The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (25 page)

D
ubin called and woke one of his old golf buddies, who now helmed the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. Within minutes, Fisk and Chay were climbing out of a taxi at Broadway and Fifty-Third Street. In order to access the Special Collection Service offices—listed in the building lobby as part of a cyber security firm that did government work—Fisk first had to leave Chay in the cyber-security-firm conference room kept under guard by Defense Security Service agents. Once inside the F6 suite, which looked like any other corporate suite, he had to check everything but the clothes on his back, then submit to two types of body scans.

After signing a series of waivers and demonstrating that his fingerprints, iris texture, face, and voice matched those in the Agency’s database, he was escorted by a DSS guard into an area closer in appearance to a science-fiction movie starship than to any midtown office. The ceiling, comprised entirely of sleek lighting panels, glowed faintly, causing the metallic walls to shimmer a dull blue.

The air was kept so cool that Fisk was surprised to see no vapor when he exhaled. He figured that the temperature was for the benefit of the batteries of hard drives, unseen but responsible for a mechanical purr. At the end of the hallway, he underwent another round of eye and hand texture scans, the result of which was the snaps of bolts
disengaging from locks within the wall. Although a heavyweight, the guard strained to push open the thick metal door.

This was what it had been like to use the Internet thirty years ago, Fisk had heard older intel hands recount. Then it was the ARPAnet, the first operational packet-switching network, created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Maybe thirty years from now, he thought, data-mining programs like XKEYSCORE and WIRESHARK would be available as free apps.

The guard brought him into a terminal room, which was anticlimactic. A couple-million-dollar SCIF, sure, with an outer layer probably made of some space-age material, but inside it looked like any dimly lit copy room. The hard-drive arrays likely cost north of a million dollars apiece, but they were housed in a rolling pressboard rack that could have been left overnight on the curb outside of Fisk’s new building in Hell’s Kitchen without any takers.

The rack stood beside a basic round table with metallic legs, atop which sat a medium-size black-framed LCD monitor identical to the model Fisk had bought at a January clearance sale. From behind it, a doughy young woman—twenty years old at most—rose to meet him, her hand outstretched. She had a button nose framed by a round face and crowned by a chaotic mass of red curls. Oblong lenses magnified the fatigue in her eyes, which was understandable at four thirty in the morning. She was all alacrity, however, when she introduced herself as “Jean—sorry, can’t give my last name, company policy.”

After introducing himself and accepting the seat across the table from her, Fisk explained what he needed, a list of all Internet searches or input involving the words “Atlantis” or “Malta” or “Gebel Gol-Bahar” cross-checked against similar uses of “Loch Ness” and “Diego Garcia.” When he’d finished, Jean said nothing. She sat and stared into her monitor. He peered around the monitor, wondering if perhaps she’d nodded off.

“Sorry, this can throw people,” she said. “WIRESHARK was listening and transcribed everything you said, then transformed it to
search terms. Here are the results.” She tapped at the monitor, swiveling it so that it faced him. “In the past seven days, there were 447,332 search engine queries in the United States involving some permutation of ‘Atlantis’ in the context of the lost city, or 98,403 less than those for the Bahamian resort also called Atlantis; 27,548 users searching for the lost city also visited the Discovery Channel site’s post about Gebel Gol-Bahar.”

She had memorized the figures, Fisk realized. Unfortunately they were about a thousand times greater than he’d anticipated. “That’s all?”

“It’s actually not that many, given that in an average week, there are twenty million searches for Lady Gaga. And we haven’t even gotten to page views of Gebel Gol-Bahar content via other means.”

Given refined parameters, WIRESHARK reported that of the 183,783 IP addresses in the continental United States from which individuals demonstrated an interest in Gebel Gol-Bahar, 24,710 had also demonstrated an interest in Loch Ness. The two places were featured on myriad websites and forums. Diego Garcia had a similar cult following.

All three locations garnered the online attention of 8,540 unique users, of whom 990 were in New York City and an additional 661 were within a fifty-mile radius. Because those IP addresses included 234 public Wi-Fi locations, used by thousands of people, the suspect pool included a quarter of a million people. Which was a start.

Fisk could open leads on all of them. If he still had any control over the case and a couple of months to follow the leads, that is.

J
ackson,” said Chay.

“Who’s that?” asked Fisk.

“Jackson, Mississippi.”

She lay inches away in bed, also wearing nothing. Heat rose off her skin. Her breath was warm and pleasant against his neck. But she might as well have been miles away now. His mind was on the case, going around it and around it in search of a clue, and around it yet another time.

She poked him. “I thought you’d be dying to know, right?”

“Huh?”

“Where I’m from.”

“Right.”

“My father was a sculptor. Not the biggest art scene, though, in Jackson. Ever been there?”

The answer was within reach, he thought. But in which direction? Looking up at the ceiling, dark save for the occasional comet cast by headlights zipping past on Eighth Avenue, he replayed the night’s events from the moment the escorting officer brought Verlyn into the administrative office to be processed out.

Chay cleared her throat. “Have you ever been to Jackson?”

“Oh, sorry. No.”

“Most people are surprised that there’s a city that big in the
middle of Mississippi: twenty-story buildings, nearly two hundred thousand people.”

“Did you like it?” he asked. Another time he would be interested. He wanted to know all about her. But now he fell into pondering Yodeler’s letter to the editors of the
Mighty Pen
.

“Yes and no,” she said.

A great man is dead, a great and wonderful man
. Yodeler was a bright guy. Why was he spouting sentiments instead of taking the singular opportunity to make his case against the Police State?

Chay ran a fingertip down his jawline. “Hey, don’t you want to hear the ‘no’ part, the traumatic childhood experience that spurred me to right society’s wrongs?”

“I do, yeah. Of course.”

“But you’re at work now, right?”

Her tone told him there was no good answer. “I feel like we’re missing an obvious piece.” He could use her help.

She pulled away. And she was right to, he knew. They’d all been right, all of them who’d said the same thing about him, in so many words. He was skilled at compartmentalizing, but that created too many barriers. Now, that illuminated a contrast, Fisk thought: Yodeler had exhibited no such flaw. He cared about Merritt Verlyn, cared deeply. That’s why the
Mighty Pen
letter had thrown Fisk. Yodeler didn’t lament the loss of Verlyn’s document cache, the perpetuation of the Police State, nothing like that—although, come to think of it, it was odd that both Verlyn and Yodeler used the same dated phrase. The key was, Yodeler had decried the loss of a wonderful man. His effort wasn’t ideological or political.

“Maybe it’s personal,” Fisk thought aloud.

“No shit,” Chay said.

He’d half forgotten she was there. “I meant Yodeler’s connection to Verlyn,” he admitted, bracing for the latest take on his emotional unavailability.

To his delight, she said, full of intrigue, “Murdering innocents on a daily basis is rather extreme if all you want is to get some documents uploaded to the Internet.” She sat up. “Why didn’t we think of that before?”

Fisk shot out of bed, checked the F6 data on his phone, and felt like he’d hit pay dirt: “There’s an IP in New Canaan, Connecticut, that someone used to look up both Diego Garcia and Gebel Gol-Bahar.”

“But wouldn’t Yodeler have to be in New York?”

“That’s what everyone’s assumed, but the entire point of an unmanned aerial vehicle is you can control it from far away.”

They worked together, she researching the Connecticut chapters of Merritt Verlyn’s life and he parsing the WIRESHARK metadata, leading to the discouraging discovery that the signal originated from a prepaid Southern New England Telephone cell phone, registered to a Dan Smith, no longer in use. A burner phone.

“Still, possibly a clue,” Fisk said. “If you’re in the market for anonymity, you would use the most common surname in the United States.”

“Or you’re in fact one of the country’s two million or however many Smiths.”

“And interested in Gebel Gol-Bahar in the same time frame Yodeler would have been?”

Chay said, “Where, physically, was Dan Smith?”

“A bowling alley called Nutmeg Lanes that has a popular video-game and pinball-machine arcade, which would be a great place to use your burner phone if you wanted to maintain your anonymity.”

“Do they have security cameras?”

Fisk said, “Now you’re a fan of security cameras?”

“Let’s say I’m coming around.”

“Not looking like this place is that modernized. Check out their website: the newest video game they have is Galaga.”

“I love Galaga. What do you say to a drive to Connecticut, then?”

Fisk hoped she saw something he’d missed. “I know a place that has Galaga in Times Square.”

Chay said, “Within walking distance from Nutmeg Lanes is a house that a Ms. Ellen Lee purchased in 1996 for two hundred and thirty thousand dollars from the estate of Bridger Verlyn, Merritt’s father.”

N
onspecific though it was, Yodeler’s threat in his
Mighty Pen
piece to exact a steep price forthwith was enough for Governor Cuomo to declare a state of emergency—in Manhattan, the outer boroughs, and part of Long Island—allowing him to immediately contract Shane Poplowski’s Lightning Factory.

The young company was immediately able to deliver eighteen working models to go with the prototype Poplowski had demonstrated in downing Yodeler’s reconnaissance quadrocopter. And stepped-up production in the LightningWorks Portland, Oregon, facility would net an additional fifty-six per day. Unfortunately, a law enforcement officer or National Guardsman armed with a LightningRod and standing in an intersection could only cover the four blocks to his right, left, front, and back, and Manhattan alone had more than two thousand blocks. Likening the use of LightningRods to an ant farting in a windstorm, Mayor de Blasio ratcheted up the state of emergency, requesting businesses in the city to close and that citizens “shelter in place” if able, to keep safe from Yodeler, and to expedite the hunt for him.

But what exactly, New Yorkers asked, were all the tacticians and experts looking for? No one had a good answer. Meanwhile, the thumps of low-flying helicopters—magnified by the otherwise hushed city, then resounding in what amounted to empty canyons
between buildings—seemed to echo the heartbeats of the terrified city.

Yodeler owned New York now.

Everything was closed, even the bodegas that never closed, not on Christmas, not on 9/11. Vehicular traffic was nil, save for Army trucks and law enforcement and emergency vehicles. What little movement Fisk and Chay witnessed, from inside the unmarked NYPD Dodge Ram he’d signed out, was oddly accelerated. Everyone approached activities like a walk down a sidewalk or getting into a car as potentially fatal.

The storybook summer morning and the Independence Day decorations—red, white, and blue Uncle Sam hats mounted on streetlight poles throughout the city—added layers of sad irony.

Driving toward the West Side Highway through the still life that Hell’s Kitchen had become, Fisk’s primary evidence that the bulk of the population hadn’t already been wiped out was the quick and unnatural flickers at apartment windows—residents wrestling, he thought, with whether to look out for drones or to stay the hell away from the windows. After passing the Jacob Javits Convention Center, he turned right onto the West Side Highway and headed north, toward Connecticut, along the same route Merritt Verlyn had taken hours earlier.

“Find out anything about Ellen Lee?” he asked Chay, who was taking in the activity around them—or, rather the lack of it—with wide eyes.

She returned her attention to the car’s tablet computer—now a standard feature in NYPD vehicles, offering proprietary links to the Department databases. “She was a teacher at a public school in Darien. Retired now. She lives alone at the old Verlyn family place on Maple Valley Lane.”

“What happened to Verlyn’s parents?”

“The mother ran off years earlier, and the father died of cancer the year before Ellen Lee bought the house. Merritt was seventeen that summer, but he’d been taking care of his little brother for well
over a year after their father was incapacitated and eventually entered hospice care. In order to keep the brother out of a foster home, Merritt told caseworkers from Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families that he was eighteen.

“The two of them continued to live in the house in New Canaan for almost an entire year before the Department of Children and Families figured out the truth. But by that time, Merritt
was
eighteen, and old enough to serve as his brother’s legal guardian. So he took him along to MIT—the kid stayed in Merritt’s dorm room and went to a high school in Cambridge. Merritt wouldn’t have blamed his expulsion on his brother, but there’s reason to believe that he didn’t keep his grades up because he took the guardianship seriously, including washing dishes late every night in the dining hall.”

“He had a good heart,” Fisk said. Too bad, he thought, that the quality was negated by Verlyn’s misplaced notions of national security interests.

They didn’t see a single car on the West Side Highway for fifty blocks before passing an Army Humvee headed in the opposite direction. Then, well into Riverdale, no one else. Given how little he’d slept, Fisk might have found the drive interminable, mile after mile of empty asphalt, glinting rhythmically in the morning sun. Yet each curve that they rounded, yielding another stretch of empty highway, filled him with wonder: How long could this last? To what extent had one guy with a couple of five-hundred-buck drones paralyzed the world’s most powerful city?

At the Connecticut border, traffic began as a trickle and increased to normal holiday-morning proportions. Suddenly the New York portion of the drive seemed to Fisk like it had been an eerie dream. In New Canaan, on what was an unqualified brilliant summer day, any one of the prim colonial homes—with their tidy yards and sparkling picket fences and Stars and Stripes flying for the holiday—appeared suitable for an American propaganda poster.

As Fisk and Chay continued their drive north, the houses grew
farther apart and the woods thickened. At the end of Maple Valley Lane, he turned the Dodge up a long, steep driveway, entering a tunnel of tall overhanging boughs and hedges. He parked by a detached garage across from a majestic two-story brick colonial. As he stepped out of the car, his soles crunched into gravel. At the same time his senses were overwhelmed by the sweet scent of daisies, the rustling of branches in the light wind, and the trill of birds—or what a New Canaanite might have called silence. There was no hint of civilization other than the house.

Rounding the car, he gazed into the glass panels on the garage door, which were thick with dust. From the sunlit outdoors, the inside of the garage was almost completely dark, but he saw no cars. No tire prints in the gravel. Schoolteachers, especially retired ones, went on vacation during the summer. Fisk wondered if their drive out hadn’t been premature—or at least if the investigator’s instinct to surprise subjects had been foolhardy—when a woman called out, “Merritt?”