The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (21 page)

Weir chuckled. “So, what, now you want him to send his drone?”

Fisk wanted to thank him. “Exactly. We may not be able to shoot it down, but we can at least follow it back to Yodeler.”

“Not bad,” Dubin said. “Except what’s preventing Yodeler from tipping off the media to the time and place of the release? A single New York One camera would save him from having to send a drone.”

“He’ll want protection for his man, Verlyn. Rival intel services are after Verlyn. Also a member of the New York One audience could decide to be the next Jack Ruby.”

The chief nodded, impressed, then, with a look, put it to the feds.

“I don’t know,” said Evans.

Weir grumbled. “Hard to say.”

They were busy trying to think of objections, Fisk suspected. There were alternative plans of action they could take, maybe even better plans. But they had nothing because they’d been too busy ass-covering.

O
n the website AirBnB.com, Blackwell booked a “breezy East Village apartment with old-world charm” at $75 per night. Way cheap for anyplace within fifty miles of New York, he thought. But it turned out to be overpriced. “Old-world charm” meant a lack of modern amenities. “Breezy” meant no air-conditioning. The place was secure, however, and had wireless Internet. He would have happily shelled out $750 for that package.

Taking a seat at the ironing board that folded out from the wall beside the refrigerator—a future ad might refer to this as a “contemporary dining room,” he thought—he checked in on Chay. The iPad hadn’t transmitted since last night, just before the cab dropped her and Fisk at East Seventy-Fourth Street. It was possible that she was onto Blackwell and had disconnected the transmitter. Or maybe she’d spent the night somewhere that interfered with transmission—New York could be one giant signal jammer.

Whichever way it was, she’d certainly been busy today, he thought as he read the
New York Times
front page. Merritt Verlyn’s bail had been reduced on appeal to $10 million following his agreement to wear an electronic monitoring device.

Chay had broken the story—for what that was worth to her: within fifteen minutes of its posting, the same story was on every other news site in the country. What it could be worth to Blackwell
was a shot at Jeremy Fisk, who would likely be on hand at the Metropolitan Correctional Center when Verlyn walked. Chay did not report when the release would take place. If she even knew, she probably withheld the information intentionally. Blackwell scoured the piece for clues.

The nonprofit First Amendment Society had ponied up a million bucks to a New York bail bondsman who told Chay he planned to have Verlyn bonded out within twenty-four hours, though details of the release were being withheld for the suspect’s protection. Of course, Blackwell thought. Otherwise the release would be a circus. He considered that most prisons processed out inmates first thing in the morning in order to allow themselves time to get ready for new arrivals. Just like hotels.

He eyed the clock in the upper right corner of his latest burner laptop. 4:20
P.M.
So it stood to reason that Verlyn would be sprung first thing tomorrow. But in Chay’s story, according to NYPD Intel’s Detective Jeremy Fisk, Yodeler had agreed in an e-mail to cease the drone attacks once Verlyn was safely out. So maybe the release would go down today so that New York could avoid another death from above? Blackwell decided to take his act to the Metropolitan Correctional Facility.

He wasn’t the only one with that idea. He realized as much while driving through Chinatown, the streets and sidewalks eerily underpopulated for a weekday, a function of Yodeler, not the light drizzle. Two different news vans—NY1 and 1010 WINS—blew past Blackwell’s rental car, their drivers clearly not as concerned as he was about getting pulled over. Backing into a parking spot, still two blocks from the Manhattan Correctional Center, he caught sight of the tall, telescoping antenna of yet another news van.

As he got closer to the center, on foot now, it appeared that about half of the pedestrians in the vicinity were journalists. A hundred of them, easy, many gathered under white temporary sun shelters, four-legged canopies labeled in block letters,
TARU
, whatever that
was. Several men, wearing navy-blue uniforms with
TARU
emblazoned on the back in bright yellow, had the bench-press-intensive build of military.

TARU?

Blackwell put it to his latest burner smartphone: Technical Assist Response Unit, a division of the NYPD that officially “provided equipment and tactical support.” Unofficially, he gathered, they were narcs. The unit had repeatedly come under fire for violating the court-imposed Handschu Guidelines, which restricted the NYPD from building files on innocent citizens. It was doubtful that the TARU was here to install canopies; more likely they were gathering intelligence, perhaps from members of the media trying to trump one another with tidbits obtained from sources on the condition of anonymity, or from WikiLeaks members with loose lips. And there might well be a Verlyn confederate in the crowd. The sun shelters were probably bait.

Unfortunately, between TARU and all of the news cameras, this was quite possibly the worst place in the city to have a go at Fisk. If he was even here. More likely the detective would oversee things from an ops center. And an NYPD ops center would be the second worst place for a go at Fisk.

Blackwell decided he was better off working at his own ops center, aka the “breezy East Village apartment with old-world charm.” Dropping his phone into his pants pocket, he turned back to his car. He wasn’t dispirited. He never was. He had always found a way, and always would. Someday, he thought, scientists would find a telepathic correlation between positive thinking and positive outcomes. As if on cue, his phone vibrated against his hip, with a texted alert:

CALL ACCOUNTANTS

This was his own code, to be delivered to him as a text message if and when Chay’s iPad came back online.

He launched his DataBanq app, selected the file of his saved IP addresses, and selected 001, his code for Chay’s iPad. It appeared as a pulsing blue circle on a rudimentary map of Manhattan. She—or at least her iPad—was just a few blocks away, at 240 Centre Street, the copper-domed landmark still known as NYPD headquarters, although the building had long since been converted to condominiums after the police moved to One Police Plaza. But possibly the police maintained a presence there, a safe house or maybe something that was off the books entirely, the sort of place from which Fisk could covertly run TARU agents in knowing violation of the Handschu Guidelines.

Blackwell hurried back to his car to get his rifle.

M
ounted on the wall in three rows of three, the nine monitors in the ops-center viewing room played feeds from surveillance cameras within the Manhattan Correctional Center and Domain Awareness cams outside.

On the lower left monitor was the feed from DOM-CAM PRW W-PRL (Park Row west of Pearl Street). Seated at a table in front of the monitors, Fisk and Chay watched a throng of journalists making room under one of the canopies for yet another camera crew.

“If the Department had obtained this without the requisite warrants, would you tell me?” Chay asked.

“Yes,” Fisk replied, although he doubted it. Which left him conflicted: He wanted to eliminate barriers between them. He wanted to tell her the truth. Deception was part of his job description, but he took pains to avoid it in his personal relationships. Of course, they were at work now. At work, he wished she could understand that justice was like triage: saving patients came first. Sometimes that meant skipping paperwork. The truth was, if red tape or misguided politics had prevented the Bureau from securing the requisite warrants tonight, he would have bugged the hell out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center anyway, because losing track of Verlyn would be catastrophic.

“So if everything goes as planned, what happens?” she asked.

“If everything goes as planned, that would be an historic first,” he said just as motion on the middle right monitor caught his eye.

A Manhattan Correctional Center escorting officer was leading Verlyn out of his cell.

Game time, Fisk thought. Or, at least, hoped.

The inmate’s eyes darted around, as if he were expecting someone to run up with news that his release had been postponed or canceled. In Fisk’s experience, inmates were often on edge when being processed out. They had dreamed of their release so often, it was only natural for them now to expect that, at any moment, they would wake up, back in their cells.

The escorting officer directed Verlyn to an elevator, down two floors, through the common area, and finally into the administration room, a cramped space that reminded Fisk of the office in a big high school. Staffers at six small desks—in a space designed for three—looked up from their terminals briefly before resuming work.

Fisk pressed the talk button on the intercom panel. “How about the dust?”

“Coming right up on seven,” came the voice of David Rettenmund, the short and stocky tech everyone called R2 after the similarly proportioned droid. Fisk thought of R2 as incredibly resourceful with computer skills and a good nature to match. As ever, the kid was at his station in the control room, two doors down the hall. The feed he directed to the lower left monitor shifted from an empty cellblock to an overhead map of the Metropolitan Correctional Center and the vicinity, with a cluster of flashing green dots superimposed over the facility.

“Are those transponders?” Chay asked.

“They’re remotely activated particles of smart dust,” Fisk said.

“The same stuff the CIA deploys from Predators?”

He knew that she meant the tiny, undetectable radio-signal transmitters the Agency’s MQ-1s dropped by the thousands from altitudes of five thousand to ten thousand feet in hope that two or three would adhere to a human target, enabling intelligence officers
halfway around the world to track him. “Pretty much,” he said. “It’s a hell of a lot more effective if you sprinkle it onto your target’s clothing and shoes from six inches away.”

The green dots jumped upward, in unison. The motion was explained to Fisk by the monitor with a close-up view of the administrative officer retrieving a brown shopping bag from a cubby. Setting the bag on the countertop between herself and Verlyn, she said, “Inmate Number 61729-013, this is dress-out. Once we’ve gotten back all the items you were given while you were incarcerated, you’ll get back the clothes you were arrested in plus any items that you had on your person.”

Pulling his orange prison-uniform shirt free of his waistband, Verlyn asked, “So are you going to play some
Flashdance
music for me?”

“Ha,” said the officer, a sleepy-eyed Hispanic woman who must have heard similar lines every day for years. She pointed to an accordion-style changing screen that stood in the corner. “Please change behind that, then hand the items to Officer Perez.”

Looking into the shopping bag, Verlyn was given pause. “I was supposed to receive a fresh dress-out.”

“You got it. It’s waiting for you on the chair behind the screen.”

Verlyn disappeared behind the screen.

“That would be our first thing gone wrong,” Fisk said. “Someone sent him new duds.”

“To thwart the smart dust?” asked Chay.

“Could be nothing. Family members send dress-outs to inmates all the time. All mail entering a correctional facility is searched for contraband and scanned.” He hit the intercom button. “R2, do we know who sent him the clothes?”

“Checking,” the tech said, a half second later adding, “Arrived by messenger just an hour ago from the First Amendment Society’s office in United Nations Plaza.”

“Too bad their advocacy of transparency doesn’t extend to keeping us in the know,” Fisk said.

Chay asked, “Before you got into business with the First Amendment Society, how thoroughly did you check them out?”

“They were vetted by Evans and Weir,” Fisk said of the FBI agents, who were monitoring the proceedings in a similar setup at 26 Federal Plaza. Fisk had judged the First Amendment Society to be harmless. Nevertheless it wouldn’t be the first time that an honorable proponent of American intelligence-agency transparency acted, unwittingly, in the interests of enemy spy services. There was evidence that the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki—or SVR, Russia’s external intelligence agency—contributed heavily to WikiLeaks, using a front organization to issue the checks.

Verlyn emerged from behind the changing screen, having replaced his orange uniform with a tight-fitting black tracksuit unadorned by piping or racing stripes or even a logo. Just black.

“Is he planning to disappear?” Chay asked.

Fisk had been wondering the same thing. “If he is, the all-black action’s a bit obvious, isn’t it?”

Verlyn returned the orange uniform, which he’d folded as neatly as any item on display at a clothing store, to the administrative officer. “Please donate my other things to the Salvation Army,” he told her.

“You got it,” she said. With the assistance of the escorting officer, she proceeded to fit an all-black device resembling a wristwatch around Verlyn’s left ankle. It registered on one of the viewing room monitors as a pulsing red circle labeled
EMD-61729-013,
shorthand for electronic monitoring device, along with Verlyn’s inmate number.

Fisk and Chay were left to watch as Verlyn was processed out, a routine as monotonous for everyone else as it was exhilarating for the inmate. Standing at the counter, Verlyn filled in the blanks, checked the appropriate boxes, and signed form after form, including a confirmation that all of his personal items had been returned to him along with a consent to the terms of his release on bond and a separate agreement to reappear in court. Finally the admin officer counted out fifteen dollars, a five and ten ones, and pushed it across the countertop.
This was his discharge allowance—because the cost of living was so much higher in New York City, discharged inmates received five dollars more than their counterparts elsewhere in the state.

“You are also entitled to an amount equal to the least expensive means of transportation to your point of sentencing,” the administrative officer told Verlyn.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, “but I have a ride.”

Fisk muttered, “He must have covertly corresponded with someone about the details of his release.”

“News to you?” asked Chay.

“I’d expected as much. This is the reason we put a surveillance team in place.”

He and Chay watched as the monitors shifted to feed from cameras on Verlyn’s walk from the administrative offices to the departure area. Idling by the loading bay in the garage was a late-model black Lincoln Navigator with exceedingly dark windows. When Verlyn entered the garage, the driver popped out and hurried around the hood to open the passenger door for him. Verlyn climbed in without a word to the man.

“First Amendment Society booked the Navigator too,” came R2’s voice.

Fisk felt a cool trickle of adrenaline. “The nonreflective tinting on the windows can’t possibly meet the legal requirement of allowing in at least thirty-five percent of outside light.”

Chay slid forward in her seat. “What do you think he’s up to?”

“Hopefully he’s up to no good. We don’t get any actionable intel if he just goes home to his apartment and orders a pizza.”

The garage-door-style gate rolled open and the Navigator chugged out, across the sidewalk and onto the street to the rear of the facility, Cardinal Hayes Place. It was met by three others just like it.

“Good or no good?” Chay asked.

“Probably just a diversion for the reporters,” Fisk said, “though if he thinks we’re going to be that easy to lose, God bless him.”

“The Navigators were dispatched by Kelly Limo, the same guys the Department uses,” came R2’s voice. “All four of them.”

“How many surveillants do you have?” Chay asked.

“Only about fifty,” Fisk said.

She didn’t blink, just nodded. As she surely knew, surveillance teams of more than a hundred people were quite common in New York and D.C. Because the streets were so much less crowded than usual, Dubin and Fisk had selected a smaller team of elite NYPD operators. Weir and Evans had ceded the reins without protest, which surprised Fisk—that is, until he considered that the Bureau had little to gain by participating in a successful surveillance op. If the team were to somehow lose Verlyn, Weir could demand Fisk’s head.

Night was falling outside the Metropolitan Correctional Facility, where the journalists weren’t decoyed by the other Lincoln Navigators. All of the reporters who had been staking out Cardinal Hayes Place now swarmed the SUVs. But it quickly became apparent that getting the vehicles to stop would place them at risk of being run down. Just like that, they lost any chance of a sound bite from Verlyn or a photo of anything more than a tinted window.

The monitors cut from a loading bay to the feed from nine Domain Awareness cameras on the street. Chay noted, “Martin Scorsese could only hope for so many camera angles. Is this the God’s Eye system?”

He wondered how she knew about the system. “The what?”

“No need to be coy, it’s old news. I reported on Father Phil two years ago.”

“Who’s Father Phil?” Fisk’s curiosity was genuine.

“Philip Borbon, the ordained-priest-turned-computer-scientist in Dayton, Ohio, who created the system. I saw that he donated twenty million dollars to Catholic University recently, so I figured he must have reeled in some customers.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about it,” Fisk said. Which was true. It was news to him.

Digging her phone from her bag, she said, “If the NYPD is using God’s Eye, I hope you’ve solved the glitch that the Metro Police in D.C. discovered last week.”

“What’s that?”

She held up her phone, showing a broad overhead view of Washington at sundown. He made out the Capitol Dome, bathed in pink light. “Father Phil thinks too well of his fellow man,” she said. “His aerial feed has almost no security. Bank robbers hacked in—or, really logged on—and were able to disable the view of the sixteen-square-block section of Adams Morgan that included the bank they robbed—two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.”

The breadth of her knowledge and sources left Fisk, once again, flabbergasted. If he ever was going to learn anything about the officially nonexistent Special Collection Service, F6, he thought, his best chance was to ask her about it.

“You hearing this, R2?” he said into intercom.

“That’s not the half of it, sir,” said the tech. “Right now anyone can access Domain Awareness feeds on faa.gov from the air-traffic-control page because the God’s Eye birds fly out of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia. We’re working on that.”

Seeing Chay keying away at the notepad on her phone, Fisk wondered if he needed to tell her that what R2 had just said was privileged, when his attention was diverted by the procession of SUVs on the monitors. Within two blocks, they’d outpaced the last of the reporters chasing on foot. After another two blocks, as the convoy rumbled past the ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, the pulsing green circle representing the electronic monitoring device on Verlyn’s ankle was replaced by a red hexagon. The speaker carried the sound of a buzzer from the control room.

“His electronic monitoring device is experiencing technical difficulties,” explained R2.

Fisk sat up. “About time!”

“Could the Brooklyn Bridge be disrupting the signal?” asked Chay.

Fisk smiled. “That’s what he’d like us to think.”

R2 said, “U.S. marshals are on line one, wanting a patrol car to stop Verlyn, for violating his bond agreement by monkeying with his EMD.”

Fisk took out his frustration by choking a chair arm. “Please tell them, again, that we want him to think that he’s gone black.”

“Yes, sir.”

Continuing past the Brooklyn Bridge, Verlyn’s Navigator took a left onto Spruce Street, passing Pace University, where traffic thickened. Not unrelated, perhaps, teenagers and twenty-somethings streamed out of an auditorium building toward the Brooklyn Bridge 4, 5, and 6 lines subway stop, at the hurried pace that had become the norm with drones liable to appear at any second. The Navigator turned abruptly into the five-story Pace Plaza parking garage. And was lost to Fisk and Chay.

Hitting the intercom, he asked R2, “Can you get video in there?”

“The Pace Plaza Parking Garage security cams are streaming live on monitors one, two, and three,” R2 said.

What? The upper-row monitors were all dark. Wait. No, they weren’t. Fisk could make out shades of gray and dark green and the occasional sliver of light.

“I’m trying to boost the light values,” the tech added.

Fisk could make out other cars exiting, and waiting to exit. A bad feeling came over him, like a cold coming on. Had he overestimated his team’s ability to track Verlyn? If Verlyn now had a confederate at the wheel of a car other than the Lincoln, or even if he had access to another car, he could get away.