The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (5 page)

“What about rifling marks?” Fisk asked. Rifling is the process of cutting helical grooves in the barrel that impart a spin to the bullet to increase its accuracy. Rifling marks left on a slug—the bullet minus the casing—permit the identification of the gun manufacturer and model.

Evans read, “Clockwise twist of one to twelve.” One to twelve meant the bullet needed to travel twelve inches to complete a rotation.

“So we’re talking AR-15?” Fisk asked. AR-15s are assault rifles so common that popular belief has it that AR stands for assault rifle, but in fact AR derives from ArmaLite, the corporation that originated the weapon.

“Yes, sir,” said Evans. “Colt AR-15 Sporter, a civilian model.”

Turning to Fisk, Chay asked, “Can’t you search the NYPD’s
database of recorded signal traffic and map where Yodeler was before and after he submitted the comment?”

A complete fishing expedition on her part, Fisk suspected, which possibly explained her presence here. “The Electronic Communications Privacy Act applies to us the same as it does to any government agency. Unfortunately, we need to serve a warrant to Verizon before we can get that sort of data.”

Chay uncapped a pen and put it to the legal pad on the table in front of her. “Why ‘unfortunately’?”

Fisk smiled at her gesture—as though a paper and pen could intimidate him. “It’s an ordeal to get the data. The Department or the Bureau needs to draft a National Security Letter, and then have it printed out and served to Verizon’s legal department. Which is the easy part. The providers send back CDs loaded with ‘toll records’—lists of calls to a phone, calls from it, texts, and Internet usage.”

Weir chuckled. “We call the CDs ‘haystacks.’”

“If we could mine the data now,” Fisk continued, “it could mean the difference between life and death if Yodeler intends to make good on his threat. If he had that phone on him or in his car while he was near the victim’s place of work or the crime scene, we’d be halfway home.”

“How can this help unless he used the phone during that time?” Chay asked.

“Fortunately we do have the Domain Awareness system surveillance cameras. On Central Park South, even within a block of the victim’s building, we can reasonably expect to see footage of five hundred people snapping a photo in the past week, it being Tourist Central and summertime. If the phone Yodeler used for his message to us were to have also transmitted from Central Park South, we would know which of the five hundred people to talk to, because taking photos is classic pre-operational reconnaissance activity.”

Chay looked at her pad and jotted something down. The fact that she said nothing suggested that Fisk had made his point.

“We’ll NSL Verizon,” Weir said.

“What about F6?” Fisk asked, on the off chance that the Bureau had some in with the service that the Department didn’t. F6 was the code name for the Special Collection Service jointly run by the CIA and NSA. In the way the CIA or MI6 intrigued ordinary citizens, F6 appealed to those in law enforcement—those who knew about the service. The Special Collection Service’s sole responsibility was getting information no one else could. In the field, its operators bugged places that had been deemed impossible to access by other agencies. And in cyberspace, the F6 techs were on a level of their own in STG—SIGINT Terminal Guidance, SIGINT in turn short for “signals intelligence”—monitoring, intercepting, and interpreting electronic communications. They ran a battery of proprietary surveillance applications like XKEYSCORE, CADENCE/GAMUT, HIGHTIDE/SKYWRITER, and WIRESHARK that allowed them to search—without FISA authorization—through vast databases containing e-mails, online chats, and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, often in real time.

“Does F6 even officially exist?” Chay asked.

“It officially exists,” said Fisk with a grin and a glance at her legal pad. “But its existence is classified.”

Evans flashed Fisk a look of rebuke. “What would be beneficial, at this point, is for us to work up a background on the victim.”

“Any reason to think he wasn’t chosen at random?” Fisk asked. “Investigating victims’ backgrounds is standard operating procedure. We never take a killer’s word that his victims have been selected at random. Some make that claim simply because it terrifies more people than if they were to say they had a specific target, like world leaders. Some make the claim purely as a diversionary tactic. And often the common denominator among victims makes no sense to a rational thinker, but yields a method to the killer’s madness.”

“We’re not buying his ideologue act,” Weir said. “If that’s what you mean.”

Checking his notes, Evans explained, “When Yodeler writes, ‘I shall sacrifice one person in New York City chosen completely at random,’ there’s reason to think the ‘chosen completely at random’ is a compensatory construct. Also we suspect that ‘citizens of America’ is a clue that he isn’t American, or at least he’s not from here, since we always say ‘U.S. citizens.’”

Weir cut in, “No one here calls New York ‘New York City.’”

Evans went on. “Also we have reason to suspect Yodeler is a reference to the Austrian yodeler who was imprisoned a couple years back for a mocking version of the Muslim call to prayer. He’s come to represent Western intolerance. You’d think Yodeler would be the last screen name he’d use if he were a member of, say, al-Shabaab, and he was trying to deflect blame for a hit.”

“Sure,” said Fisk. “Unless he wants to send the so-called authorities on a wild Muslim chase.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Weir.

“Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen—Arabic for ‘Mujahedeen Youth Movement’—originated ten years ago as a Somali cell of al-Qaeda before growing into a full-fledged terrorist organization in its own right. More recently al-Shabaab has initiated recruitment and fund-raising within the United States, but the group had never engaged in terrorism here. And al-Shabaab never use snipers, favoring less subtle methods of execution.”

“Such as?” asked Chay, as Fisk knew she would.

“Literally tearing victims limb from limb.”

Weir didn’t like Fisk’s answer. “Nothing gets crossed off the list until it gets crossed off the list.”

Fisk suspected al-Shabaab had nothing to do with this case, which meant that the FBI had brought him in for no reason.

Didn’t matter now. He was in.

“Why don’t we ask Yodeler what he wants?” he said. He took in the roomful of blank looks. A start, he thought. “He wants something.”

Chay said, “But he’s already killed someone without any provocation.”

“That’s why we want to catch him. To do that, we first need to buy some time.”

Evans nodded. “It would be good to be able to bring in the NCAVC.” He meant Quantico’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, part of CIRG, the Critical Incident Response Group. CIRG provided support for investigations on serial crimes by deploying specialized analysts.

“They could be useful,” said Fisk. But on cases like this, it wasn’t a matter of gaining time for reflection. He wanted impetus—to get Yodeler reacting to his moves, if possible surprising the killer. From his reactions, Fisk could glean information, whether it was that the guy was proficient in the use of burner phones or that he was a communist. The more back-and-forth they had, the more Fisk would learn about him. The challenge was to get into Yodeler’s mind and to adopt his thinking process.

“What do you have in mind?” Weir asked in the same tone he probably used when the neighbors’ kids rang his door to sell him magazine subscriptions he didn’t want or need. A decade of turf battles had made him averse to even yielding the floor.

“For that, I need to take this off the record,” said Fisk, turning to Chay.

Chay looked to her editor, who nodded emphatically.

Fisk said, “We handle Yodeler the same way we do a hostage taker. The value of the press covering these cases is inestimable, if the press and law enforcement cooperate. There was a case in Guatemala recently where kidnappers were publicly shamed into releasing a hostage, who was a doctor who devoted her practice to the poor. Actually she wasn’t, but that’s how the media played it. A misplaced story can anger the bad guys. So, in the interest of keeping the body count down . . .” Fisk turned to Norman. “Can you publish an edited version of Yodeler’s comment?”

“Edited how?” asked the security man.

Eyeing the comment on the screen, Fisk said, “Cut everything except how the jogger story is yet another part of the campaign of propaganda and disinformation, designed to suppress dissent and gain the trust of our citizenry. Leave in that he’s decided to dismantle that trust for the greater good of the citizens of America.”

Weir grumbled, “Makes him sound like a loony tune.”

“He sounded like that to begin with,” Fisk said. “But if we do it this way, in his mind he’ll have gotten some of his message out. We’ll have acquiesced, which is the old hostage negotiation secret: fool him into thinking that he’s imposing his will on us, that he’s holding all the aces. Then we post a comment to his comment, from, say, ‘Yodelerfan1.’ We ask him what else he wants. He can tell us via the comments box or—so he gets the sense he’s making progress—a dedicated e-mail address. Or we let him choose the venue. Because we’re just trying to do the best we can under enormous difficulties to give him exactly what he wants.”

Evans considered this. “Then what?” he asked.

“We wait by the smartphone for him to respond. If he does, great, it’s a negotiation, a protracted negotiation in which we achieve the position where he’s reacting to our moves rather than vice versa, meaning he’s not shooting people in New York chosen at random or otherwise. Meanwhile we’re sneaking up on him.”

Evans looked to Weir. With the exception of Chay, everyone looked to the senior case agent, with what Fisk hoped he correctly perceived as an air of solicitation.

“I can’t authorize this myself,” Weir said. “I gotta run it past the ASAC and the SAC.” This meant submitting a written request for approval to the assistant special agent in charge as well as the special agent in charge—which, in Fisk’s experience, was as close as it came to getting a yes from the Bureau.

W
orst-case scenario, Fisk thought, he could read Evans and Weir’s report later; cumbersome FBI reports were near the top of the list of certainties headed by death or taxes. Exiting the Times Tower now, headed for the crime scene, gave him the feel of stepping into fresh air—someplace other than New York that, in fact, had fresh air.

He was always surprised how much came to light at the scene, like eyewitnesses who come forward well after the scene has been processed, sometimes ashamed at not having come forth sooner, always with useful information. And if the scene didn’t teach him something about the killer, it would be a first. Getting a fix on the perp was usually the most difficult part of the early chapters of an investigation.

A block later, he’d bought himself a new cell phone replete with five hundred minutes, activated the line, and used it to get himself out of reporting to the office for a couple of hours. Alternating between checking for surveillance and avoiding oncoming pedestrians while glancing at bits of the initial NYPD detective’s report on his phone, he made his way up Seventh Avenue to its intersection with Central Park South.

Passing the row of hansom cabs on the park side, he caught a mix of the sales pitches by drivers to passing tourists. He also spotted
three separate groups posing by horses for photos. He suspected he’d grossly underestimated the number of amateur photographers the CCTV cams would record in a week here.

Entering Central Park, he turned right onto the lower loop, presumably the same route Harun Ahmed had taken. It was closed now to vehicular traffic, as it had been at the time of the shooting. The city’s chalky air, heavy with concrete and exhaust just moments ago, grew redolent of flowers and trees. The clamor of thousands of vehicles and millions of rushing Manhattanites dissolved into the more leisurely chatter of parkgoers accompanied by the buzz of their bike chains and Rollerblade wheels and the trill of countless birds, all of it seemingly in sync with the waltz rising from the carousel’s Wurlitzer. Thus it seemed to Fisk as if it took no time at all to walk to the crime scene.

The scene itself had already been processed and released and thus reverted to an unremarkable stretch of gravel and dirt through the woods. If he were sure of anything, it was that the crime-scene investigation unit had literally left no stone unturned here. In 2006, when he was working a homicide case in Alphabet City’s East River Park, a trace of anomalous soil the crime-scene team bagged turned out to be from the nearby baseball diamond and led to a conviction of a spectator at a softball league game there. In this case, however, he had a strong sense that the minutiae were obstructing the investigation, distracting from a critical piece of the puzzle.

But what?

As he’d been trained, he cast a mental grid over the death scene, then he walked each of the lines, occasionally stepping aside to let a jogger pass.

He saw no trace of blood, no body outline, nothing to suggest that Harun Ahmed had been gunned down here. He focused on the shadows speckled by light in the few spots where the sun managed to breach the canopy of trees. The crime-scene photos hadn’t given him a sufficient appreciation of the extent of these trees. These oaks and
elms, at the height of leafiness, posed too much of an impediment for a sniper.

Unless the guy had made his nest in one of them. It was hard to believe, though, that no one in Central Park saw or thought anything of a man with an assault rifle climbing into a tree.

Staring up the trunk of the nearest elm, Fisk speculated that if a sniper had wanted to conceal himself in one of the branches, he could have climbed up at night, when this area of the park was empty. On the plus side for the hypothetical sniper, the area wasn’t covered by a CCTV camera. Climbing the tree would be tricky, though. Those in the vicinity offered sheer trunks—no branches or other footholds—for a good twenty feet from the ground. Still they could be climbed, but Fisk saw no evidence that they had been, at least no unnatural indentations or scuff marks in the bark.

In any case, Yodeler would have needed to know Harun Ahmed’s jogging route to take him out here, and unless the killer planned to spend several days in the sniper’s nest, he needed advance knowledge of when Ahmed ran. As Fisk had gathered in his quick read of the detective’s report, the super at 122 Central Park South said Ahmed only ran on days that both the weather and his willpower permitted. So Yodeler could have made an educated guess, especially if he’d conducted pre-op recon. Or he might have gambled. But either way, if Yodeler had good enough intel to predict Harun Ahmed would run along this tiny path, he had to know that the doorman opened the door to the lobby hundreds of times a day at 122 Central Park South, offering a clear shot at him from the park directly across the street, or a car parked parallel to the park. You could make an argument that few New Yorkers presented as easy a target as Ahmed. So why here?

The answer could be that Yodeler had indeed been gunning for anyone. Although rare, it would hardly be the first act of random
violence in New York City. But why in this problematic location? And how was it that no one saw him?

F
or most people, finding a single dollar bill can turn a lousy day around. For Walter Doyle, the magic number was fifty.

In the two years since retiring as the head of Stuyvesant High School’s mathematics department, the sixty-nine-year-old had been supplementing his pension by searching for lost change. Tourists in the United States handled cash more often than they were accustomed to when at home, and in the process they each lost an average of eighteen cents per day.

And nowhere on earth, by Doyle’s reckoning, did tourists lose as much change as here at Battery Park, Manhattan’s twenty-five southernmost acres that included the gamut of outdoor park activities as well as a full restaurant, dozens of other food vendors, several famous sculptures, and the Castle Clinton, the two-hundred-year-old sandstone fort that had originally been a cannon battery. But the main attraction was the ferry across New York Harbor to Liberty Island—the ride coming only after tourists had waited for an hour plus in the hot sun and paid cash for drinks and snacks and items like foam Statue of Liberty crowns. In the vicinity of the ferry dock, Doyle had found a hundred dollars or more here on forty-seven different days. (Three times, he’d even found hundred-dollar bills—experiences that were bittersweet because he pitied the people who’d lost them.)

It was ten o’clock now, and shaping into the sort of day that made it worthwhile for Doyle to come to Battery Park even when he found no money. It was warm, but not too warm, with the sun transforming the Hudson into a mosaic of blues and greens, the trees and lawns at peak verdure, and Castle Clinton shining like a castle out of a fairy tale. Better still, hundreds of enchanted tourists stood on line for the ferry.

He also saw two of his “colleagues,” Archie and Roberta, sweeping their Fisher Gold Bug Pro metal detectors over the lawn where a yoga class had just wrapped up. Good, thought Doyle. That left him exclusive access around the Battery Place benches, where, between seven and nine, Wall Streeters nursed coffees from the carts, savoring nature before having to trudge off to windowless trading floors.

Now, shoving off, the last of the coffee and pastry cart vendors waved to Doyle. It was prime hunting time.

As Doyle started toward Battery Place, a strong gust off the Hudson raised the breakfast debris from beneath the benches—the usual spent napkins, disposable cup lids, wax-paper wrappers. Much of the litter lodged in the row of arborvitae shrubs along the back wall of the castle. Doyle thought he spied the corner of a bill protruding from the leaves. That unique stiffness of the blend of linen and cotton was unmistakable even through his declining trifocaled vision. He fought the urge to run to it, reluctant to draw attention to his find.

Fortunately, no one else was even in the vicinity. When Doyle was thirty feet from the bill, a bit of breeze swayed the shrub, causing the ink on the uppermost corner to glint from black to green, in turn giving him an exhilarating jolt. The most remarkable of the security features on the recently redesigned hundred-dollar note was the Treasury Department’s proprietary color-shifting ink, black when viewed from some angles, green when seen from others, the result of multifaceted metallic flakes mixed into the ink.

As he knelt to collect his prize, he felt a stinging blow to his left shoulder blade. A sharp, stabbing pain, as though he’d been speared. He pitched forward into the shrubbery, which should have felt sharp and scratchy. He should have felt the branches scraping into his flesh—but he did not.

And then the shrubbery seemingly engulfed him, and after a moment everything went still and silent and black.