The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (18 page)

Fisk then had to contend with Chay’s other captor, the Asian. Having flanked Fisk, he was firing at his back. All Fisk saw was the flash, and by the time he’d registered that much, the bullet had knocked him onto his side and, it felt to him, set a fire inside his hip, the pain maddening and so intense that it caused his consciousness to flicker. He rolled to tamp the pain with the dirt, meanwhile swinging his flashlight beam to delineate the guy from the darkness. He stood fifteen feet away, his pistol pointing down at Fisk’s face.

And he started to press the trigger, just as Chay slung a brick at him. He turned toward her motion, causing the brick to merely graze the back of his skull rather than smack it full-on.

The shot sailed high.

Loosened dirt from the ceiling fell on Fisk. He swung the flashlight toward the Asian, catching him in the eyes, causing him to whirl away without looking. His wrist caught one of the cattle-pen crossbars, hard—Fisk heard bone snap. The guy lost his hold on his pistol. He ran in retreat, toward the far end of the tunnel. Keeping the beam on him, Fisk fired twice, the first round raising a cloud of dirt in the guy’s wake. The second round and he grabbed at his thigh and collapsed.

“This way,” Fisk shouted, beckoning Chay toward the railcar.

She ran to him, no words, arms and legs pumping hard. She let out a gasp once she was safely behind the car.

He took in the shaft of light at the far end of the tunnel, a doorway opening. Through the doorway ran three men, their pistols unmistakable even in silhouette a block away. Could they be backup?

The Asian struggled to his feet and limped to them, screaming something Fisk couldn’t understand, except for the unmistakable urgency. The guy flung a hand toward the railcar and the three men started that way, toward Fisk.

They were backup, all right.

For the wrong side.

B
y Fisk’s count, his Glock had just five left of the eighteen rounds he’d started with, one for each of the men now hurrying down the cow tunnel after him and Chay—one for each of them, that is, if he were to shoot with freakishly good luck.

“This way,” he said to Chay, flicking the light toward the door through which he’d entered the tunnel.

As she started toward it, he fired a shot to keep their pursuers at bay. She was uncommonly quick and nimble, outrunning him to the door, making it through unscathed. Fisk fired one more round for cover. It had the effect of a clothesline on one of the attackers. Fisk had expended, he knew, his good luck.

He hastened through the door and locked it behind him, then dead-bolted it too, possibly buying them a few seconds. He found Chay waiting at the far end of the alcove.

“Elevator,” he said, starting that way.

Chay hesitated by the stairwell door. “How about this?”

“The exit door upstairs is blocked by a car.” Which, the more he thought about it, might work to their advantage.

He ran as far as the dead attendant, his position atop the elevator threshold unchanged. Stepping onto the elevator, Chay gave the corpse a wide berth. Fisk knelt and snatched up the Bentley key fob dangling the guy’s pants pocket, then hauled his body along the
floor, out of the way. Hurrying aboard the elevator, he hammered the button, releasing the lift with a hydraulic hiss.

Chay gaped at his hip. “Oh God.”

Blood swamped his light blue dress shirt, turning the tail that protruded to purple. More blood dripped onto the floor. “Looks worse than it is,” he said. He had no idea if that was true.

A gunshot rose from below, the report playing over and over again off the damp concrete walls and ceiling. Over it, Chay asked, “Are they trying to shoot the lock out—” She was preempted by an earsplitting metallic clank.

“Succeeding, sounds like,” Fisk said.

As the main level dropped into view, they heard the door to the tunnel swing inward, whacking the wall. Kicked in, Fisk guessed. He gestured Chay toward the sidewall, reaching the Glock into the garage.

He squinted against the glare of the streetlights outside. He got the sense that they were alone in the garage. Across the street, though, walked three men in dark suits, typical Wall Streeters in appearance. Which was odd in Chelsea.

“See them?” Chay said under her breath.

“Give me to three-Mississippi and then come get in the car, but look like you’re in no hurry,” he said, starting toward the Bentley.

Each time his left foot touched down, his hip had the sensation of being shot again. He aimed the keyless remote, unlocked the Bentley, and lowered himself into the driver’s seat, drawing no looks from the suits across Twenty-Fifth Street.

The cabin was clammy, the leather sticky with heat, and it would stay that way; Fisk could locate and turn on the air-conditioning later. For now, he slotted the key into the ignition, twisting it and bringing the throaty engine to life. The passenger door opened and Chay dropped in.

Her good looks were to her detriment in this instance: all three heads snapped toward her, gazes lingering. The trio flew at the
parking garage, drawing guns from within suit coats and pant waists.

“Get down,” Fisk said, shifting into drive and mashing the gas pedal.

Chay heaved herself into the passenger footwell as the car lurched forward, the squeals of the tires boosted to howls by all the concrete. The men leaped from the street, landing on the near curb, stopping at nine, twelve, and three o’clock of the garage entrance, and assumed standing firing positions, with a precision and fluidity suggesting they’d done this hundreds of times. The Bentley, a heavy car, was made with twice as much metal as an ordinary sedan, Fisk thought. Probably weighed north of five thousand pounds. Still it would be no more effective than butter against bullets.

A bullet smashed through the windshield to his left, exiting through the rear window. Another spanked his window frame before raising a haze of foam particles from the backseat. A third gonged the hood and ricocheted into the garage’s ceiling, where it ruptured the fluorescent tube, killing the light and sending glass flakes clattering onto the windshield.

As the car continued ahead, Fisk stuck the barrel of his Glock out the newly created aperture in the windshield, firing at the suit at nine o’clock, missing, the bullet disappearing into a van parked across the street. He fired again, the bullet finding the man’s stomach, knocking him to the street.

Fisk aimed the Bentley’s hood at the guy at twelve o’clock. The gunman turned away, too late. The grille rammed him, taking his feet out from under him and sending him thumping onto the hood. He remained in possession of his gun, though, and his faculties.

Fisk swung the Bentley left across the sidewalk and onto Twenty-Fifth Street. Fighting centrifugal force, the guy clung to the hood and pressed his muzzle against the glass, giving Fisk a view up the barrel. Fisk expended his last bullet. It appeared to paint a third eye between the guy’s original two before he rolled off the hood and onto the street.

The third suit, who’d originally positioned himself at three o’clock, now stood directly behind the Bentley, firing.

Bullets blasted cavities into the rear window before boring into the dashboard, instrument panel, and center console stereo, raising sparks and smoke.

Keep going, Fisk told himself. He floored the accelerator.

“Shit,” Chay said, looking over his left shoulder.

He turned to see the Perrier truck backing up, toward him, its green back fender filling his side window. Then the vehicles crunched together, the driver’s side of the Bentley swelling and bulging at Fisk, the windows exploding.

He propelled himself out of its way, in Chay’s direction. Meanwhile the truck driver clomped his brakes, halting the Perrier truck, but not before its back fender lifted the Bentley onto its passenger side wheels.

When it came to rest, at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground, Fisk and Chay’s egress was blocked by the truck’s fender to his side and by concrete to hers.

He squatted on the passenger seat, his gun hand pressed against the windshield, the other against the headrest to keep from falling against her. She looked okay. She said nothing, maybe at a loss for words. He followed her wide eyes to the suit who was still standing. He circled the hood, cautiously, apparently trying to line up his best shot at Fisk. Twenty-Fifth Street was oddly still.

Although the Glock was empty, Fisk stuck the barrel through one of the apertures in the windshield. “Drop your weapon,” he shouted.

The guy bent over and placed his gun on the pavement. But as he rose, a smile twisted his lips. The rearview showed Fisk why: the reinforcements from the tunnel were now exiting the stairwell through the doorway the Bentley had blocked.

Regarding the rearview mirror, Chay sighed. “Fuck.” Echoing Fisk’s sentiment.

He reached back to the driver’s side, into the footwell, pressing the accelerator by hand. He hoped that the weight shift in combination with the friction from the two tires still on the ground might be enough to right the car. The tires shrieked. The rest of the car vibrated, but didn’t move forward, not an inch.

Oddly, the reinforcements from the tunnel didn’t advance either. And the reason for that came to Fisk in blue and red flashes on the garage’s façade, from the light bars atop the police cars at either end of the block, and more joining them.

“We timed that well,” Fisk said.

Y
ou did a really good job of getting shot,” Fisk was told by Larry Driessen, a thirty-something Emergency Service Unit paramedic with the look and mannerisms of a Borscht Belt comic. “The bullet drilled through your hip, yes, but it came and went without messing with the hipbone or any blood vessels, and without leaving anything behind that shouldn’t be there.”

“So you’re trying to tell me I’m lucky?” Fisk lay on his side on a gurney inside one of the two ESU ambulance trucks—essentially mobile hospital rooms—that sat outside the parking garage entrance on the now sealed-off West Twenty-Fifth Street block. Inside the garage, much of which was now a crime scene, Chay was being interviewed by homicide detectives. “I don’t feel lucky.”

Driessen packed the hole in Fisk’s hip with Celox, a fine yellow powdered hemostat, intended to stem the bleeding. It offered none of the burning or stinging threatened by its danger-nuclear-radiation-yellow tint, but the pressure felt like being kicked by a horse.

Stretching a field dressing over the wound, the paramedic said, “This is cliché, I know, but—you should see the other guy.” He patted the dressing into place. “Now we just need to give the Celox five minutes to clot the blood, then get it back out, put a couple skin staples in you, and you’ll be battle-ready again.”

“Back up a sec,” Fisk said. “Which other guy?” Police had quickly
rounded up the survivors, then gone into the cow tunnel in pursuit of the Asian who’d abducted Chay.

“The Chinese kid.”

“Any idea who he is?” One of the advantages of the ESU responding to these scenes was a battery of facial recognition, fingerprint, and DNA analysis to aid in identifying perps and victims on the spot.

“A Columbia graduate student named Ji-Hsuan Lin.” Driessen chuckled. “At least as far as we know.”

“Shot in the leg?”

“His right leg, yeah, but in the femoral artery, which is the Mississippi River of the circulatory system.”

“So what are the odds of him ever making it back to school?”

“One in three,” the paramedic said matter-of-factly.

“Tell me something: How do you treat that sort of wound?”

“By ligation—you close off the artery with a ligature. For now, though, pretty much the same as with yours, you try and clot the blood—Warthog’s on it in the other meat wagon.” Driessen used the departmental nickname for the notoriously belligerent Eunice Wortheimer, a longtime ESU veteran and, prior to that, an Army triage nurse.

Fisk pointed to his field dressing. “This comes off in five minutes?”

“Give or take.”

Fisk sat up and slid off the gurney. Though he landed gently on the floor, the hip felt like it had been speared. Which was an improvement.

The paramedic stammered. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll be back in five minutes, give or take,” he said.

T
he young man who went by Ji-Hsuan Lin lay on a surprisingly comfortable gurney. I am Ji-Hsuan Lin, he told himself once more. It was important not just to play the role, but to be Ji-Hsuan
Lin, now more than ever, with the painkillers putting him at risk of babbling. His training had pushed him as close as possible to the edge, but of course, in the back of his mind, he was always aware it was training.

The issue was, you couldn’t train away susceptibility to narcosis. It was physiological roulette. Twenty-five percent of agents unwittingly blabbed under the influence of one drug or another. The moment when the painkiller kicked in had felt like the best moment of his life, although he knew better.

Certainly the moment they’d found him on the tracks was better. He’d lost so much blood. The average man has five liters in him.

Think like a Westerner, he exhorted himself. The average man has 1.5 gallons of blood in him. Lin weighed 140, so he had closer to 1.25 gallons. It looked like half that much had soaked into the pant leg the jowly nurse had scissored off.

She now packed the wound with a bright yellow hemostat. “If the police had gotten there half a minute later, you’d be on your way to the medical examiner now,” she said. Her gruff voice matched her demeanor.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” Lin said, mustering a chuckle.

“It’s a good thing you’re brave, because—” She was interrupted by the creak of one of the rear doors swinging outward. “What the hell?”

Lin thought he recognized the man, who appeared to fight back a wince as he hoisted himself into the van.

The nurse growled. “Fisk, you can’t be in here. You know that!”

“Didn’t you get my text?” he asked.

“I don’t like texts, especially not when I’m treating a damned patient.”

“I need to ask your damned patient a quick question.”

“No chance in hell.” She folded her arms over her broad chest. “Get out now.”

Fisk appeared to soften—changing tack, Lin guessed. The cop
said, “Nurse Wortheimer, I shouldn’t be telling you this.” He paused, as if having thought better of it.

“What?” she asked, taking the bait.
Fool
.

“The charming Ivy Leaguer on the gurney here has already killed four New Yorkers, and preprogrammed one of his weaponized drones to assassinate Liang Huan Ding at the United Nations today. That’s the leader of the China Democratic League, the party in China that opposes the Communists. We want to stop that.”

Lin knew the name Liang Huan Ding. Yes, an opposition party leader in China. But he’d died years ago!

The nurse stabbed a thumb at Lin. “This is the drone killer?” she asked Fisk.

“No, no, I have nothing to do with that,” Lin protested. “He is either trying to frame me, or he is crazy.”

Fisk scoffed. “
Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations
. . . Your team must have gotten ahold of our spooks’ playbook.”

Topping off the Celox, the nurse said to Lin, “Relax, I get it. Fisk is clever. He was just trying to play on my anti-Communist sympathies. But he wasn’t clever enough tonight. So now he has to the count of five to get the hell out of here or he’s going to be an ex-cop.” She stretched a large pressure pad over the wound. “One . . .”

Taking a flying step across the truck, Fisk yanked open a metal-faced drawer beneath the supply cabinets and rifled through its contents, flinging aside syringes and medication in some sort of search.

The nurse charged him. “Asshole,” she exclaimed, clamping her stovepipe arms around his back and trying to pull him away.

He spun away from her, meanwhile winding his right arm back as if to throw a baseball, revealing the preloaded syringe in his hand.

At the sight of it, she gasped. “You are crazy!”

He lunged at her, apparently sticking the needle into her shoulder and hammering the plunger, at the same time pressing a palm over her mouth to muffle her screams. She kicked, and squirmed, but
he was too strong. In seconds, her body went limp, and he shook her onto the floor to the foot of the gurney, out of Lin’s sight.

“Ketamine,” Fisk said to Lin, casting aside the spent syringe. “She’ll be out for at least five minutes.” He rose, looming over the gurney. “If you want to last that long, tell me who you are.”

Lin was stunned, and he suspected that it had nothing to do with his general drug-induced stupor. This Fisk deserved his hard-core reputation. But he was hardly the equal of the interrogators Lin had defied in the past. Lin had taken his country’s version of the American military and intelligence officers’ SERE—Survive, Evade, Resist, and Escape—course, which would have driven the Westerners to look instead for work as schoolteachers. Eight or nine days he spent in the dark pen, maybe ten—it was hard to keep track of the exact passage of time. Broiling hot, no food, no water, he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face. Other than the stench, his only sensation was the click of tiny insects’ feet against the cement floor, walls, and the four-foot-high ceiling. And that was before the sixteen-hour interrogation, during which they’d broken the same leg Fisk clawed at now. Lin knew that all he had to do was hold out for five minutes—Fisk had made a mistake in telling him that.

“Okay, I am a member of the Chinese diplomatic mission to the United—”

“Bullshit,” Fisk cut in, at the same time firing a fist, and before Lin could react, sluggish as he was, knuckles smashed his upper lip into his front teeth, loosening one of them and filling his face with searing pain. Which was nothing compared to pain from the gunshot wound—the savage ripped away the compress. The pain traveled up and down Lin’s body like an electrical current.

Finally blood bubbled up from the hemostat, now a reddish-purple putty. “Looks like the Celox isn’t going to work.”

Lin bit the side of his mouth to counter the pain, then lowered his head as if defeated. “MSS,” he said. Ministry of State Security.

“More bullshit!” Fisk thumped the wound.

Blood jetted out of it. Every last cell in Lin’s body ached. A hot, acidic vomit flew up his esophagus and out of his mouth, spilling down his chin.

“Our MSS person told one of our guys they’ve never heard of you,” Fisk said. “There are a thousand-something Ji-Hsuan Lins in China, but you’re not one of them.”

Lin felt his body temperature dropping. Plummeting. His vision began to blur. His systems were failing. Death had entered the room, and it frightened him more than anything ever had, more than he’d imagined anything ever could. He doubted that he would be able to stall much longer. But he tried. “Of course they said that,” he said, each syllable sending a flare of pain into his skull. “I’m an NOC. Means you rot if you’re caught.”

“I know what nonoperational cover means.” Glancing at his reflection on one of the mirrored supply-cabinet doors, Fisk rubbed the blood off the tip of his nose, then ran his fingers through his hair.

Was he leaving now?

Yes, the interrogators fractured Lin’s right fibula in a training session. They break one of everybody’s bones. You know that going in. For which reason, Lin realized now, no training course could adequately simulate a life-or-death proposition. This was a real life-or-death proposition. He had believed he would die for the cause. He’d been wrong.

Lin, whose real name was Ryang Yong, found himself saying, “Ryang Yong, DPRK,” and then admitting that he was an officer of the State Security Department—the North Korean spy agency.

Flying a false flag as China?

Yes, in order to get the Verlyn material.

Why?

It had not been his place to ask. But he speculated now: “Knowledge is power.”

Then blackness devoured his consciousness.

N
o sooner had the North Korean spy lapsed into unconsciousness than Fisk became aware of Nurse Wortheimer stirring on the floor behind him. As he turned around, she reached for the open cabinet door, evidently to support her weight as she tried to get up.

Fisk bounded over. “Hell of an acting job, Eunice,” he said, helping her to her feet. “I thought I’d actually knocked you out.”

Wortheimer laughed. “In your dreams, ace.”