The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (12 page)

I
n Fisk’s collection of Manhattan trivia was the little-known fact that the city has a Thirteenth Avenue—most New Yorkers would tell you that their island runs into the Hudson at Twelfth. In the nineteenth century, Thirteenth Avenue ran parallel to the Hudson River, reaching from West Eleventh Street up to West Twenty-Ninth. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the city needed to fit the newer and bigger breed of foreign ships, like the RMS
Titanic
and the RMS
Lusitania,
into its ports on the Hudson. The planners lopped off all but one block of Thirteenth Avenue. The remaining block became the Gansevoort Peninsula, also known as Pier 52.

Now the pier consisted of a square block of asphalt parking lot serving a couple of NYC Sanitation Department buildings that matched the industrial scheme of the meatpacking district across the West Side Highway.

Fisk stood on the pier’s southwestern corner now, with Chay. They’d been here for more than an hour. On the bright side, it was a picture-perfect July morning, with seemingly every water molecule in the Hudson sparkling beneath myriad boats and a colorful array of sails and spinnakers. Waves rhythmically slapped the pier’s wooden fenders.

Chay focused on a brownish, sour-smelling patch of water fifty yards west of the pier. There, four divers from the FBI’s Underwater
Search and Evidence Response Team looked for the downed drone. Two more divers from the NYPD Scuba Team assisted. Nearby, a thirty-foot FBI cruiser dragged a sonar unit along the river bottom. Four cables sprang from the deck of a slightly smaller boat before disappearing below the surface, connected to four search robots known as ROVs—remotely operated vehicles—that might remind you of canister vacuum cleaners, until you knew that each cost $120,000.

Likely as not, the divers and the ROVs would happen upon other weapons before finding the drone. New York’s criminals treated the local waterways as an evidence dump.

“What’s it like down there?” Chay asked.

“Even on a hot day in the middle of the summer like today, it’s pretty cold thirty-two feet down. The water moves fast, and hard. Everything’s pitch-black; you literally can’t make out your hand right in front of your face. You’re basically just feeling around, meanwhile trying to avoid getting stuck in muck or snared by rocks, fishing line, bodies—you name it. All of which makes it pretty fun, actually.”

“Sounds it,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Have you ever been scuba diving?”

“No. Can’t you use infrared to see underwater?”

“You would just illuminate all the dirt and the pollution. It’s only very recently that we’ve begun to use anything other than feel; the Department’s experimenting with handheld sonar guns. The display is inside the diver’s face mask.”

She nodded. “What will happen if they find the drone?”

“They’ll put it in a PVC container along with Hudson River water, to preserve the evidence.”

“How long can the drone retain fingerprints?”

“A drone? Tough to say. On a gun, it’s four days, maybe five.”

“And what if you’re able to lift prints, but they’re not in the national fingerprint and criminal history database?”

“That’s a seventy-five percent likelihood. Sort of makes you wish we had everyone’s prints in the database, doesn’t it?”

She smiled, but dismissively.

He tried again. “When I was a rookie, we found a .357 Magnum on the bottom of the East River that had been there for three years. Prints were long gone, but it still yielded a ballistics report, which was part of the evidence that brought down Vincent Gigante, the ‘Oddfather.’”

“The head of the Genovese crime family?”

“He used to wander the streets here in the Village, wearing just his bathrobe and slippers, muttering incoherently. He eventually admitted that he was just faking insanity so that he could avoid prosecution.”

“Didn’t Vincent Gigante die behind bars?”

“In Missouri.”

“Good.” Chay continued to fixate on the area beneath which the divers had disappeared, a mosaic of browns, blacks, and grays.

A minute ticked by. She asked no more questions, said nothing.

“So where are you from?” Fisk asked.

She stared ahead. “Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Don’t you already have that information?”

“Do you always answer a question with another question?”

“I’ll answer your question if you answer one of mine. Magnus Jenssen died of a fast-moving cancer, the symptoms of which were almost identical to previous cases of poisoning by polonium-210.”

Hell, he thought.

She went on. “Three days later, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, you received an injection of a protein called ‘granulocyte colony-stimulating factor’ as a treatment for radiation sickness. Do you expect anyone to believe that that’s a coincidence?”

She wasn’t just fishing this time. Obviously, she’d learned of his admission to the cancer treatment center. He needed to make sure she didn’t learn the full truth. Jenssen had plotted to kill former president George W. Bush and hundreds of spectators at the Ground
Zero ceremony, and he came within a fraction of an eyelash of succeeding. He did succeed in killing Fisk’s girlfriend, Krina, in the process essentially snuffing Fisk’s life as well. Or so it had seemed at the time, when Fisk used the oven in his kitchen—for the first time in the two years that he’d lived in the Sutton Place apartment—to bake a cupcake for Jenssen.

Along with flour, baking powder, butter, sugar, and frosting, Fisk added a microgram of the polonium-210 that had been confiscated—fittingly, he thought—from Jenssen’s Swedish Muslim terrorist brethren. The thick foil wrapper was supposed to shield Fisk from radiation exposure when he brought the cupcake to Jenssen at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Like his plan for retribution, it seemed to work at first. Jenssen ate the cupcake and died. Almost immediately, Fisk regretted his plan—and that was before the bleeding and the unrelenting fever kicked in. Then he considered that it would have been wrong to let Jenssen live. So he’d been neither right nor wrong. It was a gray area. Unfortunately, a jury wouldn’t see it that way.

“I was kind of hoping you’d ask me a sports question,” he said.

“He gets cancer, you get radiation sickness. That’s just a coincidence?”

He felt an urge to tell her. Cathartic? Maybe. Stupid? Definitely.

The signal saved him from having to lie: with a pop, a bright red Styrofoam orb, like a kickball, flew up from the area of the river where the divers had submerged. A matching nylon streamer tailed it. Both settled to a bob on the surface.

This signified that the drone had been found.

T
he UAV was “rendered safe”—declared free of booby traps and other hazards—by scuba divers from the FBI’s Hazardous Devices Operations Section, then placed in a special transparent polycarbonate case with the dimensions of a steamer trunk. Fisk and Chay had their first glimpse of the drone—a quadrocopter similar to Peavy’s—when the NYPD Harbor Patrol officers winched the evidence case onto the stern of one of their cruisers. A member of the Bureau’s Evidence Response Team videotaped every step for the chain-of-custody log.

When the Harbor Patrol boat docked at the pier, three crewmen were required to dolly the heavy evidence case up the steep gangway. One of the divers opened the door and the other two hoisted the evidence case into the cargo bay of the black late-model Chevy Suburban—unmarked, but unmistakably a “G-Ride”—that would take the quadrocopter 250 miles to the FBI laboratory at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia.

Locally the Bureau could log all of the serial numbers from the quadrocopter and the rifle, assigning them as leads for agents to follow. Locally the Bureau could also check for fingerprints and blood, but that was basically the extent of it; as far as forensics went, field offices didn’t have a fraction of the equipment seen in the evidence lab on a typical
CSI
show. In Quantico, specialists on a TEU—Trace
Evidence Unit—would search microscopically for trace materials like human hair, textile fibers, fabric, soil, and building materials.

The divers huddled with three other men: the FBI evidence unit’s supervisory agent, the forensics operations director, and the logistical management specialist, all with clipboards thick with FD-192s, the Bureau’s evidence data-loading forms. They also packed FD-1004s, the evidence chain-of-custody forms, among other documents, one of which yielded carbon copies using actual carbon paper. Outside of the FBI, Fisk had seen carbon paper only one other time: to duplicate the parent signature on his first elementary school report card.

With a wave at all of the paperwork, he asked Chay, “Ever wonder if the word ‘bureaucracy’ originated at the Bureau?”

She smiled. Only politely, he thought. From behind the smile, he suspected, she viewed him as a criminal.

He wandered over to the Suburban, where the drone sat in the evidence case between two duffel bags, like just another piece of luggage.

Chay followed him in true shadow fashion. “What are you looking for?”

“Ideally, the killer’s name,” he said. “Short of that, any clue that will get us to his name.”

She read aloud from the fuselage: “Specter.” The sporty red logo of the drone’s manufacturer featured an
S
drawn in the shape of a ghost.

The Specter’s fuselage was shaped like an X, with sleek and sturdy black rotors atop each of its four arms. A polypropylene protective hull fit over the fuselage, branching into four loops, all of them six inches in diameter, each surrounding a rotor. Parallel staple-shaped brackets hung five or six inches from the base of the fuselage, supporting a block of black foam that had been hollowed to accommodate the rifle. Waterlogged now, the foam drooped, enabling Fisk to glimpse the stripped-down barrel, its magazine, and a Band-Aid tin wedged beside it.

From the tin sprang three thin rubber-coated wires. He couldn’t see where they went, but he figured that one wire terminated at the scope’s eyepiece. The second wire would lead to an actuator in the form of a tiny robotic arm that adjusted the barrel. The last wire probably fed a similar contraption that either pushed the trigger toward the stock or bypassed the trigger and directly released the hammer.

One of the rotor blades was bent at its midpoint, while the other three lay flat. The Styrofoam loop surrounding the bent rotor looked to have been split or sliced in two. A jagged hairline fissure separated the two pieces. Probably an accident had caused the quadrocopter to go swimming, or damaged it to the point that Yodeler was unable to get the thing home, causing him to ditch it.

“How long will it take Quantico to return the results?” Chay asked.

“Could be a day, could be weeks. Depends on caseloads, and, mostly, Weir and Evans. Even to walk the four blocks here from their office, they need to fill out an ‘electronic communication’ stating their plan, and get written approval.”

Chay sighed. “At least Yodeler doesn’t have his drone anymore.”

Fisk was about to challenge her supposition, but instead held his tongue.

T
he job is fun, and it’s easy,” Mrs. Herzog, the head of Upper West Side Daycare, told Mary Rose Chaney. “You just have to escort small groups of four- and five-year-olds either to the playground in Central Park or to the Museum of Natural History, all of four blocks round trip.”

Mary Rose, a nineteen-year-old Cornell University student home for the summer, loved children. She worried, though, about the responsibility of safeguarding them in the streets of New York. It didn’t ease her mind any during the subsequent classroom visit when Alice, the grouchy senior teacher she stood to assist, said, “The hard part is protecting other humans from these monsters. If Mrs. Herzog told job candidates the truth, which is that we should get combat pay for the outings, you think anybody would ever sign on here?”

Mary Rose was in her sixth week without finding work—or, as her father had put it that morning, she was in her “thirty-seventh day of unemployment.” So she accepted the job at the day-care center.

Today was her second day on the job. She was still frazzled from the first. Fortunately this morning’s outing, to the Hall of Ocean Life at the Museum of Natural History, had been uneventful. Not a single mad potty dash in the whole hour! Alice led the group out of the museum now, towing the Walkodile, a green vinyl leash with two rows of four harnesses, one row to either side of the leash,
accommodating eight children. (“Don’t call it a leash,” Mrs. Herzog had insisted. “It’s a walking rope.”) Mary Rose brought up the rear—the caboose, Ethan called her. The train-obsessed four-year-old had memorized the entire Metro North New Haven–to–Grand Central schedule (his grandmother lived in a New Haven suburb). He walked just ahead of Mary Rose. It was an idyllic sunny afternoon, the air mild with a hint of dogwood blossoms. Not that Mary Rose could enjoy any of it. She walked on the balls of her feet, her knees tensed, ready to spring forward to the aid of a child who stumbled. The Walkodile was designed so that if one child fell, he or she couldn’t pull down the others, meaning that the child who fell could be dragged along. It had happened twice on Central Park West yesterday. That was why Mary Rose wore her New Balances today instead of her usual clogs.

Descending the steep granite staircase, she realized that she’d never previously considered just how sharp the edge of a step could be. Each one looked capable of severing a small limb, if, say, a child lost balance and were dragged by the seven others to whom he was tethered.

“Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five,” said Ethan, his glance preceding them down the stairs. “Is that the world’s record for stairs?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mary Rose.

“Careful now, people,” Alice barked as she took the first step.

The group followed—like it or not, Mary Rose thought. The Walkodile meant that while the four kids on the left side could now grip the banister, the four on the right had nothing to hold. The group was jerking Olivia—third kid back on the right, the tiniest of the bunch—so that her tiny pink left Nike came down onto air where she was expecting a step. The little girl gasped, then dangled, arms flailing, before her sneaker landed on the next stair down. She regained her balance and continued on as if nothing had happened. Still Mary Rose’s heart beat at twice its normal rate. Although it
couldn’t be much more than seventy-five out, hot perspiration sprang from her scalp and spilled down her forehead.

The steps were dotted with a lunch-hour crowd, professionals who worked nearby joining tourists in a picnic catered by an array of food carts parked below, on the Central Park West sidewalk. Obstacles, Mary Rose thought of the picnickers. Fortunately, many got up to clear a path for the children. Many more glared at Mary Rose. Yesterday, some crazy old bat hissed at her, “They’re children, not dogs.” As if a nineteen-year-old assistant teacher made the day-care center rules. Today she ignored the people. Had to. She focused on the little feet, feeling their way down, her stomach clenching anew with each step.

The group successfully navigated the first flight, passing the giant bronze statue of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback, when Mary Rose noticed the drone. It rose slowly from the stairwell leading to the underground Eighty-First Street subway station. Nate, her boyfriend, had one like it: the kind with four propellers. Nate’s older brother had one too. The two of them played some sort of game with them, firing virtual missiles at each other in their parents’ backyard in Westchester.

This one must be some kind of publicity stunt, she thought, maybe a promo for a
Terminator
-type movie. This area was Publicity Stunt Central. She had heard that last week a hot-air balloon had landed in the park advertising some new real estate site. Also, not one but two people dressed in Chuck E. Cheese suits had shown up at the playground, fifteen minutes apart, to hand out discount coupons for the arcade or something like that. The kids had leaped off the jungle gym and then sprinted to see Chuck—both times.

Mary Rose hoped they wouldn’t notice the drone. It was hard to discern its high-pitched buzz from the jackhammers and car horns. Once they saw it, it would be tough to contain them. Other grown-ups began to notice it. Suddenly heads in the crowd turned in unison, like stalks in a wheat field swept by a single gust. They took in
the drone, now floating toward the museum. Most people quickly returned to what they’d been doing, to their sandwiches or to whatever was adhering them to their phones.

“Look!” squealed Madison A., a future cheerleader for sure, second kid down on the right, her arm like a fixed bayonet pointing at the drone.

“Wow!” said Ethan. “A flying robot.”

Only Olivia kept silent, standing on her toes but still unable to see over the boy in front of her, Derek, who was a head taller than any of the others. Mary Rose remembered his name because today, just like yesterday—and, according to Alice, every day—he wore a New York Yankees shirt.

Madison B. jumped to get a better look, without thinking where on the staircase she might land, or how. In a flash, Mary Rose shot forward and wrapped her arms around the girl, catching her.

Mary Rose then felt the tug of all of the other kids at once, launching themselves and their combined three hundred pounds toward the “flying toy.” All of them except Ethan, who remained in place to declare, “It’s not a toy, it’s a quadrocopter.” Or rather he tried to remain in place. The Walkodile pulled him into the air like a kite.

Mary Rose lunged, coming up with a fistful of his gym shorts. She set him down and tried to rein in the rest. Combined, they were too powerful. It was let go or be dragged face first down the stairs.

“Halt!” Alice screamed, her brows dropping and her chin jutting into her fiercest “teacher face.”

The kids put on the brakes. All, incredibly, remained afoot.

Alice inhaled, apparently fixing to deliver a stern rebuke. Her attention was diverted by a collective megawatt smile from the children. The drone was heading right for them, with an increase in altitude of a few inches as it passed over each step.

The kids called to it, as if it were a puppy.

Mary Rose looked to Alice, who, like her, grabbed on to one
end of the Walkodile. “I guess it can’t hurt to look at it,” the teacher said. Turning to her charges, she added gruffly, “If you can stay still, monsters. Those propeller blades can chop off your fingers.”

“They’re rotor blades,” said Ethan.

Alice asked, “What’s the difference?”

“Propellers propel, rotors lift.”

“Can rotor blades hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then. Be still, all of you!”

The tide of people going up and down stepped aside to let the drone pass. Pointing at the black block of foam the drone carried, a middle-aged man said to the woman accompanying him, “That looks like a rifle.”

The woman with him stopped and stared at the metallic cylinder—like a gun barrel—that protruded from the foam. “Can’t be . . .” she said, more hopeful than certain.

“Better safe than sorry.” Grabbing her elbow, he led her away.

What if he’s right? Mary Rose wondered. This sure wasn’t like any publicity stunt or promotional gimmick she’d ever seen. The drone carried no ad or signage, save
SPECTER
, whatever that was, in fairly small letters that she had been unable to make out until right now, as the thing came to within ten feet.

“Maybe we should go,” she said to Alice, having to raise her voice over the buzz of the rotors.

“No,” the kids pleaded at once. “Please!”

Alice looked over their heads to Mary Rose, with entreaty of her own. “Why not stay one minute?” she said, waving at the kids, standing still in two rows. Mary Rose interpreted Alice’s question as, “I get so few of these moments when the rug rats’ attention is fully occupied, where I can relax. Why not just let me enjoy it?”

Mary Rose relented in spite of the fear clawing her intestines.

The drone descended so that the barrel sat at her eye level, allowing her to see into the gaps in the foam to either side of it. The
barrel—gunmetal gray—had a worn authenticity. It lacked the usual sleek shell of a rifle barrel, but its various bolts and pins and vents seemed designed for specific and genuine functions, as opposed to the relatively random placement on toy guns or the arcade versions. And the telescope atop it had no frills whatsoever, the way the good toys do.

“Alice, I think it has a
G-U-N,
” Mary Rose said, cupping her hands on the nearest shoulders, aiming to steer the kids away.

“A gun?” Ethan asked.

“I so want to get a gun!” exclaimed Derek.

An illuminated red dot appeared at his hairline and slid down his forehead. The barrel traced its path.

Goose bumps jumped up all over Mary Rose’s body. She knew—or at least she felt that she did—that things were about to get very bad. She stepped between Derek and the drone. The red dot reappeared on her shirtfront.

“Let’s go. Now!” she barked, tugging her end of the leash.

The kids didn’t heed her order, yet, somehow, as though she’d come into superstrength, the whole Walkodile came with her. It took a beat for Alice to help; it appeared that she first had to process the situation and then shake off her shock. Soon they were moving down the stairs, their twenty feet moving in sync and at a good pace. Unfortunately, the drone stayed with them, the red dot fluttering about Mary Rose’s shirtfront, seemingly trying to fasten itself to the area of her heart.