The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  She passed the last of the journalists, an ABC reporter leaning against a banister halfway down the courthouse steps. The guy didn’t look up from his phone.

  Fisk followed her the rest of the way down the steps, then called out, “Chay?”—pronounced “Shea,” like the former New York Mets baseball stadium (named for William Shea, the Manhattan lawyer who softened the blow of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ traitorous flight to Los Angeles by convincing the National League to give the city an expansion team, the Mets).

  She kept going, as if she hadn’t heard him or were someone else. But, almost imperceptibly, she stiffened.

  He tried again. “Chay Maryland, of the New York Times?”

  She glanced over a shoulder.

  He manufactured a smile. “One of your stories changed my life.”

  A blink and she made him. “Jeremy Fisk. Detective, Intel.” She looked past him, no doubt worried about drawing a news crew. Wary, but not nervous or scared. “What do you want?”

  “Just to ask you a question, for a change.”

  She stepped onto the Worth Street sidewalk. The pedestrian traffic was light, by Manhattan standards, yet enough of a crowd that she was lost to the courthouse reporters. “I’m in a rush . . .”

  Fisk caught up to her. “Aren’t you going to testify?” he asked. Despite an offer of a significantly mitigated sentence, Merritt Verlyn sat in his cell at the Marshals Service detention facility and refused to say a word. No fewer than 122,627 documents remained outstanding from the files Verlyn had stolen, and it was well within the realm of possibility that Chay had the cache on a flash drive bouncing around inside her tennis bag.

  “Why would I testify?” She accelerated slightly, her stride widening.

  “Chiefly because prison isn’t pleasant,” he said. “I fear your tennis game might suffer.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I wouldn’t have to waste time deciding what to wear in the morning. There would be no guys to deal with, no bills to worry about, I wouldn’t miss days at the gym. I could catch up on my rest and my reading, maybe write a book.”

  “That’s what vacations are for.”

  “I take about as many vacations as you do, I’ll bet. In any case, Detective, I can’t divulge confidential sources on a story, not in court, not anywhere.”

  “But your source is already on trial.”

  “Nice try. Merritt Verlyn may or may not be my source . . . but either way, prospective whistle-blowers need to know that journalists are going to protect them, even if it means we go to prison. The bigger-picture issue is that a free press is essential to democracy—you’re a great fan of democracy, aren’t you?”

  “I am. I’m also a fan of national security. Hypothetically, would it ever bother you if your reporting put American lives in danger?”

  “I think you mean your American life.”

  “Okay, maybe it’s not so hypothetical. Did you see the stolen document listing our informants on the Kkangpae mob in Koreatown?”

  Chay glanced away. “There were more than one hundred thousand documents, I could not read each one.”

  “The second that Kkangpae file goes up on WikiLeaks, the whole op is blown. The mobsters don’t exactly take kindly to people who help the police. Real lives are at stake.”

  “I’d hope you’ve taken steps to protect your informants.”

  “And that’s just one instance. These people have family members who also may be in harm’s way.” Fisk tried to hold back, but his anger was showing.

  Chay said, “Bringing the ops reports to light may also help innocent New Yorkers who are already in the cross fire, placed there by Intel without regard for their constitutional rights.”

  “Except that in every single case, a judge signed off.”

  “So it’s a case of legal authority versus moral authority.” She slowed down now, eager to win this argument. “Then why not let New Yorkers decide which they’re willing to allow?”

  “They’ve already done that through the election of representatives who approved Intel’s programs. Also there are numerous built-in safeguards: intelligence service personnel have set procedures that allow them to blow the whistle about a classified program without putting agents at risk.”

  A red palm flashed onto the sign on the far side of Broadway. Stopping at the curb, Chay turned to Fisk and asked, “Is it modesty or some sort of crazy amnesia that kept you from mentioning the attempted Cartel hit at your apartment building?”

  “It’s part of an ongoing investigation, so I can’t talk about it. Except to say that it certainly proves my point. Posting law enforcement agents’ private information on the Internet puts us at drastically increased risk of visits from assassins.”

  “I’m not sure these so-called assassins needed any help from me, informational, motivational, or otherwise. I do hope that the experience of having the informational grid turned on you gives you and your colleagues a taste of your own medicine. In the abstract, that is. You wield an enormous amount of power, and these checks and balances you rattle off are little impediment. Whatever you want to see, you see. Whoever you want to watch, you watch. You’ve been harassing me and everyone I know in pursuit of the Verlyn document cache, which is what we’re really talking about now, isn’t it? You’re not interested in whether or not I testify. The question you want answered is ‘Where are the documents?’ Right?”

  “I shouldn’t need to ask that. I should have faith that if you did know, you would have warned the agents who, along with their spouses and children, are in danger.”

  She scoffed. “That’s just a variation on the old saw that it’s the responsibility of the media to join the government in the war on terror. I’m sorry; it’s not. It’s the media’s responsibility to cover the government, not to cover the government’s ass.”

  Fisk remained in place when the sign on the far corner clicked to the man-walking icon and pedestrians shot across Broadway. Did she really believe this? “I feel like you are making the decision that some people’s lives are more sacred than others.”

  “And I feel like you do the same thing, day in and day out. Let me ask you a question. Did you murder Magnus Jenssen?”

  Fisk’s face showed nothing. “When did you switch gears from an investigative reporter to critic?”

  “I’m not sure I did.”

  “Fun to go thumbs-up or thumbs-down on food you don’t have to prepare or pay for.”

  Fisk started across while the walk signal counted down, leaving Chay at the curb, uncharacteristically without a rejoinder.

  CHAPTER 4

  Never seen you out of your uniform before, Harry,” said Wally from the driver’s seat of his hansom cab. “You’ve got a really nice ass, man!”

  Harun weighed a comeback as he jogged past, on Central Park’s lower loop. He and Wally had become friends over the years, since an afternoon even hotter than this one. From his post at the door of the luxury apartment building, 122 Central Park South, Harun had been looking out on the horses standing in a row on the park side of the street, tethered to carriages, awaiting fares despite the broiling sun.

  He felt especially sorry for Wally’s bony old horse, Buckmeister. After enduring an earful from Mrs. Billingham in apartment 19F for using one of the building’s pails, Harun brought Buckmeister some cold water.

  Harun thought now of a retort involving his ass and Wally’s lips. He kept it to himself, rather than risk obliterating whatever tip his friend still stood to collect from the prim, clearly unamused elderly couple in the back of his cab.

  Harun also needed to conserve his breath in order to make it up to the reservoir, let alone back to work. Each stride was heavy lifting, his lungs ached, and the air wasn’t just searing, it was foul. Although he couldn’t see the Central Park Zoo from here, he could sure smell the monkey cages.

  He and Durriyah had taken Rudy and the twins to the zoo to see the new snow-leopard cubs on his last day off. Not easy getting in from Ozone Park with the �
��new” (to them—really, thirdhand) double stroller on the crowded A train, plus Rudy’s stroller. And, surprise, now that Rudy was three, the price of his zoo admission ticket had gone from free to thirteen bucks. Plus another eighteen dollars apiece for Harun and Durriyah. Plus half his salary for snacks and drinks and balloons while waiting on line (almost an hour) for the cat house.

  But from the moment they got in, it was worth it: the looks on the boys’ faces, all three of them smiling and laughing.

  The image pushed away the pain of running now. Man, did he love those guys. He’d do anything for them. Running four miles during his lunch break was nothing. All for them. You’d’ve thought pushing a stroller for hours on end to get the babies to fall asleep counted as exercise, but since he and Durriyah had gotten into the baby business, as they called it, he’d somehow put on forty pounds. Now he ran for the boys, so that they’d have an old man who could play football with them, instead of just an old man.

  Before he knew it, twenty-five blocks were behind him and he was on the path through the woods, toward the gatehouse at the bottom of the Jackie O. Reservoir. No other runners around. Which figured. It was 2:15, maybe 2:30. The lunch-hour regulars, the yuppie fitness-nut types, were showered and back at their desks by now, polishing off expensive salads. Good. He liked the solitude, a commodity in this town.

  A dark shadow passed overhead. His first thought was: a bird. One of those falcons the news loves to show nesting at the tops of the buildings surrounding the park. Swooping for someone’s late lunch, maybe.

  He kept on. The shadow appeared again, out of the corner of his eye. Unnaturally round. Seemed to stay on him as he ran. He looked up, through the gap between the tops of two big trees, squinting into a blaze of sunlight. Using a hand as a visor and squinting against the glare, he made out a dark form above the treetops. Christ, a buzzard? Find someone else, vulture. Harun was running to add years to his life.

  It made no noise, or at least nothing he could hear over the din of the city, which, even here, in the depths of the park—

  A boom, as from a cannon. That’s what it sounded like. Shaking him, turning the leaves all around into a shower of green confetti falling behind him.

  Something pinged the path to his side, raising a spark and spraying dirt and gravel into his shins. He glanced down, seeing a few spots of blood.

  What the hell?

  Spooked, he sped up.

  Another blast. This time, it felt like, a firebomb went off in his throat. His legs gave out and he went down hard on his side, coming to rest on his back on the path.

  He was cold all over, except for a newly formed pit between his collarbones. Hot blood welled there, trickling down his shirt, into his left armpit. None of which made any sense.

  No real pain, fortunately. He struggled to get up—and made it as far as his elbows when a dark sheet of blood flooded down his shirtfront. His consciousness flickered.

  Three boys in the cat house, balloons in hand, smiles on faces.

  CHAPTER 5

  A rooster’s crow woke Fisk, who didn’t immediately know where he was. So what else was new? Lately he’d become Manhattan’s answer to George Washington, sleeping in one place after another on account of a digital trail that he couldn’t turn off.

  He was growing unhealthily paranoid, and he knew it. The usual cop eyes he brought to the street were becoming prey’s eyes as he watched each face and clocked each passing car. He was becoming squirrelly. In his least healthy moments, he wondered if it was penance for his own misdeeds: a Sartrean punishment for having exacted his revenge upon Magnus Jenssen.

  Flecks of dawn skirting the steel window gates outlined tall bare brick walls against the darkness. The fishy smell of old glue was the tip-off: the building was a onetime book bindery in an old printing house just off Tenth Avenue, two blocks west of Madison Square Garden. The fact that the building was zoned for commercial and not residential use didn’t stop the owner from renting out spaces fitted with crude showers and hot plates. For cash, of course. Which aligned with Fisk’s interests. The Department had wanted him to get out of town and lie low until there was some closure in the leak case, meaning he was out of harm’s way from the Cartel. Fisk maintained that there was no better place for him than Manhattan, with its multitudes—on each block. Also he wanted to be here in order to work the leak case.

  Because he needed a name to rent this place, he’d chosen Reynolds. Common enough. The choice was also an homage to Scottie Reynolds, the leading scorer in Villanova basketball history. Fisk figured there was little risk that anyone would make the association: he himself had sunk a pair of free throws in the first varsity game he played at Villanova, the eighteenth game of the season during his sophomore year. At last check, his two points placed him in a twenty-three-way tie for 533rd place on the school’s all-time scoring list. Because he’d topped out at five-eleven and, mostly, because he was short on talent, he never made it into a second varsity game. Two points in a Division I game gave him celeb status in his rec league, though.

  He snapped on his trusty Pelican 7060—the compact, rechargeable mega-lumen tactical flashlights, popular in law enforcement. Pelicans retailed for about $150 apiece, which, if you asked cops, was a bargain. The 7060 featured a control switch on the barrel and a second one on the butt end so an officer could switch from low beam to high while tracking a perp, holding the light under his weapon or above his head. Fisk’s Pelican had become perhaps the most important home-furnishing element.

  The rooster’s crow was the default ring tone, evidently, on his latest prepaid cell phone, which sat on the pitted hardwood floor beside his new inflatable bed. Goddamn. With three rows of three giant app icons, the phone looked like a toy. Recognizing the number as an NYPD exchange, he hit answer and said, “Walker.” Kenny “Sky” Walker had been his favorite Knick as a kid.

  “Good morning, Detective Fisk,” came a familiar, grandmotherly voice. “It’s Sally in Chief Dubin’s office.”

  So much, thought Fisk, for his Walker alias, and the phone, notwithstanding the voiceprint and GPS scrambling apps on which he’d spent $29.98 and forty minutes of download time. He knew of four different electronic signal intelligence collection and analysis networks on which her mention of his name might raise the digital equivalent of a red flag, if so desired by one of five hundred thousand people with the requisite clearance at seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies. Or by a single person at one of those agencies that the Cartel had gotten to. With that information, tracking him could be as simple for a hit man as using GPS.

  Here was the source of his paranoia: he knew too much about finding people like himself who did not want to be found. Fisk had never been a fan of karma.

  Fisk set the concern aside because a call of any sort from the Department at this hour almost certainly meant urgent business. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “The chief wants you to go to a meeting at eight thirty.”

  “Okay,” said Fisk.

  “At the New York Times.”

  Fisk wondered if Sally had called him in error. “A meeting at the Times?”

  “On West Fortieth.”

  Timesmen referred to NYPD Intel as the NYKGB, and Fisk as Jeremy Badenov. Was Dubin, conscious of public image to a fault, offering him as a sacrificial lamb?

  “Any idea what this is about?” he asked Sally.

  “A homicide.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Fisk liked the printing house’s broad selection of exits—front, service/delivery, basement, and courtyard. Someone waiting outside in ambush had his chance of success reduced by 75 percent right off the bat. This morning, he chose the courtyard exit door, throwing a hip into the crash bar and drawing his Glock as he backed out.

  “Courtyard” was a euphemism for a two-hundred-square-foot patch of crumbling cement patio surrounded by a high iron rail fence. Empty now. Weeds coated the fence, depriving someone in the surrounding brownstones of a view of the door to the courtyard, for
instance through a rifle scope.

  Stepping onto the patio, Fisk was hit by the blare of engine noises and horns and people trying to talk over them—a typical A.M. rush hour, unless you were feeling like a fugitive.

  He proceeded down a narrow back alley, at the end of which he peered onto Thirty-Fifth Street, spotting several doorways and other choke points ideal for an ambush. A hit man might also be lying back so that his head was beneath the window line in any of fifty parked cars. And there were hundreds of dark windows behind which a sniper might be readying a rifle.

  If so, Fisk thought, holstering the Glock, then they had him.

  Starting up the sidewalk, he had the discomfiting sense, whichever way he looked, of someone sneaking up behind him.

  The heat slowed the stream of professionals on their way to work, making it that much easier for him to pick up a tail. Tails are easier to spot than most people think. Sometimes they have no good reason to be where they are. Sometimes they even use hand signals to communicate with teammates. The key is the other times, when they’re imperceptible.

  Feel them, Fisk exhorted himself, heading up Tenth.

  When choosing the printing house, he had composed a mental list of the pros and cons of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

  Pros: Proximity to Madison Square Garden, which is to say, Knicks games.

  Cons: Everything else.

  In taking inventory of his surroundings now, he began to reassess that stance. Hell’s Kitchen’s gritty reputation was rooted in a preponderance of soot-blackened industrial buildings, the Westies gang, and Damon Runyan stories.

  Yet this part of the city had exploded into a district of upscale and exotic restaurants. In and around them were brownstones that had recently been restored to their full nineteenth-century Greek Revival luster. The warehouses had yielded to glossy television studios and extensions of Silicon Alley. Vacant lots had morphed into community gardens and playgrounds. And directly ahead, emblematic of this urban revival, stood the city’s fourth tallest building, a stunning metallic cruciform completed in 2007 and known to locals as the Times Tower.