The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (11 page)

T
hat same night Lin slept in the safe house in Chinatown. Or, rather, he tried to sleep.

His service rented the little apartment in the name of Han Zhijun, a young woman who three years ago had been hit by a bus around the corner, on Canal Street, permanently disabling her. She was subsequently institutionalized in upstate New York. If you’re going to appropriate an identity, you can’t do much better than hers, particularly for use in smuggling female agents in or out of the United States: Han Zhijun wasn’t going anywhere. She wouldn’t notice.

Lin decided to spend the night here because Chinatown was one of the best places in the world to detect surveillance, and come dawn, he would need to run the SDR—surveillance detection route—of his life. He also loved this place. Not because it was comfortable or luxurious. The furnishings were sparse and old, the carpets threadbare. Typical safe house, in other words. And it smelled strongly of the salted fish drying in the sun on the neighboring rooftops—typical Chinatown. What’s more, the bed in the single bedroom was large, but worn to concavity, probably before Lin’s service acquired it, probably left out for trash collection.

Nevertheless Lin jumped at opportunities to stay here because of the respite from his cover. Although he had his own spacious apartment near the university, on 118th and Riverside—and it was quite
well-appointed thanks to a fellowship his cover story had won him—he was on guard there. Eternally, it seemed. He had to play the role of Ji-Hsuan Lee, the country-bumpkin-turned-computer-prodigy, always, even when he slept—wearing earplugs because the din of the city kept the “country boy” awake. Even when there was no conceivable reason that anyone could be watching him, he had to operate as if they were. With its external cameras and myriad other countersurveillance measures, the safe house allowed him to breathe freely.

But not tonight.

Lin couldn’t sleep in spite of a deep well of self-relaxation techniques. No matter which way he lay or turned, he soon felt an urge to roll over.

The North American Division chief was unhappy; that was putting it mildly. Chay Maryland’s personal computer had proven worthless from an intelligence standpoint, and the Hoyas flash drive worse than worthless: in a rush to get another one to swap for it, the agency had decided on a course of action beginning with sending a diplomat from the embassy in Washington to Georgetown University’s bookstore to buy a drive, then getting the woman on a plane—a private plane—to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to deliver it. Once swapped, Chay’s drive had yielded documents that Lin’s people initially suspected were from Verlyn, disguised using sophisticated steganographic techniques: the drive purported to contain only a personal diary that the reporter had kept since she was a girl, begun using a now-defunct software known as MacWrite. After the cryptologists and computers at HQs were flummoxed, the service reached the conclusion that the drive was what it appeared to be, Chay’s means of safekeeping her diary. And although an exhaustive chronicle, nowhere did it mention the Verlyn documents.

The window for obtaining the documents was now closing, said Lin’s division chief, who didn’t trust the usual electronic commo for planning the next step. Or maybe that was just cover, Lin thought now, lest he run for fear they would erase him tomorrow.

No wonder he kept finding himself staring at the water stains on the ceiling, so dark that they were obvious even with the lights out. Of course the lights from the neon-happy Mott Street could get past any blind, let alone this tattered one. He drew the drapes, plunging the room into blackness. Then got back into bed.

And still didn’t sleep.

A while later, he struck upon the idea of the bottle of antianxialitics he kept on hand, in the medicine cabinet, to quell the occasional agent’s panic. The recommended dose was one tablet. He took three.

He awoke in the morning, as usual, just seconds before the alarm sounded, and astonishingly refreshed. He showered, got into his business suit, and sprayed the same stuff into his hair as did the other Asian yuppies who lived on this stretch of Mott, along with whom he would commute to work, or so it would appear.

All of its one-way streets, pedestrian alleys, and subway stations made Chinatown the foremost SDR zone in the city. Your surveillant has little choice but to fall in step behind you here, Lin reminded himself as he slid on a pair of eyeglasses with “rearview mirrors”—strips of mirrored film adhered to the inside of the lenses in order to give him a look at who or what was behind him. And if your tail is white, he’s that much easier to see among all the Chinese.

Shoving open the heavy steel-cage-encased lobby door, Lin stepped out of the onetime tenement house. A sharp dawn highlighted the hundreds of pieces of litter, another category in which Chinatown had no rivals in the city. Everything was still, as quiet as it got downtown, just the whir of fans and the rumble of early traffic coming in from Long Island and New Jersey.

Mott Street remained asleep save for a couple of taxis and one of the city sanitation trucks that never seemed to make more than a dent in the mounds of black bags on the sidewalks here. A watcher would have stood out against the contiguous garish-colored façades. Lin didn’t put it past the FBI to use surveillance UAVs, though, like the $200,000 Black Hornet Micro, essentially a high-performance
stealth helicopter reduced to the size of a moth. The slats on the decorative safe-house window shutters concealed sensors that could detect radio transmission in the range such electronic surveillance systems would conceivably use—900 MHz to 2.52 GHz. Lin’s phone (a five-thousand-dollar knockoff of the CIA Birdbook devices that couldn’t be tracked) remained silent, meaning the sensors had detected no threats.

As he turned west onto Canal, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. The McDonald’s was busy. Always was. The salty aroma of the hash browns enveloped him, and made his mouth water. He proceeded to the 1 train. In search of a tail he hoped he would fail to find, he would take several subway rides, and walk at least a mile in the train tunnels, and several miles on the sidewalks. Along the way he planned to shop for clothing—he would go into a tourist boutique in Penn Station and leave in a new outfit, through the back exit.

Like a commuter, he hurried down the stairwell, then into the subway station via a humid tunnel with smog-grayed white-tile walls that amplified the sound of his steps, his breaths, and, it seemed, his accelerated heartbeat.

He was alone other than the sanitation worker using a mop to move the filth around the turnstiles, an old man with gaps in his teeth that defied the abilities of the FBI’s Costume Department. Even so, Lin might have maintained his circumspection, but he’d seen the guy here before often enough to establish his authenticity.

Two more men entered the tunnel at its midpoint and followed him toward the platform, both Asian American yuppies, both of them glancing at their phones while they walked.

FBI agents? Why chance it?

At the end of the tunnel, Lin turned onto a near-empty platform just as an uptown-bound 1 train shrieked into the station. No one got off. Using the rearview mirrors, he watched the two yuppies diverge, boarding cars of their own and, seemingly, entering worlds of their own.

Lin darted into the lead car, boarding just before the doors banged shut, meaning anyone following him would be obvious. He saw no one. The lights flickered as the train launched into a tunnel lit red by traffic signals that the conductor disregarded. Among the dozen other passengers were suits—bankers and lawyers who would take the 7 or the Times Square Shuttle over to Park Avenue.

Lin etched each one into his memory. If he were to see one of them again this morning, he would abort the meeting. The exigency sharpened his senses.

A few minutes later, the subway pulled into the Times Square station and the doors snapped open. He hesitated as long as he could before making his move. Finally stepping onto the platform, he regarded the mirrored film to find no one following him, no one muttering into a lapel mic, no one doing much of anything.

He climbed up to the street, walking against traffic on Seventh Avenue, coming to a standstill suddenly midway up the crowded sidewalk between Forty-Second and Forty-Third Street and waving, as if to hail a cab. This was a timing stop, to see if anyone behind him halted or shifted behavior abruptly.

Again, all clear.

It was a ten-minute walk across Forty-Sixth Street to the tunnel through the MetLife Building that allowed for commuters to get to and from Grand Central. Zigzagging the midtown grid, turning randomly and making sure no one else was turning, Lin spent two and a half hours getting to the MetLife Building, changing along the way into a T-shirt with a New York Mets logo.

At last he entered the MetLife skyscraper, which had gained iconic status on account of the hawks who nested in the letters spelling out the company’s name just below the roof. He timed his entrance so that he would cross paths with the commuters arriving on the 8:04 express train from Stamford, Connecticut.

Anyone else plunging into that tide would have to be a tail.

There was no one else.

At the passageway’s midpoint, he ducked into a Citibank, joining a moderate line—a dozen or so people—waiting for the ATMs. A portly man waddled into line behind him, reading a
Wall Street Journal
folded into thirds the way the practiced train commuters did.

He said to Lin, “How ya doing, fellow Mets fan?”

“Happy because of last night’s game against the Orioles,” Lin said. The Baltimore Orioles played in a different league; the Mets weren’t facing them this season.

The guy groused, “I missed the seven nineteen from Stamford, had to take the seven thirty-seven.” This told Lin that the North American division chief would be in the Grand Hyatt in room 1937.

“Then you’re due for some good luck,” Lin said in acknowledgment.

The Grand Hyatt was three blocks away, two if you cut through Grand Central station. It took Lin forty-five minutes to get through the station, and another ten minutes at Modell’s Sporting Goods, just across Vanderbilt Avenue, to buy and change into a Nike tracksuit.

He exited Modell’s, turned east onto Forty-Second Street, and walked a block, passing the entrance to the Grand Hyatt before doubling back, satisfied that he hadn’t been tailed, and pushing through the door to the hotel. In the palatial, contemporary lobby, he took a tour of the men’s room for good measure, then rode the elevator to the nineteenth floor.

Meeting Dr. Jun was surprisingly anticlimactic. After Lin knocked on the door to room 1937 four times (people almost always knock three times), he found himself face-to-face with a woman who reminded him of his grandmother, licking at lips likely dehydrated from the long plane ride. Her eyes were puffy, as if from sleep (so much for the rumors that she never rested). She appeared uncomfortable in the Western business suit; at home she always wore an army uniform. She offered nothing in the way of small talk or even a greeting, telling him, “Sit.” She waved at the bench meant for suitcases by the foot of the bed.

He followed her instruction while she dropped onto the bed, her
back against the headboard, oblivious to the fact she was displaying the entirety of her bony thighs—unless she was doing it intentionally, to unsettle him. In which case she was succeeding. He tried to focus on her gray eyes.

“What made you think the flash drive had the documents?” she asked.

“It was a mistake,” he said, with remorse, which, rumor had it, she liked. “In hindsight.”

She cackled. “Is it a matter of hindsight? How is it that you failed to consider that a flash drive the reporter bought when she was a student at Georgetown University, back when such drives had storage capacity for only a hundred such documents, would not be used to store the hundreds of thousands of NSA documents?”

Don’t dig yourself in deeper, he told himself. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Hoyas was a clue I overlooked.”

“After all of your spook games, you really aren’t any closer to knowing where she has them, other than not on her computer or tiny flash drive, correct?”

It dawned on him that the scolding was a good sign. She wouldn’t waste the time to do it if she planned to have him zapped.

He said, “I am afraid that, yes, that is an accurate assessment, ma’am.”

“What other intelligence service, including the one from whom the documents were stolen, would not want them?”

Play her game, he exhorted himself. “I can’t think of any, ma’am.”

“We’ve picked up chatter suggesting that at least six other services have covert operations under way targeting the Verlyn cache. Fortunately no one has succeeded yet—or at least the Pakistanis have done a good job pretending to have blundered as badly as you have. The Israelis sent a columnist from a tabloid we know to be a Mossad front. She offered the
New York Times
director of security, Ed Norman, one million dollars for the files, a hundred thousand up front, another nine hundred if and when he came through. Norman didn’t
collect the nine hundred. Why the Israelis didn’t just ask Ms. Chay Maryland, I have no idea. Do you?”

“She seems to have no interest in material things. She’s willing to go to prison for a year and a half to keep the secret.”

“I didn’t say make her an offer. I said
ask
.”

Was this a test? If so, she liked to be smarter than anyone else. “I wish I could follow you, ma’am,” he said.

“This is what you will do. This is what you should have done from the beginning. You will bring her to the safe house on Mott Street and ask—interrogate her if you must. Do whatever is required in order to ascertain the whereabouts of the documents. Once you have the documents—I should say, when we have verified that you have them, and when you are given the go-ahead—you will put her in a taxi that will have an unfortunate accident. Do you understand?”

It was a good plan, Lin admitted. He nodded and stood to depart.

F
isk had spent most of the night looking for leads and striking out, which, he thought, described the vast majority of his time at work. And in his personal life too, since his eventual return to the playing field after Krina’s death—but that was another story. Sure, every second on the case was fraught with tension, but Fisk wasn’t complaining. If anything, the strikeouts made the hits that much more rewarding. What he should have done from the start, he realized, was call the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

The NGA was based in Springfield, Virginia, in a 2.3-million-square-foot building that resembled a sleek modern ocean liner, the atrium alone big enough to fit the Statue of Liberty. The agency’s sixteen thousand employees put a $5 billion annual budget toward the production of stunningly sophisticated logistical data in support of national security. Perhaps the best example of its product came in 2011’s Operation Neptune Spear, the U.S. raid of Osama bin Laden’s secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The agency used satellite imagery to generate three-dimensional renderings of the compound, and to create freakishly accurate empirical and algorithmic-prediction-based schedules of the local pedestrian and vehicular traffic in the vicinity. The reconnaissance systems also determined the gender, height, and weight of each of bin Laden’s housemates.

In New York, the agency occupied a twenty-eighth-floor office
in the World Financial Center, a suite so small and unassuming that other tenants probably concluded that the
NGA
on the frosted-glass door stood for the names of the principals of a boutique accounting or actuarial firm. If that weren’t enough, the lone professional at the NGA’s New York office, Roy Plummer, more closely resembled an accountant than he did a spy. He wore thick-lensed glasses, his stoop belonged to a man of twice his thirty-one years, and he had a pallor attributable to too much time spent beneath the office’s fluorescent lights. He came off as quiet too, shy to the point of diffident, and withdrawn. But that was only because he had a lot on his mind, as Fisk had come to appreciate.

“Other than a coffee machine, all an intel agency really needs these days is one decent computer,” Plummer explained, tapping the tinted glass top of the square conference table around which he, Chay, and Fisk now sat. Fisk knew from previous visits that the tabletop doubled as a computer monitor. “This system represents the digitization of what ten years ago was the combined product of seven different National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency divisions working together. Each division had its own large-format printer. Each would generate a huge printout and then run it into one central room and pushpin it to the bulletin board. The bulletin board would be the agency’s product. Now, this”—he tapped the glass—“has taken the place of the bulletin board.”

The room lights dimmed, revealing a luminous touch-sensitive keyboard on the glass in front of him. From tiny nozzles at each of the table’s four corners rose a whitish vapor, which blended with vapor emitted by a parallel quartet of nozzles on the ceiling. The result was a pale green glowing box the size of a cube refrigerator. On its base, the surface of the table, appeared a two-dimensional map of the section of Central Park where Harun Ahmed had been killed, Fisk figured.

“A Greek named Anaximander invented this in the sixth century BC,” Plummer said to Chay.

Her eyes widened with incredulity. “The vapor screen?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘vapor screen,’” the NGA man said with a vaudevillian display of confusion. “Jeremy, you know what she’s talking about?”

Fisk made a mental note to buy Plummer a steak dinner. He turned to Chay and said, “If we’re going to make any progress here, you need to assure us that if the topic of three-dimension vapor projection technology comes up after you leave here today, you won’t disclose your knowledge of its existence.”

She hesitated. “Okay?”

“Good,” said Plummer. “Actually, I meant that Anaximander invented the sort of two-dimensional map that you currently see on the tabletop. This one represents the two-thousand-square foot area of Central Park where the first victim was killed sometime between two and two thirty in the afternoon.” He tapped at his touch-sensitive keyboard. “Now we’ll add a dimension with the help of a proprietary Innovision aeronautical app called PHAERO that aggregates available data from that time period captured by eyes in the sky—satellites and other reconnaissance platforms, including unmanned aerial vehicles, like the RQ-4 Global Hawk drone, and manned systems, like the U-2 spy plane, which has been in service since 1955.” The map transformed from a drawing to a color photograph, springing into three dimensions, with 3-D images including a female jogger, a blue sky with wispy clouds, and, hovering above one of the trees, a disk-shaped white blur.

“The bulk of this imagery was snapped by the IKONOS satellite while it was on a routine overpass of the city at 2:09:20
P.M.
,” Plummer said.

Fisk pointed to the round blur. Chay beat him to asking, “What is that?”

Plummer aimed a stylus at it. The beam of red light cast by the stylus’s tip transformed into a cursor arrow inside the vapor cube. With it, Plummer drew a circle around the blur, enlarging the white
disk. As it expanded, its edges grew rounder and the color sharpened to a Day-Glo yellow.

“A Frisbee,” Chay realized aloud.

“We’re hoping to find a weaponized drone,” Fisk said.

“Not to worry, folks, we’re barely into the first inning,” said the NGA man. “Next, one by one, I’ll add any available imagery from the GeoEye satellite, which was also in the neighborhood at the time, along with any data we can get from the seventy-two satellites in Motorola’s Iridium consortium. Also I’ll mix in a couple of our own satellites.”

He hit a few keys and the three-dimensional imagery grew better defined, with richer hues. A three-dimensional image of a man’s body materialized, lying still on the running path. In contrast, two female joggers running around the reservoir were actually moving. The trees too came to life, with branches swaying in the wind. A horse lumbered around the loop, towing a hansom cab containing the driver and what appeared to be a family of four tourists, three of them apparently using their phones to record the ride.

“What you’re looking at now is a photograph that was taken by one of the Iridium birds at 2:30:44,” Plummer said. “The animation is generated by EQUIS, our Enhanced Quality Image Search. They might in reality be Olympic marathoners, but EQUIS is just rendering their motions based on averages of female joggers of their sizes.”

Chay pointed at the man lying still on the running path. “That’s the victim, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Plummer brought up a window full of numbers. “His thermal metrics are the same as the other people in the vicinity. He may have been dead a matter of seconds before the satellite passed over, or he may still be alive here—it’s impossible to know from this data alone. As for a UAV, it could have come into this part of the park during the twenty-one-minute gap between the satellite pics we have.”

“What about other kinds of images?” Fisk asked.

With a nod, Plummer returned to the keyboard. “That brings us to the second inning, incorporating data from surface cameras.” The picture sharpened again, but only slightly. “As you can see, there’s almost no surface data from that time frame.”

Fisk had expected as much. “So far the drone—or whoever or whatever it is—has been no-hitting the Department’s cameras.”

Plummer asked, “Were your camera locations part of the Verlyn leak?”

By way of reply, Fisk turned to Chay. With less conviction than usual, she said, “Not that I know of.”

“It’s spilled milk now,” Fisk said. He turned to Plummer. “What about radar?”

“Radar is in our toolbox.” Plummer went into a pianist act on his keyboard. “For Central Park, we have an amazing array of radar systems on account of the proximity of JFK and LaGuardia as well as Newark—Terminal Radar captures every plane within fifty nautical miles of a control tower.”

The upper levels of the vapor cube began to fill with objects. Fisk recognized the form of a commercial passenger jet. “Any micro UAVs by any chance?”

“The Coast Guard’s radar can give us a flying object as small as a baseball within a hundred miles of any coastline, and of course Central Park is less than a mile.” Plummer keyed in smaller objects, rendered in all of the primary colors, which proliferated in the projected sky.

“What are these?” Chay said.

“Could be birds, or kites, or baseballs, or tossed bridal bouquets, drones,” Plummer said. “Resolution and classification of small objects is extremely difficult, particularly if they’re flying at low speeds. Micro UAVs, like a quadrocopter, average about eleven miles per hour—Little League pitchers throw a ball five times that fast. Add in the clutter of trees and buildings, it’s almost impossible to tell anything about smaller objects. What I can do, though, is eliminate
anything with a radar cross section bigger than an ultralight airplane and ask EQUIS to use empirical-data-based algorithms to fill in the blanks for us.” Two clicks and most of the sky clutter vanished. “As you can see distinctly, now there are birds. There’s a kite. Looks like some poor kid lost a balloon over here.”

“But no drone?” Chay asked.

“Not yet,” said Plummer. “We can enhance the photo by using even more tools. Here’s some radio signal data recorded by the FAA, here’s NORAD, here’s J-STAR, and good old AWACS. Now EQUIS will attach icons based on its best guess as to which system provided the data . . .”

Icons of cell phones popped up above each of the pedestrians. Above one of the treetops, a small black airplane icon materialized. Fisk sat bolt upright, as did Chay. Plummer followed their stares, using his stylus to outline and enlarge the icon.

“It’s just a little radio-controlled plane,” he said. “A toy. Probably too small to haul a ballpoint pen, let alone any kind of gun. But it’s possible that an algorithm-based system like this wouldn’t differentiate a weaponized UAV from an RC plane because we haven’t written UAV parameters for it yet. Frankly, this is the first time I’ve heard of anyone wanting imagery of a UAV outside of war theaters, and most of the military UAVs are way bigger than an ultralight airplane. If LaGuardia’s ground control or the Coast Guard or Homeland were concerned about a blip like that on their screens, they would basically zoom in and find out what it was in real time—or they would send up an F-16 to investigate. Probably the NGA system needs a tweak.”

“What about this tourist family here?” Chay pointed to the hansom cab on the loop. “It looks like they’re taking pictures or videos. Is there any way to access what they captured?”

Plummer gestured to Fisk to take the floor. “Once we get warrants, figure out who their carriers are, send the carriers NSLs and get the data back,” Fisk said, “it’s possible. In the meantime, our options
are down to what Anaximander had: we need to find a human eye witness.”

“We can still build imagery from the other crime scenes,” Plummer said.

Fisk had hoped so. Hoping now to increase Chay’s appreciation for the surveillance technology, he said, “Your choice, need to choose between canvassing the city on foot and sitting here in the a/c watching more videos.”

She flashed a smile, revealing a well of mirth beneath her hardened exterior.

Plummer went back into his pianist act, fading the Central Park scene to the vapor’s chalky-white default, then refilling it with a two-dimensional map of 435 West Seventeenth Street, victim Tameka Ann Crowley’s apartment building.

The image rose into three dimensions, morphing from drawing to photograph, then became animated, with pedestrians wandering along the sidewalks, a few trees swaying in a light breeze, and a trio of yellow cabs and a UPS delivery truck rumbling westward between Ninth Avenue and Tenth.

Again, all manner of flying objects filled the sky, until Plummer filtered out small birds and large aircraft, leaving just one object over West Seventeenth Street.

Seen from above, the object had the general shape of two rows of conjoined circles. Drawing a red loop around it, Plummer said, “EQUIS must be confused. It’s saying that this is a McDonnell Douglas MD-88, but that’s a commercial jet with a hundred-and-three-foot wingspan.”

“Could it be as simple as that it looks like the number eighty-eight?” Fisk asked.

“It’s a quadrocopter,” Chay exclaimed.

“That’s it,” Fisk said. If it weren’t just the three of them in a small, quiet room, he would have cheered.

Plummer opened an Internet Explorer window on the tabletop
and scrolled through images of UAVs. “Evidently the eighty-eight shape is a foam safety hull that protects the fuselage and extends into a ring around each of the four rotors,” he said. “Without it, if the rotor blades were to brush against a streetlamp or some other hard object, the quadrocopter could experience catastrophic failure.”

“What about radio frequency?” Fisk asked. “Can we use the radio signals to track the thing?”

“Yes and no. It looks like it used multiple frequencies, hopping randomly from one frequency to another every nanosecond, probably implemented for the express purpose of thwarting someone who would go hunting for the transmitter.”

“What’s the ‘yes’ part of yes and no?” Fisk asked.

“The data we have is sufficient to see if the quadrocopter turned up anywhere else.” Plummer banged away at the keyboard. The area in the projection expanded to include, in three-dimensions, the lower half of the island, with thousands of objects above the buildings, like a hailstorm of cannonballs.

A keypunch—and they disappeared, all but three, in its original position at the 88 on West Seventeenth Street and in two other positions depicted by 88s close together on the surface of the Hudson River, just off Pier 52. “I don’t know where it came from, but given that it spent enough time in positions two and three to be photographed by two satellites, I have a pretty good idea of where it is right now.” He pointed to the floor. “At the bottom of the Hudson River.”