The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  Recognizing that his own outrage was of no use, Fisk clung to the hope that such a release would be illegal, or that the U.S. attorney would block the move on moral grounds. “Forgetting that letting Verlyn walk would be idiotic from a law enforcement perspective, how can we just let him go from a legal standpoint? Get the judge to waive the U.S. Constitution just this one little time?”

  “Maybe the judge will knock down his bail out of the stratosphere,” Dubin said.

  Fisk hoped logic would prevail. “The bail’s in the stratosphere because Verlyn’s a flight risk, not to mention a couple of mouse clicks away from posting the NSA family jewels to the World Wide Web. The Russians would literally kill to exfiltrate him.”

  “Well, we’ve got to figure something out.” The chief lowered himself into his desk chair as if he were getting into a cold bath. “For now we need to face the facts. It’s late in the game, and Yodeler’s kicking our ass.”

  Evans closed his laptop and took one of the chairs in front of the desk with a similar air of defeat. Weir dropped into the adjacent seat.

  Still pacing, Fisk said, “If we quit now, it’s not just that Yodeler wins, it’s encouraging the next guy who wants something to stick a gun on a drone.”

  Dubin shrugged. “The grown-ups are saying that by the time there’s a next guy, Iron Apple will be fully up and running.”

  Of course they’re saying that, Fisk thought. Politicians almost always viewed technology as a cure-all, or at least they knew that they could sell it to the voting public that way. He said, “When Clinton was president, he concluded that intelligence officers could be replaced by satellites. Where would the four of us be now if that had happened? Where would the country be now?”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, kiddo,” said Dubin.

  The world’s most dispirited choir, Fisk thought. “So let’s tell them that Iron Apple isn’t the solution now, that we can’t give in to the Yodelers of the world no matter what. If and when the Iron Apple is working, the next bad guy will find a way to—I don’t know—glue C-4 to cockroaches and remotely detonate them.”

  Dubin stiffened. “‘The Israelis let terrorists walk all the time’—that’s a direct quote from the governor, who I was talking to on the phone right before you got here, and he has a point.”

  Weir and Evans nodded like bobblehead dolls. In national security circles, Israel was Hogwarts. But the Israelis would never swap out a Hamas prisoner, Fisk thought, if the guy were poised to upload files that would cost Israeli lives. Israel routinely traded prisoners by the truckload for just one of their own men. More than once the Israelis had traded a dozen live prisoners for the body—only the body—of one of their men. And often, Israeli intelligence officers turned a prisoner so that, on return to Beirut, he acted on behalf of Jerusalem, whether he was aware of it or not.

  It dawned on Fisk that this might be the play here: an intelligence operation. What if Yodeler believed he was winning the game while, in reality, he was scoring points for the NYPD?

  Finally taking a seat, Fisk thought aloud: “Maybe it’s a good thing that Verlyn’s a flight risk. Maybe there’s a way to play it so Verlyn leads us to Yodeler.”

  Weir chuckled. “Can he do windows too?”

  Fisk reminded himself that he needed Weir. Between now and midnight, one of the hundred-something FBI staffers working the phones might learn of a delivery of a four-pack of Specter rotor blades to a local post office box belonging to a person who, it turned out, didn’t exist—or who used to exist but didn’t anymore.

  “There’s reason to believe Verlyn and Yodeler are confederates,” Fisk said.

  Weir seemed surprised. “There is?”

  When Evans muttered a reminder to his partner about the NYPD record-of-interview PDF he’d forwarded to him, Fisk took the opportunity, for Dubin’s benefit as well as Weir’s, to recap what he and Chay had gleaned in their interview of Verlyn at the Manhattan Correctional Center. He’d put as much in the record of interview, but the significance of the Verlyn-Yodeler connection wasn’t as great then as it was now.

  Weir turned to Dubin. “We wish we’d known the NYPD was going to question the suspect. We would have tried a few different things.”

  Dubin looked to Fisk with eyebrows raised, turning the lines on his forehead into channels. His unasked question, Fisk knew, was, Have you gone rogue once again?

  Fisk wanted to reply that the FBI had already taken multiple cracks at Verlyn, and that if, prior to last night’s interview, the Red Team had produced any useful elicitation tactics, it would have been an historic first. Instead he said, “If we can black out the media when Verlyn walks, our line of communication with Yodeler won’t have been for nothing. We’ll shoot him an e-mail that says something like, ‘You’ve won, Yodeler. We’ll let Verlyn go tonight at such and such time and place.’ Without media coverage, Yodeler will want some other verification that his man is out.”

  Weir chuckled. “So, what, now you want him to send his drone?”

  Fisk wanted to thank him. “Exactly. We may not be able to shoot it down, but we can at least follow it back to Yodeler.”

  “Not bad,” Dubin said. “Except what’s preventing Yodeler from tipping off the media to the time and place of the release? A single New York One camera would save him from having to send a drone.”

  “He’ll want protection for his man, Verlyn. Rival intel services are after Verlyn. Also a member of the New York One audience could decide to be the next Jack Ruby.”

  The chief nodded, impressed, then, with a look, put it to the feds.

  “I don’t know,” said Evans.

  Weir grumbled. “Hard to say.”

  They were busy trying to think of objections, Fisk suspected. There were alternative plans of action they could take, maybe even better plans. But they had nothing because they’d been too busy ass-covering.

  CHAPTER 34

  On the website AirBnB.com, Blackwell booked a “breezy East Village apartment with old-world charm” at $75 per night. Way cheap for anyplace within fifty miles of New York, he thought. But it turned out to be overpriced. “Old-world charm” meant a lack of modern amenities. “Breezy” meant no air-conditioning. The place was secure, however, and had wireless Internet. He would have happily shelled out $750 for that package.

  Taking a seat at the ironing board that folded out from the wall beside the refrigerator—a future ad might refer to this as a “contemporary dining room,” he thought—he checked in on Chay. The iPad hadn’t transmitted since last night, just before the cab dropped her and Fisk at East Seventy-Fourth Street. It was possible that she was onto Blackwell and had disconnected the transmitter. Or maybe she’d spent the night somewhere that interfered with transmission—New York could be one giant signal jammer.

  Whichever way it was, she’d certainly been busy today, he thought as he read the New York Times front page. Merritt Verlyn’s bail had been reduced on appeal to $10 million following his agreement to wear an electronic monitoring device.

  Chay had broken the story—for what that was worth to her: within fifteen minutes of its posting, the same story was on every other news site in the country. What it could be worth to Blackwell was a shot at Jeremy Fisk, who would likely be on hand at the Metropolitan Correctional Center when Verlyn walked. Chay did not report when the release would take place. If she even knew, she probably withheld the information intentionally. Blackwell scoured the piece for clues.

  The nonprofit First Amendment Society had ponied up a million bucks to a New York bail bondsman who told Chay he planned to have Verlyn bonded out within twenty-four hours, though details of the release were being withheld for the suspect’s protection. Of course, Blackwell thought. Otherwise the release would be a circus. He considered that most prisons processed out inmates first thing in the morning in order to allow themselves time to get ready for new arrivals. Just like hotels.

  He eyed the clock in the upper right corner of his latest burner laptop. 4:20
P.M. So it stood to reason that Verlyn would be sprung first thing tomorrow. But in Chay’s story, according to NYPD Intel’s Detective Jeremy Fisk, Yodeler had agreed in an e-mail to cease the drone attacks once Verlyn was safely out. So maybe the release would go down today so that New York could avoid another death from above? Blackwell decided to take his act to the Metropolitan Correctional Facility.

  He wasn’t the only one with that idea. He realized as much while driving through Chinatown, the streets and sidewalks eerily underpopulated for a weekday, a function of Yodeler, not the light drizzle. Two different news vans—NY1 and 1010 WINS—blew past Blackwell’s rental car, their drivers clearly not as concerned as he was about getting pulled over. Backing into a parking spot, still two blocks from the Manhattan Correctional Center, he caught sight of the tall, telescoping antenna of yet another news van.

  As he got closer to the center, on foot now, it appeared that about half of the pedestrians in the vicinity were journalists. A hundred of them, easy, many gathered under white temporary sun shelters, four-legged canopies labeled in block letters, TARU, whatever that was. Several men, wearing navy-blue uniforms with TARU emblazoned on the back in bright yellow, had the bench-press-intensive build of military.

  TARU?

  Blackwell put it to his latest burner smartphone: Technical Assist Response Unit, a division of the NYPD that officially “provided equipment and tactical support.” Unofficially, he gathered, they were narcs. The unit had repeatedly come under fire for violating the court-imposed Handschu Guidelines, which restricted the NYPD from building files on innocent citizens. It was doubtful that the TARU was here to install canopies; more likely they were gathering intelligence, perhaps from members of the media trying to trump one another with tidbits obtained from sources on the condition of anonymity, or from WikiLeaks members with loose lips. And there might well be a Verlyn confederate in the crowd. The sun shelters were probably bait.

  Unfortunately, between TARU and all of the news cameras, this was quite possibly the worst place in the city to have a go at Fisk. If he was even here. More likely the detective would oversee things from an ops center. And an NYPD ops center would be the second worst place for a go at Fisk.

  Blackwell decided he was better off working at his own ops center, aka the “breezy East Village apartment with old-world charm.” Dropping his phone into his pants pocket, he turned back to his car. He wasn’t dispirited. He never was. He had always found a way, and always would. Someday, he thought, scientists would find a telepathic correlation between positive thinking and positive outcomes. As if on cue, his phone vibrated against his hip, with a texted alert:

  CALL ACCOUNTANTS

  This was his own code, to be delivered to him as a text message if and when Chay’s iPad came back online.

  He launched his DataBanq app, selected the file of his saved IP addresses, and selected 001, his code for Chay’s iPad. It appeared as a pulsing blue circle on a rudimentary map of Manhattan. She—or at least her iPad—was just a few blocks away, at 240 Centre Street, the copper-domed landmark still known as NYPD headquarters, although the building had long since been converted to condominiums after the police moved to One Police Plaza. But possibly the police maintained a presence there, a safe house or maybe something that was off the books entirely, the sort of place from which Fisk could covertly run TARU agents in knowing violation of the Handschu Guidelines.

  Blackwell hurried back to his car to get his rifle.

  CHAPTER 35

  Mounted on the wall in three rows of three, the nine monitors in the ops-center viewing room played feeds from surveillance cameras within the Manhattan Correctional Center and Domain Awareness cams outside.

  On the lower left monitor was the feed from DOM-CAM PRW W-PRL (Park Row west of Pearl Street). Seated at a table in front of the monitors, Fisk and Chay watched a throng of journalists making room under one of the canopies for yet another camera crew.

  “If the Department had obtained this without the requisite warrants, would you tell me?” Chay asked.

  “Yes,” Fisk replied, although he doubted it. Which left him conflicted: He wanted to eliminate barriers between them. He wanted to tell her the truth. Deception was part of his job description, but he took pains to avoid it in his personal relationships. Of course, they were at work now. At work, he wished she could understand that justice was like triage: saving patients came first. Sometimes that meant skipping paperwork. The truth was, if red tape or misguided politics had prevented the Bureau from securing the requisite warrants tonight, he would have bugged the hell out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center anyway, because losing track of Verlyn would be catastrophic.

  “So if everything goes as planned, what happens?” she asked.

  “If everything goes as planned, that would be an historic first,” he said just as motion on the middle right monitor caught his eye.

  A Manhattan Correctional Center escorting officer was leading Verlyn out of his cell.

  Game time, Fisk thought. Or, at least, hoped.

  The inmate’s eyes darted around, as if he were expecting someone to run up with news that his release had been postponed or canceled. In Fisk’s experience, inmates were often on edge when being processed out. They had dreamed of their release so often, it was only natural for them now to expect that, at any moment, they would wake up, back in their cells.

  The escorting officer directed Verlyn to an elevator, down two floors, through the common area, and finally into the administration room, a cramped space that reminded Fisk of the office in a big high school. Staffers at six small desks—in a space designed for three—looked up from their terminals briefly before resuming work.

  Fisk pressed the talk button on the intercom panel. “How about the dust?”

  “Coming right up on seven,” came the voice of David Rettenmund, the short and stocky tech everyone called R2 after the similarly proportioned droid. Fisk thought of R2 as incredibly resourceful with computer skills and a good nature to match. As ever, the kid was at his station in the control room, two doors down the hall. The feed he directed to the lower left monitor shifted from an empty cellblock to an overhead map of the Metropolitan Correctional Center and the vicinity, with a cluster of flashing green dots superimposed over the facility.

  “Are those transponders?” Chay asked.

  “They’re remotely activated particles of smart dust,” Fisk said.

  “The same stuff the CIA deploys from Predators?”

  He knew that she meant the tiny, undetectable radio-signal transmitters the Agency’s MQ-1s dropped by the thousands from altitudes of five thousand to ten thousand feet in hope that two or three would adhere to a human target, enabling intelligence officers halfway around the world to track him. “Pretty much,” he said. “It’s a hell of a lot more effective if you sprinkle it onto your target’s clothing and shoes from six inches away.”

  The green dots jumped upward, in unison. The motion was explained to Fisk by the monitor with a close-up view of the administrative officer retrieving a brown shopping bag from a cubby. Setting the bag on the countertop between herself and Verlyn, she said, “Inmate Number 61729-013, this is dress-out. Once we’ve gotten back all the items you were given while you were incarcerated, you’ll get back the clothes you were arrested in plus any items that you had on your person.”

  Pulling his orange prison-uniform shirt free of his waistband, Verlyn asked, “So are you going to play some Flashdance music for me?”

  “Ha,” said the officer, a sleepy-eyed Hispanic woman who must have heard similar lines every day for years. She pointed to an accordion-style changing screen that stood in the corner. “Please change behind that, then hand the items to Officer Perez.”

  Looking into the shopping bag, Verlyn was given pause. “I was supposed to receive a fresh dress-out.”

  “You got it. It’s waiting for you on the chair behind the screen.”

  Verlyn disappeared behind the screen.

&n
bsp; “That would be our first thing gone wrong,” Fisk said. “Someone sent him new duds.”

  “To thwart the smart dust?” asked Chay.

  “Could be nothing. Family members send dress-outs to inmates all the time. All mail entering a correctional facility is searched for contraband and scanned.” He hit the intercom button. “R2, do we know who sent him the clothes?”

  “Checking,” the tech said, a half second later adding, “Arrived by messenger just an hour ago from the First Amendment Society’s office in United Nations Plaza.”

  “Too bad their advocacy of transparency doesn’t extend to keeping us in the know,” Fisk said.

  Chay asked, “Before you got into business with the First Amendment Society, how thoroughly did you check them out?”

  “They were vetted by Evans and Weir,” Fisk said of the FBI agents, who were monitoring the proceedings in a similar setup at 26 Federal Plaza. Fisk had judged the First Amendment Society to be harmless. Nevertheless it wouldn’t be the first time that an honorable proponent of American intelligence-agency transparency acted, unwittingly, in the interests of enemy spy services. There was evidence that the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki—or SVR, Russia’s external intelligence agency—contributed heavily to WikiLeaks, using a front organization to issue the checks.

  Verlyn emerged from behind the changing screen, having replaced his orange uniform with a tight-fitting black tracksuit unadorned by piping or racing stripes or even a logo. Just black.

  “Is he planning to disappear?” Chay asked.

  Fisk had been wondering the same thing. “If he is, the all-black action’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?”

  Verlyn returned the orange uniform, which he’d folded as neatly as any item on display at a clothing store, to the administrative officer. “Please donate my other things to the Salvation Army,” he told her.