The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  But this job brought an additional challenge: he needed to know ahead of time where Chay kept the item he wanted, the Merritt Verlyn document cache. Also time was of the essence, because other services would try to get it—they might be trying already.

  It was amazing that the American authorities hadn’t forced the reporter to turn the documents over. Amazing unless you knew the Americans, Lin mused.

  He walked past the building’s façade, which accounted for the lower third of the east side of Broadway. The sidewalk was still dark, the air still cool and still—stagnant, as if holding its breath in anticipation of a scorcher of a day. Other than a team of sanitation workers collecting trash, only a few of the earliest birds were out, traders who concentrated on the Nikkei or Europe, Lin guessed. Now in a khaki suit, with his hair slicked back, he would be taken for one of them. He had his regulation messenger’s uniform, including the black spandex bicycle shorts, in his computer case.

  At the corner, he turned left onto a tree-lined stretch of West Eighty-Seventh, both brighter and warmer on account of the sun climbing over the rooftops on the East Side. He unpocketed a crawler, a remotely controlled video camera about the size of a cockroach. Thanks to a pair of miniature tank tracks that provided suction, the crawler could move up and down walls or buildings.

  Lin checked to see that no one was looking. Vehicular traffic, a trickle to begin with, was nil. The sidewalk was now populated only by a jogger absorbed in whatever was pulsing through her headphones. Lin placed the crawler onto the wall three stories below Chay’s apartment, in the shadow cast by a utility pipe. The device adhered to the bricks. Thanks to a realistic plastic skin, from more than a few inches away, it looked like any other bug. From more than three feet away, it wouldn’t be noticed at all.

  Lin walked to the Starbucks at the far end of the block, entered, and purchased a ridiculously expensive iced coffee drink. All but one of the ten tables were empty.

  He chose a two-top in the back corner. While nursing the iced coffee, he used the control app on his phone to send the crawler scurrying up the wall. A tap at the phone and the controls shifted to the live feed from the camera on the bug’s belly, giving Lin a view of red bricks, graying mortar, then, finally, glass—a window into Chay Maryland’s apartment. One of her three windows, he hoped, would be open a crack—this was the preferred method of temperature control in so many New York City apartments.

  The crawler crept the length of the ledge running beneath the three windows, all of which, it turned out, were sealed tight. Lin would not be able to get the robot into the apartment this morning.

  So he shifted tactics, parking the device and activating the wide-angle lens in its head. He aimed it through the glass, giving him a close-up of a beige venetian-blind slat. He sent the bug crawling until it found a gap between a slat and the window frame.

  Through it, he could see only darkness. No surprise there: like everyone else on the planet, the reporter slept with the lights off.

  Fortunately the crawler was equipped with forward-looking infrared. Another tap at the controls activated the FLIR, affording Lin a view of the entire apartment, which wasn’t saying much. The studio was four hundred square feet, if that. The reporter paid $3,500 a month in rent, Lin had read in the dossier compiled by the station. A studio apartment on a high floor in this building ran north of $4,000. More insanity.

  She lay asleep now, or at least unmoving. Eyes shut, breathing softly. Her full-size bed unfolded from the wall, taking up nearly one-fourth of the available floor space. Another fourth of the room was taken up with moving boxes in stacks, which was odd, Lin thought, because she’d moved into this apartment almost a year ago. Why hadn’t she unpacked by now?

  The answer came to him as he took in the apartment: No artwork, no plants, not a single tchotchke. It was the apartment of a workaholic who was in New York to work, using a home merely as a place to sleep, shower quickly, and store her belongings.

  He shifted his focus to the small granite-topped kitchen counter, which also served as dining table and desk, as evidenced by the stacks of books and clippings wedged between the open MacBook and the coffeemaker. Once he broke in, Lin would use a five-terabyte pen drive to clone the MacBook’s hard drive. Or, if time were an issue, he would just steal the MacBook.

  Ideally, though, no one would know he’d been there—no American, that is.

  The problem lay in the likelihood that she had stored the documents somewhere else more secure than a PC, in a hiding place. He suspected that the NSA man had given the cache to her on a flash drive. It would have been laborious as well as foolhardy to transmit thousands of classified documents over the Web, and nearly impossible to produce and traffic hard copies. In the course of writing about national security, Chay had no doubt learned of dozens of clever and effective dead drops and other hiding places. If she’d hidden the flash drive—and why wouldn’t she have?—it might require hours for Lin to find it.

  He texted the station (although if anyone intercepted the message, it would appear to be sent from Dick’s Sporting Goods in Monmouth, New Jersey, to an Adidas sales rep):

  PLEASE SHIP 60 UNITS MODEL 731-1

  The key was the first digit, 6. This instructed Ops Support to go ahead and activate the Montana’s fire alarm—they’d already hacked into the building’s system last night.

  He sat back, sipped at his coffee drink, which wasn’t bad, meanwhile wandering to the Major League Baseball site and clicking open last night’s New York Mets box score. Force of habit.

  The klaxon startled him.

  It emanated from the Montana. Perfect.

  He clicked back to the crawler controls and reactivated the forward camera to see Chay Maryland up, hurrying into a tracksuit and a pair of cross-trainers that had been within arm’s reach of her bed, her fluidity suggesting she’d woken up and dressed in a flash before. Without turning on a light, she snatched the MacBook from the kitchen counter, stuffed it into a neoprene case, and hurried toward the door.

  Just shy of the door, however, she stopped and knelt, putting her weight into one of the stacks of moving boxes and sliding it a few inches, revealing a wall outlet about a foot and a half from the floor. She dug her fingernails beneath the edge of the plate, which turned out to be hinged; it opened outward like a laundry chute door.

  From the miniature safe the wall plate concealed, she withdrew a necklace and—Lin zoomed in—a flash drive.

  He zoomed in further. HOYAS, it said in big letters. He had no idea what that meant, but he would find out. Unless HOYAS was of significance or immediate national security importance, his people would either procure a flash drive just like it within an hour, or produce a duplicate themselves.

  Two taps at the control panel and he photographed the Hoyas drive and sent the image (a proprietary steganography app automatically concealed the image within the pixels comprising a comma) to the team.

  After Chay left her apartment, he counted ten seconds and texted again, MAKE THAT 72 UNITS, the key this time being the 7.

  Within half a minute of his sending the message, the klaxon faded to a faint echo and then to nothing, the alarm company evidently having received the diagnostic message that purportedly had been generated by the Montana’s system.

  The Montana staff would now inform the residents that it had just been a false alarm. Like most of them, Lin supposed, Chay would go back to bed—as soon as she returned the flash drive to its hiding place.

  He was wrong, he realized, when the door to Starbucks opened, and one of the baristas, a plump Hispanic woman, called out, “Chay, how’re you doing, sweetie?”

  Lin cursed himself for coming here rather than his standby, Burger King. None of his targets went near the place.

  “Rude awakening,” said Chay, entering the café with a look of resolve, as if she were bent on capitalizing on the klaxon’s early wake-up. “But I’m up. How are you?”

  A flood of morning light through the big front windows brou
ght her necklace to a glow. She surveyed the tables, flashing a smile Lin’s way. He responded in kind, watched her advance to the counter, then resumed reading MLB, losing himself in the statistical league leaders while she ordered her caffeinated drink.

  She soon returned to her apartment and replaced the flash drive, along with the necklace, then got dressed for work and hurried off.

  Lin had no trouble finding a courier, a Wall Street runner who was elated at the prospect of being paid to have his job done for him. Lin passed muster at the Montana front desk and delivered an envelope to a yuppie lawyer in 20C, who tipped him ten dollars.

  Everything was going freakishly well, he thought. Maybe too well. The inevitable hitch came at Chay’s door.

  The door was protected by a biometric lock requiring a fingerprint scan as well as a five-digit code in order to turn the handle. It was the only such lock Lin had seen in the building. In fact it was the first time he had ever seen a biometric lock in an American residence; first time he’d ever heard of it. Rare and expensive. The flecks of sawdust atop the door-handle plate and on the carpet by the door suggested to him that the new biometric lock had been installed recently—perhaps as an additional security measure Chay had undertaken to protect something. Good, he thought.

  He had a contingency plan in his back pocket: a small crowbar. However, there were workmen from AT&T working on an apartment near the elevator, and a valet was watching them. Certainly the valet would hear him prying open Chay’s door. If the valet even saw Lin in the hall, it wouldn’t be long before a cop was up here.

  Lin left the building empty-handed. Two hours later, a truck labeled MANHATTAN TREE TRIMMING turned off Broadway, double-parked on West Eighty-Seventh, and set to work on a spruce tree that reached just past the target’s window. The leaves, which indeed needed a trim, provided cover for one of the men wearing white coveralls and a Manhattan Tree Trimming helmet to climb into Chay’s apartment.

  CHAPTER 13

  BODY OF MANHATTAN MAN FOUND IN BATTERY PARK

  By Chay Maryland

  Published: June 30, 2015 2 Comments

  NEW YORK—Police are conducting an investigation following the discovery of the body of Walter Doyle in Battery Park late Tuesday night.

  Doyle, 69, a retired schoolteacher, was found under bushes behind Castle Clinton by sanitation workers at about midnight, according to the NYPD. He appeared to have suffered a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

  The police have released no other information about the case.

  Fisk read the story in his office—actually, the office belonging to Detective Dan Werner, who was on medical leave. Fisk’s regular office had a window that overlooked Ninth Avenue, or rather offered a decent shot to a gunman who might have been on Ninth Avenue, or in an office or on a rooftop across the street. So Fisk had relocated temporarily. Story of his life lately.

  “I liked your piece in today’s paper,” he told Chay when she arrived.

  “I’m glad to hear it.” She took the seat facing his desk—glided into it, actually, her every movement fluid. Her gray business suit was matronly, he thought, the boxy skirt dipping well below her knees. But it worked, particularly now, as she crossed her legs, giving prominence to a calf muscle that looked to have been sculpted from amber—

  He reminded himself that she was an obstacle; his objective was to get rid of her.

  From her bag, she produced a Krispy Kreme box. “I don’t mean to be cliché, arriving at a police station with doughnuts,” she said, “but would you like one?”

  Fisk’s culinary leanings generally extended only so far as trying to mix a dinner other than a slice of pizza into his diet. On occasion, though, he found himself going out of his way to patronize the twenty-four-hour Krispy Kreme store on West Thirty-Second Street. He decided to decline, until she opened the box. Warm air rose from it, carrying the enticing aroma of chocolate frosting and reminding him that he was starving.

  “It is cliché, and terribly offensive,” said Fisk, helping himself to one of the chocolate glazed doughnuts.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  “So what do you have in mind for shadowing?” he asked.

  She sat back. “I’ll follow the story, ideally, until the case is closed.”

  “The Zodiac case in San Francisco has been open since 1969.”

  “If this case lasts that long, then I suppose I’ll get to write a book after all.”

  “What about your other work? Or has your desk been cleared for this exclusive?”

  She looked across the desk, as if reading his mind, eyes like lasers. “My job is to follow the story. I followed it right here.”

  “I’m not the story,” Fisk said.

  “You’re part of it.”

  Fisk frowned, showing her his displeasure. “Do you know how few NYPD officers fire a gun in the line of duty in a given week?”

  “No, but let me guess. The Department has, what, about thirty-five thousand four hundred officers?”

  “Give or take.” She was off by all of twelve officers, he thought. Or, more likely, she’d read a more recent Department personnel profile than he had. “And they discharge their weapons an average of six hundred times per year . . .”

  What didn’t she know? “Where did you get that figure?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen the totals posted at the police range in Astoria.”

  He’d seen them too, the annual printouts, taped to the front door at the range. They listed the number of rounds expended in the line of duty by the NYPD along with misses—seldom were New York’s Finest accurate with more than a third of their shots.

  “Are you a shooter?” he asked.

  “Only to be better acquainted with my subject matter, and my subjects.”

  Wow, he thought. The reporters he knew liked to go to Upper East Side cocktail parties to get better acquainted with their subjects. She was the first he’d heard of to opt for a loud, poorly ventilated pistol range.

  “How about updating me on the investigation?” she asked.

  Oddly, he felt inclined to respond with the truth, which was that he had nothing new to report, and that he would happily sacrifice a year of his life if the computer would ping right now with an incoming e-mail bringing news of any development whatsoever in the case. He also wanted to say that if that didn’t happen soon, the suspense would cost him five years of his life.

  “Nothing to report,” he said.

  “You and this ‘Yodeler’ haven’t become pen pals yet?”

  “Silence sometimes is a tactic.”

  “In which case—you feel you’ve learned something about him?”

  Charitable of her, he thought. “Could be.”

  “What about the surveillance-camera footage?”

  What he wouldn’t give for a call bringing news of a cold hit from the tech room, four members of which were currently scouring the video database for so much as a frame of drone footage in either Central Park or Battery Park at or around the estimated times of the killings.

  “We’re following a number of leads at this time,” Fisk said. A law enforcement brush-off line as old as the profession.

  “That’s not going to fly this time. What leads specifically?” Chay asked.

  “Nothing worth wasting your time on. But how about this? Since your office is so close, how about I just text you if anything happens?”

  She looked him over. “If there’s so little going on, why were you here all night?”

  Damn. Did she have a source within Intel? He’d had no choice but to stay here overnight. Because being on cases like this one was like being at a crucial hockey game that’s gone into sudden death. The big cases usually did feel that way. The next call or e-mail or seemingly innocuous document that dropped into his mailbox could provide a crucial puzzle piece. Or the crucial piece. So it was hard to leave the office. He hadn’t, not even to grab a slice of pizza last night or breakfast this morning. Afraid of missing another call,
he hadn’t wanted to get on the phone to the diner a block away. And so that Chay wouldn’t suspect that he’d been here all night, he’d changed into a fresh white oxford shirt—he always had one or two spares in his lower desk drawer, still in the plastic packaging they came in from the dry cleaners.

  “How did you know that?” he asked her.

  “I didn’t.” She curbed a smile.

  He started to roll his eyes when his computer pinged with the arrival of an e-mail. He spun his chair toward the monitor, clicking open the mailbox.

  He found one new item in his in-box, headed TO THE SO-CALLED AUTHORITIES.

  CHAPTER 14

  Taking in the subject line of Yodeler’s e-mail, Fisk experienced the same jolt he did when he was fishing and felt a big one strike his line. He tried to hide it.

  “What is it?” asked Chay.

  “An e-mail,” he said. Technically, it was a Hushmail, a message from an e-mail service that encrypted all traffic and routed it in such a way that it couldn’t be traced, thus making Hushmail the Hotmail of spooks. This message, “TO THE SO-CALLED AUTHORITIES,” was from USER435982768.

  “I know it’s an e-mail,” she said. “Let’s see it.” She waved at the monitor.

  Why not? He thought. He double-clicked to open the message. In order for the text to be decrypted, he cued a prompt that informed him that he needed to supply the correct response: A PATRIOT WHO USED MARKAROV 9MMS? Grudgingly he entered YODELER, which worked, allowing him to read:

  One way or the other, I shall bring to light your violations of the public trust. One way is the continuation of the daily sacrifices. The other way is the immediate release from captivity of the patriot, Mr. Merritt Verlyn, so that he may in turn release the truth.

  —YODELER

  P.S. Perhaps the alternate ammunition has thrown your confederates. This morning’s victim, whose blood is on your hands, has Remington 9mms in her.

  Chay might be of use to the investigation after all, Fisk thought. If she saw blood on her own hands, she might give up the Verlyn documents.