The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (29 page)

T
he bad news was that Chay Maryland was nobody’s fool. A beefy pair of
New York Times
security guards accompanied her to the agreed-upon meeting spot beneath the Coca-Cola sign in Times Square.

The good news, Blackwell thought, was the impromptu street party: half a million in Times Square celebrating Yodeler’s dirt nap or getting a head start on the July Fourth bash. If things went south, getting away would be cake.

And he was nobody’s fool himself. He wore a black wig, fake ’stache, and gobs of bronzer—to mess with any skin-texture recognition software. Damned if he didn’t look like the wetback he was pretending to be. He’d barely recognized himself in the Toys “R” Us men’s room where he’d donned his disguise. He also had on a pair of wraparound mirror shades and a Band-Aid on the bridge of his nose—these things threw a wrench into the measurement-based stuff. And he’d packed a wad of Red Man between his cheek and gum. Another wrench, and good stuff. Still, the guards were reason enough to abort. She was supposed to have come alone.

Then again, she had legitimate security concerns apart from her Cartel reporting, he thought. And if this were a trap, an NYPD Intel or an FBI takedown, the ridiculously risk-averse cops and Feebs would never put her in jeopardy. Blackwell was further tempted to stay because he was running out of time. And with the holiday here
now, who was to say that Fisk wouldn’t spirit this honey away to the beach for a long weekend?
Shit, look at that body. He’d be crazy not to
. This, Blackwell thought, could be his last chance. Worse came to worst, he had at the ready, within his loose fisherman’s vest, a slim and lightweight Ruger Mark III 22/45 capped with a Gemtech Outback II suppressor that reduced the report to a pop that, in this crowd, would be nothing. He could shoot both guards, as well as Chay, and be long gone before anyone was the wiser. Probably before their bodies hit the sidewalk too.

He unfolded the red Washington Nationals baseball cap from the back pocket of his cargo pants (loose-fitting clothing veiled his stature) and pulled it on. This was Chay’s cue to ask him the time, to which he was to reply 3:34 even though it was a good four hours past that.

The guards stayed back as she weaved her way through a crowd lined up for a food cart. Coolly, she asked him the time, he said 3:34, and she hit him with “Are you El Polvo?”

He was shocked. “Where’d you get that?”

“My father was one of those sculptors who always had plaster dust on him, even after he took a bath.” She didn’t look him in the eye so much as look him over—reading him, looking for physical cues, he figured. She had guts, he had to give her that. “So I brought that to my investigation, which was mostly a fishing expedition, until I called the statuary in Chicago where I spoke to Franciszka.”

This was bad, Blackwell thought, and it could get a hell of a lot worse fast. Abort, he told himself, and get the hell out of here. Turning away, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She made no attempt to follow. The guards too stayed put.

Immersing himself in the crowd, Blackwell cursed himself. He understood that when she’d asked
Are you El Polvo?
and he failed to deny it—or ask her what the hell she was talking about—he had confirmed it.

T
he unmarked Chevy Tahoe waited at the curb outside at the Christopher Street PATH train station, the first stop in Manhattan after Hoboken.

As Fisk hurried from the station to the SUV, the driver’s door popped open. He heard Dubin’s gruff voice from inside. “Don’t worry about it, Luis, I got it.” Then the chief reached across the backseat and punched the door open.

Fisk climbed in. As always, the chief’s ride had a bouquet of cigar smoke and musky cologne and he had the a/c set to arctic, which he thought wasn’t cold enough. He appeared especially uncomfortable in a crisp, double-breasted navy blazer, white slacks, and a red-white-and-blue-striped necktie. A matching handkerchief, folded with origami precision, spouted from his breast pocket. The problem was that, by nature, he was a sweats guy. Tossing Fisk a handled shopping bag from a trendy Chelsea men’s store, he said, “Change.”

“Hey, Chief, how are you?”

Dubin rapped the driver’s headrest. “Come on, Luis, we need to be there five minutes ago.”

As the SUV lurched uptown, Fisk looked in the bag, finding a navy blazer, white slacks, a matching dress shirt, and a Stars and Stripes–themed silk tie. When he had called from Bantam Chemical,
the chief sounded more concerned about the toll that the descent into the water tower had taken on Fisk’s clothes than about Boyden Verlyn’s plotting. Fisk asked now, “What happened to ‘We’re fucking spies, not suits in marketing’?”

“Ended when I was to serve as your valet tonight.” Dubin squeezed his brow. “How the hell often are you awarded the key to the city?”

The more things change . . .
“What’ll it be worth if the city is blown up?”

“Not going to happen.”

“Glad to hear that. How do you know?”

Dubin groaned. “Maybe you’re right, maybe Boyden Verlyn was working on a bomber drone. I’ll upgrade that from
maybe
he was to
probably
. But he’s not blowing anything up with it tonight. Or ever. Not unless he rises from the dead.”

“Drones can fly autonomously,” Fisk reminded him. “Once you input their flight plans, setting them to launch at some point in the future isn’t much harder than setting an alarm clock.”

“I just don’t get why he would have done that.”

“Remember his threat to ‘exact a steep price’? Setting a drone full of TATP in the right place, say, a tank full of liquefied natural gas . . .”

Dubin nodded. “Possible but unlikely. In any case, largely to humor you, I had the Airborne Division send up both of its Koalas and a couple of the Bell helicopters, all of them with their detectors set to TATP. Also we’ve got K9s out, our guys and gals on the street have been issued the five-hundred-however-many colorimetric sensors, and over in Jersey, the Port Authority PD’s flying Sikorskys. Plus the Bureau ERTs are taking fine-tooth combs to Hoboken in search of missing drones or bombs or a big container of hydrogen peroxide. Same deal in Norwalk, Connecticut.”

“Did you reach the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency?”

“You’re welcome. What’s your guy at NGA’s name again?”

“Roy Plummer.”

“Plummer, right. He was on his way to watch the fireworks show. A cruiser’s taking him down to his video games at the World Financial Center.”

Fisk tipped the shopping bag upside down and let the contents fall on the seat between him and Dubin, then set to work unwrapping the oxford shirt and extracting the pins. The chief had done a hell of a job setting the defense, he thought. It troubled him, though, that they still had no inkling of what Boyden had in store.

He’d knotted the red-white-and-blue necktie, and on the third try, just as they reached Riverside Park, dimpled it to Dubin’s satisfaction.

B
lackwell ditched his disguise piece by piece—into a trash can here, down a sewer grate there—while making his way up Eighth Avenue, which was effectively closed to vehicular traffic due to the overflow of celebrants from Times Square. He dodged the July Fourth revelers, many of whom had apparently availed themselves of the special “Yodeler Shot!”—a shot glass full of vodka with bloodlike red food coloring in it, for sale in so many of the area bars. And he tried to do what he always did: think positive.

He would find Fisk.

He would kill Fisk.

Then he would go home and buy an RFF 28 with the proceeds. He now imagined himself sitting in a captain’s chair, rocketing across whitecaps at the powerboat’s top speed of seventy-three knots. Damn if he didn’t feel the sea spray cooling him now, on Eighth Avenue.

Then, as if the positive energy he’d generated had influenced the powers controlling the universe, he saw, on a TV above the bar, none other than Detective Jeremy Fisk, wearing a navy blazer and an American-flag tie. He was ascending the steps to a stage.
LIVE FROM RIVERSIDE PARK
, read the caption.

T
hen, after his promotion to the rank of detective, he served New York City courageously and selflessly,” Mayor de Blasio told the full bleachers up and down Riverside Park. The park, the piers, the boat basin, and most of the western shore of Manhattan had become a viewing area for the fireworks show over the adjacent Hudson River, now golden in reflection of the sun descending over New Jersey.

The mayor went on, his words amplified by hundreds of speakers and reverberating off the water, “Detective Fisk single-handedly thwarted the assassination of President Obama . . .”

Waiting stage left to receive the key, Fisk wanted to enjoy this experience, he really did. He wished he could have notified family and friends. But seeing no need to do the Cartel any favors, he had done what he could to make sure that tonight’s “surprise presentation” remained a surprise. He’d told only Chay, albeit via a last-minute text, and she texted back her regrets; she was caught up in investigating an El Polvo story. Only one other person knew: somehow Shane Poplowski, the LightningRod kid, had gotten wind of the presentation and wasted no time texting Fisk and asking for an assist in getting a VIP table for him and his buddies at Riverside Park’s Boat Basin Café, which was within spitting distance of the stage.

The other reason that Fisk wasn’t enjoying himself was that he couldn’t turn off his apprehension. Where would the attack come from? About the only place that could be ruled out was the water tower in which he’d found the rotor blade.

“. . . And today, once again, he has delivered our city from the clutches of a terrorist, restoring our independence on Independence Day . . .”

Could that be it?
Could Boyden Verlyn, always a step ahead, have foreseen that his death would bring New Yorkers streaming out to celebrate Independence Day in record numbers? That would go a long way toward explaining today’s precipitous suicide-by-cop. And if his plan had included getting law enforcement to drop its guard, he’d succeeded wildly: the Iron Apple, a temporary fix, had been
dismantled entirely. The few National Guardsmen who had been equipped with LightningRods were gone too. Once again, there was no system in place to detect drones, let alone counter them.

Or was there?

Fisk dug his phone from his white slacks and, cupping it in his hand for stealth, connected to the 360-degree cameras on an A-119 Koala helicopter sniffing for TATP. He wasn’t stealthy enough, though. He felt Dubin’s eyes go hot on him from the front row of seats. The Koala was circling Liberty Island, high above the Statue, offering a stunning—and stunningly sharp—view of New York Harbor, which looked like a sheet of silver gift wrap. The clarity of the feed notwithstanding, he thought, a drone would appear as no more than a dot. He might easily miss it. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t see anything. He hoped and prayed that there was nothing to see.

He did see a bird, a gray-and-white seagull, flying past Lady Liberty’s torch. To Fisk’s surprise, he was able make out the bird’s eyes and beak set in a gentle expression.

“. . . The first key to New York City was presented on June twenty-seventh, 1702, when Mayor Philip French awarded what was termed a ‘Freedom of the City’ to the Viscount Cornbury.”

Fisk tapped into the feed from another of the Aviation Division helicopters, a Bell 412, which hovered over the Hudson directly above the Holland Tunnel. The tunnel consisted of a pair of tubes situated in the bedrock a hundred feet below the surface of the river. Every year, 35 million vehicles used it to go between New York and New Jersey. A terrorist target if there ever was one. Fisk saw only the river, free of boat traffic due to the fireworks. He also had a clear view of one of the Coast Guard Maritime Safety and Security Team’s red twenty-five-foot Defender-class security boats maintaining the fireworks safety zone. He was able to read the white numbers on the Defender’s bow: 91106.

“By the middle 1800s, it became the custom to bestow a key to the city as a symbol of New York City’s intention that the recipient was free to come and go at will.”

Fisk saw more of the same via the second Bell, which was flying over the Hudson just off Riverside Park’s dog run, just a couple of blocks from the stage. Looking up, he spotted the helicopter against a backdrop of purple clouds. He realized he’d been hearing the rhythmic thumps of its rotors throughout de Blasio’s speech. The Bell’s camera provided a view of one of the five fireworks barges bobbing with the current. And no drones. One of the Koalas, over Central Park, showed tens of thousands of people on the Great Lawn and on the Sheep Meadow. There could be fifty drones hovering over this hive, Fisk thought, and he wouldn’t notice them. He was wrong: he was able to make out several helium balloons and Frisbees, a Nerf football, and two different Batman kites, and nothing hovering or zipping the way a quadrocopter would. Good. His preference was to be 100 percent wrong about an attack.

Switching to the camera aboard one of the Port Authority Police Department’s Sikorskys, in the air above Union City—just north of Hoboken—his eye was drawn to movement between the roofs of two industrial buildings. Something about the size of a pizza box. He zoomed in. A quadrocopter. Although he couldn’t read it, he could make out the shape of the sporty red Specter logo on the fuselage.

Fighting the inclination to jump from the shock, he tried to get a read on the drone’s heading.

“It is my great honor to present a key to the city of New York on this July Fourth to a true American hero—”

“Thank you, Mayor de Blasio,” Fisk said, advancing to center stage.

Surprised at the interruption and understandably indignant, de Blasio handed over the gleaming skeleton key in its leather case. Fisk accepted it—an afterthought. He needed to figure out a way to bring down the quadrocopter without sending millions of people into a panic in the process. Turning toward the Boat Basin Café, he said, “I want to thank Shane Poplowski. Where are you, Shane?”

A high-pitched whoop from within the crowd directed him to
Shane’s white-blond hair, above which his arms were raised. The kid had taken off his shirt, revealing uniformly burned skin. Fortunately he still had on the LightningRod in its scabbard.

“Shane, come up here, please?” The kid’s cry of joy matched any game-show contestant’s. If he only knew what was coming. “I also need the chief of NYPD Intel,” Fisk said, looking for Dubin, finding him looking on, openmouthed. “Barry Dubin, please join me too—it’s important.”

Getting it, Dubin snapped into his commander mode and rocketed out of his seat. Fisk held his hands in front of him as if he were turning a steering wheel. Dubin nodded, message received.

Fisk continued, “These men represent the blend of state-of-the-art technology and shrewd old-school intelligence that makes our city as safe as anyplace on the planet.” Handing the microphone to the mayor on his way off the stage, Fisk added, “And we need to get back to work.”

The mayor said, “That’s the spirit, ladies and gentle—” The ovation drowned him out. Leading the cheers were the two public relations executives who’d been at Dubin’s apartment. Meanwhile the chief’s Tahoe rolled to the end of the nearest asphalt walkway. Policemen fanned into grass on either side of it to keep spectators back.

Hurrying toward the Tahoe, Fisk corralled Poplowski. The kid was clearly befuddled, a function of the situation as well as, Fisk surmised from the skunklike scent, smoking something New York had yet to legalize.

“Is something up?” Shane asked between gasps.

“Nothing that we can’t bring down,” Fisk said. As he and Poplowski met Dubin and proceeded to the Tahoe, Fisk told them about the quadrocopter he’d seen headed across the Hudson River from Union City, probably laden with the explosive TATP. Barreling into the SUV, Dubin got on his radio, issuing intercept orders to the Aviation Division and Emergency Services.

The quadrocopter was flying slowly, just ten or fifteen miles
per hour. Still, none of the three helicopters would be able to get within firing range before the drone reached Manhattan. The Air National Guard redirected two F-16s from their air patrols within fifty miles. Flying at their top speed of fifteen hundred miles per hour, the fighter jets would be in range within two minutes, which would put its arrival in Manhattan at about the same time as the quadrocopter’s.

While trying to maintain a visual on the quadrocopter via his phone, Fisk directed Dubin’s driver through the Riverside Park dog run. The SUV parked on the unpopulated cement shoulder of the Seventy-Second Street West Side Highway on-ramp, out of view of everyone except northbound drivers. The drone, flying at about fifty feet over the river and one hundred yards off the industrial pier at Fifty-Ninth Street and Twelfth Avenue, was beginning to blend in with the dusk.

Like Dubin, Fisk sprang out of the Tahoe. He ran to open the door for Poplowski, who slid out, meanwhile regarding the LightningRod readout panel with consternation.

“What is it?” Fisk asked.

Poplowski groaned. “The charge is wicked low.”

Of course it is, thought Fisk. “How about you try it anyway?”

The drone was within fifty yards of the shore.

“We’ll have one shot.” The kid leveled the LightningRod at the quadrocopter and pressed an eye against the rear sight. “Maybe.” He clicked a button on the wand.