The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (17 page)

He crossed his forearms over the back of his head to protect himself, meanwhile turning his head away, allowing him to see the gunman raise the rifle and launch a second projectile.

It buzzed upward until exploding and ripping through the tail boom of the helicopter, sending the craft into a downward spiral from which it couldn’t recover. It crashed into a wooden water tower on the roof of the corner apartment building.

Fisk braced for the explosion and fireball. Neither happened, but water gushed over the cornice, falling like a chute down the red brick façade, turning the roofs of cars parked below into a set of steel drums and knocking pedestrians to the sidewalk.

Fisk jumped up, found the Asian in his gun sight, standing on the street, on the passenger side of the taxi. Chay sat on the driver’s side. Far enough away for Fisk to take a shot.

He squeezed off two rounds. Meanwhile the Asian ducked back into the Crown Vic cab. One of Fisk’s bullets dinged the rear passenger-side doorframe, the other hammered the roof, and the cab took off, knocking aside the lone vehicle left in its path, a Civic, and banging a right onto a tree-lined, almost entirely residential block of Twenty-Fifth Street, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.

Fisk hurried back to the Jaguar and into the driver’s seat, turning over the engine. Too many stopped vehicles stood on the street between the Jaguar and Twenty-Fifth Street. He sent the car up the curb, raking the undercarriage. Dodging a parking meter and circumventing the bus shelter on the sidewalk meant clanking against one of the city’s new eighty-five-pound steel trash cans.

It might be telling, he thought, that the cab turned onto single-lane Twenty-Fifth Street rather than continue down four-lane Ninth Avenue, a relative speedway. If her captors intended to take Chay downtown, there was just one route left before they ran out of island, Eleventh Avenue, two blocks over. After Eleventh, Twenty-Fifth Street terminated at Chelsea Piers.

The Jaguar thumped onto Twenty-Fifth Street, affording Fisk an unimpeded view all the way to Chelsea Piers, overlooking the Hudson River. The Crown Vic, the only other moving vehicle on the block directly ahead, came to a red light at the intersection of Tenth.

It stopped, its new relaxed pace perhaps signifying the captors’ belief that they’d gone black. Fisk fought the impulse to accelerate and catch up to them. Instead he called in the update to the EOC, meanwhile rolling ahead at fifteen miles an hour. He slowed here and there, as though he were searching for a parking spot.

When the light at the end of the block turned green, the taxi drove across Tenth Avenue and onto a onetime industrial stretch of Twenty-Fifth Street that was now an odd mix of auto-body shops, trendy art galleries, and a combination of the two, the Tesla Motors showroom. Midway down the block, the cab stopped suddenly.

Driving onto the block, Fisk sensed that the driver was executing a timing stop. If he were to hit the brakes too, he might reveal himself as a tail. So he continued to within five car lengths, at which point the taxi turned left into a parking garage.

Fisk continued past, catching the cab halt just inside the dimly lit garage, the brake lights turning the parking attendants’ stand red.

Fisk pulled the Jaguar into a loading-zone space in front of a
giant green Perrier delivery truck—which figured in an art-gallery district. He got out, trying to appear unhurried, and wandered back toward the parking garage. He passed an art gallery fronted by a wall of tinted glass, through which he saw a dressy and well-heeled crowd sipping champagne. One couple, venturing out and onto the sidewalk, looked with consternation at the rain. Clearly no one had a clue about the melee two blocks away or the kidnappers next door.

Fisk called into EOC with the address of the parking garage before ambling past the entrance, a concrete chute about the height and width of a van. He saw Chay and the two men at its base, boarding a car lift and then descending.

He kept walking for fear that a sudden stop on his part might alert the captors. He monitored their descent in the angled glass mirror on the upper corner of the entrance. When their heads dipped below ground level, he hurried back into the garage.

On the main level, which included about fifty cars improbably packed into space for half that many, he found the Crown Vic cab parked by the unmanned attendants’ stand. The entire level seemed deserted, save for Norman, who lay in the backseat of the taxi, his face drawn in, skin a bluish-gray, eyes bulging, open and unblinking. He’d died a horrible death.

Fisk peered down the open elevator shaft. The car—which consisted only of a platform, with no walls or roof—sat one level below, empty but for a pair of legs, in navy uniform pants cuffed over work boots. It was the body of the garage attendant, lain across the elevator threshold, Fisk guessed, for the dual purposes of preventing the elevator from returning to the main level as well as preventing him from revealing where Chay and her captors went. If they’d intended to flee the garage in a different car—a sensible tactic—why hadn’t they done so already?

Fisk looked around before finding the door to the stairs leading down a level. A glossy black late-model Bentley sat directly in front of it, in the New York parking-garage tradition of showing off the
fanciest car without letting an inch of space go to waste. It was easier for the captors to take the elevator down, Fisk thought, than wait while the attendant went to the lockbox, got the key for the Bentley, got it running, and then moved it out of the way.

He checked his phone. No cell reception. Should he take the time to go back outside to call in an update? Backup would be here soon enough regardless, he decided.

He sat down on the edge of the shaft, dropped his legs in first, lowered the rest of himself as far as he could reach, then jumped the remaining five feet. Concerned not so much for his knees or ankles as landing face-to-face with one of the captors, he hit the oily metal floor in a roll and sprang up, leading with his gun, to find . . . only the garage attendant. He lay splayed on his back, his head at a preposterous angle, neck broken. A metallic winged letter
B
dangled from his pocket. The Bentley key fob.

Fisk stepped out of the elevator. Sputtering fluorescent tubes on the ceiling revealed a subterranean level packed with a hundred more cars, and no people. At least no sign of people. On the far side was a dark alcove. Leading with his gun, Fisk wormed his way through the parked cars and proceeded into the alcove. At the end was a rusty fire door, closed but unlocked—it had to be bolted from within.

He pulled it open half an inch. The cool air that seeped out reeked of mold and rats. On the other side of the threshold was a dark space. Here and there light trickled in, not enough that he could see anything, but the vibrations from the traffic and the power grid overhead and to either side gave him an immediate sense that it was spacious. Creeping in, he heard no one, no whispers, no breaths, no telltale weight shifts—and this was the sort of place that magnified sounds. The door groaned shut behind him, plunging him into blackness. He was reluctant to use his Pelican flashlight, even on low, for fear of giving away his position.

Although the floor was dirt—or something else completely covered in dirt—his footfalls, even in stealth mode, were thuds. His eyes
acclimated just enough to make out the form directly ahead. A cage of some sort. Horizontal bars a foot apart, from the floor to his head level. The whole thing as big as his office. Which gave him an idea of where he was.

In the nineteenth century, he knew, New Jersey cattle were transported by barge across the Hudson River to the docks on the west side of Manhattan, then walked through the streets to the meatpacking-district slaughterhouses. When the advent of automobiles made that walk problematic, the city dug a network of cow tunnels. Fisk figured he was in dirt-caked remains of the main cow thoroughfare, looking at a cattle pen. He was running his hand along a cold, rust-encrusted bar when a blast shook the tunnel. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a burst of yellow light. Muzzle flash, he knew on some level.

By the time he’d fully processed it, the bullet whacked the tunnel floor a few feet in front of him, dirt and gravel leaping up at him, sharp edges biting into his face and hands. He dropped to the dirt, flattening himself behind the base of the cattle pen, trying to present the smallest target.

Another percussive blast and a round sparked the crossbar—the one on which he’d placed his hand a moment ago—before ricocheting away. The spark revealed a small, open-topped boxcar on a pair of railroad tracks about twenty feet away. The car, which was the size of a station wagon, might have been for cattle. Or maybe it was a transport installed by the rumrunners who frequented these tunnels during the Prohibition. Or the Army in World War II.

Now it was a stroke of luck. The ancient wood-slatted railcar couldn’t protect Fisk against a bullet traveling a couple thousand feet per second, but it could conceal him.

He took four running steps and dove for it. With three more flashes and booming shots, one after the next, three bullets traced his route, spraying dirt. He landed face first in muck.

Through the swirls of kicked-up dirt, the waning flashes showed him the shooter. The thickset taxi driver, fifty yards down the rails.
The Asian was a few feet farther down the tunnel, with Chay in tow. The two men apparently wore goggles—night vision, almost certainly. Hell of an escape route they’d chosen, Fisk had to give them credit for that.

He fired his Glock, aiming for the ground near their feet, but not close enough to endanger Chay. His hope was to keep the taxi driver at bay. The shot, which bored into the dirt between railroad crossties, caused both men to drop back, the Asian simultaneously tamping the goggles as though they’d caught fire. The Glock’s muzzle flash, as seen through his infrared lenses, must have been exceedingly bright. So long as they kept their goggles on, Fisk thought, he might be able to blind them using the six-hundred-lumen beam of the Pelican flashlight, giving him the advantage in a shootout, though only a momentary one. Another problem was that the distance between him and them was too great for him to fire with any real degree of accuracy. And if he were to attempt to advance, he would relinquish the cover of the car.

His best chance was to retreat, to return to the parking garage and connect with backup there. But then Chay would be lost. If these guys got out of here—and they’d certainly thought that part out—they wouldn’t permit her to walk away, not even after they’d gotten what they wanted.

He felt his way to the steering-wheel-like brake release, which was atop a knee-high spindle at the front of the car, still slick with grease after all the years. Yet the wheel wouldn’t budge, not until he put his full weight into it. With a whine, the swinging hook at the bottom of the spindle pulled free of the axle, and the car began to roll, but in the wrong direction, it seemed.

It was difficult to say for sure due to the darkness and because the car was moving so slowly. Fisk cursed himself for failing to think of this ahead of time. The rails were level. Gravity wouldn’t move the car one way or the other. Hell, this was why trains had engines.

With another ringing shot, a bullet pounded through a slat at the
head of the car, slicing apart the air to his left before drilling into the rear wall. A barb ripped into his forehead, loosing hot blood. Something to worry about if and when he made it out of this.

He wondered whether he could move the railcar himself. Circus strongmen traditionally pulled train cars four times the size, right?

With both hands, he gripped the top of sidewall facing away from the taxi driver, and hurdled it. The guy fired, twice, one bullet and then another buzzing over Fisk’s head and striking the far wall of the tunnel. Landing, with a crunch, in the mound of gravel in and around the tracks, he took a quick inventory of himself.

Everything where it was supposed to be, except the blood that slid down his forehead and seeped into his eyes. Blinking against it only spread the stinging.

The railcar now stood between him and the taxi driver. Another shot hit the far wall, popped free a wooden slat, then pierced a slat on the near wall, inches to Fisk’s left, at eye level. The muzzle flash, which he viewed through the newly created apertures, appeared bigger than before. Under cover of darkness, the shooter was coming to get him.

Fisk crawled through the gravel, gingerly, so as not to telegraph his movements, reaching the back of the car. He rose until he could get his full weight against the platform, then he drove with his legs, trying to heave the car ahead as though it were a football sled. Except it was unyielding. His knees were at the point of snapping, it seemed, when the car finally fell away and rolled forward.

A shot cracked through a slat by his left shoulder. A chunk of wood flew up, knifing his shoulder before clinking against the rail. Another bullet sparked the metal lip of the car inches to his right and ricocheted to God-knew-where. The taxi driver had managed to find his range, that was for sure. The good news was that Fisk now had a pretty good idea where the guy was: twenty-five yards up the tracks, to the right, in the open. He resumed firing, the reports thunderous at close range, the rounds pounding and splintering the
slats, through which Fisk’s thermal signature clearly revealed too much. The air swirled with dirt and pungent gunpowder.

He kept pushing the railcar ahead, its increasing momentum easing his task. Quickly he was jogging to keep up with it. Then he let go and sprinted along the left side of the car, opposite the taxi driver, stopping ten yards down the rails and readying both his Pelican flashlight and his Glock. As soon as the car passed, he clicked the single button on the base of the Pelican, igniting its harsh high beam, finding the wide face of the taxi driver, and bringing his goggle lenses to a glow, which sent him reeling. Fisk followed with gunshots to the chest, dropping the taxi driver to the tracks—and he would not, it appeared, be getting up.