the people shouting, one of them casting aside her hand-painted “Al for President” placard.

  The bulk of the news reports of the incident featured cell-phone videos taken by tourists who had been eating breakfast around the corner at the Rock Center Café, in the same sunken plaza that served as the ice-skating rink during winter months. What appeared to Fisk to be a black Specter quadrocopter descended like a feather into the sunken plaza, coming to a hover at its center stage, in front of the famous gilded statue of Prometheus. The burble of the surrounding fountains masked the whine of the rotors. Still, each of the two hundred heads spun toward the drone.

  This time, no one sought a closer look. No one exhibited the slightest curiosity. No, they knew full well whose drone it was and why it was there. It was the reason so many of them had scored Rock Center Café tables this morning—after the Yodeler story broke, tourists who’d made their breakfast reservations months in advance decided they were better safe than sorry.

  Now parents seized their children by the wrists, and, in many cases, picked them up out of their seats. All around, chairs toppled and plates and glasses shattered against the granite floor. Everyone charged the stairwell leading out of the sunken plaza, up to street level. There were other ways out, Fisk knew, through the indoor section of the restaurant or the Rockefeller Center subway station or the adjacent underground shopping center. But if you’re in a rush—this sort of rush, you don’t take time to read signs or venture into the dark recesses of an unfamiliar sunken plaza in hope that one of the bronze-plated doors happens to be an unlocked path to safety. No, you take the sure thing a thousand times out of a thousand: the flight of stairs with an upper landing, Rockefeller Plaza, right there in plain view.

  Sure enough, every last one of the two hundred diners swarmed into the base of the narrow stairwell, which was suitable for perhaps ten people—if those ten were proceeding in an orderly and unhurried fashion.

  To Fisk’s surprise, the crowd did remain orderly, several with cool heads among them hanging back to assist the pair of policemen in funneling the patrons into two single-file lines. Fisk recognized one of the cops, Larry McCone, who was known to fellow officers as “McClone” because of his seeming propensity to be in several places at the same time: on duty as well as a devoted father to four young boys, a leader of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s World Trade Center efforts, and the shortstop for the NYPD Blues, perennial contenders for the Police Softball National Championship. McCone was aided by restaurant staffers, who managed to steer many of the patrons to safety via the subway station. Nobody would be trampled today, it appeared. Fisk and Chay already knew, however, that the death count stood at three, but even if they hadn’t known, a tragic end was indicated by the demeanor of the anchorwoman narrating the story, particularly when she warned that the footage was about to get “graphic.”

  The quadrocopter fired three shots, each hitting Larry McCone in the back, spraying blood onto the patrons assisting him and creating the panic that spurred the stampede. As the anchorwoman related, a young mother from Iowa was trampled to death along with her eighteen-month-old daughter she’d been trying to protect.

  Well after the report had ended, Fisk remained in bed, his back against the brick wall. He was feeling more guilty by the minute. Chay lay beside him, her head wedged into the crook of his neck, a gesture of commiseration. Her long hair, hot from the influx of sun, warmed his rib cage. He wondered how long she’d been in that position. Last he’d noticed, she was sitting on the far side of the mattress, watching the telecast in horror.

  Turn off your emotions, he exhorted himself, and get to work. He could do that, to a fault, he’d been told many times. Use it to your advantage now.

  He returned his thoughts to the investigation, going over everything that had happened. He tried to form different perspectives, in search of a clue he might have overlooked—

  All of that went out the window with the incoming text from Dubin—who barely knew how to text. Encrypted no less.

  SHT/FAN. GROWNUPS WANT US TO IBB RAPUNZEL.

  The shit had hit the fan. RAPUNZEL was Merritt Verlyn. The GROWNUPS were some combination of the commissioner, the mayor, the governor, and the president. IBB originated in baseball, where it stood for intentional base on balls, better known as an intentional walk. The brass wanted to let Verlyn walk.

  After squaring Chay away in his apartment, Fisk headed down to Intel on foot, which was always the fastest way to go twenty blocks or less in New York. Fury doubled his usual brisk pace and relegated the stabbing pains in his hip to an afterthought.

  The city was freakishly quiet, perhaps 10 percent of which was because of the July Fourth holiday—Independence Day was tomorrow. The other 90 percent was attributable to the Yodeler news. Hearing it, commuters on the way into town had turned around. Everyone else who could miss work stayed home. Summer camps were suspended until further notice, leaving wary parents to draw the blinds and explain to children why they couldn’t play in the park on this, the most beautiful day of the summer.

  When Fisk got to Dubin’s office, he found the chief standing by the row of windows looking onto Ninth Avenue, where almost as common as Crown Victoria taxis this morning were boxy olive-green trucks. Deployed by the Army, the trucks comprised the ground-based component of the airborne warning and control system intended as the city’s answer to Israel’s Iron Dome. The NYPD Hercules teams implementing this system had taken to calling it the Iron Apple.

  Evans was standing oddly straight, considering he was holding a laptop computer and typing on it. He read aloud what he and Weir, who sat on the back of the couch, maintained was their lone remaining lead:

  FISK:

  DID YOU REALLY THINK YOU COULD PUSH MY BUTTONS? I WILL CONTINUE TO PUSH MY OWN BUTTON (THE TRIGGER) UNTIL MERRITT IS FREE.

  DON’T WASTE MY TIME OR YOURS ON COMMUNICATION (READ: STALL TACTICS) UNTIL YOU HAVE SECURED HIS RELEASE.

  YODELER

  “For what it’s worth, the e-mail originated in Loch Ness,” Evans said. “And that’s not just us, that’s according to Lackland.” Lackland, Fisk knew, was the NSA’s Cryptologic Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Lackland had been the best hope of electronically tracing Yodeler.

  “In Loch Ness?” Dubin asked. The morning light streaming in added depth to his worry lines.

  Evans nodded. “The communication was sent—or at least appears to have been sent—from the exact mathematical middle of the twenty-two-point-seven-square-mile loch, yes, sir.”

  Dubin sighed. “Clever guy.”

  “Which he reminds us in every e-mail,” Fisk said. “It’s a weakness of his.”

  Both Dubin and Evans reacted as though he’d said something off-color, and Weir grumbled, “Bastard’s been a step ahead of you all along, Fisk.”

  Not ahead of us. Ahead of you. Anger heated Fisk. A wa
ste of heat, he thought. Similarly, the blame game wouldn’t get them any closer to Yodeler. He said, “We just need time until it causes him to make a mistake.”

  Dubin turned away from the window. “You’ve had plenty of time, Jeremy.”

  Again you rather than we. And had, past tense. This meeting wasn’t about a game plan, Fisk realized, as much as it was about Monday-morning quarterbacking.

  “So you guys hear how Iron Apple detected the drone?” Dubin grinned as if telling a joke.

  “How?” Weir didn’t ask so much as egg him on.

  “The sensor operator in one of the trucks happened to be watching the Today show broadcast live. The best detection system on the planet, and it didn’t detect shit. Turns out Iron Apple is useless against anything that’s launched from within two kilometers, however much that is in nonmetrics.”

  “One and one-quarter miles,” Weir offered.

  Dubin ignored him. “The Israelis don’t have anyone launching at them from anything close. And when their Iron Dome does detect a UAV, you know how they intercept the thing? They scramble F-16s to shoot it down, or drop flares or fire lasers to fuck with its sensors. But you can’t very well fly F-16s here—half the streets, the wings wouldn’t even fit. We do have lasers, all six of the laser cannons available east of the Mississippi, on rooftops. And the Hercules guys have been given flare guns. The thing is, they have a tough enough time shooting accurately with a handgun, a one-in-three proposition. And the flares still don’t work half the time.”

  Which was why the grown-ups, Dubin went on to relate, were now en route to One St. Andrew’s Plaza, to the U.S. attorney’s office. Commissioner Bratten, Mayor de Blasio, Governor Cuomo, and the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, George Venizelos—Evans and Weir’s boss’s boss—were meeting with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to discuss the possibility of releasing Verlyn, as early as midnight tonight, in order to satisfy Yodeler before another day had elapsed.