The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (9 page)

T
aking in the subject line of Yodeler’s e-mail, Fisk experienced the same jolt he did when he was fishing and felt a big one strike his line. He tried to hide it.

“What is it?” asked Chay.

“An e-mail,” he said. Technically, it was a Hushmail, a message from an e-mail service that encrypted all traffic and routed it in such a way that it couldn’t be traced, thus making Hushmail the Hotmail of spooks. This message, “TO THE SO-CALLED AUTHORITIES,” was from USER435982768.

“I know it’s an e-mail,” she said. “Let’s see it.” She waved at the monitor.

Why not? He thought. He double-clicked to open the message. In order for the text to be decrypted, he cued a prompt that informed him that he needed to supply the correct response: A PATRIOT WHO USED MARKAROV 9MMS? Grudgingly he entered YODELER, which worked, allowing him to read:

One way or the other, I shall bring to light your violations of the public trust. One way is the continuation of the daily sacrifices. The other way is the immediate release from captivity of the patriot, Mr. Merritt Verlyn, so that he may in turn release the truth.

—YODELER

P.S. Perhaps the alternate ammunition has thrown your confederates. This morning’s victim, whose blood is on your hands, has Remington 9mms in her.

Chay might be of use to the investigation after all, Fisk thought. If she saw blood on her own hands, she might give up the Verlyn documents.

“I’m not the only one who might be part of the story,” said Fisk.

He pivoted his monitor toward her side of the desk so that she could see Yodeler’s e-mail, then he watched while she read. He hoped to catch her reaction to the Verlyn bombshell. She blinked, but no differently than people did ten or fifteen times during a given minute, to keep their eyes clean. She played her cards close to the vest. A compelling quality, he thought, except if you’re trying to read her.

He asked, “Do you think he’s a fan of Verlyn’s or he’s just after the release of the documents?”

“Maybe both.”

He watched her. “Does that make you more inclined to cooperate?”

She glared. “Why would it?”

“The Department’s objective on this case—the FBI’s objective too—is to bring the killer to justice at the lowest possible cost, with cost measured in bodies. If releasing the documents prevents killings, we’d release the documents. We would just need to get a look at them beforehand.”

“So that you could redact the incriminating stuff?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of looking at the documents ahead of time to make sure releasing them wouldn’t put a different set of lives in danger, like men and women who are working on behalf of our national security.”

She raised her shoulders. “I don’t have anything to say that I didn’t already say in court.”

“All you said in court, if I’m not mistaken, was that you weren’t going to testify.”

She said, “Exactly.”

“Super.” Her philosophy aggravated him; her gumption impressed him.

“What about the Remington nine-millimeter bullet part?” she asked.

“I was just going to ask the computer that,” he said, pivoting the monitor back to its original position and typing his way into the Department database.

New York City averaged north of four hundred homicides per year, so it was quite possible that one—or five—hadn’t made it onto his radar.

In fact, there had been two in the past twenty-four hours. Both were news to him. The first was at one in the morning, a bodega owner pumping a wannabe thief full of buckshot. The second was reported two hours later. Hoping that the details might nudge Chay to a philosophical middle ground where he could get a look at the Verlyn cache, he said, “The victim was a young African American woman, Tameka Ann Crowley. Tameka spent the vast majority of her waking hours at St. Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village, where she was an oncology resident. She lived alone—and died—in number 435 West Seventeenth Street, apartment 9E. She was found here by police who broke down her door after neighbors heard gunshots and called 911. The crime-scene unit found a small-caliber bullet in her inner wall. It could be a Remington nine-millimeter. The other slug is still in her head.”

Chay’s brow knitted. “But she was inside her apartment when she was shot?”

Fisk nodded. “A minimally furnished five-hundred-square-foot studio.”

“So if Yodeler did it, wouldn’t he have had to be in the apartment with her?”

“Unless . . .” Fisk let his thoughts settle, reminding himself he was in the presence of a reporter.

“Unless what?”

Fisk said, “If whoever killed Tameka Ann Crowley had been inside her apartment, the responders shouldn’t have needed to break down the door.”

“Meaning . . .”

She knew full well what it meant. But in true reporting fashion, she wanted him to say it.

“Unless he used a drone.”

Fisk snapped up his sport coat from its usual position, in a ball on the nearest free surface, in this case the top of a stack of moving boxes. “I’ll be right back.”

She stepped into his path to the door. “No, you don’t. You’re not going to the crime scene without me.”

In his rush to get to Tameka Ann Crowley’s apartment, Fisk realized, he’d neglected to formulate an exit strategy. Maybe for the best. Because all of a sudden he had some leverage: Chay wanted to go to the crime scene. When told by police that they could not enter a crime scene, reporters and photographers bleated that news gathering was protected by the First Amendment; otherwise freedom of the press would be eviscerated. But in fact the courts had never spelled out the privileges that news gathering entailed, meaning that keeping reporters out of a crime scene violated no constitutional rights.

“If you want to shadow me to the crime scene, you have to agree that any information you gather there is off the record.”

“No problem,” she said with zero hesitation, making him wonder if there was in fact a problem that he’d overlooked.

“That includes anything you hear.”

She shrugged. “Every syllable is off the record and for my background use only, of course. I wouldn’t want my presence to impede your investigation.”

Surprisingly reasonable, he thought. And highly suspect.

He led her out the basement exit, which he’d been using for two weeks. It took them into an air shaft. Its cement floor was caked in droppings from the pigeons that roosted in and around the window air conditioners on the adjacent ten-story apartment building.

Chay either wrinkled her nose in mystification, or held it against the stench. “Is this a shortcut?”

He didn’t feel the need to share his paranoia about Cartel hit teams.

He used his key to the neighboring apartment building—best she didn’t know how he’d obtained it—and ushered her into the labyrinthine basement, which gave him three different ways out: the service entrance, the main lobby, and the laundry room. He opted for the last, an expanse of rusty washers and dryers and cracked linoleum whose fire-door alarm was broken. The door led up a few steps to an alley, which in turn led to West Sixteenth Street, which was clear. Or it appeared to be.

T
hey walked the block and a half to West Seventeenth Street between Ninth and Tenth. At ten on an overcast morning, traffic consisted of a trickle of pedestrians.

They looked up at Tameka Ann Crowley’s building, a slender prewar construction that, a few architectural flourishes notwithstanding, amounted to a fourteen-story stack of limestone blocks. It was similar to several other tenements on the block, grayed to further uniformity by weather and soot. A narrow alley separated the eastern side of the building from its neighbor, a ten-story warehouse. The entirety of the warehouse’s brick sidewall was covered by the peeling remains of an ad for Horn & Hardart’s Forty-Second Street and Broadway Automat, a Rockwell-type painting of a young woman happily placing a coin in a sandwich vending machine, the slogan
LESS WORK FOR MOTHER
.

Fisk counted nine picture windows up the eastern side of
Crowley’s building—she had lived in 9E. There were two windows on the ninth floor, a sliver of a frosted-glass casement, probably belonging to the bathroom, was closed—painted shut, if it was anything like the majority of bathroom windows in older New York buildings. The larger of the two main windows was open halfway. The combined bedroom and living room of Tameka Ann Crowley’s studio, Fisk figured. Possibly the young oncologist relied on the narrow alley for ventilation. According to the detective’s report, she had paid $2,500 a month in rent. Which was cheap for Manhattan; this was as low-rent as buildings got around here. Even if she had been able to afford an air conditioner, old buildings like this one couldn’t handle the power requirements. The residents often hoisted up their windows on summer nights, only closing them, for security purposes, when they left for work the next morning.

“So can we go up there now?” asked Chay.

“No,” Fisk said. “We’ve already seen all we need to.”

U
pon entering the Joint Terrorism Task Force’s lobby, Fisk checked his cell phone with the security officer—cell phones were prohibited in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where he was headed. Chay was required to stay in the lobby as well, her status as his shadow having failed to impress Weir.

“Hey,” she said, calling after Fisk as though they had been partners forever.

Fisk shrugged. “Maybe next time,” he said.

At the entrance to the SCIF, he entered the code on what appeared to be a digital version of a telephone keypad. The difference between it and other such keypads was that the keys themselves couldn’t be seen from any angle but yours. Also, as you input the code, the numbers on the keys rearranged themselves, at random, to prevent anyone who was sneaking a look from learning anything based upon your hand positions.

Gaining admission, Fisk stepped into a work space that was cavernous not just in size but in its subterranean feel, a result of the absence of windows. Windows were prohibited in SCIFs, as were wall hangings or anything else that required putting a hole in the wall. Although everyone in the Chelsea FBI office had passed thorough background checks and polygraph exams, they didn’t need to know what was being said in the SCIF. For the same reason, the walls of
the SCIF contained three times the requisite number of Sheetrock layers, each layer surrounded by cotton-fiber acoustical batting and coated with latex sound-dampening sealant.

The heating and air-conditioning ductwork was soundproofed too, and access to the ducts required a key to the steel sleeves around them, essentially cylindrical cages, comprising half-inch-thick bars welded horizontally and vertically at six-inch intervals. The FBI guarded against off-site eavesdroppers as well: all of the plumbing in the SCIF and in the vicinity was wrapped in special padding to prevent it from carrying electrical signals. For the same reason, utility lines weren’t permitted within ten feet of the room, save for the single cable dedicated to the SCIF that threaded through a secure aperture less than an inch in diameter. Everything was swept by security each morning and evening, seven days a week.

Fisk passed agents working at terminals in fifteen clusters of four workstations—the SCIF’s computers, containing classified information, had their own network. He entered a compact conference room where Weir and Evans sat at a table with three other men—two Field Intelligence Group analysts, or FIG, and a psychologist from the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit—and a woman, a CIA Middle East analyst who was assigned to the JTTF.

By way of greeting, Weir said, “Fisk, I was just getting into how we ought to respond to our e-mail.”

Sitting down, Fisk smiled to himself. “Our e-mail?” he asked. There was a lot of truth to the old saying that the FBI is a company of ten thousand agents all struggling to stay at the bottom so they could keep fighting crime. But Weir hadn’t made it to the head of this table on selflessness alone.

“Here’s the reply that we propose,” Evans said. Then he read from a legal pad: “‘We do not, as a matter of policy, negotiate with terrorists.’”

Which was the opposite of the approach the case merited, Fisk
thought. He asked the table, “What if instead we were to suggest to Yodeler that the ‘so-called authorities’ see that there is no choice but to bow to his leverage?”

“What’s the upside in that?” asked the young woman from the CIA. Intelligence shone through cat-eye glasses that better suited a woman fifty years her senior.

Fisk liked her instantly. “During the early stages of an investigation, I’m always asking myself, ‘Who’s out there?’ From the e-mail, we’ve learned that Yodeler is a Merritt Verlyn fan. Verlyn, of course, is an NSA analyst. And Yodeler is familiar with Hushmail. So probably he’s been around the law enforcement or intelligence community block, or at least he knows enough about it that he probably won’t be affected by the usual law enforcement strategy of breaking his resolve by dissing him.”

The CIA woman nodded. The two FIG agents reacted in similar fashion. Weir cleared his throat. “So, what, Fisk, you want to give him Verlyn?”

“Of course not,” said Fisk, trying not to tip his aggravation. “The trick is to convince Yodeler that he’s making progress.”

“What do you have in mind?” asked Evans. His interest, unlike his partner’s, seemed sincere.

Fisk said, “We write him back and say something like ‘Thank you for your response, Mr. Yodeler. Of course our wish is that there be no further slaughter of innocents. So I will, at once, investigate obtaining a conditional release of Mr. Verlyn. The thing is, this is an area in which law enforcement has very limited powers. We can influence decisions, but it may take time. How’s that, Yodeler?’”

“It might be beneficial for Yodeler to have one person here to talk to,” offered the psychologist, a thirty-something man with immaculate skin named Pole. “Otherwise he’s getting a memo from the nameless, faceless authorities whom he holds in contempt.”

Decent point, Fisk thought. “Most of the homicidal maniacs in
town already know where I live,” he said. “We can give Yodeler my phone number while we’re at it, on the off chance that he slips up and calls in a way that gives us something.”

“Yes, dialogue’s now the key,” Weir said, as if he’d advocated the tactic from the get-go. “Fisk, give me your message in writing, and I’ll run it up the flagpole.”

Ideally Fisk would have already e-mailed his response to Yodeler. The Bureau’s multiple layers of approval would only slow things down. But he needed the FBI in order to effectively play his lead. J. Edgar Hoover’s genius had been in amassing manpower; he capitalized on superior numbers as well as any tactician in history. Now, with people at more than four hundred field offices and resident agencies in the United States, the Bureau was better equipped than any service on the planet—probably better equipped than any five services put together—to work this case the old-fashioned way, doggedly pursuing leads one at a time. Which is what was in order. A lead would have to be opened on every single one of the hundreds of thousands of people who owned a drone, or even the parts, then they would have to investigate one person at a time.

The FBI might also claim jurisdiction to task the NSA and National Reconnaissance Office resources, the politics of which would be problematic if the NYPD were at the helm of the case. Although the hourly operational cost of a satellite exceeded that of a 747, a single frame of imagery, even a blurry one, could be almost as helpful as videotape of the killer at the drone’s controls; no more than three or four drones took flight on a given day in New York City without FAA clearance.

Weir ceded the floor to Pole, the psychologist, who was from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. He had scruffy-chic hair and a shiny olive-green suit—anything but close-cropped and drab stood out as quirky in the staid Bureau. He began with “The suspect is now wanted for murdering three New Yorkers, and in his choices of victims, he is slowly revealing how he thinks, which can help us hone in on his true identity. What I’d like us to do first is take
a look at his ‘hunting zone.’ As you all know, killers are usually reluctant to venture too far away from their homes because they like having the ability to get back to safety as expeditiously as possible. We should also spend time on behavioral clues, like who the victims are and where the killer has chosen to murder them. That way we can get an idea of what he’s like in the rest of his life, which will help us find him.”

This sounded to Fisk like the introduction to a two-hour tangent. He asked Pole, “What if we just consider for a moment the possibility that the guy is simply choosing victims at random?”

Stroking an invisible beard, the psychologist said, “Random actions are by definition chosen without method or conscious decision. The decision to take victims purely at random is in and of itself a methodology, and from it, we can get a glimpse at his thinking, and perhaps derive evidence that can help narrow down Yodeler’s true identity—for example that he’s intelligent, orderly, quantitative.”

Taking in the nods around the table, Fisk wondered: Were these people just being polite? “What if he’s flying a drone around and using it to shoot whoever he happens to see?”

“A drone?” said one of the FIG agents as if the word were foreign to him. Or maybe, Fisk thought, he was among the many in intel and law enforcement who abhorred the term “drone.”

“A UAV,” Fisk said, again exercising maximum patience. The term they preferred—unmanned aerial vehicle—encompassed the entirety of the unit, the vehicle itself as well as the ground-based controller and the communications connecting them. A drone, they maintained, was just a mindless weapon.

“Is this just a hypothetical?” asked Weir, reaching for his coffee cup.

“Have you been to the Tameka Ann Crowley crime scene?” Fisk asked.

Weir picked up his coffee mug, the vapor blurring his features. “No, why?”

“Her living room window was open.”

Weir slurped. “So Yodeler shot her from outside?”

“The window faces a brick wall. To get a line on her, either he would have had to use a remotely controlled weapon. Or be Spider-Man.”

No one said anything right away. Processing, Fisk hoped.

Weir asked, “Why couldn’t the shooter have used an elevator or the stairs to get to a roof on one of the buildings across the street?” He turned to Evans. “Isn’t that what happened?”

Evans opened a folder and ran his index finger down a report. “That’s what it looks like, yes. Of course air resistance, gravity, wind, et cetera, make it easy to incorrectly analyze the flight path of a bullet . . .”

“A UAV explains how he could shoot around all the trees in the parks,” Fisk tried, resulting only in the sound of keyboards clicking, from the cubicles outside the conference room, the SCIF equivalent of crickets.

“Maybe.” Evans sounded like an encouraging parent of a slow child.

“If the shooter had used a remotely piloted system, wouldn’t we be able to see video of it?” asked the CIA woman.

“Unfortunately the cameras in these areas are all angled downward, because all the action we’re usually interested in is on the ground,” Fisk said. “Yodeler could have sent in a remotely piloted jumbo jet and the cameras would have missed it.”

“Except a jumbo jet would’ve cast a shadow,” said Weir, turning to Pole as if in search of a lifeline.

A decent point, Fisk thought. “Certainly the tech group looked for shadows on the ground. Maybe the angle of the sun was such that the drone cast a shadow on a tree. Or a cloud might have precluded a shadow altogether?”

“This is really excellent stuff, Detective Fisk,” said Pole with too much gratitude. “If the suspect were in fact using such a device, that
would be considerable ‘leakage’—insight into his psychology that we can glean from his methodology. Sketching a profile of such a killer really does require a complex blend of art, science, and psychology, and it can be especially useful in cases like this where the evidence is lacking.”

The shrink was right about one thing, Fisk thought: the evidence was lacking.

He left at the first possible opportunity.

He found Chay in the lobby, studying the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted board. Quietly fuming.

Fisk decided he preferred her doggedness to the dissembling he had experienced upstairs.

“Let’s go get some evidence,” he said.

T
here’s never been a better time to be a sniper,” said the onetime Army sharpshooter Pete Peavy as he ushered Fisk and Chay out of his company’s reception area and toward his office. “Take this one job I did back in 2000, when we were in Sierra Leone. I had to lie in full camo in cold, rank muck for the better part of three days, sometimes having to stay so still that the leeches had the run of me—and took full advantage of it. Today I could do the same job from my house in East Hampton, thanks to these guys.” He tapped the cartoon painted on the wall above the receptionist’s desk, a trio of badass anthropomorphic warplanes. It was the logo of his UAV start-up, Flying Robots, LLC.

“What exactly can they do for a sniper?” Chay said.

It was for this information, Fisk thought, that they had come to Tribeca.

“I’ll try and show you,” Peavy said, leading them down a long corridor that, like the reception area, was lined with bamboo rods. In rows on the walls were framed action photos of surfers, all autographed—Duke Kahanamoku, Kelly Slater, Laird Hamilton.

The beach theme matched Peavy’s laid-back appearance, which was purely cosmetic, Fisk thought. On the inside, his friend was filled to capacity with a desire to compete, or, specifically, to win. Fisk hadn’t been surprised when Peavy went, in just two years, from a lowly instructor at a little Krav Maga studio on the Lower East Side to the proprietor of eighteen state-of-the-art self-defense training centers in New York, New Jersey, and Tel Aviv. It was just a matter of time, Fisk thought, until Peavy laced a tie through the collar of one of his signature Hawaiian shirts and rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange to open trading on the day of the Flying Robots initial public offering.

“People think what we do here is on the cutting edge.” Peavy ran his hand along a glossy white polyurethane surfboard, mounted on the wall. “But the truth—between you, me, and any NSA folks listening—is that there’s nothing being done here, or in the whole commercial UAV industry for that matter, that wasn’t already done forty years ago.” He stopped before the lone still photo, a black-and-white seated portrait of a relatively somber man in a suit, his dark hair slicked back in the midcentury business fashion. “Now this here is the man!”

It was a blowup, Fisk guessed, of a faculty photograph from a midcentury university course catalog. There was no autograph, just a printed label on the base of the frame:
DR. FOSTER
.

“The inventor of parasailing?” Fisk guessed.

“Way bigger, bro. Dr. John S. Foster was the physicist who ran the Livermore National Lab, the federally funded nuke research place. At home, in his spare time, he dabbled in remote-control airplanes, for fun. Until one day in 1971, he said to himself, ‘Hey, this little hobby of mine could be turned into shit that’s more effective against the enemy than the nukes I work on at my day job.’”