The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (10 page)

“Is that a direct quote?” Chay asked blithely.

“Yeah, verbatim,” said Peavy.

She smiled, apparently taken with him, which should have pleased Fisk. For some reason, it rankled him.

Peavy went on: “So what Doc Foster did was he stuck a lawn-mower engine into the fuselage of a radio-controlled fixed-wing plane that had a little push propeller in back—the kind that looks like a desk fan. A little trial and error and he had himself a system that could stay in the air for two hours, with a payload of twenty-eight pounds.”

“Can a sniper operate a UAV?” Chay asked.

“That depends on the sniper.” Peavy pushed open a door to a spacious office that continued the seaside theme, patio furniture substituting for the traditional appointments, but with a two-story ceiling. “Have yourselves a deck chair.”

Fisk and Chay each sat, and Peavy dropped into a seat behind the slatted table that served as his desk. From its lone drawer, he produced what appeared to be a pair of mirrored Wayfarers and slid them on. Sheepishly, he said, “The specs are a little gimmicky, sorry, but the model I’m going to show you is the one we use for sales presentations—as our marketing guy likes to say: ‘Whistles and bells sells.’”

He clicked a button on his desk, and with a hiss, a panel rolled up into the far wall like a garage door. Peavy cocked his head and out rolled a miniature version of a familiar-looking stick figure of an aircraft, with fixed wings spanning about five feet. “This here is basically a one-tenth-the-size version of General Atomics’ MQ-1, which you know as the Predator, which is the Elvis of UAVs. The Predator was developed in the nineties for recon. Then, one day, a U.S. Air Force general said, ‘Dudes, this is amazing, I can see the enemy’s tank trying to sneak up on us. Any way I can use the drone to blow the tank up?’ So the Air Force stuck on a couple of AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. And that worked great, so they built a bigger version, the Reaper, which has about seventeen Hellfires and a pair of five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs. Now it’s just a matter of time until we have stealth fighter drones and bombers that can deliver nukes.”

Peavy tilted his head. As if in response, the miniature Predator whirred toward him on the floor.

“This is our current bestseller, Yona, which is the Hebrew word for dove. Yona can cure what ails you with a couple dozen rocket-propelled grenades or, if you’re into bullets, a modified M230 chain gun.”

Fisk hoped Yodeler had nothing like Yona. “How do you launch it?” he asked, thinking that the launch might require considerable open space, which would significantly limit Yodeler in a city like New York.

Peavy sat against the edge of the table. In sync, the drone bucked. “I’ve used my driveway out on Long Island for a runway. It’s a hundred feet and change. Ideally you’d need a couple hundred feet. Yona’s designed to take off from an offshore oil-rig deck—we’re going for the petro-security market.”

“What if a sniper wanted to deploy it in an urban theater?” Chay asked.

“Say, this urban theater?” Peavy indicated the window behind him and its view of rooftops rising toward midtown.

Chay looked to Fisk, who said to Peavy, “Sure.”

“It would be easy enough to launch here; any old sidewalk or street will do as a runway.”

“And what about operating Yona?” Chay asked.

“What used to be known as the ‘ground station’ now fits into a book bag,” Peavy said. “You connect it wirelessly to the glasses or a phone, so you can see what your UAV sees, and it moves the way you do. To fire, you push a button.” He pointed to one of the buttons on the eyeglass frame by his right temple. “With a twenty-mile radius, Yona effectively makes all five boroughs your sniper’s nest. And because target acquisition is so much easier when you’re using a flying robot, a sniper mission that used to take five, six days in the field is now something you could do while you eat lunch at your desk.”

“And what if you wanted your whole op to be black?” Fisk asked.

“That makes it harder, because Yona, just like the Predator and all the rest, is controlled by radio or, for shorter range missions,
Wi-Fi. So figuring out where someone has launched from and landed and everything in between is like playing connect the dots with his signals after the fact. If you don’t want anyone to be able to do that, you could disguise your radio signals. Or you could get a UAV that’s small and slow enough that, in a crowded city, its signals would make it look like just another cell phone.”

“How would you get a UAV like that?” Chay asked.

“Go to any shopping mall. Here . . .” Peavy took off his glasses, set them on his desktop, then crossed the room to a file cabinet. From it, he removed an aircraft with a black plastic fuselage the size and shape of a papaya mounted on a crossbeam, the four ends of which held a rotor. “This here is a quadrocopter—also known as a quadcopter. It’s basically a multirotor helicopter that is lifted and propelled by four rotors; they’re also available as hexacopters and octocopters—six rotors, eight rotors. You can get a quad in any hobby shop. Spend more than two hundred bucks, you’ve been had. It has vertical takeoff and landing, so you don’t need any runway at all.”

“And what if you wanted to weaponize it?” Fisk asked.

“This baby could deliver a lightweight grenade or a small gun.” Peavy flicked one of the black plastic rotor blades, which was about five inches long.

“How do you fly it?” asked Chay.

“I’ll let you try it for yourself.” Peavy fished a cell phone from his board-shorts pocket. “What video-game apps do you play?”

Chay shrugged. “Text messaging.”

Peavy turned to Fisk, who shook his head. “Nothing since Coleco stopped updating their handheld basketball game.”

Peavy laughed. “I’d heard there were a couple of you out there.”

He set the quadrocopter on the floor and flipped a tiny switch on the fuselage. Light beamed from the base of each rotor, casting bright red circles on the slate-gray carpet.

“The quad’s using lasers to get her bearings,” he said. One by one, the lights turned from red to green. “So, older pilots, other folks
who aren’t into apps, it can take those people a week to get the feel for fly-by-phone. But my five-year-old niece, because she plays an app called Doodlebug, like most of her friends from kindergarten, she just took one look at this . . .”

He showed Fisk and Chay the face of his phone, which displayed the drone’s view of the carpet with the now-green dots. To the side of the footage were sliders for
UP
/
DOWN
and
LEFT
/
RIGHT
and a steering-wheel icon.

“. . . And she could fly this quadrocopter without a hitch.”

He tapped the wheel, setting the rotors into motion accompanied by shrieks like that of a hand vac, then dragged the up/down slider upward with his thumb, causing the drone to take flight. He released the slider, halfway up, leaving the quadrocopter in a hover seven feet from the floor.

“The quad’s got an accelerometer, so it does what my body does.” Peavy raised his voice to compete with the blenderlike rotors. He spun around, turned the phone end over end, and then stood still. Like Yona, this quadrocopter moved in sync with him, rotating and then somersaulting before returning to a hover. “It can literally turn on a dime, unlike a fixed-wing craft. And there’s no worries about going too slow and stalling. This system would be perfect for the sniper in your urban theater.” He tapped again at the controls and the drone floated to the carpet, landing smoothly, the rotors slowing to nothing. “The thing is, if it’s going to carry anything more than a popgun, you’re going to need a model with more oomph.”

“Where do you get oomph?” asked Chay, her playfulness gone.

Fisk saw that she too was now immersed in the hunt.

“That kind of UAV is more of a specialty item, but nothing you can’t order on the Web and have at your house the next day—with free shipping—for six, seven hundred bucks,” Peavy said. “There’s a model called the Specter that Domino’s has been using to deliver pizzas. A pizza weighs about three and a half pounds including the pizza box. So let’s say the Specter’s max payload is four pounds. I’ve
never heard of anyone weaponizing a quad, but if you did, low recoil would be the key if you want to be able to get off a second shot, let alone stay in the air. As long as your range is sub–three hundred yards, you could start with, say, a basic low-end Bushmaster—the Superlight Carbon weighs five and a half pounds. If you take off the Bushmaster’s furniture—the grip, the stock, the rail system—and then replace its barrel with a ten-and-a-half-inch pencil barrel, you could get it down to three and a half pounds. Hell, a little custom work and you could just as easily send up an AR.”

Chay swallowed a gasp. “An AR-15?” she asked as if merely curious.

“Sure. Or something that shoots a five-point-seven-mil cartridge would still have enough bite. Heckler & Koch’s MP7 would do it for you.”

Fisk said, “If you’re on the ground, how would you get the AR-15 to fire?”

“That’s nothing,” Peavy said. “There are a dozen apps, like Ultimate Sniper, that sync the ballistics calculator on your gunsight to any cell phone. The app lets you correct for prevailing wind direction and speed, temperature, humidity, air pressure, all that. You could get a kit from any RadioShack or hobby store to build a little actuator to adjust the barrel and to pull the trigger.”

Fisk was unnerved by the ease with which Yodeler—or anyone—could acquire such a system. This was what he had come here to find out, though. Rising to go, he said, “Now we know what to look for.”

Chay remained seated. “I have one more question.” She turned to Peavy. “If a sniper were using a quadrocopter with an AR-15, what sort of countermeasures could you employ?” She always asked open-ended questions, Fisk had noticed, the sort that netted insights and additional information, and she had a chess player’s talent for thinking several moves ahead.

Peavy thought for a few seconds before answering. “You’d best take him out first.”

E
vans spent several minutes getting his laptop computer connected properly, projecting Yodeler’s new e-mail on the screen in the smallest of the three NYPD Intel conference rooms. Never mind, Fisk thought, that the message could be read just fine on the phones of everyone present—Evans, himself, Weir, Dubin, and Chay. Or that they all had already read it.

“Okay, here goes nothing,” Evans said. With a flourish, he double-clicked the track pad, projecting the decrypted Hushmail.

HELLO DETECTIVE FISK:

DO YOU TAKE ME FOR AN IMBECILE, WITH THE ENTRY-LEVEL STALL TACTICS? EACH DAY MR. VERLYN REMAINS IN CAPTIVITY SHALL MEAN ANOTHER SACRIFICE.

YODELER

Weir said, “Good thing we haven’t pissed him off.”

Which was a version of
I told you so,
thought Fisk. “It’s fine. He’s engaged. It’s not like he was good-natured before.”

Only Dubin laughed, the way chagrined parents convey to a guest that their child had been trying to be amusing.

“So why are we here?” Fisk asked.

Dubin had convened the meeting, hoping to, as he put it, “help.”

“Primarily, we want to discuss our response to Yodeler,” said Evans.

“Naturally,” Dubin said.

Fisk could have easily written Yodeler back from the sidewalk outside Flying Robots, LLC, where he’d first read the e-mail. But he was obligated to first get input from Weir and Evans. And he still needed them. He admitted, “The dialogue with Yodeler isn’t working—”

Weir cut in. “You think?”

Fisk ignored the barb, continuing, “Isn’t working if you presumed his response was going to be surrender and a plea for forgiveness. Maybe Yodeler breached his tradecraft to write while full of piss and vinegar, using all caps. If not, the goal is still to buy time. So what we might do is tell him that the U.S. attorney may be amenable to adjusting Verlyn’s terms of custody, say, to house arrest—or maybe, ‘home confinement with travel restrictions,’ because that sounds better.”

Weir looked to Dubin. “Have you been in contact with the U.S. attorney?” By which he meant,
What the hell are you doing talking to the U.S. attorney behind our backs?

Dubin smiled Fisk’s way. Not really an expression of pleasure or amusement, Fisk knew. “No, wouldn’t talk to him without you.”

Fisk said to Weir, “But he may be amenable. Worst case, it takes Yodeler an hour to get a new burner phone and go to Penn Station or wherever he goes to read the message, and it takes him the same amount of time or more to compose and send a response. That’s time he’s not working on sacrifices.”

He was surprised to see Chay nodding her accord. One of the things he’d learned at the Farm—the CIA-run field-officer training base just outside of Williamsburg, Virginia—was that a mere nod of corroboration by a second party almost always causes the target’s trust-governing synapse to fire. And approval from a woman is almost twice as effective on the Weirs and Evanses of the world, which is to say: men.

Indeed Evans appeared impressed. He looked to Weir. “Flagpole?”

“As long as we red-team it,” Weir said, in turn looking to Dubin, probably because he sensed that Fisk would try to spike the red team. In which case Weir was right. In red-team sessions, the Bureau brought together an assortment of agents and analysts and specialists and tried to see things from the adversary’s perspective. While that could be valuable, Fisk thought, in this context, “red team” was a euphemism for more sitting around pontificating.

“Can’t hurt,” Dubin said. Which was more politics. Or maybe too many years out of the field had softened him.

“Great,” Fisk said. He meant it too. The red team would convene in the SCIF at the JTTF, meaning Chay would be excluded. He would claim something came up, precluding his attendance. And something would definitely come up. Unencumbered by meetings and his shadow, he might just get some work done tonight.

T
he Cartel ought to make a donation to the Online Foundation to Support Whistle-Blowers, thought Blackwell.

Last week, he’d been able to find the Drug Enforcement Agency’s mole hiding in a safe house in Miami thanks to a leaked law-enforcement-expenditure form listing the dummy corporation the DEA had used on a previous sting operation in Key Biscayne, a cigarette-boat dealership. The same dummy corporation paid the utilities bill at the safe house.

Locating Fisk was even easier, thanks to the leaks of his Social Security number, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name. There wasn’t much about the detective that wasn’t available online now. While still in Miami, Blackwell was able to hack Fisk’s Diner’s Club credit-card account, and found the purchase of a prepaid cell phone prior to the card’s suspension following a suspicious purchase of a $2,200 Les Paul electric guitar. He then tracked the prepaid phone to Hell’s Kitchen thanks to one of the myriad mobile locator services
available online (you have to pay $4.95 per locate with the purchase of a $19.95 monthly plan—and you have to check the box promising that you weren’t using the service in conjunction with any illegal activities). Last night, during a couple of McDonald’s stops on the drive up from Miami, he determined that Fisk had been crashing in an industrial building in Hell’s Kitchen, the Manhattan epicenter of hostels, illegal residences in commercially zoned buildings, and other cheap crash pads. A quick bit of Internet digging said that the developer who owned Fisk’s building owned nine others in Hell’s Kitchen.

It was a sound investment strategy, Blackwell thought. You buy a run-down factory or warehouse cheap and with zero down payment thanks to various urban economic development programs, then you spend next to nothing running it thanks to Con Ed’s Project Appleseed. Meanwhile you collect 100K in rent each month under the table. And five, ten years down the road, when you have to make good on your urban development commitment and renovate the building, you’ve got the cash several times over. And after you renovate, you sell the place for millions, all of which is profit. His mistress’s statuary benefited from a similar deal from the city of Chicago. Decaying buildings are fine for casting plaster statues and lawn art, desirable even, because a place where you do that sort of work is going to get trashed no matter what. Blackwell hadn’t thought of it as an investment initially, but rather a place to launder money. But now he was making a handsome profit there because other than cheap labor and even cheaper plaster, the business had virtually no expenses. Plus he’d gotten Franciszka out of the deal—although that was in jeopardy on account of the broken jaw, the second time it had happened. She’d been in his face again the night before he left for Miami. Of course he couldn’t give her any details about his trip, for her own good, but she wouldn’t shut up. The weird thing was, he’d barely hit her this time.

He parallel-parked his rented Toyota Something-or-Other, a piece of shit. In real life, he alternated between a Porsche Cayman
and a 1955 Mercedes-Benz CLS, the one with the gull-wing doors. On the job, though, the goal always was to blend in. It was also a goal of his to surveil the hell out his marks before striking, for a week or more, to learn their schedules, their routes, their susceptibilities. Like so many other guys, the DEA mole had had a weakness for the fairer sex. All it had taken to get him out of the safe house and to the kill room was a scrawny chick from a low-rent escort service willing to pose as a tourist staying nearby. Plus Blackwell had given her an extra fifty bucks.

Fisk would be cagier. Of that Blackwell was sure. With thirty-five dollars sent via PayPal to a Park Avenue messenger service, Blackwell had already learned that Fisk hadn’t stayed at the Sutton Place apartment since the bungled hit. The Diner’s Club statement showed that the detective had spent a night at a private club in midtown that provided hotel rooms to members and guests, then a couple of nights at a Hampton Inn. And after that, he went black, no doubt worried that someone like Blackwell would show up to finish what the Mexicans had started at Sutton Place. Procuring a burner phone using a traceable method of payment had been Fisk’s one mistake. Pros like him make mistakes, but not often. If he were to realize this one, he would move again, in which case it might be weeks before Blackwell tracked him down again, so success tonight was critical.

It was almost midnight. There were still enough people wandering the streets that Blackwell wouldn’t stand out in any way—he was fairly average in appearance, and forgettable by design. He had time for a quick scout of the place Fisk was staying in, a dilapidated World War I–era building, originally a factory of some sort, like so many of the buildings around here.

Getting into this one through the front door required a sturdy numeric lock. Windows were a possibility, though he could count on window alarms on the first three floors, probably the roof too. Blackwell might also talk his way in, or, if that failed, let Smith & Wesson do the talking for him. The problem with any of these entries was that
once he was inside, he would know nothing of the layout, other than, thanks to the mobile location service, that Fisk was on the third floor, facing east, near the uptown corner. Fisk would then have a hell of a home field advantage. But the location was also Fisk’s susceptibility. The guy was a pro, but he was on the run, which means off balance, easier to take down.

The industrial building had massive windows, ten feet high, lots of them, dating to a time when the sun was the best means of lighting a room. Anyone staying in a place like this would want curtains or blinds, even if they weren’t worried about someone popping them through the window. Otherwise they were guaranteed to be woken at sunup each and every day. Looking up now, Blackwell ascertained that Fisk hadn’t installed blinds yet, though he’d improvised, affixing a sleeping bag to the steel window gate.

If ever a job called for popping a scope on your rifle and taking a shot, Blackwell thought, this was it.

He returned to the shit Toyota, opened the trunk, and took out a racquet bag, which contained a Mark 14 Mod 0 rifle with a collapsible stock that he’d brought on the trip for this sort of contingency. He proceeded to the building one down from Fisk’s, a forgettable, pollution-browned, yellow-brick tenement. Residential, fortunately. Getting in required hitting enough buttons on the front intercom panel—three—until a resident bent on sleeping decided anything was better than hearing more of that damned buzzer.

Blackwell entered a worn lobby consisting of a narrow corridor leading to the stairs. On one side was a row of mailboxes, all of them locked except for 3W’s, which was missing its hatch—but not the sticker advising the mailman of the previous resident’s forwarding address.

The assassin climbed the stairs and rang 3W’s bell just in case. No answer. He slipped on a pair of cotton gloves and quietly went to work on the lock with a torsion wrench and a feeler prong. Sometimes this took five minutes. Sometimes it didn’t work at all. This
time he heard the faint snap of the bolt leaving the doorframe in about forty-five seconds.

The apartment was hot and smelled of dust. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Nowhere better for that than Manhattan, with all the street light. It took five seconds. As expected, the place was vacant but for a few chairs and a bookcase that must not have been worth the effort of transporting anywhere.

The lone bedroom had a chair missing one arm and a radiator. This was all Blackwell would need. He approached the window from the side, peering out, and, through an alley full of misty streetlight, found Fisk’s crash pad. The light inside formed a halo around the sleeping bag.

Blackwell popped the rifle together and set it onto his bipod, positioned on the radiator cover. The shot ought to be a lay-up, he thought. No obstructions save the sleeping bag. Through the ample, exposed windowpane to either side of the sleeping bag, he could see his target, sitting alone in a beanbag chair, watching TV and picking at a guitar.

Blackwell cracked the window in the borrowed apartment. Then, dropping to a kneel in front of the radiator, he positioned the barrel. Shooting at a downward angle complicated matters far more than people thought: gravity could severely mess with a shot traveling three thousand feet per second. But not from this distance. The hardest part would be pulling the trigger. He leaned into the stock’s cheek piece and squinted against the scope, still warm from the trunk, giving off a slight whiff of exhaust. He found the back of Fisk’s head centered almost exactly within the crosshairs.

Rather than draw attention with the laser range finder, Blackwell used the mil dot reticle in the scope to find the range—a mere sixty-one feet. He zeroed the scope, took a deep breath, and let the air out in small increments, the idea being to hold his lungs empty at the moment of the shot.

Finally he focused on Fisk, whose minimal motion took him in
and out of the crosshairs. Anticipating the target’s behavior is integral to a precise shot, Blackwell knew, and took it into account.

He readied his index finger by the trigger—he would squeeze straight back with the ball of the finger to avoid jerking the gun sideways. To minimize barrel motion, he would fire between his heartbeats.

As usual, a calm enveloped him. It’s a one-of-a-kind rush, to have this power over another person’s life, he thought, when he noted that Fisk’s hair was shaggier and darker than it had been in the photos. A disguise element? Also Fisk didn’t look quite as sturdy as usual. And his sharp features were softer, beyond the powers of a disguise kit.

Because Fisk hadn’t made a mistake. Wouldn’t have, in hindsight. Blackwell cursed himself for failing to figure it out from the moment he saw the guitar. This guy at the other end of the scope had purchased the guitar using the Diner’s Club card he’d lifted from Fisk—yeah, a shiny electric Les Paul.
Shit
.