The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (3 page)

F
isk hurried from his latest temporary residence, the Hampton Inn on Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan, late for court. He’d been detained by the desk clerk, who told him that if he wished to remain in his room beyond this morning’s eleven o’clock checkout time, he needed a new method of payment: The Diner’s Club card he’d given when checking in the other day had just been suspended on account of suspicious charges. Which was par for the course lately. Along with his home address, his date of birth and his Social Security number were in the documents posted by WikiLeaks. About once per day since then, he received a call from a credit-card company about a suspicious charge.

These calls came to an end only when AT&T canceled his account.

And now the suspicious credit-card charges would cease as well, because the Diner’s Club was the last of his active cards. To pay the Hampton Inn, he’d gone to an ATM to withdraw the $290 for another night (a pretty good deal by Manhattan standards), only to discover that his checking account balance, which had been $1,104.45 the day before, somehow dipped to $4.12. Later he would need to transfer funds from his pension account (why not, while there were still funds in the pension account?). No telling how late he would be if he hadn’t simply returned to his hotel room, stuffed all of his things into his duffel bag, and checked out.

By the time he reached Foley Square, he was twenty minutes late for today’s episode of
United States v. Verlyn,
the trial of thirty-two-year-old systems analyst and self-proclaimed NSA whistle-blower Merritt Verlyn for violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. Fisk bounded up the massive granite steps leading to the United States Courthouse. The sharp morning light brought the stunning white granite landmark building to a glow. A collector of Manhattan trivia, Fisk knew that the building had been renamed the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in 2001—Marshall had worked here as a Second Circuit Court of Appeals judge before being bumped up to the United States Supreme Court (whose Washington digs were designed by the same architect, Cass Gilbert).

As he shot between two of the giant Corinthian columns and into the portico, the contrast between sunlight and shade was so extreme that Fisk needed to remove his Oakleys in order to see. In the process, he nearly ran into a woman hurrying out of the courthouse. If she were aware that her pink UCLA tennis bag grazed him, she didn’t show it.

He kept going, until hit with the realization that his tardiness made no difference. The witness he’d come to see testify wouldn’t be testifying today. She was leaving the courthouse. The UCLA tennis bag was probably part of a disguise that included a tracksuit, a Yankees cap, and wraparound shades: so that she could get past the media swarm in the lobby. All good disguise choices, Fisk thought. The baseball cap hid her lustrous chute of black hair, with the bill of the cap draping her sharp features in shadows. The big sunglasses eliminated the pronounced contour of her cheekbones. The loose-fitting tracksuit, ironically, veiled her track athlete’s physique. In his professional opinion, the hot-pink UCLA tennis racquet bag was the pièce de résistance. When people see such a unique item on a person, they fixate on that item rather than on the person. In fact, the woman had neither gone to UCLA nor played tennis—if Fisk’s memory served, she’d run the 100 at Georgetown, nearly earning a spot on the 2004 U.S. Olympic team.

She passed the last of the journalists, an ABC reporter leaning against a banister halfway down the courthouse steps. The guy didn’t look up from his phone.

Fisk followed her the rest of the way down the steps, then called out, “Chay?”—pronounced “Shea,” like the former New York Mets baseball stadium (named for William Shea, the Manhattan lawyer who softened the blow of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ traitorous flight to Los Angeles by convincing the National League to give the city an expansion team, the Mets).

She kept going, as if she hadn’t heard him or were someone else. But, almost imperceptibly, she stiffened.

He tried again. “Chay Maryland, of the
New York Times
?”

She glanced over a shoulder.

He manufactured a smile. “One of your stories changed my life.”

A blink and she made him. “Jeremy Fisk. Detective, Intel.” She looked past him, no doubt worried about drawing a news crew. Wary, but not nervous or scared. “What do you want?”

“Just to ask you a question, for a change.”

She stepped onto the Worth Street sidewalk. The pedestrian traffic was light, by Manhattan standards, yet enough of a crowd that she was lost to the courthouse reporters. “I’m in a rush . . .”

Fisk caught up to her. “Aren’t you going to testify?” he asked. Despite an offer of a significantly mitigated sentence, Merritt Verlyn sat in his cell at the Marshals Service detention facility and refused to say a word. No fewer than 122,627 documents remained outstanding from the files Verlyn had stolen, and it was well within the realm of possibility that Chay had the cache on a flash drive bouncing around inside her tennis bag.

“Why would I testify?” She accelerated slightly, her stride widening.

“Chiefly because prison isn’t pleasant,” he said. “I fear your tennis game might suffer.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I wouldn’t have to waste time
deciding what to wear in the morning. There would be no guys to deal with, no bills to worry about, I wouldn’t miss days at the gym. I could catch up on my rest and my reading, maybe write a book.”

“That’s what vacations are for.”

“I take about as many vacations as you do, I’ll bet. In any case, Detective, I can’t divulge confidential sources on a story, not in court, not anywhere.”

“But your source is already on trial.”

“Nice try. Merritt Verlyn may or may not be my source . . . but either way, prospective whistle-blowers need to know that journalists are going to protect them, even if it means we go to prison. The bigger-picture issue is that a free press is essential to democracy—you’re a great fan of democracy, aren’t you?”

“I am. I’m also a fan of national security. Hypothetically, would it ever bother you if your reporting put American lives in danger?”

“I think you mean your American life.”

“Okay, maybe it’s not so hypothetical. Did you see the stolen document listing our informants on the Kkangpae mob in Koreatown?”

Chay glanced away. “There were more than one hundred thousand documents, I could not read each one.”

“The second that Kkangpae file goes up on WikiLeaks, the whole op is blown. The mobsters don’t exactly take kindly to people who help the police. Real lives are at stake.”

“I’d hope you’ve taken steps to protect your informants.”

“And that’s just one instance. These people have family members who also may be in harm’s way.” Fisk tried to hold back, but his anger was showing.

Chay said, “Bringing the ops reports to light may also help innocent New Yorkers who are already in the cross fire, placed there by Intel without regard for their constitutional rights.”

“Except that in every single case, a judge signed off.”

“So it’s a case of legal authority versus moral authority.” She
slowed down now, eager to win this argument. “Then why not let New Yorkers decide which they’re willing to allow?”

“They’ve already done that through the election of representatives who approved Intel’s programs. Also there are numerous built-in safeguards: intelligence service personnel have set procedures that allow them to blow the whistle about a classified program without putting agents at risk.”

A red palm flashed onto the sign on the far side of Broadway. Stopping at the curb, Chay turned to Fisk and asked, “Is it modesty or some sort of crazy amnesia that kept you from mentioning the attempted Cartel hit at your apartment building?”

“It’s part of an ongoing investigation, so I can’t talk about it. Except to say that it certainly proves my point. Posting law enforcement agents’ private information on the Internet puts us at drastically increased risk of visits from assassins.”

“I’m not sure these so-called assassins needed any help from me, informational, motivational, or otherwise. I do hope that the experience of having the informational grid turned on you gives you and your colleagues a taste of your own medicine. In the abstract, that is. You wield an enormous amount of power, and these checks and balances you rattle off are little impediment. Whatever you want to see, you see. Whoever you want to watch, you watch. You’ve been harassing me and everyone I know in pursuit of the Verlyn document cache, which is what we’re really talking about now, isn’t it? You’re not interested in whether or not I testify. The question you want answered is ‘Where are the documents?’ Right?”

“I shouldn’t need to ask that. I should have faith that if you did know, you would have warned the agents who, along with their spouses and children, are in danger.”

She scoffed. “That’s just a variation on the old saw that it’s the responsibility of the media to join the government in the war on terror. I’m sorry; it’s not. It’s the media’s responsibility to cover the government, not to cover the government’s ass.”

Fisk remained in place when the sign on the far corner clicked to the man-walking icon and pedestrians shot across Broadway. Did she really believe this? “I feel like you are making the decision that some people’s lives are more sacred than others.”

“And I feel like you do the same thing, day in and day out. Let me ask you a question. Did you murder Magnus Jenssen?”

Fisk’s face showed nothing. “When did you switch gears from an investigative reporter to critic?”

“I’m not sure I did.”

“Fun to go thumbs-up or thumbs-down on food you don’t have to prepare or pay for.”

Fisk started across while the walk signal counted down, leaving Chay at the curb, uncharacteristically without a rejoinder.

N
ever seen you out of your uniform before, Harry,” said Wally from the driver’s seat of his hansom cab. “You’ve got a really nice ass, man!”

Harun weighed a comeback as he jogged past, on Central Park’s lower loop. He and Wally had become friends over the years, since an afternoon even hotter than this one. From his post at the door of the luxury apartment building, 122 Central Park South, Harun had been looking out on the horses standing in a row on the park side of the street, tethered to carriages, awaiting fares despite the broiling sun.

He felt especially sorry for Wally’s bony old horse, Buckmeister. After enduring an earful from Mrs. Billingham in apartment 19F for using one of the building’s pails, Harun brought Buckmeister some cold water.

Harun thought now of a retort involving his ass and Wally’s lips. He kept it to himself, rather than risk obliterating whatever tip his friend still stood to collect from the prim, clearly unamused elderly couple in the back of his cab.

Harun also needed to conserve his breath in order to make it up to the reservoir, let alone back to work. Each stride was heavy lifting, his lungs ached, and the air wasn’t just searing, it was foul. Although he couldn’t see the Central Park Zoo from here, he could sure smell the monkey cages.

He and Durriyah had taken Rudy and the twins to the zoo to see the new snow-leopard cubs on his last day off. Not easy getting in from Ozone Park with the “new” (to them—really, thirdhand) double stroller on the crowded A train, plus Rudy’s stroller. And, surprise, now that Rudy was three, the price of his zoo admission ticket had gone from free to thirteen bucks. Plus another eighteen dollars apiece for Harun and Durriyah. Plus half his salary for snacks and drinks and balloons while waiting on line (almost an hour) for the cat house.

But from the moment they got in, it was worth it: the looks on the boys’ faces, all three of them smiling and laughing.

The image pushed away the pain of running now. Man, did he love those guys. He’d do anything for them. Running four miles during his lunch break was nothing. All for them. You’d’ve thought pushing a stroller for hours on end to get the babies to fall asleep counted as exercise, but since he and Durriyah had gotten into the baby business, as they called it, he’d somehow put on forty pounds. Now he ran for the boys, so that they’d have an old man who could play football with them, instead of just an old man.

Before he knew it, twenty-five blocks were behind him and he was on the path through the woods, toward the gatehouse at the bottom of the Jackie O. Reservoir. No other runners around. Which figured. It was 2:15, maybe 2:30. The lunch-hour regulars, the yuppie fitness-nut types, were showered and back at their desks by now, polishing off expensive salads. Good. He liked the solitude, a commodity in this town.

A dark shadow passed overhead. His first thought was: a bird. One of those falcons the news loves to show nesting at the tops of the buildings surrounding the park. Swooping for someone’s late lunch, maybe.

He kept on. The shadow appeared again, out of the corner of his eye. Unnaturally round. Seemed to stay on him as he ran. He looked up, through the gap between the tops of two big trees, squinting into a blaze of sunlight. Using a hand as a visor and squinting against the
glare, he made out a dark form above the treetops. Christ, a buzzard? Find someone else, vulture. Harun was running to add years to his life.

It made no noise, or at least nothing he could hear over the din of the city, which, even here, in the depths of the park—

A boom, as from a cannon. That’s what it sounded like. Shaking him, turning the leaves all around into a shower of green confetti falling behind him.

Something pinged the path to his side, raising a spark and spraying dirt and gravel into his shins. He glanced down, seeing a few spots of blood.

What the hell?

Spooked, he sped up.

Another blast. This time, it felt like, a firebomb went off in his throat. His legs gave out and he went down hard on his side, coming to rest on his back on the path.

He was cold all over, except for a newly formed pit between his collarbones. Hot blood welled there, trickling down his shirt, into his left armpit. None of which made any sense.

No real pain, fortunately. He struggled to get up—and made it as far as his elbows when a dark sheet of blood flooded down his shirtfront. His consciousness flickered.

Three boys in the cat house, balloons in hand, smiles on faces.