The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (20 page)

F
isk ushered Chay into darkness. At night, especially this late, with only a smattering of lights still on in the surrounding buildings, stepping into the new apartment had the feel of embarking on a spacewalk.

“Where are the lights?” she asked.

“Here.” He pulled the Pelican flashlight from his pocket and clicked on its low beam, which he aimed at the cube fridge. “There’s also a light in there.”

She knelt and opened the door, the bright light snapping on and forming a halo around the six-pack of Brooklyn Lager, of which five bottles remained. She drew out two of them. “Don’t suppose you have a bottle opener?”

“Right here.” He tapped the adjacent counter.

“I don’t see anything.”

He took one of the bottles and laid it on the countertop so that the edge crimped the underside of the bottle cap. He gave the bottle itself a sharp tap. With nowhere to go but off, the cap flew into the darkness, landing with a jangle that echoed in the vast, empty room, of which Fisk said, “Sorry, the interior decorator and I haven’t been able to find a time to sit down yet.”

He led her to the small round table and its pair of folding chairs, the only furniture save for the TV and the inflatable bed—that
there was just the one bed, he knew, would be an issue for later.

With the Pelican balanced on its base, serving as a candle, they sat at the table and recapped the events of the day. Quickly they finished their Brooklyn Lagers. Chay found her way to the kitchen and returned with two more bottles.

“The opener,” Fisk reminded her.

“It’s okay,” she said, retaking her seat and crossing her legs. “I’ve got this one.” She took up one of the bottles and wedged the bottle cap into the underside of her chiseled calf muscle, giving her a hold on the cap’s teeth. She applied pressure, meanwhile twisting the bottle, bringing three tiers of sinew in her forearm into play. And off popped the cap.

Fisk had thought this method of opening a bottle the stuff of urban myth. Amazing. It made him hard.

After she uncapped the second Brooklyn Lager, in the same fashion, he raised his bottle to toast. “Here’s to your origin story.”

She held her bottle back. “Because this is the Second Beer?”

“Will you tell me where you’re from now?”

“I’m going to need one more thing from you first.”

“Now what?”

“This . . .” She leaned closer to him and kissed him on the mouth. And didn’t back away. Her breath tasted like Brooklyn Lager, and her scent—a fragrance of flowers with a trace of peppermint in combination with a long summer day’s worth of salty perspiration and New York City emissions—was intoxicating. To keep it coming, Fisk laced his arms around her back and drew her closer. She slid from her chair and onto his lap. She was firm in the right places, and soft in the right places, and he set about exploring them all. Ever the investigator, so did she, with caresses and kisses. His hip flared with pain. Small price to pay, he thought. They proceeded slowly and gently. But inevitably, fueled by the release of pent-up feelings and desires, the intensity ratcheted up, forcing them beyond the limits of the folding chair.

“Do you want to see the bedroom?” he asked.

“There’s a bedroom?”

“Actually, we’re already in it, but if you want to see it . . .” He took up the Pelican and swept the beam along the floorboards, toward the bed.

They raced that way, unbuttoning, unbuckling, unsnapping each other, and leaving a wake of tossed clothing before plunging onto the mattress. They made love at a sprint, both of them ravenous, and it seemed concerned that, at any moment, another attack or drone strike would forestall them.

The next morning, that’s exactly what happened.

S
till in bed, Fisk and Chay turned on the TV to watch one of the rebroadcasts of the
Today
show. They saw the beginning of the attack the way millions of other Americans had. The hosts—Al Roker, Matt Lauer, and Savannah Guthrie, seated in a row at their elevated news desk—turned around and stared in mystification through their window onto Rockefeller Center, where the crowd of spectators was bolting en masse, many of the people shouting, one of them casting aside her hand-painted “Al for President” placard.

The bulk of the news reports of the incident featured cell-phone videos taken by tourists who had been eating breakfast around the corner at the Rock Center Café, in the same sunken plaza that served as the ice-skating rink during winter months. What appeared to Fisk to be a black Specter quadrocopter descended like a feather into the sunken plaza, coming to a hover at its center stage, in front of the famous gilded statue of Prometheus. The burble of the surrounding fountains masked the whine of the rotors. Still, each of the two hundred heads spun toward the drone.

This time, no one sought a closer look. No one exhibited the slightest curiosity. No, they knew full well whose drone it was and why it was there. It was the reason so many of them had scored Rock Center Café tables this morning—after the Yodeler story broke,
tourists who’d made their breakfast reservations months in advance decided they were better safe than sorry.

Now parents seized their children by the wrists, and, in many cases, picked them up out of their seats. All around, chairs toppled and plates and glasses shattered against the granite floor. Everyone charged the stairwell leading out of the sunken plaza, up to street level. There were other ways out, Fisk knew, through the indoor section of the restaurant or the Rockefeller Center subway station or the adjacent underground shopping center. But if you’re in a rush—this sort of rush, you don’t take time to read signs or venture into the dark recesses of an unfamiliar sunken plaza in hope that one of the bronze-plated doors happens to be an unlocked path to safety. No, you take the sure thing a thousand times out of a thousand: the flight of stairs with an upper landing, Rockefeller Plaza, right there in plain view.

Sure enough, every last one of the two hundred diners swarmed into the base of the narrow stairwell, which was suitable for perhaps ten people—if those ten were proceeding in an orderly and unhurried fashion.

To Fisk’s surprise, the crowd did remain orderly, several with cool heads among them hanging back to assist the pair of policemen in funneling the patrons into two single-file lines. Fisk recognized one of the cops, Larry McCone, who was known to fellow officers as “McClone” because of his seeming propensity to be in several places at the same time: on duty as well as a devoted father to four young boys, a leader of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s World Trade Center efforts, and the shortstop for the NYPD Blues, perennial contenders for the Police Softball National Championship. McCone was aided by restaurant staffers, who managed to steer many of the patrons to safety via the subway station. Nobody would be trampled today, it appeared. Fisk and Chay already knew, however, that the death count stood at three, but even if they hadn’t known, a tragic end was indicated by the demeanor of the anchorwoman narrating the story, particularly when she warned that the footage was about to get “graphic.”

The quadrocopter fired three shots, each hitting Larry McCone in the back, spraying blood onto the patrons assisting him and creating the panic that spurred the stampede. As the anchorwoman related, a young mother from Iowa was trampled to death along with her eighteen-month-old daughter she’d been trying to protect.

Well after the report had ended, Fisk remained in bed, his back against the brick wall. He was feeling more guilty by the minute. Chay lay beside him, her head wedged into the crook of his neck, a gesture of commiseration. Her long hair, hot from the influx of sun, warmed his rib cage. He wondered how long she’d been in that position. Last he’d noticed, she was sitting on the far side of the mattress, watching the telecast in horror.

Turn off your emotions, he exhorted himself, and get to work. He could do that, to a fault, he’d been told many times.
Use it to your advantage now
.

He returned his thoughts to the investigation, going over everything that had happened. He tried to form different perspectives, in search of a clue he might have overlooked—

All of that went out the window with the incoming text from Dubin—who barely knew how to text. Encrypted no less.

SHT/FAN. GROWNUPS WANT US TO IBB RAPUNZEL.

The shit had hit the fan. RAPUNZEL was Merritt Verlyn. The GROWNUPS were some combination of the commissioner, the mayor, the governor, and the president. IBB originated in baseball, where it stood for intentional base on balls, better known as an intentional walk. The brass wanted to let Verlyn walk.

A
fter squaring Chay away in his apartment, Fisk headed down to Intel on foot, which was always the fastest way to go twenty
blocks or less in New York. Fury doubled his usual brisk pace and relegated the stabbing pains in his hip to an afterthought.

The city was freakishly quiet, perhaps 10 percent of which was because of the July Fourth holiday—Independence Day was tomorrow. The other 90 percent was attributable to the Yodeler news. Hearing it, commuters on the way into town had turned around. Everyone else who could miss work stayed home. Summer camps were suspended until further notice, leaving wary parents to draw the blinds and explain to children why they couldn’t play in the park on this, the most beautiful day of the summer.

When Fisk got to Dubin’s office, he found the chief standing by the row of windows looking onto Ninth Avenue, where almost as common as Crown Victoria taxis this morning were boxy olive-green trucks. Deployed by the Army, the trucks comprised the ground-based component of the airborne warning and control system intended as the city’s answer to Israel’s Iron Dome. The NYPD Hercules teams implementing this system had taken to calling it the Iron Apple.

Evans was standing oddly straight, considering he was holding a laptop computer and typing on it. He read aloud what he and Weir, who sat on the back of the couch, maintained was their lone remaining lead:

FISK:

DID YOU REALLY THINK YOU COULD PUSH MY BUTTONS? I WILL CONTINUE TO PUSH MY OWN BUTTON (THE TRIGGER) UNTIL MERRITT IS FREE.

DON’T WASTE MY TIME OR YOURS ON COMMUNICATION (READ: STALL TACTICS) UNTIL YOU HAVE SECURED HIS RELEASE.

YODELER

“For what it’s worth, the e-mail originated in Loch Ness,” Evans said. “And that’s not just us, that’s according to Lackland.” Lackland,
Fisk knew, was the NSA’s Cryptologic Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. Lackland had been the best hope of electronically tracing Yodeler.

“In Loch Ness?” Dubin asked. The morning light streaming in added depth to his worry lines.

Evans nodded. “The communication was sent—or at least appears to have been sent—from the exact mathematical middle of the twenty-two-point-seven-square-mile loch, yes, sir.”

Dubin sighed. “Clever guy.”

“Which he reminds us in every e-mail,” Fisk said. “It’s a weakness of his.”

Both Dubin and Evans reacted as though he’d said something off-color, and Weir grumbled, “Bastard’s been a step ahead of you all along, Fisk.”

Not ahead of
us
. Ahead of
you
. Anger heated Fisk. A waste of heat, he thought. Similarly, the blame game wouldn’t get them any closer to Yodeler. He said, “We just need time until it causes him to make a mistake.”

Dubin turned away from the window. “You’ve had plenty of time, Jeremy.”

Again
you
rather than
we
. And
had,
past tense. This meeting wasn’t about a game plan, Fisk realized, as much as it was about Monday-morning quarterbacking.

“So you guys hear how Iron Apple detected the drone?” Dubin grinned as if telling a joke.

“How?” Weir didn’t ask so much as egg him on.

“The sensor operator in one of the trucks happened to be watching the
Today
show broadcast live. The best detection system on the planet, and it didn’t detect shit. Turns out Iron Apple is useless against anything that’s launched from within two kilometers, however much that is in nonmetrics.”

“One and one-quarter miles,” Weir offered.

Dubin ignored him. “The Israelis don’t have anyone launching at
them from anything close. And when their Iron Dome does detect a UAV, you know how they intercept the thing? They scramble F-16s to shoot it down, or drop flares or fire lasers to fuck with its sensors. But you can’t very well fly F-16s here—half the streets, the wings wouldn’t even fit. We do have lasers, all six of the laser cannons available east of the Mississippi, on rooftops. And the Hercules guys have been given flare guns. The thing is, they have a tough enough time shooting accurately with a handgun, a one-in-three proposition. And the flares still don’t work half the time.”

Which was why the grown-ups, Dubin went on to relate, were now en route to One St. Andrew’s Plaza, to the U.S. attorney’s office. Commissioner Bratten, Mayor de Blasio, Governor Cuomo, and the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office, George Venizelos—Evans and Weir’s boss’s boss—were meeting with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to discuss the possibility of releasing Verlyn, as early as midnight tonight, in order to satisfy Yodeler before another day had elapsed.

Recognizing that his own outrage was of no use, Fisk clung to the hope that such a release would be illegal, or that the U.S. attorney would block the move on moral grounds. “Forgetting that letting Verlyn walk would be idiotic from a law enforcement perspective, how can we just let him go from a legal standpoint? Get the judge to waive the U.S. Constitution just this one little time?”

“Maybe the judge will knock down his bail out of the stratosphere,” Dubin said.

Fisk hoped logic would prevail. “The bail’s in the stratosphere because Verlyn’s a flight risk, not to mention a couple of mouse clicks away from posting the NSA family jewels to the World Wide Web. The Russians would literally kill to exfiltrate him.”

“Well, we’ve got to figure something out.” The chief lowered himself into his desk chair as if he were getting into a cold bath. “For now we need to face the facts. It’s late in the game, and Yodeler’s kicking our ass.”

Evans closed his laptop and took one of the chairs in front of the desk with a similar air of defeat. Weir dropped into the adjacent seat.

Still pacing, Fisk said, “If we quit now, it’s not just that Yodeler wins, it’s encouraging the next guy who wants something to stick a gun on a drone.”

Dubin shrugged. “The grown-ups are saying that by the time there’s a next guy, Iron Apple will be fully up and running.”

Of course they’re saying that, Fisk thought. Politicians almost always viewed technology as a cure-all, or at least they knew that they could sell it to the voting public that way. He said, “When Clinton was president, he concluded that intelligence officers could be replaced by satellites. Where would the four of us be now if that had happened? Where would the country be now?”

“You’re preaching to the choir, kiddo,” said Dubin.

The world’s most dispirited choir, Fisk thought. “So let’s tell them that Iron Apple isn’t the solution now, that we can’t give in to the Yodelers of the world no matter what. If and when the Iron Apple is working, the next bad guy will find a way to—I don’t know—glue C-4 to cockroaches and remotely detonate them.”

Dubin stiffened. “‘The Israelis let terrorists walk all the time’—that’s a direct quote from the governor, who I was talking to on the phone right before you got here, and he has a point.”

Weir and Evans nodded like bobblehead dolls. In national security circles, Israel was Hogwarts. But the Israelis would never swap out a Hamas prisoner, Fisk thought, if the guy were poised to upload files that would cost Israeli lives. Israel routinely traded prisoners by the truckload for just one of their own men. More than once the Israelis had traded a dozen live prisoners for the body—
only the body
—of one of their men. And often, Israeli intelligence officers turned a prisoner so that, on return to Beirut, he acted on behalf of Jerusalem, whether he was aware of it or not.

It dawned on Fisk that this might be the play here: an intelligence
operation. What if Yodeler believed he was winning the game while, in reality, he was scoring points for the NYPD?

Finally taking a seat, Fisk thought aloud: “Maybe it’s a good thing that Verlyn’s a flight risk. Maybe there’s a way to play it so Verlyn leads us to Yodeler.”

Weir chuckled. “Can he do windows too?”

Fisk reminded himself that he needed Weir. Between now and midnight, one of the hundred-something FBI staffers working the phones might learn of a delivery of a four-pack of Specter rotor blades to a local post office box belonging to a person who, it turned out, didn’t exist—or who used to exist but didn’t anymore.

“There’s reason to believe Verlyn and Yodeler are confederates,” Fisk said.

Weir seemed surprised. “There is?”

When Evans muttered a reminder to his partner about the NYPD record-of-interview PDF he’d forwarded to him, Fisk took the opportunity, for Dubin’s benefit as well as Weir’s, to recap what he and Chay had gleaned in their interview of Verlyn at the Manhattan Correctional Center. He’d put as much in the record of interview, but the significance of the Verlyn-Yodeler connection wasn’t as great then as it was now.

Weir turned to Dubin. “We wish we’d known the NYPD was going to question the suspect. We would have tried a few different things.”

Dubin looked to Fisk with eyebrows raised, turning the lines on his forehead into channels. His unasked question, Fisk knew, was,
Have you gone rogue once again?

Fisk wanted to reply that the FBI had already taken multiple cracks at Verlyn, and that if, prior to last night’s interview, the Red Team had produced any useful elicitation tactics, it would have been an historic first. Instead he said, “If we can black out the media when Verlyn walks, our line of communication with Yodeler won’t have
been for nothing. We’ll shoot him an e-mail that says something like, ‘You’ve won, Yodeler. We’ll let Verlyn go tonight at such and such time and place.’ Without media coverage, Yodeler will want some other verification that his man is out.”