The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  She didn’t blink. “I don’t see how globe-trotting whetted your appetite for police work in New York.”

  “More like American school after American school, full of overprivileged kids who believe the world is theirs by divine right.”

  “So, what, you chose a profession where you do something about them?”

  “If that’s what I wanted to do, I would have become an IRS agent.” He couldn’t pinpoint what about being a cop had appealed to him, or if, in fact, there was any one or two or three specific reasons. Her questions demanded more introspection than he would have liked.

  “Then why a cop?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you remember when you first thought about becoming a policeman? Was it while you were at one of the American schools?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Maybe you saw a world that wasn’t just, and you gravitated toward one where justice is more clearly delineated?”

  Her insightfulness impressed him. “Sounds about right.”

  “Good to know, but since I answered the question, you may still owe me one.”

  “So do I get your secret now?”

  She plucked a cardboard coaster from a stack of them between the ketchup and mustard dispensers against the wall. Rheingold Extra Dry, it said. Rheingold Beer was a Brooklyn company that had gone out of business around the time he was born. In its day, though, it was legendary, its annual Miss Rheingold contests garnering as much attention as games between the Yankees and the then Brooklyn Dodgers.

  “This is the secret right here,” said Chay.

  “Rheingold?”

  “Any kind of beer, in my experience.”

  “Is this a variation on in vino veritas?” He hoped he hadn’t botched the Latin maxim, which translated to something along the lines of “in wine, there is truth.”

  “Coming up, I used to hear this old journalist maxim that there’s a tendency among a class of sources to withhold information from a reporter until the reporter has ordered the Second Beer. The Second Beer is a trust threshold; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sitting in a booth in a place like this with a hardcase source who seems like he’d rather die than reveal even his favorite color, but as soon as the waiter takes the order for the second round and walks off, the hardcase opens up like a canyon.”

  “It’s that simple?” Fisk looked toward the waiter, who was crumpling what looked like an offtrack betting-parlor receipt.

  “A lot of the time, it is that simple, yes,” said Chay, “to the extent that it feels like cheating.”

  He caught the waiter’s eye, and the man began lumbering toward the booth. “You like Guinness?” Fisk asked Chay.

  “The way you like Krispy Kreme,” she said.

  Pulling up, the waiter mumbled something that Fisk took for “What do you want, folks?”

  Fisk said, “Two pints of Guinness, please.”

  “I’d also like two pints,” said Chay, delighting Fisk but confusing the waiter. She added, “One for each of us now, one more when you bring our cheeseburgers.”

  After the waiter walked off with their order, Fisk asked Chay, “How did you know I wanted a burger?”

  “Use your deductive reasoning, Detective. At worst, it’s a one-in-four shot, one-in-five if you included the liver and onions. But if you’re a liver-and-onions guy, I would prefer to be wrong.”

  Fisk smiled, mostly at the thought of a context in which his having eaten liver and onions would trouble her.

  She stiffened suddenly, before producing her phone from her bag; Fisk hadn’t heard it ring over the Sinatra—“I’ve got you under my skin,” Frank was singing.

  “Maryland,” she said, clamping a palm over her free ear. “No, call anytime . . . Okay, I’ll be right there.” She dropped the phone back into the bag and, in the same motion, slid out of the booth. “I need a rain check on those two beers,” she said to Fisk.

  Fisk caught her arm. “Hold up. You’re shadowing me, I think that gives me the right to shadow you too.”

  She thought about that for a moment before coming clean. “Ed Norman has a tipster claiming to know who Yodeler is. I’ll keep you in the loop. Promise.”

  CHAPTER 26

  On the face of it, New York Times director of security Ed Norman had a simple task: get Chay Maryland into a car.

  He was standing outside in the doorway of the Tech and Design School on the middle of West Thirty-Seventh between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, puffing intermittently on a Pall Mall cigarette. For whatever reason, Pall Mall had been the cheapest brand at the kiosk he passed on the five-block walk from the Times Tower. Most were $13 a box. At $12, he knew, Pall Mall was still three times the average price in many other states. Albany imposed a tax of about $4.50 per pack, and the city added another couple bucks on top of that. It had never bothered Norman until today, because he didn’t smoke, hadn’t in twenty-odd years. But the cigarette gave him license to loiter outside the Tech and Design School, along with students and faculty members on their nicotine breaks. Otherwise his presence might have seemed suspicious.

  In the five minutes he’d been here, both of the other smokers had gone back into the building, leaving him alone to look up and down the rain-slicked block. Any moment Chay would round a corner, probably on foot; the weather would have made it difficult for her to get a cab downtown. As soon as he spotted her, he would click the Weather Channel app on his phone, reconfigured to covertly notify Lin of her arrival.

  Once Norman verified that she was alone and that no one was tailing her, he would click the Weather Channel app a second time to close it, providing the go-ahead for the yellow taxi in which Lin waited now.

  The cab was a good choice of venue for the sort of discussion Lin had planned. A ten-buck gadget powered by the car’s cigarette lighter could jam the signal to a cell phone or any RFID device on a person, precluding electronic eavesdropping and leaving a trail. A two-hundred-buck device could make it appear to eavesdroppers that the conversation was taking place fifty blocks away, or fifty states away. The cab, as opposed to the use of a private car, was also designed to minimize Norman’s exposure. According to Lin, the Ministry of State Security, the agency of the People’s Republic of China responsible for foreign intelligence, had further use for the ex-FBI agent.

  If Chay were to link Norman to the Chinese, however, he would be an accessory to kidnapping, for starters. No reason at all she would make the connection now, he thought. Yet something troubled him about the arrangement.

  He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he’d learned to pay attention to such instincts. So what the hell was it? He’d orchestrated exponentially more complex operations before, including the exfiltration of a Pakistani national from Pakistan’s consulate on East Sixty-Fifth Street here in New York. When Pakistani ISI officers first began to suspect that the woman was cooperating with the FBI, in their typical fashion, they decided they would pack her off to a dark cell in Islamabad and ask questions there. Norman’s team planned to rescue her the night before she was to leave. Entering the New York consulate along with a legitimate local party-supply company working an event at the consulate, he and two other agents concealed the woman in what appeared to be one of the band’s speakers. They dollied her out in the speaker, right past the ISI officers, and handed her over to U.S. marshals, who spirited her into WitSec. He hadn’t heard of her since, meaning she was okay, probably in a sweet three-bedroom house in Scottsdale or some such perma-vacation town favored by defectors, with a new Cadillac Escalade in the carport—defectors were crazy for Escalades.

  He had to admit to himself now that he was concerned for Chay’s welfare. Yes, Lin had assured him that it would be a simple Q&A. But Lin lied for a living. On the other hand, to Lin’s credit, each of the previous three times Norman had worked for the MSS, $45,500 appeared in his Bank of Reykjavik account before the op, and another $49,500 twenty-four hours after mission accomplished, like clockwork. And even
in the deception business, reputation mattered. But what if, once Lin had gotten the location of the Verlyn cache from Chay, his people decided to cover their tracks by killing her on the spot and putting her body in one of their notorious “golf cases” (the Chinese solved the problem of urban-theater body disposal with mobile liquefaction chambers that, on the outside, looked like the hard plastic cases used by wealthy executives and PGA players to bring their golf bags on flights)? It was more likely that the Chinese would be averse to killing an American on U.S. soil, especially someone of Chay’s prominence.

  Right?

  Yes, yes, of course, Norman told himself. Probably Lin would put a hook into Chay, give her no choice but to cooperate. She had an older brother who paid for his heroin habit importing alpaca sweaters from Bolivia, selling them for twenty times what he paid for them. Lin’s people would fix things so that Chay’s brother was picked up on a narcotics charge and sentenced to twenty years without hope of parole in a filthy Bolivian hole—unless she gave up the goods. If she still refused, her brother’s life would be brought into play.

  Norman asked himself for the thousandth time whether he was giving Lin too much this time. No, for God’s sake. It was just a bunch of documents that had already been stolen and would surface one way or another. Someone was going to profit; might as well be the Norman family. And he desperately needed the money now to clean up their latest messes. His son the gambling addict was in serious debt to “heavy guys,” on top of the usual alimony and support for his other two children, his grandsons, and granddaughter. Then there was Norman’s wife, with an addiction of her own to expensive purchases—like a pair of Italian shoes she “picked up” for him at $1,100. He tried to return them to the fop shoe store, but was unable to because $1,100 had been a clearance price. Craziness.

  Chay rounded the northwest corner from Seventh Avenue, walking east across Thirty-Seventh Street. Her face was veiled by her umbrella, but he recognized the long legs and proportionate gait. Still he wasn’t certain it was her until he caught her reflection in a storefront window across the street. Anxiety began to press at Norman’s chest. Locking the cigarette between his lips, he drew his phone from his suit pants pocket and clicked the Weather Channel to life. He glanced at the results—sixty-three and raining—only for the sake of appearance. Really he was searching the street for surveillants.

  No one followed her around the corner. Pedestrian traffic was negligible to begin with due to the rain and, perhaps, the drone. Ordinarily New Yorkers moved as swiftly as anyone, but the rain not only slowed them but caused greater variation in their paces than usual, making it easier to pick out a tail. Norman saw nothing suspicious on the sidewalks. And unless the Bureau had commandeered an M7 bus and its twenty-some passengers, there was nothing doing on the street. He clicked out of the Weather Channel app and repocketed his phone. Time to go to work.

  When Chay was halfway to him, a yellow Crown Victoria cab turned right from Seventh Avenue and onto Thirty-Seventh Street, the “off-duty” sign illuminated. The taxi rolled past Chay and then Norman, pulling up at the curb on his side of the block, its “off-duty” sign dimming and the medallion number flashing on, signifying its availability.

  Chay stopped a few feet from Norman and said, “I’m afraid this is a setup.”

  Shocking him.

  How had she figured it out?

  “No, no,” he tried to assure her. “The source is just afraid that the drone will get him, so he wants to talk to you in a taxi.”

  “You’re in on it, aren’t you?” she asked.

  Norman wondered how the hell she could have known. Or was this just one of her trick questions? She was known for that. Relax, he exhorted himself. “In on what?”

  “The cab pulled up to the curb when I was on Seventh. The driver told me to keep on going, and to stay on the uptown side of the street. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t being followed.”

  “Maybe it’s just a case of reasonable paranoia?”

  “Maybe.”

  The choice of the uptown side of the street made no sense to Norman. It also troubled him that Lin would have made contact with Chay already. Hot and prickly perspiration rose from his scalp. This wasn’t just a change of plans, he thought. This was the Chinese trying to tie up all loose ends, including their agent at the New York Times.

  The taxi stood at the curb, engine still idling, the fog of exhaust fumes rent by the rain but still blurring the figure climbing out of the backseat, leaving the door open as he mounted the sidewalk. It was Lin, gripping something the size and shape of a pen, but something about the way it glowed red in the reflection of the taillights told Norman it wasn’t a pen, and put him on guard. Reflexively, he reached for his shoulder holster. Which wasn’t there. It had been two years since he’d worn it. The best course of action, he knew, was to retreat. Turn and run as fast as he could into the Tech and Design School.

  Lin’s hand jumped back, the pen appearing to recoil. Norman felt a stab in his chest, just left of his sternum, like a bee sting. It shook him.

  Chay, standing with her back to Lin, asked Norman, “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said.

  But he wasn’t fine. It felt like his brain was turning to soup. He looked to his lapel expecting to see some sort of entry wound. A few tiny crystals shimmered there. He’d heard of darts made of ice that completely disintegrated upon entering the target—the CIA had used them in the seventies. They left nothing but a tiny red dot on the skin, but released a poison that rapidly entered the bloodstream, fatally, denaturing quickly so that an autopsy wouldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary about the heart attack.

  He fell to the sidewalk, shoulders hitting first, head bouncing off the cement. But he didn’t feel anything. He lay flat on his back.

  “Ed!” Chay dropped to his side.

  He tried to shout to her to run. Run came out as a feeble “Rrr.”

  “Is he okay?” asked Lin, jogging up.

  Chay pressed a finger against the side of Norman’s neck. He could see her do it, but he couldn’t feel a thing. “His pulse is awfully low,” she said.

  Lin looked him over. “Is his skin always that pale?”

  Taking in Norman’s face, Chay’s eyes widened in alarm. “Looks like cyanosis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think he’s having a heart attack!” She quickly looked around. “We need an ambulance or—”

  “We could take him to hospital.” Lin aimed a thumb at the cab.

  “Yes, good idea,” she said to Lin.

  The driver, a heavyset Hispanic man, bounded out of the taxi to help them. If it occurred to Chay that he’d sized up the situation and acted a beat too quickly, she didn’t show it. “You’re going to be okay, Ed,” she said to Norman as she took his ankles. The two men each gripped a shoulder and hurried him toward the cab.

  Norman attempted to scream, to tell her to run, to at least draw attention from passersby. Nothing happened. He couldn’t move. Not a muscle. Not a thing, including his lungs. He figured he had two minutes left.

  CHAPTER 27

  Together, the taxi driver, the passenger, and Chay carried Ed Norman into the backseat. Then the three got in, closed the doors, and the cab darted off.

  Fisk watched on his phone while riding uptown on a 1 train going slower than he would have liked, but, fortunately, a beneficiary of the $200 million Transit Wireless program. The Wi-Fi allowed him to get into the Department system, which included a direct link to 911, the crime information database, the warrant system, readings from the city’s radiation and chemical detectors, and the feed from the Domain Awareness cameras. Several of the cameras were making use of the beta version of a system enhancement that intelligence and law enforcement insiders had taken to calling God’s Eye, due to its capabilities as well as the rumor that the Dayton, Ohio–based computer scientist who invented it had once attended divinity school with the intent of becoming a Catholic priest.

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nbsp; In her reporting on the NYPD’s data network and electronic surveillance capabilities, Chay hadn’t mentioned God’s Eye, probably because she hadn’t known about it. Fisk thought of the application as a live version of Google Earth, only with TiVo capabilities: it allowed you to rewind, zoom in, and automatically follow certain targets. In many stretches of the coverage, the target no longer disappeared off the screen to the right or left. The system blended the feed with that of a high-resolution camera aboard either an airplane or a helicopter—soon to be replaced by far cheaper unmanned blimps—that captured a twenty-five-square-mile segment of the city, for six hours at a time. It was a tool as potent, he thought, as anything in the vaunted F6 arsenal.

  He began with DOM-CAM 37-E8, Thirty-Seventh Street east of Eighth Avenue, finding the block quiet, as usual for this time of night. If you were going to set up a New York Times reporter for a drive-by abduction, Fisk thought, this was a prime location. You had a minimum of witnesses and onlookers who might interfere, plus you were close enough to the Times Tower that it seemed like a plausible meeting place for a source who was skittish about showing his face at the paper. It hadn’t aroused Chay’s suspicion. It aroused Fisk’s, but not until she’d left the pub. He had no idea why, though, until he was on the subway heading uptown to the office and his thoughts turned to Norman’s distinctive boat-shaped Bettanin & Venturi loafers at a cost of five hundred dollars—each. Then his internal alarm went off.

  The bad guys, whoever they were, were trying to kill two birds with one stone. They were getting rid of Norman and, at the same time, using him to rob Chay of time to think, and to get her into the car. Fisk watched the cab zip across Eighth Avenue, unimpeded by traffic. If the driver were heading uptown, he would have turned right on Eighth—the avenue goes one way, uptown. So the cab was either continuing west or going downtown.