The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (19 page)

M
anhattan Plastix on Canal Street sold a variety of plastic products—sheet rubber, foam, stair treads, hoses, tubing, and floor tiles—and did a side trade in random items including cell phones, televisions, laptop computers, textbooks, and infant formula.

The single common denominator of these products, Blackwell suspected, was their provenance: they’d “fallen off the back of a truck.” As far as computers went, for him, stolen was the best kind because the user was that much harder to trace. Outside the store, while rummaging through a carton of high-grade Ray-Ban knockoffs among the quick cash sale items, he discussed a new Hewlett-Packard laptop with one of the proprietors’ nephews.

Two minutes later, three hundred-dollar bills lighter and wearing a new pair of sunglasses in spite of the rain—they’d been a gift from the nephew—Blackwell walked away from the store with the new computer tucked under his arm. He turned uptown at a stretch of Sixth Avenue that he knew had a plethora of drugstores.

In the smallest, oldest, and dingiest drugstore—chosen because it appeared the least likely to have any sort of cameras, he paid another hundred, in small bills this time, for a prepaid American Express card. Which would put him back in the business of tracking Fisk.

A few blocks further up Sixth Avenue, he took his new purchases into the Jefferson Market Library, a nineteenth-century red-brick
assembly of steeply sloped roofs, gables, and other Gothic bells and whistles; Blackwell liked it for the free wireless. Lucking into a carrel in the crowded reading room, he bought himself—or rather, Cameron Milner, whom he concocted on the spot—an eighty-nine-dollar-per-month membership to DataBanq, a private investigators’ resource that leveraged some thirty billion public data sources, including millions that were difficult to obtain otherwise, like voting records, bankruptcies, liens, and judgments. DataBanq also had thousands of proprietary databases, an aggregation of supposedly private social network information. But DataBanq’s special sauce was the data it shouldn’t have had.

Log onto DataBanq and you’ll get the impression that it is a respectable organization, along the lines of the Legal Aid Society, dedicated to helping investigators solve cases. In fact, Blackwell knew, the company was a one-man shop, the one man being a forty-something ne’er-do-well who, practically overnight, turned his computer skill and the basement of his father’s Milwaukee office-supply store into a multimillion-dollar business. He paid top dollar for the data equivalent of items that had fallen off trucks—motor-vehicle records, personnel files, medical records, drug prescriptions, utility bills, credit-card statements, airline reservations. No ten sites put together were as useful. Blackwell would have happily paid $890. Or, in this case, tonight, ten grand.

But—shit—DataBanq turned up nothing recent on Fisk, no record of recent financial transactions connected to his Social Security number, no expenditures, no withdrawals, no digital contact with friends or family members.

Fugitives left more of a trail than this guy.

Which left Blackwell back at square one, an old-school stakeout. Square zero, really. He knew Fisk was going to work; getting the proprietary address of NYPD Intel had been child’s play and he’d staked it out, not in person but with Koolcams—camcorders concealed in what appeared to be empty, discarded packs of cigarettes—placed
early in the morning in braided steel city-street trash barrels so that they captured twelve hours of activity. Fisk hadn’t shown up in the footage. Probably he had a covert way in and out. For all intents and purposes, the guy was working in Fort Knox.

In desperation, Blackwell entered
Jeremy Fisk
as a search term on Google, and a recent news article turned up, straightaway:

WHY THE
NEW YORK TIMES
HELD THE DRONE KILLER STORY

By Chay Maryland

       
Published: July 1, 2015
16 Comments

                
NEW YORK—Following the shooting death of retired schoolteacher Walter Doyle in Battery Park late Tuesday night, the
New York Times
came into evidence that the killer, going by the pseudonym Yodeler online, had employed a remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicle. The paper made an editorial decision to hold back the story so as not to compromise NYPD Intelligence leads on the case. As a measure of checks and balances, this reporter has since accompanied Detective Jeremy Fisk on the investigation.

Blackwell stopped reading, sat back, and allowed himself to exhale. Finding Fisk, he thought, would now be as easy as finding the reporter.

W
hile Wall Street teetered, another New York City investment was rolling—literally, Blackwell reflected. Taxi medallions, the licenses that owners were required to fasten to the hoods of yellow cabs operating in the city, were now going for $800,000, an increase of 150 percent over ten years. Blackwell had been playing the stock market over the same period of time. New York taxi medallions had outperformed his portfolio by . . .

Best not to do the math, he thought.

With a booth to himself on the upper level of a two-story McDonald’s in midtown—enjoying a Big Mac, a chocolate shake, and free wireless—the hit man returned his attention to the website of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, the municipal organization that sold the medallions. He input the user name and password of a cabdriver he’d met. The guy had been more than happy to trade Blackwell his log-in information for a pair of hundred-dollar bills.

That $200 quickly started to look like one of Blackwell’s better investments of late: he accessed the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s proprietary traffic tracker, where medallion owners could keep tabs on their $800,000 cars in real time. Not only was each cab equipped with a transponder; each time a driver picked up a new fare and keyed in the destination, you could access that information on the traffic tracker.

Accordingly Blackwell was 98 percent sure that Chay Maryland had just gotten into a cab at the corner of West Twenty-Fifth Street and Tenth Avenue, about thirty blocks south of the McDonald’s. He was 100 percent sure that her iPad, whose IP address he’d scored using Twitter Tracker, was in the cab—a Toyota Prius, according to the traffic tracker. Earlier this evening, via her iPad signals, Blackwell had been able to track Chay to a parking garage on West Twenty-Fifth, which was also a crime scene right now, according to his police scanner app, and not just any crime scene: an army of emergency responders was present. Fisk’s latest case, Blackwell figured. To find Fisk now, Blackwell hoped to learn where Chay was going next.

With a tap at the Prius taxi icon on the traffic tracker, the destination input by the cabbie appeared in a pop-up window:
121 East 74th Street New York, NY 10021
. Blackwell clicked the address. Another window opened, offering a satellite view of a tree-lined stretch of East Seventy-Fourth Street. Building number 121 was one of several brownstones. Blackwell hurried out, leaving his empty Big Mac container and half-finished shake on the table. His rental car was parked at a meter on East Fifty-Ninth Street, a block away. He would drive to East Seventy-Fourth to meet Chay. If Fisk was along for the ride, great. That would save Blackwell a lot of time. If Chay were by herself, not bad either. He would use her to bait Fisk.

M
adison Avenue glowed red and white as rain-slicked asphalt reflected the brake lights and headlamps. Most of them, thought Fisk, belonged to cabs returning residents home from evenings of theater or opera or similar tedium. From across the backseat of the Toyota Prius taxi, he took in Chay’s lithe form silhouetted against the blur of neon bar and restaurant signs. He was pleased that she’d asked him to escort her to the FBI safe house. He wanted to be with her for reasons that had nothing to do with her security. For now, though, her security was paramount.

“And what about your phone?” he asked, part of a checklist of potential vulnerabilities.

“I pried the battery connector from the socket on the logic board,” she said. “I have a Mossad source in Brooklyn who insists I do this every time I meet with him. It’s getting to the point that I don’t have to pry the battery so much as flick at it.”

“Very good. How about that computer tablet you were using at the Bureau—is it Wi-Fi enabled?”

“The iPad? Yes, it has Wi-Fi, but it’s not mine. It’s one of the loaners from the bullpen at the
Times
.”

“Have you checked your e-mail or anything on it?”

“Yes, but unless Twitter has also been infiltrated by the North Korean State Security Department . . .”

“Better safe than the other thing, right?”

She withdrew the tablet from her bag. “Do you know how to disable the signal?”

“It’s a piece of cake,” he said. When she handed it to him, he added, “After you spend an hour and a half learning how to do it from one of our tech guys.”

Her laughter made him feel as though he’d sunk a three-pointer.

He began the complex procedure of neutralizing the iPad by inserting one of his apartment keys between the top edge of the display assembly and the rear panel assembly. Then he used the key to pry the two pieces apart.

Forty blocks later, as the taxi slowed on approach to Seventy-Fourth Street, he had succeeded in de-routing the Wi-Fi antenna through its channel in the speaker assembly. He asked the driver to continue past Seventy-Fourth Street, go to Seventy-Sixth. His plan was to have the driver turn back downtown via Park Avenue before dropping them off on that side of Seventy-Fourth. The address he’d given the driver when they first got in—121 East Seventy-Fourth Street—was chosen at random. He didn’t know what was there. Probably a brownstone. He had seen no reason to let the
TLC log the real address of an FBI safe house. The purpose of going past Seventy-Fifth, the actual location of the safe house, was reconnaissance.

The taxi slowed for a red light at the intersection of Madison and Seventy-Fifth, permitting Fisk an extended look at the safe-house block, to his right. To his eye, the block was a still life. He also used God’s Eye. DOM-CAM 75EMAD, the nearest NYPD cam, showed nothing out of the ordinary on the block.

After directing the taxi driver back downtown, Fisk was given one more angle onto Seventy-Fifth. Again, okay.

Finally he and Chay were dropped at the dummy address on the equally quiet and mostly dark Seventy-Fourth Street. Taking inventory, he saw no one in the cars in the vicinity.

Starting onto the sidewalk, heading back toward Madison, he heard someone get out of a car parked behind them. Odd. The gentle way the person closed the door, as if trying to make as little noise as possible, set off Fisk’s internal alarms.

He spun around, meanwhile drawing his reloaded Glock, coming to a stop so that his back was against Chay’s, so that his body shielded hers from the man seventy-five feet away on the sidewalk—a sturdy middle-aged Caucasian with thick-framed glasses, a baseball cap pulled awfully far down his forehead, and a .22 tipped with a sound suppressor in hand. Burned into Fisk’s mind, if not his muscle memory, were the five most common outcomes in this situation:

1. You die.

2. You spend a long time in the hospital.

3. You try to run away.

4. You shoot, prompting the other guy to retreat.

5. You shoot, injuring or killing him.

Fisk fired three times.

The first shot flew past the guy, the report scaring unseen pigeons
into flight from between the curb and a parked car and resounding off the wet street, cars, and buildings.

The second shot appeared to shear the button off the top of the guy’s baseball cap, raising a puff of fibers into the cone of light cast by a streetlamp, but no more.

The third round stung his gun, sparking the suppressor as he aimed it and pressed the trigger, costing him his grip on the weapon. The report sounded like a dry cough.

His bullet tore into a few leaves on the bough over Fisk’s head, sending particles drifting to the sidewalk. He took a step backward, positioning himself between Chay and the gunman to give her much more protection against the next shot.

But there was no next shot. The guy lost his hold on the silenced pistol altogether, and it clattered to the sidewalk before bouncing into the dark gap between the curb and the front tire of a parked Jeep. If he tried to recover it, he’d be a sitting duck. Not surprisingly, he turned and sprinted in the opposite direction.

Fisk started after him. One step into the pursuit, he knew that it was over. It felt as though his hipbone had exploded in the vicinity of his earlier wound. He tried to ignore it, but his body simply wouldn’t permit him to proceed, and he fell forward, face first. Still he got off another shot at the shooter, but missed by a wide margin, taking out more leaves and a side mirror on a parked car. He hit the concrete, his free hand breaking some of the fall, his jaw absorbing the brunt of it.

Chay scrambled to him. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he said, trying to appear that way as he struggled to his feet.

“Do you think he tracked me by the bloody iPad?” Although the temperature was close to seventy, she was trembling.

“Maybe at first. But the only way he could have gotten this address was from the taxi driver, after the driver logged the dummy destination into his system.” It was well known in the Department that with thirty thousand active drivers able to access the Taxi and
Limousine Commission’s traffic tracker, and even more ex-drivers still in possession of the log-in info, the site was practically open to the public. Because the man had been shooting to kill, as opposed to trying to snatch Chay, Fisk couldn’t dismiss the possibility that he had been the target. “He might have been a representative of my friends at the Cartel.”

She looked around, bracing, it seemed, for another attack. “I don’t see how it’s safe anywhere on the grid.”

Actually, he thought, she would be okay in almost any hotel. Just check in under an alias. Either the Department or the Bureau would deploy watchdogs.

He said, “I know of a place that’s off the grid.”

Chay said, “Does it have beer?”