The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel

by Dick Wolf

  The technician screwed up his face. “All the fireworks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would I ever want to do that?” Clearly it was the first he’d heard of this effort.

  “To stop drones from killing people.”

  “Drones?”

  Fisk pointed up.

  The technician looked up at the solar system’s worth of flares, then quickly down again, now with a wispy grin. “Dude, those are just flares.”

  Pointing up again, Fisk barked, “Listen!”

  The technician cocked an ear. It sounded like there was a swarm of giant bees overhead. Intermittently, the flares illuminated fuselages and rotors. If that weren’t enough to convince the technician, the wobbly octocopter bringing up the rear abruptly descended off the coast of Jersey City, tumbling end over end before splashing into the river beside the bow of a moored tugboat. The tug, rising and falling with the current, leaped into the air before disappearing in a ball of flame, a sun in miniature, accompanied by an earsplitting blast and a pillar of water like something out of a Bible story. A hot blast current buffeted the barge, nearly costing Fisk his balance again. The water and flames quickly shrank to nothing, having reduced the tugboat to smoking flotsam. Through the blaring whine in Fisk’s ears came delirious roars from the spectators on shore.

  He exchanged a knowing look with the technician, whose eyes bulged. He stammered, “I’m still going to need some, you know, authorization.”

  “How about my key to the city?” Fisk drew his Glock.

  Raising his hands, the technician slowly backpedaled. Toward the control panel, fortunately.

  Fisk followed. “What do you do? Just turn it on and then press the red buttons?”

  The guy nodded.

  Holstering his Glock, Fisk snapped the oversize toggle switch at the top of the panel into the on position, causing the red light beside it to dim and the green to illuminate. With both hands he swatted the red buttons—four rows of sixteen, the numbers beside each corresponding to crates, he supposed.

  He turned to the technician to verify that he’d done it properly. Needlessly. Confirmation came in the form of a cannonlike blast from one of the mortars and a plume of flame that reached twice his height, sending a shell whistling into the darkness.

  It appeared to be headed directly into the path of the drones. Two or three hundred feet overhead, Fisk estimated, the shell let out a gut-rattling boom and expanded into a sphere of yellow, red, and orange stars that drifted back down to earth with trails of sparks.

  Meanwhile more blasts—hundreds of blasts up and down the barges—blended into a single roar, with the plumes of flame commingling to produce a reverse rain of shells, many bursting into neon comets that formed large tendrils, producing a palm-tree-like effect.

  Other shells exploded at their apex into small stars that crisscrossed one another. Some generated a quick flash followed by a very loud report and then nothing but smoke. Each bang rattled Fisk from head to toe. He dug his thumbs into his ears to protect his hearing, and still his eardrums were pummeled.

  Quickly it became impossible to distinguish one effect from the next, the airborne stars and candles and comets merging into a single giant multicolored sun. The conflagration gradually descended, engulfing the drones, which, like flies, dropped, one after the next.

  They sliced into the Hudson River and sank slowly, their duct-tape-wrapped payloads shimmering in the reflection of what turned out to be the last shell to launch. It erupted into a cluster of stars that whizzed in all directions before forming a swaying American flag.

  Amid a rain of sparks and ash and cumulus smoke that tasted of cordite, Fisk heard the cheers on both sides of the river transform to confusion, everyone wondering no doubt why the hell all of the fireworks for the hour-long show went off in one twenty-second burst. He also heard his phone buzz with a text from Plummer of the NGA.

  GOOD WORK! 4 OCTOS DOWN, 5 TO GO.

  Swallowing hard, Fisk looked up through the thinning smoke, making out a brand-new set of octocopters preceded by another twenty or thirty quadrocopter escorts, most directly overhead, a few more than halfway to Manhattan. All he could do was draw his Glock and hope for unprecedented range and marksmanship.

  At the same time, from the pier, Shane Poplowski managed to take out one of the octocopters with a recharged LightningRod—the drone fell like a twirling baton before knifing through the surface of the Hudson and disappearing unceremoniously. A Koala pilot proved a deadeye shot, taking down another of the octocopters with his Smith & Wesson 5906 service pistol at a hundred yards. Get that guy on the Olympic team, Fisk thought. Unfortunately, no other helicopter crew scored a hit, and on the city streets and rooftops on either side of the river, not a single sharpshooter got into position in time to expend a round.

  As Fisk’s own rounds disappeared into the night around them, the three remaining octocopters turned downriver. The smaller quadrocopters turned as well before taking the lead.

  Fisk’s mind played a feverish montage of downtown landmarks. Like One World Trade Center. Or how about the Stock Exchange? An explosion there would have the effect of crippling the economy. Or the Statue of Liberty—the TATP could take her head off. And then there was the High Line park, into which hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers—at least—were packed to watch fireworks.

  Damnably, he could do nothing now but watch. Right away, however, he received a measure of hope: an F-16 flew over the barge and onto the scene, so fast that it seemed supernatural, the sonic boom dwarfing that of the explosions of the fireworks shells. The fighter plane released dozens of flares. The balls of yellow-green fire drifted down into the path of the drones.

  Whether or not the flares did any good was difficult to say because, on instructions from Dubin, thousands of fireworks shells shot into the night from the four other barges. They rose past the drones and burst into a galaxy of stars before seemingly setting the sky ablaze, lighting New York City like noon.

  The drones plummeted.

  To a watery grave.

  All of them.

  And Fisk felt it at once: the mix of exhaustion and delirium and satisfaction. The one-of-a-kind buzz that accompanied a case truly closed.

  He might have fallen to his knees and kissed the deck, or maybe embraced the technician. But then he would have missed the end of the fireworks. He enjoyed every last spark.

  CHAPTER 53

  Fisk knew of no standard procedure that follows the downing of a fleet of drones. It was nine-something at night on a federal holiday. He got back onto the Harbor Patrol boat only because it seemed like the most expedient way to get off the river, and because going ashore seemed like a better idea than not.

  When the harbor cop in the wheelhouse asked him where he wanted to be dropped, he needed to think about it. They could drop him anywhere, really, no big, the guy said. Where they’d picked him up was fine. He appreciated being able to make a low-stakes decision for a change.

  They dropped him at the Riverside Park boat basin, because it was more accessible and extended far enough from shore that his disembarking wouldn’t draw a crowd. In fact, no one seemed to notice.

  Reaching the park, he walked between pools of dark shadows, unrecognized. He heard people, from their lawn chairs and picnic blankets, wondering if there were going to be more fireworks. Others were already packing up. Most stayed, enjoying the night. This was the best part, Fisk thought. Having kept them safe, free to enjoy sitting around in a park at night doing nothing, he felt like a superhero.

  He thought he might go get a beer, maybe catch an inning or two on TV at a bar. When given the gift of time, it was hard to pass up a walk in New York. And since it meant prolonging the case-closed buzz, it was a no-brainer. He decided to walk the thirty-some blocks down to the Times Tower, in hopes that Chay had made sufficient progress in that El Polvo story and was able to get a nightcap. He cut through the dog run at the base of the park. Still deserted. Dogs and fireworks weren’t a
good mix, plus the trees blocked the view onto the river. The stout metal trash barrel smelled like it had worked overtime collecting bags of dog shit.

  Accelerating past it caused his hip to hurt. Better to take a cab to the Times Tower, he thought. Fishing his phone out of his pocket in order to text Chay first, he saw that she had texted him twice. No surprise that he’d missed it between the detonation of the octocopters and all of the fireworks.

  COMING 2 RIVERSIDE PK AFTER ALL, said the first message.

  The second said only EL POLVO IS, ending abruptly.

  As Fisk puzzled over their meaning, he heard a crunch of gravel behind him.

  He spun around. The lone illuminated streetlamp silhouetted the man twenty feet away, leveling a Glock, the same model Fisk should have drawn, but capped with a sound suppressor. Fisk didn’t recognize the guy, but figured from context it was the hit man from East Seventy-Fourth. Yeah, same cold eyes, and that misplaced grin. The dark, wavy hair was probably a wig, or maybe it was what had been underneath the wig the other night. What mattered was, Fisk was about to die.

  There would be no discussion, no time for him to dive out of the way of bullets traveling at a thousand feet a second, certainly no time for him to draw his own Glock. What stood to be the last second of his life played out now in hundredths of a second.

  The barrel glinted as the hit man tweaked his aim, exhaled, and tensed his trigger finger. Then he added his left hand to the base of the grip, steadying it—and in taking those extra few hundredths of a second, he remained in place for the rolling trash barrel—one of the metal city-park models that weighed a good fifty pounds when empty—to impact his calves and the backs of his ankles, taking his legs out from under him. In the shadows beneath the dense trees lining the dog run, someone must have tipped the barrel onto its side and pushed it toward him.

  The hit man still got off a shot, and Fisk still instinctively dove and was hit—hit by gravel kicked up by the round. It ripped into his throat and face, but he’d happily take that over bullets. The hit man meanwhile landed on his side in the gravel, enabling Fisk to draw his gun and aim. But the guy rolled away, then sprang into a kneeling firing position, both arms extended in front of him, a firm hold on his pistol. He pivoted the barrel toward Fisk, pressing the trigger. At the same time Fisk’s bullet boomed from his Glock and drilled through the hit man’s neck, exiting along with a shimmering tail of gore and ringing against the base of the trash barrel before ricocheting into the night. The man fell sideways like a spent top and lay in the gravel, writhing.

  “Thank you,” Fisk said to Chay, who stepped out of the patch of trees from which she’d rolled the trash barrel.

  “Meet El Polvo,” she said with a wave at the hit man. “He’s wanted for seven murders, responsible for exponentially more business at the morgue, and if you believe his mistress—which I do—he’s an even worse guy at home.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Some old-fashioned research, and some new-fashioned. After he took another crack at me in Times Square, I was able to track him using the Domain Awareness system feed on faa.gov.”

  Fisk was eager to hear more. “That’s how you followed him here?”

  She smiled. “The Domain Awareness system is amazing. I’ve come around on it now—” She was interrupted by a wail of pain from El Polvo.

  Scrambling to his feet, Fisk said, “We should call Emergency Operations.”

  “Nine-one-one?”

  He reached for his phone. “Yeah.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “Could really put a damper on the rest of our night.”

  Fisk smiled, shaking his head. He yelled to a passerby, “Hey, call 911, will you?”

  CHAPTER 54

  What happened to Chay?” asked Ellen Lee, leading Fisk into her Norwalk house.

  The sentencing had been all over the news three months ago. If the old woman didn’t know by now that Chay had been jailed for contempt of court for her refusal to testify, Fisk thought, she would probably never be the wiser.

  “She’s away on business,” he said.

  Which was true. Chay was defending a journalistic principle, and he admired that, particularly since her sentence had been cut to five months. It didn’t hurt that the minimum-security Federal Correction Institution in Otisville, New York, offered extended conjugal visits to inmates’ boyfriends who happened to be New York cops.

  He followed Lee up to the attic, where the bookcases had been emptied of Merritt Verlyn’s collection. In front of them sat four stacks of three moving boxes.

  “Are you sure you want to buy them?” she asked.

  He held forth the check, which he’d made out to her before he left New York, because he thought this might happen, that she would hesitate, as she did now, keeping her hands at her sides, acting as though she didn’t notice the check. Seller’s remorse.

  “What makes you want Merritt’s book collection?” she asked. Not what made you, past tense, but what makes you, as if this were not in fact a done deal.

  “I’d like to have a first edition of Camille Flammarion in my library,” he said. “I’ve always been a fan of both Flammarion and R. A. Lafferty. I knew it was science fiction, but reading Lafferty in particular when I was a boy made me believe anything was possible.”

  The only truth in his answer was his desire to have the first-edition Flammarion, for work reasons. He’d never heard of either Flammarion or Lafferty before Ellen Lee’s craigslist ad pinged on R2’s computer in Tel Aviv. He didn’t like deceiving Lee. But he was a spy, and sometimes doing the job effectively required operating in gray areas.

  That evening, back at the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen—he’d decided to keep the place because he liked life better off the grid—he cracked the first edition of Flammarion’s Lumen and felt himself immediately engaged by the astronomer who was the novel’s main character. But he wasn’t looking for a good read tonight. He set the book aside, in favor of a hardcover edition of Orwell’s 1984. Probably where he should have started, he mused.

  He was right. He found a secret compartment carved into the spine and then patched over with surgical precision using the original red cloth. Wedged into the compartment was a silvery micro 512-gigabyte USB 3.0 drive, about the size of a Chiclet, yet containing about 130,000 classified documents.

  And a hell of a read. Before he knew it, the dark shapes outside the window became the water towers and chimneys and roofs across the alley and, with the first flecks of dawn, individual roof tiles. Another hour still and Fisk rose from his reading chair in possession of secrets that would be devastating to the careers of so many politicians and law enforcement and intelligence-agency officials—so many that he’d lost count. Several of the documents could bring down regimes. One in particular might result in anarchy in the United States.

  He resolved to destroy Merritt Verlyn’s micro drive immediately.

  Then he thought better of it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Chuck Hogan, for all his help and support, and for his enthusiasm for new technology.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DICK WOLF, a two-time Emmy award–winning writer, producer, and creator, is the architect of one of the most successful brands in the history of television—NBC’s Law & Order, one of the longest-running scripted shows. Wolf is also the creator and executive producer of Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. He has won numerous awards, including Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series (Law & Order) and Outstanding Made-for-Television Movie (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee); a Grammy; and an Edgar. Wolf is the New York Times bestselling author of The Intercept and The Execution. The Ultimatum is the third book in his Jeremy Fisk series. He lives in Southern California.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  ALSO BY DICK WOLF

  The Execution

  The Intercept

  CREDITS

  COVER DESIGN BY ERVIN SERRANO

  COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: BACKGROUND © BY
JEFF SPIELMAN/GETTY IMAGES;

  FLAG © BY ADRIANO RANIERI, NEW YORK/GETTY IMAGES

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  THE ULTIMATUM. Copyright © 2015 by Dick Wolf. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-228683-3 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-06-228689-5 (international edition)

  EPub Edition JUNE 2015 ISBN 9780062286871

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