by Dick Wolf
Fisk asked Bellinger, “Does anyone here ever do the chemical plant equivalent of taking home office supplies?”
“Back in the day, sure, guys would take home some concentrated H2O2 or C3H6O, especially this time of year, to make their own firecrackers. But since 9/11, no one would dare. Not worth losing your livelihood over. Also, in compliance with the new federal regulations, it’s kind of impossible.” Bellinger typed in a code above the handle and pressed his thumb against the adjacent panel, which glowed red as it scanned. With a series of pops and hisses, the bolts sprang free of the jamb. He pushed down the levered handle and then heaved open the big metal door.
Fisk was hit by a wave of chilled air that smelled intensely like an indoor swimming pool. Bellinger swatted at a light-switch panel on the wall inside the door, illuminating fluorescent ceiling tubes protected by thick sheets of plastic and metal cages, stacks of drums, barrels, and industrial-size bottles in a surprising array of bright colors. If not for the stench, Fisk might have thought he was in the supply room of an ice cream or candy factory. The containers were labeled with the names of the chemicals Bellinger had been discussing, and many more Fisk hadn’t heard of.
“Not that this happened,” Fisk said, “but if someone did get in here and somehow snuck off with a drum full of concentrated hydrogen peroxide, would you know?”
“Yeah, six ways until Sunday. Every last one of these containers has an adhesive decal over the seal that’s not only tamper-proof but contains a transponder that constantly transmits a radio signal. I can track the whereabouts of everything, in real time, using my mobile phone.” He fished an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and clicked open an inventory app. “Let’s take the concentrated hydrogen peroxide as an example. Currently we have seven of the Global Peroxygen brand fifty-six-point-eight-liter containers of standard grade seventy percent concentration.” He looked up from the phone. “Right over here.” He pointed to three royal-blue plastic containers, each the size and approximate shape of a beer keg, each with an identical container stacked on top of it.
Fisk counted six containers in total.
“Now this is very strange,” Bellinger said.
CHAPTER 48
The Connecticut coastline flew past, with the cerulean Long Island Sound making appearances in bursts in and around trees at their summertime lushest. Blackwell had just gone all the way out to Norwalk for nothing. Now he was driving back to the familiar confines of square one in New York. So he couldn’t enjoy the view.
His phone trilled and he answered, “Freeman.”
“A marvelous Independence Day to you, Mr. Freeman,” came Segui’s silky voice, with an excess of joy.
The Cartel man was overcompensating again, Blackwell thought. Meaning the day was about to get even less marvelous. “Back at you, bud. What’s up?”
“Certain CNN viewers were displeased to see our prospective customer from Appleton on live television today, in the embrace of a beautiful young woman no less.”
Blackwell decoded this as: Segui’s Zeta bosses were watching TV—probably a news network other than CNN—and saw the coverage of the man from Appleton (New York), Detective Jeremy Fisk, rescuing Chay Maryland from the clutches of Yodeler.
The Cartel’s problem with “live television” almost certainly referenced their dismay that Fisk remained alive. Once they’d put out a hit on someone, they tended to feel as though each hour the target continued to live cost them in clout. Whether or not that was true, each hour that Fisk lived certainly depleted Blackwell’s clout, as well as his future earning potential, and, if he were to fail altogether, his future in general.
Segui offered him an out. “Listen, I know you’ve had bad luck on this sales trip.”
Blackwell didn’t need any sympathy. “Amigo, any fool can have bad luck. The art consists in exploiting it.”
“Glad to hear it! Also, maybe F-dash-F-dash-33511-dash-5 will help.”
A few minutes later, sitting inside a Wi-Fi–equipped roadside food court, laptop powered on, Blackwell opened the Tucson junkyard website and entered the middle six characters Segui had given him. F-33511 produced a listing for a 1974 BMW 3.0 CSI driver’s-side chrome flag-shaped side mirror in good condition, $129.95 plus shipping.
Within pixel number 3,351 Segui had inserted his idea of help, or, more likely, that of his impatient superiors, who had determined that Fisk was impossible to find, but not to trap. So they’d gotten a message to Chay Maryland inviting her to an off-the-record interview with a Sinaloa Cartel representative bent on exposing the Zeta hit currently out on Jeremy Fisk. Their idea was to use a Zeta operative in the role of Sinaloa Cartel representative. That operative would kidnap Chay and use her to bait Fisk. The operative was to be none other than Blackwell.
Using Chay as bait had essentially been his own backup plan the other night on East Seventy-Fourth Street, in the event that Fisk hadn’t been with her in the taxi. It had been a convoluted plan then, and it was worse now, because she would probably be on guard. Also she’d seen Blackwell, although it had only been a fleeting look in the dark.
The good news was that they’d gotten her to agree to the meeting.
CHAPTER 49
Fisk stood on the roof of Bantam Chemical, looking out at the industrial landscape of Hoboken, and just across the Hudson River, Boyden Verlyn’s probable target, Manhattan. In the waning sunlight, the skyscrapers and the harbor resembled molten copper. As much as anything, TATP was a security headache because of the difficulty in detecting it. The explosive defied most standard methods of chemical sensing: it didn’t fluoresce, it didn’t absorb ultraviolet light, you couldn’t readily ionize it. Moreover, screening for TATP required cumbersome and expensive equipment, and even with the best machines, it took a ridiculous amount of time to prepare the samples for testing. Eventually, the NYPD invested in handheld colorimetric sensors. With a readout that changed colors based upon the TATP concentration in the air, the way litmus paper reacts to pH, the devices detected as few as two parts per billion. If Boyden had in fact made TATP and then snuck it elsewhere, thought Fisk, the Department would now need about five million sensors to track it.
Fisk had decided to come up here because Bantam’s owner, Sol Bellinger, had told him that Darren Draco often came up here for cigarette breaks. Fisk saw no evidence of that now, no quadrocopter launch pad, nothing but gull shit, crumbling asphalt roof tiles, a road map of blemished ducts, and a water tower that looked ready to topple off its stilts as soon as a strong gust came along. On the elevator ride up, he had confided to Bellinger the truth about Boyden Verlyn in hopes of spurring him into additional recollection. Now Bellinger just paced in the shadow of the water tower, in stunned silence. The elevated corner of the roof supported a pair of giant air-conditioning units that spewed hot and chemical-laden air, the vapor slicking the wall of the wood-slatted water tank.
“Do you drink the water from that?” Fisk wondered aloud.
“Oh, God no,” said Bellinger. “I’d have grown scales and five eyes by now. Thing’s been dry since my father bought the place.”
A couple of years ago at a party in Chelsea, Fisk and Krina had been handed an antique pocket watch by one of her friends, who instructed them to go to the top floor of the building, climb the fire escape to the roof, and then knock on the trapdoor at the base of the water tower there. How could they resist? Knocking on the trapdoor gained them admission to the Night Heron, a bar within the tower that was as exclusive as it was lawless, and due to the latter, was soon shuttered.
Fisk now tapped the rusty ladder running up the side of the Bantam tower. “Would it be okay if I have a look in there?” he asked Bellinger.
“Fine with me,” the old man said, then, as if having thought better of it, hastened over and gripped the side rails. “I’d better hold on, just in case.”
Fisk hoisted himself on the metal ladder, cold and wet on account of the discharge from the elevated cooling units, before he too had second thoughts. If Bo
yden had used the tower for any Yodeler-related business, it could be booby-trapped.
“You better stay back,” he told Bellinger.
When the old man was out of harm’s reach, Fisk continued to the top of the ladder. The rungs terminated at the pitched roof, a six-sided pyramid atop the barrel, which was once covered with tar paper. Now it was covered with scraps of tar paper and, mostly, more seagull crap. The point of entry was a square hatch on the nearest of the six triangular panels, wide enough to admit a man—or launch a Specter quadrocopter through.
Fisk leaned as far away as the ladder would allow, ducked his face so that the barrel shielded him, then reached the Pelican to the hatch and poked at the knob. The hatch, unlocked and already open, flew sideways, clattering against the roof panel.
“Everything okay?” Bellinger called up.
“So far,” Fisk said.
He set the flashlight on full lumen blast and peered into the barrel. If he hadn’t once visited the illicit nightclub, he would have been shocked by the structure’s expanse. The air was stagnant, oven hot, and smelled like soil. The base was ringed with deposits of some sort, decayed leaves or dust or more droppings.
But the central part was oddly clean, as if the debris had been swept or pushed to the side. Before climbing down the interior ladder, rungs bolted to the inner wall, Fisk scoured the place with the flashlight, searching for a booby trap and then for a sign of weakness in the rungs. That was when the beam landed on a black rotor blade. At first glance it was identical to the Specter blades Fisk had seen. On closer look, he realized, it was twice their size. A bigger blade, meaning bigger rotors, meaning a bigger drone. Which you would want why? he thought. To carry a bigger payload? Like a bomb?
CHAPTER 50
The bad news was that Chay Maryland was nobody’s fool. A beefy pair of New York Times security guards accompanied her to the agreed-upon meeting spot beneath the Coca-Cola sign in Times Square.
The good news, Blackwell thought, was the impromptu street party: half a million in Times Square celebrating Yodeler’s dirt nap or getting a head start on the July Fourth bash. If things went south, getting away would be cake.
And he was nobody’s fool himself. He wore a black wig, fake ’stache, and gobs of bronzer—to mess with any skin-texture recognition software. Damned if he didn’t look like the wetback he was pretending to be. He’d barely recognized himself in the Toys “R” Us men’s room where he’d donned his disguise. He also had on a pair of wraparound mirror shades and a Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose—these things threw a wrench into the measurement-based stuff. And he’d packed a wad of Red Man between his cheek and gum. Another wrench, and good stuff. Still, the guards were reason enough to abort. She was supposed to have come alone.
Then again, she had legitimate security concerns apart from her Cartel reporting, he thought. And if this were a trap, an NYPD Intel or an FBI takedown, the ridiculously risk-averse cops and Feebs would never put her in jeopardy. Blackwell was further tempted to stay because he was running out of time. And with the holiday here now, who was to say that Fisk wouldn’t spirit this honey away to the beach for a long weekend? Shit, look at that body. He’d be crazy not to. This, Blackwell thought, could be his last chance. Worse came to worst, he had at the ready, within his loose fisherman’s vest, a slim and lightweight Ruger Mark III 22/45 capped with a Gemtech Outback II suppressor that reduced the report to a pop that, in this crowd, would be nothing. He could shoot both guards, as well as Chay, and be long gone before anyone was the wiser. Probably before their bodies hit the sidewalk too.
He unfolded the red Washington Nationals baseball cap from the back pocket of his cargo pants (loose-fitting clothing veiled his stature) and pulled it on. This was Chay’s cue to ask him the time, to which he was to reply 3:34 even though it was a good four hours past that.
The guards stayed back as she weaved her way through a crowd lined up for a food cart. Coolly, she asked him the time, he said 3:34, and she hit him with “Are you El Polvo?”
He was shocked. “Where’d you get that?”
“My father was one of those sculptors who always had plaster dust on him, even after he took a bath.” She didn’t look him in the eye so much as look him over—reading him, looking for physical cues, he figured. She had guts, he had to give her that. “So I brought that to my investigation, which was mostly a fishing expedition, until I called the statuary in Chicago where I spoke to Franciszka.”
This was bad, Blackwell thought, and it could get a hell of a lot worse fast. Abort, he told himself, and get the hell out of here. Turning away, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She made no attempt to follow. The guards too stayed put.
Immersing himself in the crowd, Blackwell cursed himself. He understood that when she’d asked Are you El Polvo? and he failed to deny it—or ask her what the hell she was talking about—he had confirmed it.
CHAPTER 51
The unmarked Chevy Tahoe waited at the curb outside at the Christopher Street PATH train station, the first stop in Manhattan after Hoboken.
As Fisk hurried from the station to the SUV, the driver’s door popped open. He heard Dubin’s gruff voice from inside. “Don’t worry about it, Luis, I got it.” Then the chief reached across the backseat and punched the door open.
Fisk climbed in. As always, the chief’s ride had a bouquet of cigar smoke and musky cologne and he had the a/c set to arctic, which he thought wasn’t cold enough. He appeared especially uncomfortable in a crisp, double-breasted navy blazer, white slacks, and a red-white-and-blue-striped necktie. A matching handkerchief, folded with origami precision, spouted from his breast pocket. The problem was that, by nature, he was a sweats guy. Tossing Fisk a handled shopping bag from a trendy Chelsea men’s store, he said, “Change.”
“Hey, Chief, how are you?”
Dubin rapped the driver’s headrest. “Come on, Luis, we need to be there five minutes ago.”
As the SUV lurched uptown, Fisk looked in the bag, finding a navy blazer, white slacks, a matching dress shirt, and a Stars and Stripes–themed silk tie. When he had called from Bantam Chemical, the chief sounded more concerned about the toll that the descent into the water tower had taken on Fisk’s clothes than about Boyden Verlyn’s plotting. Fisk asked now, “What happened to ‘We’re fucking spies, not suits in marketing’?”
“Ended when I was to serve as your valet tonight.” Dubin squeezed his brow. “How the hell often are you awarded the key to the city?”
The more things change . . . “What’ll it be worth if the city is blown up?”
“Not going to happen.”
“Glad to hear that. How do you know?”
Dubin groaned. “Maybe you’re right, maybe Boyden Verlyn was working on a bomber drone. I’ll upgrade that from maybe he was to probably. But he’s not blowing anything up with it tonight. Or ever. Not unless he rises from the dead.”
“Drones can fly autonomously,” Fisk reminded him. “Once you input their flight plans, setting them to launch at some point in the future isn’t much harder than setting an alarm clock.”
“I just don’t get why he would have done that.”
“Remember his threat to ‘exact a steep price’? Setting a drone full of TATP in the right place, say, a tank full of liquefied natural gas . . .”
Dubin nodded. “Possible but unlikely. In any case, largely to humor you, I had the Airborne Division send up both of its Koalas and a couple of the Bell helicopters, all of them with their detectors set to TATP. Also we’ve got K9s out, our guys and gals on the street have been issued the five-hundred-however-many colorimetric sensors, and over in Jersey, the Port Authority PD’s flying Sikorskys. Plus the Bureau ERTs are taking fine-tooth combs to Hoboken in search of missing drones or bombs or a big container of hydrogen peroxide. Same deal in Norwalk, Connecticut.”
“Did you reach the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency?”
“You’re welcome. What�
��s your guy at NGA’s name again?”
“Roy Plummer.”
“Plummer, right. He was on his way to watch the fireworks show. A cruiser’s taking him down to his video games at the World Financial Center.”
Fisk tipped the shopping bag upside down and let the contents fall on the seat between him and Dubin, then set to work unwrapping the oxford shirt and extracting the pins. The chief had done a hell of a job setting the defense, he thought. It troubled him, though, that they still had no inkling of what Boyden had in store.
He’d knotted the red-white-and-blue necktie, and on the third try, just as they reached Riverside Park, dimpled it to Dubin’s satisfaction.
Blackwell ditched his disguise piece by piece—into a trash can here, down a sewer grate there—while making his way up Eighth Avenue, which was effectively closed to vehicular traffic due to the overflow of celebrants from Times Square. He dodged the July Fourth revelers, many of whom had apparently availed themselves of the special “Yodeler Shot!”—a shot glass full of vodka with bloodlike red food coloring in it, for sale in so many of the area bars. And he tried to do what he always did: think positive.
He would find Fisk.
He would kill Fisk.
Then he would go home and buy an RFF 28 with the proceeds. He now imagined himself sitting in a captain’s chair, rocketing across whitecaps at the powerboat’s top speed of seventy-three knots. Damn if he didn’t feel the sea spray cooling him now, on Eighth Avenue.
Then, as if the positive energy he’d generated had influenced the powers controlling the universe, he saw, on a TV above the bar, none other than Detective Jeremy Fisk, wearing a navy blazer and an American-flag tie. He was ascending the steps to a stage. LIVE FROM RIVERSIDE PARK, read the caption.
Then, after his promotion to the rank of detective, he served New York City courageously and selflessly,” Mayor de Blasio told the full bleachers up and down Riverside Park. The park, the piers, the boat basin, and most of the western shore of Manhattan had become a viewing area for the fireworks show over the adjacent Hudson River, now golden in reflection of the sun descending over New Jersey.