The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  “You got it,” she said. With the assistance of the escorting officer, she proceeded to fit an all-black device resembling a wristwatch around Verlyn’s left ankle. It registered on one of the viewing room monitors as a pulsing red circle labeled EMD-61729-013, shorthand for electronic monitoring device, along with Verlyn’s inmate number.

  Fisk and Chay were left to watch as Verlyn was processed out, a routine as monotonous for everyone else as it was exhilarating for the inmate. Standing at the counter, Verlyn filled in the blanks, checked the appropriate boxes, and signed form after form, including a confirmation that all of his personal items had been returned to him along with a consent to the terms of his release on bond and a separate agreement to reappear in court. Finally the admin officer counted out fifteen dollars, a five and ten ones, and pushed it across the countertop. This was his discharge allowance—because the cost of living was so much higher in New York City, discharged inmates received five dollars more than their counterparts elsewhere in the state.

  “You are also entitled to an amount equal to the least expensive means of transportation to your point of sentencing,” the administrative officer told Verlyn.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, “but I have a ride.”

  Fisk muttered, “He must have covertly corresponded with someone about the details of his release.”

  “News to you?” asked Chay.

  “I’d expected as much. This is the reason we put a surveillance team in place.”

  He and Chay watched as the monitors shifted to feed from cameras on Verlyn’s walk from the administrative offices to the departure area. Idling by the loading bay in the garage was a late-model black Lincoln Navigator with exceedingly dark windows. When Verlyn entered the garage, the driver popped out and hurried around the hood to open the passenger door for him. Verlyn climbed in without a word to the man.

  “First Amendment Society booked the Navigator too,” came R2’s voice.

  Fisk felt a cool trickle of adrenaline. “The nonreflective tinting on the windows can’t possibly meet the legal requirement of allowing in at least thirty-five percent of outside light.”

  Chay slid forward in her seat. “What do you think he’s up to?”

  “Hopefully he’s up to no good. We don’t get any actionable intel if he just goes home to his apartment and orders a pizza.”

  The garage-door-style gate rolled open and the Navigator chugged out, across the sidewalk and onto the street to the rear of the facility, Cardinal Hayes Place. It was met by three others just like it.

  “Good or no good?” Chay asked.

  “Probably just a diversion for the reporters,” Fisk said, “though if he thinks we’re going to be that easy to lose, God bless him.”

  “The Navigators were dispatched by Kelly Limo, the same guys the Department uses,” came R2’s voice. “All four of them.”

  “How many surveillants do you have?” Chay asked.

  “Only about fifty,” Fisk said.

  She didn’t blink, just nodded. As she surely knew, surveillance teams of more than a hundred people were quite common in New York and D.C. Because the streets were so much less crowded than usual, Dubin and Fisk had selected a smaller team of elite NYPD operators. Weir and Evans had ceded the reins without protest, which surprised Fisk—that is, until he considered that the Bureau had little to gain by participating in a successful surveillance op. If the team were to somehow lose Verlyn, Weir could demand Fisk’s head.

  Night was falling outside the Metropolitan Correctional Facility, where the journalists weren’t decoyed by the other Lincoln Navigators. All of the reporters who had been staking out Cardinal Hayes Place now swarmed the SUVs. But it quickly became apparent that getting the vehicles to stop would place them at risk of being run down. Just like that, they lost any chance of a sound bite from Verlyn or a photo of anything more than a tinted window.

  The monitors cut from a loading bay to the feed from nine Domain Awareness cameras on the street. Chay noted, “Martin Scorsese could only hope for so many camera angles. Is this the God’s Eye system?”

  He wondered how she knew about the system. “The what?”

  “No need to be coy, it’s old news. I reported on Father Phil two years ago.”

  “Who’s Father Phil?” Fisk’s curiosity was genuine.

  “Philip Borbon, the ordained-priest-turned-computer-scientist in Dayton, Ohio, who created the system. I saw that he donated twenty million dollars to Catholic University recently, so I figured he must have reeled in some customers.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about it,” Fisk said. Which was true. It was news to him.

  Digging her phone from her bag, she said, “If the NYPD is using God’s Eye, I hope you’ve solved the glitch that the Metro Police in D.C. discovered last week.”

  “What’s that?”

  She held up her phone, showing a broad overhead view of Washington at sundown. He made out the Capitol Dome, bathed in pink light. “Father Phil thinks too well of his fellow man,” she said. “His aerial feed has almost no security. Bank robbers hacked in—or, really logged on—and were able to disable the view of the sixteen-square-block section of Adams Morgan that included the bank they robbed—two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.”

  The breadth of her knowledge and sources left Fisk, once again, flabbergasted. If he ever was going to learn anything about the officially nonexistent Special Collection Service, F6, he thought, his best chance was to ask her about it.

  “You hearing this, R2?” he said into intercom.

  “That’s not the half of it, sir,” said the tech. “Right now anyone can access Domain Awareness feeds on faa.gov from the air-traffic-control page because the God’s Eye birds fly out of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia. We’re working on that.”

  Seeing Chay keying away at the notepad on her phone, Fisk wondered if he needed to tell her that what R2 had just said was privileged, when his attention was diverted by the procession of SUVs on the monitors. Within two blocks, they’d outpaced the last of the reporters chasing on foot. After another two blocks, as the convoy rumbled past the ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, the pulsing green circle representing the electronic monitoring device on Verlyn’s ankle was replaced by a red hexagon. The speaker carried the sound of a buzzer from the control room.

  “His electronic monitoring device is experiencing technical difficulties,” explained R2.

  Fisk sat up. “About time!”

  “Could the Brooklyn Bridge be disrupting the signal?” asked Chay.

  Fisk smiled. “That’s what he’d like us to think.”

  R2 said, “U.S. marshals are on line one, wanting a patrol car to stop Verlyn, for violating his bond agreement by monkeying with his EMD.”

  Fisk took out his frustration by choking a chair arm. “Please tell them, again, that we want him to think that he’s gone black.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Continuing past the Brooklyn Bridge, Verlyn’s Navigator took a left onto Spruce Street, passing Pace University, where traffic thickened. Not unrelated, perhaps, teenagers and twenty-somethings streamed out of an auditorium building toward the Brooklyn Bridge 4, 5, and 6 lines subway stop, at the hurried pace that had become the norm with drones liable to appear at any second. The Navigator turned abruptly into the five-story Pace Plaza parking garage. And was lost to Fisk and Chay.

  Hitting the intercom, he asked R2, “Can you get video in there?”

  “The Pace Plaza Parking Garage security cams are streaming live on monitors one, two, and three,” R2 said.

  What? The upper-row monitors were all dark. Wait. No, they weren’t. Fisk could make out shades of gray and dark green and the occasional sliver of light.

  “I’m trying to boost the light values,” the tech added.

  Fisk could make out other cars exiting, and waiting to exit. A bad feeling came over him, like a cold coming on. Had he overestimated his team’s ability to track Verlyn? If Verlyn now had a confe
derate at the wheel of a car other than the Lincoln, or even if he had access to another car, he could get away.

  No sooner did he think it than Fisk was on the radio with the surveillance team’s chief, pleased to hear that she was sending all available units into the parking garage. After that he could only sit and watch as the monitors brought video of a young man in a Pace University T-shirt hurrying away from his table and then out of a Starbucks, slowing as he entered the garage. At the same time, a woman in her early twenties, clad in a Yankees jersey as well as a cap with the interlocked N and Y, ran toward the parking garage, relaxing her pace on arrival.

  Pointing at them, Chay asked, “Won’t a sudden influx of people tip off Merritt?”

  “Yes,” said Fisk. “But only if he sees a lot of them. They’re each being deployed to a different sector to search, so there’s no reason he would.”

  “Iron Apple has a fix on a drone,” announced R2, going on to detail the Specter quadrocopter hovering at 108 feet above Park Row, blocked from the view of those on the street by a canopy of trees in City Hall Park, by the intersection of Spruce Street.

  Fisk gathered as much with the vibrant green thermal imagery on the centermost monitor, replete with data readily accessible to any amateur, like AIR SPEED 0 MPH and SYSTEM’S BEST GUESS: SPECTER QUADROCOPTER MODEL Q4.3. His attention went to ARMAMENT: NOT RECOGNIZED.

  “Any idea what it’s packing?” Fisk said into the intercom.

  “Zooming,” said R2. The image of the drone enlarged, filling the monitor. In the craft’s payload area, where the assault rifle had been in the past, hung a box about the size of a pint of milk. “Looks like an HDR-AS100VR.”

  “Please translate to English.”

  “Action video camera—Sony’s smaller, cheaper version of the GoPro.”

  “So this is a recon mission?”

  “Apparently.”

  So if they couldn’t find Verlyn, the drone could give him away soon enough, Fisk thought. Why else would it be here but to confirm that the inmate was free?

  But before he could relax, Chay exclaimed, “What in the world is that?”

  He followed her stare to monitor 3’s image of a bright beam of light rising from a rooftop and enveloping the quadrocopter. Then the drone plummeted, end over end, its descent slowed by a tree limb, but only slightly. It struck the sidewalk, the fuselage popping apart at the seam connecting the upper and lower halves, the camera exploding into too many shiny pieces to count, some of them bouncing as far as half a block. Then there was no movement at all.

  Disappointment numbed Fisk. “Let’s hope Yodeler has a better backup plan than we do.”

  “What is your backup plan?” Chay asked.

  “Follow Verlyn to Yodeler.” Fisk fought an urge to run down the stairs and across three blocks to the parking garage to recover their lone remaining lead. He regarded the monitor. No movement on Spruce except for an NYPD cruiser that appeared to be on routine patrol. It pulled up at the curb opposite the Pace Plaza garage, and two officers hurried into the street and whisked the quadrocopter debris into their trunk—into evidence cases, Fisk hoped.

  As the two men went back for the remains of the camera, a lanky college-age kid—or maybe he was a full-grown but scrawny twenty-something—ran up to them, his exuberance obvious from half a block away and through the grainy infrared security cam feed. As the kid jumped up and down—you’d think he’d just scored the game-winning touchdown—a metallic baton in his hand caught the streetlight glow. The baton had what looked to Fisk to be a folding back sight and foresight, and, between them, a trigger. The kid plunged it into a sheath that hung from his belt.

  “Where does this leave us?” asked Chay.

  “Ah, this is just another day at the office.” Fisk wished it were true. Things usually go wrong. Lots of things go wrong.

  Today, everything had.

  CHAPTER 36

  The six-story apartment building, directly across Centre Street from the old police headquarters, looked to Blackwell to have been built a hundred years ago—and like it ought to have been torn down fifty years ago.

  But around that time, he knew, artists and other bohemians in search of cheap loft space started buying up these outmoded commercial buildings in this part of the city and turning them into co-ops. Urban hippie compounds. They’d painted this one maroon for some reason. Probably because they were on acid, he thought, slinging the duffel bag containing his rifle over his shoulder and falling in on the sidewalk behind two couples who looked like members of the newest bohemian generation, on their way toward the maroon building. One of the dudes carried a liquor bottle in a paper bag. The other had a hookah protruding from his knapsack.

  The first of the group to reach the building entrance was the girl whose down-to-her-ass hair almost matched the paint on the building. She punched in the door code. Blackwell slowed, trying to time it so that, without drawing their attention, he could grab the door as it fell shut behind them.

  Act like you live here, he told himself. Wealthy guy, maybe Silicon Alley money, who dropped $2 million on a dinky two bedroom because . . . Blackwell couldn’t think of a reason to live in this dump for any price.

  The second girl gave it to him, though. The sight of her inspired him. Her body, emphasized by a miniskirt and halter top that combined used less fabric than a typical hand towel, reminded him of a statue of Venus, the goddess of beauty.

  You invested $2 million on a two-bedroom loft here, he told himself, because of the girls. And it’s paying off.

  His gait slowed to the sort of strut befitting a Silicon Alley prince on the prowl. He reached the entrance to the building just as the last of the four, the guy with the hookah, pushed his way through the door. Blackwell prepared to spring and catch the door, when the hookah guy spun around and said, “Whoa!”

  Shit, Blackwell thought.

  The guy snared the door, preventing it from falling shut, and held it open.

  “Thanks, man,” Blackwell said.

  “De nada, bro.”

  Blackwell followed the four into the ancient industrial elevator. Venus pressed six. “How about you?” she asked Blackwell.

  “Two, please.” He was actually going to three, having calculated that Chay’s iPad was in a room on the third floor of the old police headquarters building.

  “You got it.” She pressed the button, the old kind that snapped into place, staying flush with the elevator panel until the car reached the floor. With a series of grunts and groans, the elevator began to rise.

  “So is 4A having another party?” Blackwell asked the group.

  “The girls in 4G,” the hookah guy said, as if anyone in the building would know those girls.

  “Oh, the girls, yeah.” Blackwell flashed a smile. The elevator ground to a stop, the door chugged open. Stepping out, he said to the hookah guy with a wink, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  As soon as the elevator door closed behind him, he turned in to the stairwell. Exiting on the third floor, he found the light-switch panel and snapped the switch down, killing the row of fluorescent tubes on the ceiling, dropping the hallway into darkness. He quickly flicked the lights back on.

  “Oops,” he said, in case whoever was in 3E had come to the door.

  Three-E was the only apartment that was occupied, he’d determined by the light that shone beneath the door when the hall was dark. Three-C’s placement in the center of the building was ideal for his purposes.

  In twenty-five seconds, his feeler prong and torsion wrench had defeated the lock and he was in. He didn’t have to wait long for his eyes to acclimate to the Manhattan take on darkness; he was in a one-bedroom space so Spartan that it had to be a single guy’s. The blimp of a black leather couch, matching recliner, glass-topped chrome coffee table, and chrome floor lamps all looked to have been picked up in the same place as the La-Z-Boy. The air was still and warm. Maybe the guy was away on business. Taking no chances, Blackwell bolted the front door. You cou
ldn’t open this one from outside. If the guy who lived here came home, Blackwell would hear him, and he would slip out while the guy went back downstairs to ask the super WHAT THE FUCK?

  Blackwell set his duffel bag on the coffee table, unzipped it, removed the components, and put the rifle together on the couch. He set the bipod on a windowsill that was so deep you might think it was designed for use by a sniper. Before opening the window, he knelt and peered into the scope, searching for Fisk. Like the majority of the third-floor apartments across the street, in the old police headquarters building, the one Blackwell had identified as containing the iPad was dark. But inside, something flickered.

  Blackwell brought the scope into better focus, enabling him to see an iPad sitting on a table beside the window. Two people were visible on a couch, their backs to the window, watching the flickering TV. A man and woman. Oddly still. Extremely still. In fact, Blackwell realized, they weren’t moving at all.

  Because they were mannequins.

  Because—shit!—this was a trap. The iPad had been the lure. The cops were probably on the roof of their old headquarters building, on the lookout for a rifle scope—and/or they had their fucking Big Brother cams and sensors trained on the buildings a sniper might use. Meaning they’d probably made him by now. Maybe not, but he couldn’t chance it. He had to assume men were on their way up to this apartment right the hell now. And fast.

  So, no time to break down the rifle, to get it back into the duffel bag. And carrying it as is would slow him down, not to mention make him a million times more conspicuous as he tried to get away. He decided to leave behind the rifle, bipod, bag, ammo, everything. It was for this sort of contingency that he’d been on Capecitabine, the antimetabolic drug given to patients for whom chemo had been successful. Cancer cells needed to make and repair DNA in order to grow and multiply. The drug stopped those cells from making and repairing DNA, keeping the cancer from returning. Capecitabine’s almost universal side effect was inflammation of the palms and the soles of the feet, leading to peeling and blistering of the skin. It was a small price to pay. The downside for patients was it also eliminated fingerprints, making identification problematic. But if you were in the liquidation trade, Capecitabine was a godsend.