The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (16 page)

O
n the face of it,
New York Times
director of security Ed Norman had a simple task: get Chay Maryland into a car.

He was standing outside in the doorway of the Tech and Design School on the middle of West Thirty-Seventh between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, puffing intermittently on a Pall Mall cigarette. For whatever reason, Pall Mall had been the cheapest brand at the kiosk he passed on the five-block walk from the Times Tower. Most were $13 a box. At $12, he knew, Pall Mall was still three times the average price in many other states. Albany imposed a tax of about $4.50 per pack, and the city added another couple bucks on top of that. It had never bothered Norman until today, because he didn’t smoke, hadn’t in twenty-odd years. But the cigarette gave him license to loiter outside the Tech and Design School, along with students and faculty members on their nicotine breaks. Otherwise his presence might have seemed suspicious.

In the five minutes he’d been here, both of the other smokers had gone back into the building, leaving him alone to look up and down the rain-slicked block. Any moment Chay would round a corner, probably on foot; the weather would have made it difficult for her to get a cab downtown. As soon as he spotted her, he would click the Weather Channel app on his phone, reconfigured to covertly notify Lin of her arrival.

Once Norman verified that she was alone and that no one was tailing her, he would click the Weather Channel app a second time to close it, providing the go-ahead for the yellow taxi in which Lin waited now.

The cab was a good choice of venue for the sort of discussion Lin had planned. A ten-buck gadget powered by the car’s cigarette lighter could jam the signal to a cell phone or any RFID device on a person, precluding electronic eavesdropping and leaving a trail. A two-hundred-buck device could make it appear to eavesdroppers that the conversation was taking place fifty blocks away, or fifty states away. The cab, as opposed to the use of a private car, was also designed to minimize Norman’s exposure. According to Lin, the Ministry of State Security, the agency of the People’s Republic of China responsible for foreign intelligence, had further use for the ex-FBI agent.

If Chay were to link Norman to the Chinese, however, he would be an accessory to kidnapping, for starters. No reason at all she would make the connection now, he thought. Yet something troubled him about the arrangement.

He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he’d learned to pay attention to such instincts. So what the hell was it? He’d orchestrated exponentially more complex operations before, including the exfiltration of a Pakistani national from Pakistan’s consulate on East Sixty-Fifth Street here in New York. When Pakistani ISI officers first began to suspect that the woman was cooperating with the FBI, in their typical fashion, they decided they would pack her off to a dark cell in Islamabad and ask questions there. Norman’s team planned to rescue her the night before she was to leave. Entering the New York consulate along with a legitimate local party-supply company working an event at the consulate, he and two other agents concealed the woman in what appeared to be one of the band’s speakers. They dollied her out in the speaker, right past the ISI officers, and handed her over
to U.S. marshals, who spirited her into WitSec. He hadn’t heard of her since, meaning she was okay, probably in a sweet three-bedroom house in Scottsdale or some such perma-vacation town favored by defectors, with a new Cadillac Escalade in the carport—defectors were crazy for Escalades.

He had to admit to himself now that he was concerned for Chay’s welfare. Yes, Lin had assured him that it would be a simple Q&A. But Lin lied for a living. On the other hand, to Lin’s credit, each of the previous three times Norman had worked for the MSS, $45,500 appeared in his Bank of Reykjavik account before the op, and another $49,500 twenty-four hours after mission accomplished, like clockwork. And even in the deception business, reputation mattered. But what if, once Lin had gotten the location of the Verlyn cache from Chay, his people decided to cover their tracks by killing her on the spot and putting her body in one of their notorious “golf cases” (the Chinese solved the problem of urban-theater body disposal with mobile liquefaction chambers that, on the outside, looked like the hard plastic cases used by wealthy executives and PGA players to bring their golf bags on flights)? It was more likely that the Chinese would be averse to killing an American on U.S. soil, especially someone of Chay’s prominence.

Right?

Yes, yes, of course, Norman told himself. Probably Lin would put a hook into Chay, give her no choice but to cooperate. She had an older brother who paid for his heroin habit importing alpaca sweaters from Bolivia, selling them for twenty times what he paid for them. Lin’s people would fix things so that Chay’s brother was picked up on a narcotics charge and sentenced to twenty years without hope of parole in a filthy Bolivian hole—unless she gave up the goods. If she still refused, her brother’s life would be brought into play.

Norman asked himself for the thousandth time whether he was giving Lin too much this time. No, for God’s sake. It was just a
bunch of documents that had already been stolen and would surface one way or another. Someone was going to profit; might as well be the Norman family. And he desperately needed the money now to clean up their latest messes. His son the gambling addict was in serious debt to “heavy guys,” on top of the usual alimony and support for his other two children, his grandsons, and granddaughter. Then there was Norman’s wife, with an addiction of her own to expensive purchases—like a pair of Italian shoes she “picked up” for him at $1,100. He tried to return them to the fop shoe store, but was unable to because $1,100 had been a clearance price. Craziness.

Chay rounded the northwest corner from Seventh Avenue, walking east across Thirty-Seventh Street. Her face was veiled by her umbrella, but he recognized the long legs and proportionate gait. Still he wasn’t certain it was her until he caught her reflection in a storefront window across the street. Anxiety began to press at Norman’s chest. Locking the cigarette between his lips, he drew his phone from his suit pants pocket and clicked the Weather Channel to life. He glanced at the results—sixty-three and raining—only for the sake of appearance. Really he was searching the street for surveillants.

No one followed her around the corner. Pedestrian traffic was negligible to begin with due to the rain and, perhaps, the drone. Ordinarily New Yorkers moved as swiftly as anyone, but the rain not only slowed them but caused greater variation in their paces than usual, making it easier to pick out a tail. Norman saw nothing suspicious on the sidewalks. And unless the Bureau had commandeered an M7 bus and its twenty-some passengers, there was nothing doing on the street. He clicked out of the Weather Channel app and repocketed his phone. Time to go to work.

When Chay was halfway to him, a yellow Crown Victoria cab turned right from Seventh Avenue and onto Thirty-Seventh Street, the “off-duty” sign illuminated. The taxi rolled past Chay and then Norman, pulling up at the curb on his side of the block, its “off-duty” sign
dimming and the medallion number flashing on, signifying its availability.

Chay stopped a few feet from Norman and said, “I’m afraid this is a setup.”

Shocking him.

How had she figured it out?

“No, no,” he tried to assure her. “The source is just afraid that the drone will get him, so he wants to talk to you in a taxi.”

“You’re in on it, aren’t you?” she asked.

Norman wondered how the hell she could have known. Or was this just one of her trick questions? She was known for that. Relax, he exhorted himself. “In on what?”

“The cab pulled up to the curb when I was on Seventh. The driver told me to keep on going, and to stay on the uptown side of the street. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t being followed.”

“Maybe it’s just a case of reasonable paranoia?”

“Maybe.”

The choice of the uptown side of the street made no sense to Norman. It also troubled him that Lin would have made contact with Chay already. Hot and prickly perspiration rose from his scalp. This wasn’t just a change of plans, he thought. This was the Chinese trying to tie up all loose ends, including their agent at the
New York Times
.

The taxi stood at the curb, engine still idling, the fog of exhaust fumes rent by the rain but still blurring the figure climbing out of the backseat, leaving the door open as he mounted the sidewalk. It was Lin, gripping something the size and shape of a pen, but something about the way it glowed red in the reflection of the taillights told Norman it wasn’t a pen, and put him on guard. Reflexively, he reached for his shoulder holster. Which wasn’t there. It had been two years since he’d worn it. The best course of action, he knew, was to retreat. Turn and run as fast as he could into the Tech and Design School.

Lin’s hand jumped back, the pen appearing to recoil. Norman felt a stab in his chest, just left of his sternum, like a bee sting. It shook him.

Chay, standing with her back to Lin, asked Norman, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he said.

But he wasn’t fine. It felt like his brain was turning to soup. He looked to his lapel expecting to see some sort of entry wound. A few tiny crystals shimmered there. He’d heard of darts made of ice that completely disintegrated upon entering the target—the CIA had used them in the seventies. They left nothing but a tiny red dot on the skin, but released a poison that rapidly entered the bloodstream, fatally, denaturing quickly so that an autopsy wouldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary about the heart attack.

He fell to the sidewalk, shoulders hitting first, head bouncing off the cement. But he didn’t feel anything. He lay flat on his back.

“Ed!” Chay dropped to his side.

He tried to shout to her to run. Run came out as a feeble “Rrr.”

“Is he okay?” asked Lin, jogging up.

Chay pressed a finger against the side of Norman’s neck. He could see her do it, but he couldn’t feel a thing. “His pulse is awfully low,” she said.

Lin looked him over. “Is his skin always that pale?”

Taking in Norman’s face, Chay’s eyes widened in alarm. “Looks like cyanosis.”

“What’s that?”

“I think he’s having a heart attack!” She quickly looked around. “We need an ambulance or—”

“We could take him to hospital.” Lin aimed a thumb at the cab.

“Yes, good idea,” she said to Lin.

The driver, a heavyset Hispanic man, bounded out of the taxi to help them. If it occurred to Chay that he’d sized up the situation and acted a beat too quickly, she didn’t show it. “You’re going to be okay,
Ed,” she said to Norman as she took his ankles. The two men each gripped a shoulder and hurried him toward the cab.

Norman attempted to scream, to tell her to run, to at least draw attention from passersby. Nothing happened. He couldn’t move. Not a muscle. Not a thing, including his lungs. He figured he had two minutes left.

T
ogether, the taxi driver, the passenger, and Chay carried Ed Norman into the backseat. Then the three got in, closed the doors, and the cab darted off.

Fisk watched on his phone while riding uptown on a 1 train going slower than he would have liked, but, fortunately, a beneficiary of the $200 million Transit Wireless program. The Wi-Fi allowed him to get into the Department system, which included a direct link to 911, the crime information database, the warrant system, readings from the city’s radiation and chemical detectors, and the feed from the Domain Awareness cameras. Several of the cameras were making use of the beta version of a system enhancement that intelligence and law enforcement insiders had taken to calling God’s Eye, due to its capabilities as well as the rumor that the Dayton, Ohio–based computer scientist who invented it had once attended divinity school with the intent of becoming a Catholic priest.

In her reporting on the NYPD’s data network and electronic surveillance capabilities, Chay hadn’t mentioned God’s Eye, probably because she hadn’t known about it. Fisk thought of the application as a live version of Google Earth, only with TiVo capabilities: it allowed you to rewind, zoom in, and automatically follow certain targets. In many stretches of the coverage, the target no longer disappeared off the screen to the right or left. The system blended the feed
with that of a high-resolution camera aboard either an airplane or a helicopter—soon to be replaced by far cheaper unmanned blimps—that captured a twenty-five-square-mile segment of the city, for six hours at a time. It was a tool as potent, he thought, as anything in the vaunted F6 arsenal.

He began with DOM-CAM 37-E8, Thirty-Seventh Street east of Eighth Avenue, finding the block quiet, as usual for this time of night. If you were going to set up a
New York Times
reporter for a drive-by abduction, Fisk thought, this was a prime location. You had a minimum of witnesses and onlookers who might interfere, plus you were close enough to the Times Tower that it seemed like a plausible meeting place for a source who was skittish about showing his face at the paper. It hadn’t aroused Chay’s suspicion. It aroused Fisk’s, but not until she’d left the pub. He had no idea why, though, until he was on the subway heading uptown to the office and his thoughts turned to Norman’s distinctive boat-shaped Bettanin & Venturi loafers at a cost of five hundred dollars—each. Then his internal alarm went off.

The bad guys, whoever they were, were trying to kill two birds with one stone. They were getting rid of Norman and, at the same time, using him to rob Chay of time to think, and to get her into the car. Fisk watched the cab zip across Eighth Avenue, unimpeded by traffic. If the driver were heading uptown, he would have turned right on Eighth—the avenue goes one way, uptown. So the cab was either continuing west or going downtown.

Fisk clicked his way to an operator at the EOC—Emergency Operations Center, the same place that fielded 911 calls—and he reported the 10-33 (kidnapping in process). Meanwhile he clicked into the feed from DOM-CAM 37-E9 in time to see the taxi sail along Thirty-Seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth. At the midpoint of the block, the cab’s left-turn signal began to flash, and then the brake lights glowed as it slowed to turn downtown on Ninth.

Fisk relayed these details, along with the cab’s license-plate number, KBY-2092—thank you, Microsoft numeric recognition
software. “And, of course, it’s a Crown Victoria,” he added of the taxi—for what that was worth. If you’re going to snatch someone off the streets of New York, Crown Victoria was the model for you. Crown Vics comprised more than half of the New York taxi fleet, with Ford Escape hybrids and Nissan minivans a distant second and third.

The 1 train shrieked to a stop at Penn Station. As soon as the doors opened, Fisk flew out. He jogged in and around the passengers waiting to board, ran up the stairs, and surfaced at the intersection of West Thirty-Third Street and Seventh Avenue, two blocks west of Ninth Avenue, where he hoped to intercept the Crown Vic cab.

He could probably run the two crosstown blocks in a minute. But once at Ninth Avenue, he would have to pick the Crown Vic out of a sea of essentially identical cars—at this time of night, two-thirds of the vehicles on the streets of Manhattan were yellow taxis. Assuming he could pick out the right Crown Vic, then what? Wade into traffic and flag the cab down, waving his Glock for incentive? Shoot at its tires? To brandish his gun carried a willingness to use it, and any shot in that environment risked a fatality. As little as stepping off the curb and waving a Glock might frighten a passing driver into sending his vehicle into another or onto the sidewalk. And all of this was assuming Fisk got to the intersection of Thirty-Third and Ninth in time, hardly a given.

His eye fell on a guy about his own age, in a lemon blazer and the sort of cowboy boots that could only be for show, much like the copper-gold Jaguar XJ sedan he was lowering himself into. The car was overpriced, in Fisk’s opinion, but quick.

He pulled up to the driver’s door as the Don Johnson wannabe turned over the engine. Rapping the driver’s window, Fisk got the guy’s attention. “Police business,” he said, flashing his shield. “I need to commandeer your vehicle.”

The guy didn’t budge. “Why
my
car?” he asked indignantly.

Fisk might have explained to him that if you’re an adult and a law
enforcement officer with proper identification requests your help in catching or arresting a suspect, recapturing an escaped arrestee or prisoner, or preventing a crime, you are required by law to oblige; otherwise you face a fine ranging from fifty to a thousand dollars.

Pressed for time, he ripped the door open and made for the safety-belt release button. The guy hadn’t buckled. Fisk seized him by the shoulders, hauled him onto the street, and jumped into the bucket seat, landing with his foot on the accelerator and his hand on the shifter. An automatic. Figured. He rammed it into D, the engine growled, and Thirty-Third Street began to jet past.

He heard a wail, the electronic version of the old air siren. It switched to a yelp, signifying that the operator of the emergency vehicle was approaching an intersection. Could be an NYPD cruiser closing in on Chay’s cab. Could be another squad car responding to another disturbance. Sirens were part of New York’s sound track.

A station wagon shot out of a parallel spot to the left and onto the single-lane street, two car lengths ahead of him. If the driver had seen the Jaguar at all, she grossly underestimated its speed. The city, in Fisk’s mind, compacted to only the wheel and hood of the Jaguar, the passenger side of the station wagon, and the Jaguar-width gap between the station wagon and the van parked on the opposite side of the block, a gap that was now narrowing.

He sped up, shooting the car into the gap, threading the needle, sending him hurtling into the four lanes’ worth of brisk crosstown traffic at the intersection of Eighth. Wary of hydroplaning on the rain-slicked street, he pumped the brake. The Jaguar slid nevertheless, the tires howling, edging the hood across the stop line, inches from broadsiding a speeding cab, before Fisk brought the car to a halt.

The cab, whose driver honked angrily, was a Crown Victoria. Not the right driver, though. The vast majority of the vehicles on Eighth were yellow, with as many as twenty of them, to Fisk’s glance, Crown Vics.

One outpaced the rest, shifting lanes and weaving recklessly
around cars and trucks. The driver was crazy, Fisk thought, even by the high standard of crazy set by New York cabbies.

He couldn’t see the driver. But the woman in the backseat was white, and corpulent, with short blond hair. Essentially Chay’s opposite. Which didn’t preclude Chay from being in the taxi, along with the young Asian, the two of them perhaps keeping their heads below the window line, the blonde serving as a decoy.

Yelps emanated from a Ford Taurus NYPD cruiser five cars behind the taxi in question, the cruiser’s light bar alternating between red and blue. The new Taurus cruiser didn’t intimidate anyone on appearance or muscle, but it was “smart,” equipped with an infrared monitor capable of scanning license-plate numbers, and 360-degree surveillance cameras that transmitted live video to NYPD headquarters, where it was analyzed by powerful computers.

Fisk followed the Taurus driver’s line of sight to another taxi, three cabs ahead, also a Crown Vic. Chay was in plain view in the backseat, across from the Asian. Along with traffic, the cab was heading downtown at about thirty miles per hour.

Fisk jumped the red light at Thirty-Seventh, turning left onto Ninth. His Jaguar fell in two lanes to the left of the Ford Taurus cruiser. The two taxis ahead of the Taurus peeled off in deference to the lights and the yelp, looks of profound relief from both drivers upon realizing that the police car was after someone else.

Paying no heed to the police car, the Crown Vic taxi shot ahead, slaloming around a sanitation truck. Traffic began to part in deference to the police, allowing the cruiser to get within a few car lengths of the taxi.

Fisk had no such luck, blocked by the cars slowing and stopping to let the police car past. Still the policemen’s options weren’t much better than his own, a function of departmental pursuit policies designed to protect bystanders. In this instance, the police were prohibited from discharging their weapons. Shooting at the driver of a moving vehicle is a low-percentage play at best. Shooting out his
tires carried too many risks to bystanders. The Department’s recommended Pursuit Intervention Technique, using the car to strike the fleeing vehicle behind one of its rear wheels and put it into a spin, was even riskier. So the cops’ objective now was probably just to keep tabs on the Crown Vic and report its progress to headquarters so that other units could lay spike strips and roadblocks and bring the pursuit to a safe conclusion.

Finding a gap between two other taxis, Fisk accelerated the Jaguar, rounding a sanitation truck and yet another taxi, trying to get closer, but not too close. No reason to reveal himself, or even bring the Jaguar close and provoke Chay’s captors, who might have few compunctions about taking a risky shot. He figured they had an escape route planned. All of the cameras notwithstanding, a city of eight million was a great place to get lost. But would they have planned on a helicopter? Surely they heard it now, and felt the chops, as Fisk did, all over. The Jaguar’s sideview mirror showed him its skids. A Bell 412, about two hundred feet up.

Motion ahead snapped Fisk’s attention back to the street; he needed to brake to avoid rear-ending the taxi in front of him, a—what else?—Crown Vic.

Traffic congealed where Ninth Avenue met Twenty-Fifth Street. To continue, Chay’s Crown Vic taxi would have to drive over the four vehicles ahead of it. All traffic was now stopped for the light. Cars to either side penned the taxi in place. It was as though the chase had been put on pause. Red lights in Manhattan lasted from forty-five to a hundred and twenty seconds, based on traffic patterns at the time.

In waiting it out, Chay’s captors risked falling into the crosshairs of a shot that would qualify as relatively low risk. A cop or tactical-team member could advance on them and threaten to fire point-blank if they didn’t release Chay and then get out of the car, hands in the air. That was what the police had in mind, Fisk suspected, on spotting two more police vehicles, a GMC Yukon cruiser
and a tiny Smart car used by traffic enforcement. They both parked on Twenty-Fifth Street, one vehicle on either side of Ninth Avenue. An officer hustled out of each, toward the Crown Vic.

The taxi’s rear passenger-side door snapped open, and out slid the Asian, having put on a navy-blue armor-plated vest and a high-ballistic face shield—a black mask made of Kevlar. He cradled a TAR-21, a black, fully automatic assault rifle that looked more like a weapon from the
Terminator
movies than anything from present day. It included a 40mm grenade launcher and an optical scope that provided target images in 3-D via a holographic weapons sight.

The Jaguar was no longer of use. Fisk pulled it in front of a fire hydrant on the right side of Ninth. Before he could get out, while he jerked the shifter into park and readied up his Glock, the Asian leveled the TAR-21 at the cop approaching on Twenty-Fifth Street from the east, a big guy, who, at the sight of the rifle, ducked behind a parked van.

The Asian pressed the trigger, issuing three booming shots in rapid succession. The rounds tore into the steel siding of the van, exiting on the far side with enough force to lift the cop and hurl him backward, onto the street, where he didn’t move, and, from the looks of it, wouldn’t again.

Pivoting 180 degrees, the gunman sprayed a series of rounds, so close together that the staccato blasts blended into a continuous blare, felling the traffic cop, a young woman coming down Twenty-Fifth from the west. As the reverberations from the reports faded, the air filled with panicked screams of people running for cover or diving to the pavement. Vehicles near the intersection tore off, or tried to—several crashed.

Fisk dropped out of the driver’s door of the Jaguar and into a crouch below the roofline of the SUV parked between him and the gunman. He plotted a route in and around parked cars and a bus shelter that would permit him to advance the twenty or thirty yards, as quickly as possible, in order to get a shot at the Asian.

As if reading his mind, the Asian pivoted, aiming the gun up Ninth Avenue, on a line toward Fisk, and pulled the trigger.

Diving for the pavement, Fisk heard a
sproing
like that of a spud gun firing. The assault rifle’s grenade launcher, he realized, in the same instant that the grenade clanked into the hood of the Ford Taurus cruiser. Both policemen knelt in firing position on the street, shielded by their engine block. The explosion transformed the hood into a burst of fire, shrapnel, and glass that laid out both men and spat the rest of the car backward, into the grille of a
Daily News
delivery truck.

Most glass in the vicinity—cars and store windows—shattered. Shards that had been the Jaguar’s driver’s window cascaded down the driver’s door and onto Fisk.