by Dick Wolf
Another car, a black late-model Nissan, sped from a mile back to take the Toyota’s place. The driver of the Civic waited until the Nissan was behind her before turning to the right lane.
Verlyn didn’t signal to turn off at exit 36. He continued ahead at fifty-five miles per hour, the posted limit. At the last possible moment, however, he sent the Accord onto the off-ramp for New Canaan. A surveillance detection maneuver, Fisk suspected. The Civic had been far enough behind the Accord on the parkway that, two seconds later, in signaling to turn off at exit 36, the driver probably didn’t give herself away.
Reaching the end of the off-ramp, the Accord lingered at the stop sign. A beat too long, Fisk thought. Had Verlyn made the woman in the Civic?
Verlyn signaled a right turn onto the drab stretch of the Old Stamford Road, nothing but overgrown grass on either side, the entire area dark save for the occasional pair of passing headlights from highway overpass. There was no traffic from either side of Old Stamford. Yet Verlyn just sat in the Accord, turn signal blinking away. With no street-level cameras, there was no telling what he was doing. He could be calling or texting someone. Or maybe he’d succumbed to the Sapporo.
The spray of the Accord’s brake lights onto the black off-ramp was engulfed by the headlights of the approaching Civic. She too braked, waiting for Verlyn to go. On Old Stamford Road, a quarter of a mile to his left, a dangling signal light popped from red to green, setting in motion the six vehicles that had been stopped for it.
Now Fisk got it. “Damn. He’s waiting for traffic.”
“Why would he do that?” Chay asked.
“Watch.”
Led by a long, rear-loading garbage truck, the half-dozen vehicles accelerated on Old Stamford Road, heading toward the parkway off-ramp.
As Fisk had anticipated, Verlyn waited at the stop sign as long as he could before gunning the Accord, sending it leaping into traffic less than a car length ahead of the garbage truck. Clearly his plan was to force the driver of the Civic to remain on the off-ramp until all of the cross traffic had passed. That would put six vehicles—and as much as a mile—between her and him.
It was an Escape and Evasion 101 method way of losing a tail. But Verlyn didn’t execute it properly: he hadn’t given himself ample time to get ahead of the garbage truck.
The truck driver now slammed his brakes, sending the gargantuan vehicle into an abrupt deceleration—too abrupt. Without audio, Fisk was left to imagine the bellow of his horn and the howl of tires, drowning out all other sounds on the bucolic road.
The truck’s grille hammered the rear of the Accord, knocking the car clockwise so that its right flank became wholly exposed. The truck driver desperately tried to avoid a collision. His truck, still hurtling forward, swerved left. Still the right corner of his hood struck the Accord, sending it, like a baseball off a bat, into the metal guardrail along the right side of the road.
The guardrail buckled, catapulting the Accord. Aglow in the head and taillights of the truck and the cars on Old Stamford Road, it rolled upside down before smashing, roof first, into the concrete highway overpass wall.
The impact nearly flattened the roof, so that it was flush with the hood and truck. The car dropped to the grassy roadside on its flank and remained still, until, at once, the hood erupted into flame, which swelled and engulfed the whole car, bringing much of Old Stamford Road to a glow. Then just as quickly it receded into nothing but ribbons of chalky smoke that blended into the dark sky and soon dissipated, returning the roadside to darkness.
The high grass swayed with the breeze. Otherwise nothing moved. Nothing at all.
CHAPTER 38
A MESSAGE FROM YODELER
Published: July 4, 2015 2:15 A.M. 1,344 comments
[Editors’ note: We at the Mighty Pen received the following message from Yodeler, who also supplied the fuselage markings on the drone downed late last night by the NYPD. The FBI has verified the accuracy of this information, which has not been made public.]
Greetings, Citizens of New York:
I am, in the great scheme of things, your advocate against the Police State that has usurped control of our Democracy and co-opted our trust. The campaign of deception waged by these so-called authorities knows no bounds. The latest example came a few hours ago in the joint statement the New York Police (ironically, a criminal organization) and the United States Marshals (glorified goons) that Mr. Merritt Verlyn met an accidental death. I do not believe a word of it, with the exception of “death.” I believe that he is dead. Moreover, a great man is dead, a great and wonderful man who dared to stand in the way of the Police State’s suppression of truth.
I shall exact a steep price forthwith.
—Yodeler
At four in the morning, Chay, Fisk, Evans, Weir, two executives from the Department’s PR firm, and Dubin all crouched around the big computer monitor in the family room of the chief’s lower Fifth Avenue apartment. Apparently Dubin’s granddaughter was the only member of the family who ever used the desktop computer, or the family room, for that matter. Evans held one of the little girl’s Barbie dolls. Weir clutched the stuffed hippo he’d started to fling out of his way until Mrs. Dubin, bringing in the coffee tray, pointedly cleared her throat. Weir’s exaggerated look of guilt, for the benefit of the others, might have provided a measure of levity, but instead it served to emphasize the overall solemnity.
“I’d call this a total disaster, but that’s not the half of it,” said Dubin while pacing the Oriental carpet, the floorboards underneath whining with every step and resonating in the still of the night. From underneath his flannel robe peeked royal-blue pajamas with little white anchors, a gift from his wife or one of his daughters, Fisk would have bet. The chief stooped, as if beneath the weight of his predicament. Rounding the antique floor globe on the far side of the room, he found Fisk’s eyes and said, “I don’t know how releasing Verlyn could have gone any worse, frankly.”
Fisk was still trying to work the case, which, at the moment, felt like trying to stem the flow of the ocean. “What about the downed quadrocopter? Did we get anything useful?”
“It’s on its way to Quantico,” Evans said. “The preliminary wasn’t encouraging, though. One of our techs hypothesized that to avoid leaving traces, Yodeler had used an industrial robot to remove the Specter from the factory case and to mount the rifle.”
Weir added, “The guy is pitching a shutout.”
“Could be a clue,” Fisk said. “How many people have industrial robots?”
Evans checked a chart on his tablet. “One hundred and sixty-six thousand industrial robots manufactured in the United States in 2012, one hundred and sixty-eight in 2013, and I’m still waiting on a number for 2014.”
Fisk was undeterred. “How about we check the customer lists against the drone-supplies customer list?”
Weir shook his head. “Fisk, after what you’ve seen, do you really think Yodeler would have been stupid enough to have a robotic arm delivered to his apartment?”
Fisk would have liked to punch the G-man. “Nothing to lose in checking, right? Speaking of which, what about his communication to the Mighty Pen? Maybe we can get metadata from that.”
“Glad you asked.” Weir turned to Evans. “You can tell him.”
“The Mighty Pen was happy to cooperate with us, as long as we gave them an exclusive on the results.” Evans checked his notes. “Yodeler used the comments box, like he did before on the New York Times site. This time he posted his comment from a location with a latitude of 35.843318 degrees north and a longitude of 14.384385 degrees east. Does that mean anything to you?”
Fisk shrugged.
Chay said, “Is it in southern Italy?”
“That’s pretty good,” Evans said. “It’s close, in the Mediterranean Sea, just off the coast of Malta. An old Maltese temple called Gebel Gol-Bahar that wound up underwater after an earthquake.”
“Okay?” Fisk waited for the punch line.
Weir snick
ered. “It’s Atlantis.”
“That’s the speculation,” Evans clarified. “This is based on some new research.”
It sounded to Fisk as though Yodeler might have gotten a bit too clever with his counterfeit transmission locations. Everyone knew Loch Ness, but Gebel Gol-Bahar? “Good, this will make Yodeler easier to find.”
“You gonna send a submarine down?” asked Weir.
Dubin wandered over to Fisk, eyes on the carpet. Fisk was reminded of a manager coming to the mound to take out his pitcher. “We need to talk next steps, kiddo,” the chief said, nodding to Weir and the others.
As if having received their cue, they gathered up their things and said hasty good-byes. At the same time, Mrs. Dubin appeared and asked Chay to accompany her to the living room—which was at the other end of the apartment—“to give Jeremy and Barry a moment.”
When everyone else was gone, Fisk said to Dubin, “I’ll throw myself under the bus if I can stay on the case.”
The chief plopped heavily into a leather wing chair, his lips pursed—he was clearly averse to saying what he had to say. “You know how politics work.”
“Then have you considered pinning the blame instead on whoever taught Verlyn escape and evasion? Or was it just that he watched too many Jason Bourne movies?”
“The perception is that everything you’ve tried on the case hasn’t worked.”
“Yet.” Fisk refrained from smashing the lovely porcelain vase on the mantel, because it was undoubtedly Mrs. Dubin’s.
“You’re gonna get a promotion and a raise,” Dubin said without joy. “The Department hopes you’ll accept the position of chief of intel at our Tel Aviv office.”
It smacked of PR, which explained why the PR people had been in the room. The Middle East was a vital front in the Department’s intelligence efforts. The Tel Aviv job would get Fisk out of New York in a way that would satisfy those who wanted to punish him for what happened to Verlyn yet could be defended to those who supported him, assuming he had any defenders left, as a better and more targeted deployment of his abilities, or some such crap.
“Let me guess,” Fisk said. “There’s a case in progress with life-or-death stakes that I won’t be able to turn down, the lawman’s version of a puppy left on a doorstep?”
Dubin nodded. “As it happens, the Mossad has an al-Shabaab source. There’s reason to believe al-Shabaab’s planning a new op targeting New York. You speak Arabic, you know New York, you’re a hell of an intelligence officer . . . Much as I hate to lose you, this is tailor-made for you.”
Fisk’s biggest objection to the move was that it would cost him Chay. Then again, distance could be surmounted. No, his biggest objection was that Yodeler’s act would play on. “Are you offering me this ‘promotion’ or . . . ?”
“This is for your own good, too. The only usable evidence we pulled out of the maroon co-op across Centre Street from the old headquarters building was the prints, a whorl pattern, almost totally erased.”
“So a Capecitabine user?”
“Gotta be.”
Fisk understood this to mean that this wasn’t any Cartel goon tasked with a hit, but someone enduring a harrowing treatment on top of the cost of four hundred dollars per day in pills. Generally, this was true of just two categories of people: cancer patients whose lives depended on it and elite criminals for whom fingerprints were an occupational hazard.
“What about video?”
“Same kind of hat he was wearing the other night on East Seventy-Fourth, plus makeup and light prosthetics . . .” In other words, he’d successfully taken steps to thwart the Domain Awareness system’s Skin Texture Analytics and Linear Discriminate Analysis software.
“So not a cancer patient?” Fisk said.
Dubin shook his head. “The Federal Ministerial Police are looking for a serial liquidator who has no prints.” He meant the Policía Federal Ministerial, Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI.
“El Polvo?”
“Does that mean dust, something like that?”
“That’s all they find of him.”
Fisk knew of El Polvo from the Interpol alerts, an assassin in the mold of the Venezuelan Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal, but believed to be a European or American. The only clue police had was a trace amount of plaster dust at each of the crime scenes, a subtle calling card, it was thought.
“If we’re talking about that guy,” Dubin went on, “it’d be that much better for you to get out of Dodge.”
“Unless you want to catch a serial liquidator.”
“If he tried to get into Ben Gurion Airport, he’d be as good as caught. Apart from that, the Department wants you to embrace this assignment, publicly. Any mention of the Tel Aviv office is good PR.”
“I need to take care of one thing first,” Fisk said.
Dubin stiffened. “What?”
“Get me into F6.”
“The Special Collection Service?”
“I want to see the wizard, yes.”
Dubin shook his head. “You know that’s impossible.”
“Impossible for an NYPD Intel officer to access WIRESHARK on his own, sure,” Fisk tried, “but not to look over the shoulder of a SIGINT Terminal Guidance jockey. You would just need to make a call to one of your buddies at Langley.”
Dubbin reddened. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve already made all the calls I can for you. If I hadn’t, we’d be opening an office in Bumfuck, Alaska, for you to work at. And you wouldn’t be the chief there, that’s for damned sure.”
“Just think about it, okay?” Fisk hoped reason would prevail. “Yodeler’s first two messages appeared to originate from Loch Ness and Diego Garcia, both of which are notorious—”
Dubin cut in. “What’s your point?”
Better than no, Fisk thought. “Loch Ness and Diego Garcia are both the subjects of hundreds of thousands of Internet searches every day. So even if Yodeler had looked online for their latitude and longitude to plug into whatever location-masking app he was running, we wouldn’t be able to track him. But unless he just happened to know Gebel Gol-Bahar’s latitude and longitude to the hundred-thousandth of a degree, he would have needed to look it up. And if he looked online, F6 would be able to give us our best lead on this case to date.”
Dubin’s expression of exasperation softened into one of appreciation. He looked at the ceiling. “Put it in your report. Weir and Evans can carry the ball.”
Fisk locked eyes with him. “They’ll fumble—you know that. This is why Intel exists.”
Dubin shook his head. “I’m trying to keep Intel in existence. This case was supposed to make us look good, remember?”
What Fisk remembered was that Dubin remained conscious of Intel’s public image to a fault. “Chief, do you really want to open the New York Times tomorrow and read about the consequences of Intel’s decision to hand off the case to the Bureau?”
Clenching both fists, Dubin stomped toward the globe before turning back abruptly and grumbling, “Fuck you.”
Which, Fisk knew, was the chief’s way of saying yes to F6.
CHAPTER 39
Dubin called and woke one of his old golf buddies, who now helmed the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. Within minutes, Fisk and Chay were climbing out of a taxi at Broadway and Fifty-Third Street. In order to access the Special Collection Service offices—listed in the building lobby as part of a cyber security firm that did government work—Fisk first had to leave Chay in the cyber-security-firm conference room kept under guard by Defense Security Service agents. Once inside the F6 suite, which looked like any other corporate suite, he had to check everything but the clothes on his back, then submit to two types of body scans.
After signing a series of waivers and demonstrating that his fingerprints, iris texture, face, and voice matched those in the Agency’s database, he was escorted by a DSS guard into an area closer in appearance to a science-fiction movie starship than to
any midtown office. The ceiling, comprised entirely of sleek lighting panels, glowed faintly, causing the metallic walls to shimmer a dull blue.
The air was kept so cool that Fisk was surprised to see no vapor when he exhaled. He figured that the temperature was for the benefit of the batteries of hard drives, unseen but responsible for a mechanical purr. At the end of the hallway, he underwent another round of eye and hand texture scans, the result of which was the snaps of bolts disengaging from locks within the wall. Although a heavyweight, the guard strained to push open the thick metal door.
This was what it had been like to use the Internet thirty years ago, Fisk had heard older intel hands recount. Then it was the ARPAnet, the first operational packet-switching network, created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Maybe thirty years from now, he thought, data-mining programs like XKEYSCORE and WIRESHARK would be available as free apps.
The guard brought him into a terminal room, which was anticlimactic. A couple-million-dollar SCIF, sure, with an outer layer probably made of some space-age material, but inside it looked like any dimly lit copy room. The hard-drive arrays likely cost north of a million dollars apiece, but they were housed in a rolling pressboard rack that could have been left overnight on the curb outside of Fisk’s new building in Hell’s Kitchen without any takers.
The rack stood beside a basic round table with metallic legs, atop which sat a medium-size black-framed LCD monitor identical to the model Fisk had bought at a January clearance sale. From behind it, a doughy young woman—twenty years old at most—rose to meet him, her hand outstretched. She had a button nose framed by a round face and crowned by a chaotic mass of red curls. Oblong lenses magnified the fatigue in her eyes, which was understandable at four thirty in the morning. She was all alacrity, however, when she introduced herself as “Jean—sorry, can’t give my last name, company policy.”
