The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  While logging in, he had an edgy sense that accessing the Times TCP pack would bring a tactical team crashing into the lab. Could Willoughby have set him up? Getting to this point had almost been too easy. He fought the urge to take a deep breath. A display of nerves might be caught by a camera system running a Behavioral Recog application, in which case a duty officer at the Fort—the NSA in Fort Meade, Maryland—would receive notification and monitor Lin in real time.

  Lin operated under the assumption that they were already monitoring him in real time. A little over two hours later, in the course of his regular work on the Department of Commerce project, he opened—purportedly for reference purposes—the Structured Query Language injection tool Willoughby had created for the Times. With the injection tool, Lin could go elsewhere, connect with the paper, and then access the trove of classified documents that Merritt Verlyn had given Chay Maryland.

  Of paramount value was what NYPD Intel, the FBI, and the NSA knew about the businesses fronting Lin. The hitch was that the SQL comprised more code than he could memorize—more than he and the entire population of China, working in concert, could take out of this lab in their heads. Copy it, take a cell-phone photo of it, even write a line down, and he risked setting off alarm bells at the Fort. He had a plan, though.

  Sitting back, he rubbed at his temples, as he had done several times already this session, and as he often did when fatigued. This time, he pressed the spring hinge on the left side of his eyeglass frames. This activated a subminiature video camera concealed by the nosepiece. He began scrolling through the SQL.

  When he was nearly finished, a bell sounded—like a typical home door chime, though it had the effect on him of an air-raid siren.

  Trying to appear merely curious, he punched up the controls for the special SCIF intercom, which transmitted on a push-to-speak basis, like an old-fashioned walkie-talkie. “Who there?”

  “Hey, Ji.” It sounded like Hawk was calling from deep space, a function of a specialized local amplifier that prevented the receiver from serving as a microphone.

  “Everything okay?” Lin saw that he had the equivalent of two pages remaining to scroll through and record.

  “You gotta come out here.”

  “Why?”

  “Take a couple seconds off, willya, buddy?”

  Without the final two pages of the SQL file, the first hundred would be useless. “Hang on,” Lin said. Video the rest of the file first, then deal with Hawk, he told himself.

  “Come on, I’m telling you!” Hawk sounded feverish.

  “Okay, okay.”

  Lin captured the last page, then rose, preparing to take out the guard, who, alerted to malfeasance, would be waiting in the hall with his Beretta drawn.

  In his wallet, Lin carried an ultrathin blade made of surgical steel. It unfolded from a polypropylene fake Visa card that served as knife handle. He’d had ample training in defending himself with the weapon. Hawk would only pose a threat if he were expecting a knife, for which reason Lin didn’t dare reach for it, not now, while the action might be broadcast live.

  He pulled the door open and stuck out his head. No sign of anyone in the corridor, or on the floor for that matter, other than Hawk, who held a computer tablet so that the red light cast from the screen turned his wrinkly face into a road map.

  Lin did not let himself relax. “What’s up?” he asked, going for nonchalance.

  “Check this out.” Hawk beckoned him with an exaggerated motion.

  “Hawk, I’m in middle of something.”

  “No, no, no.” Hawk reached for him. Startled, Lin tried to dodge the thick hand, then felt himself lose balance. As he attempted to regain it and go for his knife, Hawk thrust the bright green tablet monitor toward his face. On a baseball diamond, shown from a camera in center field, the batter swung and missed, the catcher squeezed the ball into his mitt, and leaped up.

  Along with one of the broadcast announcers, Hawk shouted, “Harvey just pitched a perfect game!”

  Early the next morning, Lin purchased a can of Coca-Cola from a vending machine and found a seat at a back corner table of the food court at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop he’d selected for its crowds, free Wi-Fi, and lack of surveillance cameras.

  Powering on a virgin, seven-inch Nextbook computer tablet that had run him sixty-nine dollars in cash, he inserted a flash drive loaded with the injection tool. His video capture had been digitized overnight at headquarters and then transmitted back to him along with a depressing electronicom from his boss: the Interdisciplinary Science Building penetration had been ill-conceived, the North American Division chief complained, also requesting eyeglasses matching Lin’s, custom-fitted with a video camera (they’d cost the equivalent of $10,000 U.S.). Far worse, HQ’s search of the Times system had yielded little intel that they couldn’t have accessed with the basic ninety-nine-cent introductory special subscription. If Chay Maryland or another reporter indeed had the Verlyn cache, they hadn’t been foolish enough to upload it to the Times.

  Lin would reply that the reporters’ discretion was understandable. But as anyone who’d operated in the United States knew (the North American Division chief had never once set foot in the field), such discretion was an anomaly. First he needed to go online and see for himself. With Willoughby’s Structured Query Language, he was able to waltz into the New York Times system and then go to the backstage area, where reporters read internal memos, posted stories, and stored large files.

  To her additional credit, Chay Maryland, the reporter on the Verlyn story, filed stories she composed on a secure personal computer. Secure, that is, until Lin accessed it.

  If he could get Maryland’s home address, he could break in and copy the entire contents of her hard drive, or he could simply steal her computer. Her address was listed nowhere, however, not on voting or tax records, not in the aggregators and databases private investigators pay fifty dollars a month for. She was a cipher, either naturally or as a function of her experience.

  Thankfully, the New York Times Human Resources Department’s complete staff directory was wide open to him now. It listed each employee’s date of birth, salary, Social Security number, and, yes, home address.

  CHAPTER 9

  FBI special agent Evans could have said, in about ten seconds, “Walter Doyle was found shot to death in Battery Park yesterday in a manner similar to Harun Ahmed.”

  Including extraneous information like the courses the victim had taught at Stuyvesant High School prior to his retirement, Evans took twenty minutes to impart the same information while briefing a small group that included Fisk. They sat in the smaller of the two conference rooms at the FBI office on Ninth Avenue, above Chelsea Market. Fisk might have arrived via the footbridge connecting the FBI to the NYPD Intel offices, which were directly across Ninth Avenue, but the footbridge was always locked on both ends. Symbolic of the relationship between the two services, he thought.

  At the head of the table, Evans went on, reading directly from the medical examiner’s report: “Entrance wound one inch to the right of the left scapula. The projectile perforated the heart through the right atrium, .5 inches above the right ventricle, exiting the left pectorals major three inches below the clavicle, leaving a wound of 1.6 centimeters by 0.9, with no abrasions, soot, or stippling.”

  It seemed like he would read the bulk of the report—ten single-spaced pages was a medical examiner’s norm—before getting to the most critical piece of information.

  Fisk cut in. “Quick question: Was the projectile recovered?”

  Weir looked up, annoyed. He reached onto the conference table for the ceramic mug imprinted with COFFEE FIRST, THEN MAYBE YOUR TEDIOUS BULLSH*T WON’T SEEM SO BAD and took a swallow. “Answer’s yes, same Makarov nine-mil, same gun. So we told Norman at the Times to go ahead and roll the dice with the comment thing. We just all need to be able to access that Hotmail account you opened.”

  Fisk’s inclination was to take point. With hearts and minds af
fected by a killer on the loose, tactics were deliberated for too long (the FBI’s industrial-strength brand of red tape aside). At this juncture, however, the committee managing to field an e-mail from Yodeler would be progress.

  “Sure thing,” Fisk said.

  “Good,” Weir said. “Not to waste any more time, I want to turn things over to Supervisory Special Agents Flynn and Morgan, who are up here from the NCAVC.” Weir indicated the middle-aged white professorial types across the table, National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime agents who performed the task known in common parlance as “profiling.” Unlike Hollywood profilers, they didn’t do so by walking around crime scenes and picking up vibes. Instead theirs was a world of criminal behavioral data and statistical likelihood.

  The focus of the meeting shifted to the application of NCAVC intel to Yodeler. “The tactical choice, sniping, is rooted in fastidiousness,” said the bespectacled Special Advisory Agent Flynn. “Now, here’s a nifty stat for you all. In Vietnam, the United States expended fifty thousand rounds of ammunition for each enemy killed. Snipers expend less than two rounds per kill.”

  Fisk had never thought about it that way. But, yes, the snipers he’d known shared that trait. Interesting . . .

  “There are a number of characteristics shared by criminal snipers that can help us whittle down the list of suspects,” said the other Quantico man, Morgan. He spun his laptop so that the others around the conference table could see its monitor, then he clicked open a PowerPoint slide show and began to read the captions aloud. “Ritualistic behavior, compulsivity—often at obsessive levels, suicidal tendencies, history of serious assaults, hypersexuality, history of drug and/or alcohol abuse, parental history of drug and/or alcohol abuse, arsonist tendencies . . .”

  Fisk was unsure how these symptoms differentiated the criminal sniper from the garden-variety serial killer.

  Morgan continued, “Many also suffer from chronic depression, feelings of powerlessness or inadequacy, and feelings of interrupted bliss during childhood—in fact, many have stated that they were the result of an unwanted pregnancy.”

  Fisk’s attention drifted toward the special advisory agents’ shoes, shiny black wing tips, laces tied in near-perfect symmetry, no blemishes. The case would be better served, he thought, if the special advisory agents walked around crime scenes.

  Shortly thereafter, after making an excuse about an important phone call and five minutes on the 1 train, Fisk climbed out of the Bowling Green subway station and took in a busy Battery Park on a sunny day suitable for a Visitors and Convention Bureau commercial.

  Behind the Castle Clinton, the two policemen guarding the crime scene were lost in the crowd, or at least their presence had no ill effect on the passersby. Fisk doubted that the couple dozen yoga practitioners on the adjacent lawn would continue their meditative recline if they had any inkling of the nature of the crime.

  Entering the park, he had the sensation of eyes on him, or rather a single eye, through a spotting scope from one of the tall buildings uptown. As in Central Park, however, the wall of trees between the buildings and the crime scene would pose a substantial impediment to a sniper shooting from a high floor.

  Despite its proximity to the water, the park was essentially windless. As Fisk walked down the paved path to the castle, an unnaturally elliptical shadow caught up to him and then slowed to a stop, as if it had hit the brakes.

  He looked up. He might as well have been staring directly into the sun. Popping on his Oakleys and then squinting, he managed to distinguish from the blaze the silhouette of a round object hovering overhead, a blimp-shaped balloon no bigger than a bolster pillow.

  It appeared, in the glare, to be made of chrome, but really it was nylon. Fisk had seen refillable helium balloons like it before; you controlled them using a key-chain-size infrared remote. They also came in the form of a shark and as Nemo, the clownfish from the animated movie. Vendors by the ferry sold them for fifty dollars apiece, meaning you could probably find them in toy stores for ten.

  Piloting the little blimp was an Asian boy, seven or eight years old, with an oversize foam Statue of Liberty crown falling into his eyes. His mother watched his display of piloting with an open mouth. Dad snapped pictures with a phone.

  Fisk tracked down a vendor and paid his fifty, asking if he could have the Nemo model the guy was using to demonstrate the device, rather than taking the time to open a new one. Fisk piloted the nylon dirigible over an unoccupied patch of greenery. He sent it out, slowed it to a hover, and then brought it back around over his head, settling it in place to blot out the sun.

  With such a device, Fisk thought, trees would provide very little if any impediment—

  “Nice day for flying clownfish in the park,” came a woman’s voice.

  Fisk turned to find Chay Maryland, in an outfit that enabled her to blend into the crowd here or perhaps help her get answers from the crime-scene cops: An I ♥ NY T-shirt and cutoff jeans that directed attention to long legs—and spoke to her sprinting career more capably than a Georgetown track-team uniform would have.

  Fisk brought his flying fish in for a landing. “You didn’t follow me,” he said.

  “No need, I thought I knew you’d wind up here.” She looked at the remote control in his hand. “So this is what you do to blow off steam?”

  “Yeah,” he said, playing her game. “Calms me down.”

  Her smile faded. “I wonder if you could deploy a rifle with one of those?”

  To stonewall her further here would only send the reporter, with a vengeance, to another source. Countless unmanned aerial vehicle experts would be happy to regale her—and effectively millions of New Yorkers—with details of the lethal capability of microdrones. Better to stay in front of the story in order to control it, and, ideally, prevent it. “No, I don’t think you could use a balloon. Not one that small, anyway. It’s barely strong enough to transport a water pistol. But other systems could carry a rifle, absolutely.”

  “Which ones?”

  “That’s the question I’ll be trying to answer as soon as I get back to my office, if not sooner. I can tell you now, though, that five years ago, the Department tested the Shadowhawk UAV.”

  “The remotely piloted helicopter, right?”

  “Miniature helicopter. It weighs only about forty-five pounds. But it’s able to fly seventy miles an hour and fire stun baton rounds, shotgun shells and grenades, not to mention nine-millimeter bullets.” Fisk hoped that tossing her some background information might satisfy her investigative nature. “You can’t publish that, of course. The Department has managed to keep the Shadowhawk tests under wraps. A news story now would only compromise our methods if the city purchases the system, as Miami, Houston, and London have.”

  “And nobody knows this?”

  “Best if they don’t, at this point. The drones could do anything a police helicopter could do, at a fraction of the cost.”

  “A system with that capability seems wide open for abuse,” she said. “Any chance that’s what Yodeler used here?” Chay aimed a thumb at Castle Clinton.

  Fisk shook his head. “Shadowhawks run a couple hundred thousand bucks apiece. Yodeler’s going to use something more commonplace, assuming he wants to avoid getting caught.”

  “For the same reason he used an AR-15 and commonplace bullets?”

  “I don’t know a whole lot about drones, but I’d guess that the same relatively simple and inexpensive systems that can deliver packages from Amazon could be modified to carry an AR-15.”

  Chay looked toward the sky, not in trepidation, but with wonder.

  “The good news is that those drones are a lot fewer and farther between that AR-15s,” Fisk continued. “If we can get surveillance cam imagery of the drone in flight here or in Central Park, we can trace the drone to Yodeler. We also might be able to trace the radio signal he used to control it.”

  “If he was careful enough to use an untraceable gun and bullets, what would be the od
ds he used his Amex if and when he bought a drone?”

  “The odds aren’t great. But they’re a little bit better that he would use a prepaid Visa card to buy a drone online and have it delivered to, say, an out-of-the-way UPS store he’d chosen for his PO box because the place had no security cameras and the employees didn’t ask questions.”

  “Then he would have picked up his drone and left without a trace.”

  “As far as he knows. This is one of the reasons we’re not keen on publishing the locations of the cameras—or publishing any of our methods.”

  Chay crossed her arms, looking around the park again. She said, “If he is using a drone, even if you find surveillance camera footage of him, it may not be in time to stop him. He’s killed two people in the last two days. If people are forewarned, they can stay inside today. At the least, if there were a drone overhead, they would know not to stand on the sidewalk and gawk at it.”

  “Forewarned isn’t forearmed if there’s no way of seeing or hearing the thing coming,” he said. “Anyway, a drone can target people who are inside buildings. So by warning them, you’d be doing little more than telling Yodeler that we’re onto him, in which case he covers his tracks and we’re back to square one.”

  “Detective Fisk, how would you feel if by the end of the day, you’ve found no further clues to Yodeler’s identity, and, meanwhile, he’s killed a child who was on a playground because his parents didn’t know to keep them indoors?”

  “I’d feel terrible. But you understand why we can’t evacuate the city every time we have a killer on the loose. And in this case, it’d be based on a hypothesis developed on the basis of a kid flying a remote-control blimp.”

  “Actually, a detective from Intel flying a remote-control blimp. But—point taken.” Fisk didn’t quite believe her. She plucked a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook from her back pocket and clicked a mechanical pencil to readiness, walking away.