The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  After introducing himself and accepting the seat across the table from her, Fisk explained what he needed, a list of all Internet searches or input involving the words “Atlantis” or “Malta” or “Gebel Gol-Bahar” cross-checked against similar uses of “Loch Ness” and “Diego Garcia.” When he’d finished, Jean said nothing. She sat and stared into her monitor. He peered around the monitor, wondering if perhaps she’d nodded off.

  “Sorry, this can throw people,” she said. “WIRESHARK was listening and transcribed everything you said, then transformed it to search terms. Here are the results.” She tapped at the monitor, swiveling it so that it faced him. “In the past seven days, there were 447,332 search engine queries in the United States involving some permutation of ‘Atlantis’ in the context of the lost city, or 98,403 less than those for the Bahamian resort also called Atlantis; 27,548 users searching for the lost city also visited the Discovery Channel site’s post about Gebel Gol-Bahar.”

  She had memorized the figures, Fisk realized. Unfortunately they were about a thousand times greater than he’d anticipated. “That’s all?”

  “It’s actually not that many, given that in an average week, there are twenty million searches for Lady Gaga. And we haven’t even gotten to page views of Gebel Gol-Bahar content via other means.”

  Given refined parameters, WIRESHARK reported that of the 183,783 IP addresses in the continental United States from which individuals demonstrated an interest in Gebel Gol-Bahar, 24,710 had also demonstrated an interest in Loch Ness. The two places were featured on myriad websites and forums. Diego Garcia had a similar cult following.

  All three locations garnered the online attention of 8,540 unique users, of whom 990 were in New York City and an additional 661 were within a fifty-mile radius. Because those IP addresses included 234 public Wi-Fi locations, used by thousands of people, the suspect pool included a quarter of a million people. Which was a start.

  Fisk could open leads on all of them. If he still had any control over the case and a couple of months to follow the leads, that is.

  CHAPTER 40

  Jackson,” said Chay.

  “Who’s that?” asked Fisk.

  “Jackson, Mississippi.”

  She lay inches away in bed, also wearing nothing. Heat rose off her skin. Her breath was warm and pleasant against his neck. But she might as well have been miles away now. His mind was on the case, going around it and around it in search of a clue, and around it yet another time.

  She poked him. “I thought you’d be dying to know, right?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where I’m from.”

  “Right.”

  “My father was a sculptor. Not the biggest art scene, though, in Jackson. Ever been there?”

  The answer was within reach, he thought. But in which direction? Looking up at the ceiling, dark save for the occasional comet cast by headlights zipping past on Eighth Avenue, he replayed the night’s events from the moment the escorting officer brought Verlyn into the administrative office to be processed out.

  Chay cleared her throat. “Have you ever been to Jackson?”

  “Oh, sorry. No.”

  “Most people are surprised that there’s a city that big in the middle of Mississippi: twenty-story buildings, nearly two hundred thousand people.”

  “Did you like it?” he asked. Another time he would be interested. He wanted to know all about her. But now he fell into pondering Yodeler’s letter to the editors of the Mighty Pen.

  “Yes and no,” she said.

  A great man is dead, a great and wonderful man. Yodeler was a bright guy. Why was he spouting sentiments instead of taking the singular opportunity to make his case against the Police State?

  Chay ran a fingertip down his jawline. “Hey, don’t you want to hear the ‘no’ part, the traumatic childhood experience that spurred me to right society’s wrongs?”

  “I do, yeah. Of course.”

  “But you’re at work now, right?”

  Her tone told him there was no good answer. “I feel like we’re missing an obvious piece.” He could use her help.

  She pulled away. And she was right to, he knew. They’d all been right, all of them who’d said the same thing about him, in so many words. He was skilled at compartmentalizing, but that created too many barriers. Now, that illuminated a contrast, Fisk thought: Yodeler had exhibited no such flaw. He cared about Merritt Verlyn, cared deeply. That’s why the Mighty Pen letter had thrown Fisk. Yodeler didn’t lament the loss of Verlyn’s document cache, the perpetuation of the Police State, nothing like that—although, come to think of it, it was odd that both Verlyn and Yodeler used the same dated phrase. The key was, Yodeler had decried the loss of a wonderful man. His effort wasn’t ideological or political.

  “Maybe it’s personal,” Fisk thought aloud.

  “No shit,” Chay said.

  He’d half forgotten she was there. “I meant Yodeler’s connection to Verlyn,” he admitted, bracing for the latest take on his emotional unavailability.

  To his delight, she said, full of intrigue, “Murdering innocents on a daily basis is rather extreme if all you want is to get some documents uploaded to the Internet.” She sat up. “Why didn’t we think of that before?”

  Fisk shot out of bed, checked the F6 data on his phone, and felt like he’d hit pay dirt: “There’s an IP in New Canaan, Connecticut, that someone used to look up both Diego Garcia and Gebel Gol-Bahar.”

  “But wouldn’t Yodeler have to be in New York?”

  “That’s what everyone’s assumed, but the entire point of an unmanned aerial vehicle is you can control it from far away.”

  They worked together, she researching the Connecticut chapters of Merritt Verlyn’s life and he parsing the WIRESHARK metadata, leading to the discouraging discovery that the signal originated from a prepaid Southern New England Telephone cell phone, registered to a Dan Smith, no longer in use. A burner phone.

  “Still, possibly a clue,” Fisk said. “If you’re in the market for anonymity, you would use the most common surname in the United States.”

  “Or you’re in fact one of the country’s two million or however many Smiths.”

  “And interested in Gebel Gol-Bahar in the same time frame Yodeler would have been?”

  Chay said, “Where, physically, was Dan Smith?”

  “A bowling alley called Nutmeg Lanes that has a popular video-game and pinball-machine arcade, which would be a great place to use your burner phone if you wanted to maintain your anonymity.”

  “Do they have security cameras?”

  Fisk said, “Now you’re a fan of security cameras?”

  “Let’s say I’m coming around.”

  “Not looking like this place is that modernized. Check out their website: the newest video game they have is Galaga.”

  “I love Galaga. What do you say to a drive to Connecticut, then?”

  Fisk hoped she saw something he’d missed. “I know a place that has Galaga in Times Square.”

  Chay said, “Within walking distance from Nutmeg Lanes is a house that a Ms. Ellen Lee purchased in 1996 for two hundred and thirty thousand dollars from the estate of Bridger Verlyn, Merritt’s father.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Nonspecific though it was, Yodeler’s threat in his Mighty Pen piece to exact a steep price forthwith was enough for Governor Cuomo to declare a state of emergency—in Manhattan, the outer boroughs, and part of Long Island—allowing him to immediately contract Shane Poplowski’s Lightning Factory.

  The young company was immediately able to deliver eighteen working models to go with the prototype Poplowski had demonstrated in downing Yodeler’s reconnaissance quadrocopter. And stepped-up production in the LightningWorks Portland, Oregon, facility would net an additional fifty-six per day. Unfortunately, a law enforcement officer or National Guardsman armed with a LightningRod and standing in an intersection could only cover the four blocks to his right, left, front, and back, and Manhattan alone had mor
e than two thousand blocks. Likening the use of LightningRods to an ant farting in a windstorm, Mayor de Blasio ratcheted up the state of emergency, requesting businesses in the city to close and that citizens “shelter in place” if able, to keep safe from Yodeler, and to expedite the hunt for him.

  But what exactly, New Yorkers asked, were all the tacticians and experts looking for? No one had a good answer. Meanwhile, the thumps of low-flying helicopters—magnified by the otherwise hushed city, then resounding in what amounted to empty canyons between buildings—seemed to echo the heartbeats of the terrified city.

  Yodeler owned New York now.

  Everything was closed, even the bodegas that never closed, not on Christmas, not on 9/11. Vehicular traffic was nil, save for Army trucks and law enforcement and emergency vehicles. What little movement Fisk and Chay witnessed, from inside the unmarked NYPD Dodge Ram he’d signed out, was oddly accelerated. Everyone approached activities like a walk down a sidewalk or getting into a car as potentially fatal.

  The storybook summer morning and the Independence Day decorations—red, white, and blue Uncle Sam hats mounted on streetlight poles throughout the city—added layers of sad irony.

  Driving toward the West Side Highway through the still life that Hell’s Kitchen had become, Fisk’s primary evidence that the bulk of the population hadn’t already been wiped out was the quick and unnatural flickers at apartment windows—residents wrestling, he thought, with whether to look out for drones or to stay the hell away from the windows. After passing the Jacob Javits Convention Center, he turned right onto the West Side Highway and headed north, toward Connecticut, along the same route Merritt Verlyn had taken hours earlier.

  “Find out anything about Ellen Lee?” he asked Chay, who was taking in the activity around them—or, rather the lack of it—with wide eyes.

  She returned her attention to the car’s tablet computer—now a standard feature in NYPD vehicles, offering proprietary links to the Department databases. “She was a teacher at a public school in Darien. Retired now. She lives alone at the old Verlyn family place on Maple Valley Lane.”

  “What happened to Verlyn’s parents?”

  “The mother ran off years earlier, and the father died of cancer the year before Ellen Lee bought the house. Merritt was seventeen that summer, but he’d been taking care of his little brother for well over a year after their father was incapacitated and eventually entered hospice care. In order to keep the brother out of a foster home, Merritt told caseworkers from Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families that he was eighteen.

  “The two of them continued to live in the house in New Canaan for almost an entire year before the Department of Children and Families figured out the truth. But by that time, Merritt was eighteen, and old enough to serve as his brother’s legal guardian. So he took him along to MIT—the kid stayed in Merritt’s dorm room and went to a high school in Cambridge. Merritt wouldn’t have blamed his expulsion on his brother, but there’s reason to believe that he didn’t keep his grades up because he took the guardianship seriously, including washing dishes late every night in the dining hall.”

  “He had a good heart,” Fisk said. Too bad, he thought, that the quality was negated by Verlyn’s misplaced notions of national security interests.

  They didn’t see a single car on the West Side Highway for fifty blocks before passing an Army Humvee headed in the opposite direction. Then, well into Riverdale, no one else. Given how little he’d slept, Fisk might have found the drive interminable, mile after mile of empty asphalt, glinting rhythmically in the morning sun. Yet each curve that they rounded, yielding another stretch of empty highway, filled him with wonder: How long could this last? To what extent had one guy with a couple of five-hundred-buck drones paralyzed the world’s most powerful city?

  At the Connecticut border, traffic began as a trickle and increased to normal holiday-morning proportions. Suddenly the New York portion of the drive seemed to Fisk like it had been an eerie dream. In New Canaan, on what was an unqualified brilliant summer day, any one of the prim colonial homes—with their tidy yards and sparkling picket fences and Stars and Stripes flying for the holiday—appeared suitable for an American propaganda poster.

  As Fisk and Chay continued their drive north, the houses grew farther apart and the woods thickened. At the end of Maple Valley Lane, he turned the Dodge up a long, steep driveway, entering a tunnel of tall overhanging boughs and hedges. He parked by a detached garage across from a majestic two-story brick colonial. As he stepped out of the car, his soles crunched into gravel. At the same time his senses were overwhelmed by the sweet scent of daisies, the rustling of branches in the light wind, and the trill of birds—or what a New Canaanite might have called silence. There was no hint of civilization other than the house.

  Rounding the car, he gazed into the glass panels on the garage door, which were thick with dust. From the sunlit outdoors, the inside of the garage was almost completely dark, but he saw no cars. No tire prints in the gravel. Schoolteachers, especially retired ones, went on vacation during the summer. Fisk wondered if their drive out hadn’t been premature—or at least if the investigator’s instinct to surprise subjects had been foolhardy—when a woman called out, “Merritt?”

  CHAPTER 42

  Ellen Lee appeared from the woods behind the house. She looked to be in her early fifties, but unless the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles records Chay had accessed were mistaken, she was sixty-six. She was trim, her features were sharp; her sea-glass-green eyes radiated intelligence. Both her sleek ski parka and her horse-riding breeches contributed to a windblown vitality. She looked as though she’d just finished a morning ride or hike.

  Yet something was off. Fisk couldn’t put his finger on it, beyond the parka—if in fact she were sixty-six, she wouldn’t be the first senior citizen with circulatory issues. Maybe it was that, at the sight of strangers, she continued her approach without any sign of circumspection. Then again, this was rural Connecticut, where people still left their front doors unlocked.

  If Lee were unaware of Merritt Verlyn’s death, as context suggested, Fisk hoped to keep the news from her until after he’d learned what he could. Catching Chay’s eye, he pointed to himself, intending to communicate, I got this. She nodded.

  “Ms. Lee, I’m Detective Jeremy Fisk of the New York Police Department and this is Chay Maryland, a journalist who is reporting on an ongoing investigation.”

  Her eyes widened. “Well, that is not something I hear every day.”

  “We were hoping to ask you a few questions, just for background.”

  “That would be my pleasure.” She came off as too eager. “Would you like to come inside the house?”

  If Yodeler were waiting inside, Fisk thought, he could probably kill them several ways. Because of the distance from civilization, he could use one of his Colt AR-15 Sporter assault rifles and no one would be the wiser. On the other hand, Fisk had his own gun, and going inside promised additional information.

  “That would be great,” he said.

  Lee led them around the house, past shutters that actually shut, installed back in the day when they were a defense against storms.

  “Who was it that you were expecting?” Fisk asked.

  “Oh, I wasn’t expecting anyone.” Lee climbed the slate steps to the back door. “Every once in a while, the previous residents come by.”

  They proceeded into the living room via the mud room, old floorboards whining with each of their steps. The place was tidy, and done in the minimal New England rustic style—solid, simple pine furniture, framed nature watercolors of ducks, braided rugs—but it was oddly lacking in contemporary amenities like a microwave, TV, or air-conditioning.

  Lot of nooks and crannies to hide in here, Fisk thought. He inched his hand closer to his holster.

  Lee gestured them onto an antique Chesterfield sofa. The cushions spouted dust when they sat down. After they said thank you but no thank you to her offer of
iced tea, she took the wing chair across from them.

  “I can see why the previous residents come by,” Chay said. “It’s a lovely house.”

  “Thank you, dear. I do what I can.”

  Chay said to Fisk, “Don’t let me sidetrack us, but I’m interested in this.” She returned her focus to Lee. “It’s not often that you hear of previous residents coming by.”

  “It’s not often in life that you get to know such lovely boys,” Lee said. “They’re just wonderful.”

  Fisk and Chay discreetly shared a quick look that asked, What the hell?

  Maybe Lee also didn’t know that Boyden had died, he thought. “How often do you get to see them?” he asked her.

  She smiled. “Every now and then. Sometimes they keep me company on the holidays—I used to think they just felt sorry for me that I had no one else, but over the years, I feel as though we’ve become like family. I bought this house from the estate of their father, who’d passed away, and they too had no one else.”

  “When was that?” Fisk asked, although he knew.

  “Oh, a long time.” Lee counted on her fingers. “Eleven or twelve years now.”

  Actually it was closing in on twenty years, Fisk thought. Dementia would explain a lot of things here. “When was the last time?” he tried.

  “They come fairly often. It was a turnkey sale—the house came with most of the furniture and a good deal of their father’s possessions. Mind you, nothing valuable—nothing with monetary value, I should say, but a good deal in terms of sentimental value. Merritt, the older one, loved to read the adventure novels from his father’s boyhood collection that was still in the attic. And I was delighted to have his company.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?” Fisk asked.