The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (2 page)

With the trash bag held against his shirtfront, Fisk turned the door handle. Prior to stepping out, he intended to let go of the door handle and slide the gun from his waistband and into hiding behind the bag. Unfortunately the steel door offered extraordinary resistance, which had little to do with its steel plating or considerable weight. A hazard of the “Manhattan thermostat” was the wind tunnel effect an open window could cause within an apartment, with its force directed at the door.

This was a one-second fix, a hard tug. Then Fisk wedged his shoe into the gap between door and jamb. But that one second was enough to draw the full attention of Taurus and Tomahawk as well as the man from around the corner, their leader by virtue of seniority if his graying beard were any indication.

Taurus and Graybeard hid their weapons. Tomahawk let his dangle at his side, as if it were a nothing accessory. None of them appeared to recognize Fisk. But Mrs. Cooper did.

Before Fisk could devise a means of forestalling her, she asked, “What are you doing in the Fosters’ apartment, Jeremy?”

Tomahawk reared back to throw his ax at Fisk, Graybeard leveled his SIG, and Taurus aimed his pistol and squeezed the trigger.

Adrenaline compacted Fisk’s world into a tunnel between him and them: Mrs. Cooper, the walls, the ceiling, and everything else
outside the tunnel snapped into soft focus. He threw himself back into the Fosters’ apartment. Not that a door—even a thick steel-plated one—could do much more than slow a bullet traveling at a thousand feet per second. The idea was to remove his body from the gunmen’s view.

The bullet snapped through the steel plate and buzzed over his head, spraying wood dust into his eyes before boring into more metal in the kitchen, maybe the fridge. He cracked the door enough to peer into the hallway, and squinting against billowing wood dust, he returned fire. Three shots in rapid succession.

The first drilled through Tomahawk’s right clavicle, exiting behind him with a scarlet streamer, knocking him backward. He collapsed, losing his grip on the tomahawk. The metal handle cracked the glass over the framed English countryside painting before thunking to the floor.

The second and third shots painted dark red holes on Taurus’s neck and forehead and matching starbursts on the honeycomb wallpaper behind him. He fell to the floor as if he’d been turned to stone.

The reports—thunder in these confines—reduced Fisk’s hearing to a whine, beneath which he heard a Mexican-accented, “Drop your gun and come the fuck out now!”

Graybeard stood beside a petrified Mrs. Cooper, his sound suppressor wedged into her temple.

Fisk fired at him.

At such close range, a bullet would incapacitate Graybeard before he’d processed that he’d been fired upon—if the bullet were on target.

A purple cavity appeared on the man’s denim shirtfront, about an inch below the collar. He crumpled to the carpet, spraying a dark red stripe onto the wall behind him.

Mrs. Cooper’s eyes went white, and she teetered.

Fisk launched himself toward her, circumnavigating the three
prostrate figures, and catching her cleanly, save for her cumbersome evening bag, the contents of which crunched and clanked together on hitting the floor.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I . . .” She looked around, as if struggling to find focus. “I guess so.”

Motion drew his eyes to the mirror across the hall from the elevator: Tomahawk rolling on the carpet, snatching up Graybeard’s SIG.

Fisk allowed his momentum to carry him and Mrs. Cooper around the corner. She retained enough consciousness to snatch her bag by the leather straps.

Three coughs from the Taurus produced three holes in the wall—right where her head had been a second before.

Fisk set her onto the bench beside the elevator. Flattening himself against the wall, he reached his Glock around the corner and blindly fired. Four shots.

The mirror showed him the results, bullet holes in a row on the wall fronting his apartment, each spewing a ribbon of plaster dust.

Tomahawk, meanwhile, ducked into the emergency stairwell.

So now it was a standoff. Which was an improvement. Reinforcements would eventually arrive. Problem was, Fisk had ten bullets left and Tomahawk had at least twice that many just in the Beretta and the SIG.

“Do you have your apartment key?” he whispered to Mrs. Cooper, who was pressing the elevator call button over and over.

She began rummaging through her evening bag. “I was trying to get out my Taser when they came at me out on the sidewalk, and I think I dropped my key in here—”

The brass elevator door popped open, surprising them both, but offering a potential escape route. It could take them to the lobby faster than Tomahawk could get down seventeen flights of stairs.

The elevator was a better option, Fisk thought, than taking their chances with Tomahawk here until help arrived.

If
help arrived.

Fisk fired around the corner to keep Tomahawk at bay, then spun toward Mrs. Cooper. “Come on,” he said, taking her by the arm, helping her into the small car and hammering the button for the lobby.

The door rumbled shut. No bullets rang it. No hint of Tomahawk at all, though he had to be wise to their escape plan.

With an electrical grunt, the motor set to spinning the pulley, known as a sheave. (Fisk had learned this as a rookie while busting Alphabet City “shaft hackers,” thrill seekers who forced their way into elevator shafts and “surfed” up and down while balancing on the cars’ roofs.) The hoist ropes—steel cables that looped around the sheave—groaned as they lowered the car. Fisk sat against the thick brass handrail, deriving a measure of contentment from its solidity. The buzzing ventilation cooled the perspiration coating his forehead.

Mrs. Cooper gripped the handrail as if staying afoot depended on it, the veins and bones in her left hand all in plain sight through skin that was pale to the point of translucent, like an anatomical model. With her free hand, she rifled through her bag.

“Still looking for your key?” Fisk asked. He wondered if she was in shock.

“Oh, no, for this.” She fished out a clamshell phone and snapped it open. “To call the police.”

Fisk suspected that the shooting had already spurred several 911 calls, but another one couldn’t hurt. He started to say as much when the elevator car came to an abrupt and bumpy stop. He suspected that Tomahawk had run up to the machine room on the nineteenth floor, directly above the elevator shaft.

The ceiling light blinked out and the ventilation fan slowed to nothing. The handset icon on the elevator’s emergency phone flashed on, turning Mrs. Cooper’s bulging eyes pink. “What’s happening?” she asked, staggering to the center of the car as if the walls were closing in.

“Please, Mrs. Cooper, try to stay calm,” Fisk said. They didn’t need a case of claustrophobia-induced hyperventilation now. “He’s just trying to stop us from getting downstairs.”

In fact, Fisk suspected that the hit man was trying to accelerate their descent. A clank of metal against metal confirmed it. The guy was trying to tomahawk apart the braided steel cables suspending the elevator, to send the car into free fall.

“What if he cuts the cords?” asked Mrs. Cooper.

“The big pulley has an emergency braking system. When it spins too fast, centrifugal force raises a pair of weighted metal arms that clamp onto ratchets mounted inside the pulley, stopping its rotation.”

“What if he whacks apart those things too?”

“We’re still okay, because the elevator also has a backup system, electromagnetic brakes that engage when the power fails—”

As if Tomahawk had just taken the power into consideration, the car’s ceiling light came back on and the fan whirred to life. So much for an assist from the electromagnetic brakes.

The clanking resumed, sharp blows that resounded through the shaft. Fisk felt them in his teeth. “Maybe we should get out of here,” he said, thumbing the “open door” button.

Nothing happened.

The chopping from the top of the shaftway increased in pace and intensity.

Fisk dug his fingers into the narrow gap between the slab door and the frame, then threw his weight backward. To his surprise, the door came with him, revealing a stretch of sheer cinderblock wall between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors. Whether or not Tomahawk intended it, he’d stopped the car in perfect position to preclude their escape.

“Now what?” Mrs. Cooper asked, panic eroding her newfound poise.

“There are emergency brakes, plus a big piston at the bottom of the shaft that’s like a shock absorber, to cushion the impact.”

Her brow knitted.

With good reason. If this thing were to fall for three seconds, impact velocity would be near fifty miles an hour. “I might have a better idea,” he said. Though he didn’t. Not yet.

Standing on his toes, he reached up and slid aside one of the four opaque plastic panels that diffused the light of a fluorescent ring mounted at the ceiling’s center. To one side of the ring was the service hatch, used primarily to accommodate items like furniture that were too tall to fit in the elevator otherwise. He tugged at its lever.

Mrs. Cooper gasped. “But he’ll shoot you!”

Fisk released the hatch. “His view into the shaft is blocked by the machine room floor,” he said, hoping he was right.

He slid the service hatch to the side and looked up fifty feet of dimly lit vertical tunnel with guide rails to either side of the car. Without the hatch, the volume of the clanks increased. With each, the vibrations rippled the four steel cables hanging down the center of the shaftway to the crossbar bolted to the roof of the elevator.

An odd idea struck him. “Hey, Mrs. Cooper, did you say you have a Taser?”

“Yes, my daughter gave it—”

“Can I borrow it?”

She searched her shoulder bag, producing a fire-engine-red Taser C2, a state-of-the-art personal protection model the size of a banana. “What are you going to do?”

The car canted, and she fell into him. As his spine hit the wall, one of the four-inch-thick cables hit the roof with a metallic whipcrack before jangling down the shaft.

He reached for the Taser, and she handed it to him.

“Hang on now,” he said.

Grasping the light-panel grid, he pulled himself through the safety hatch and into the cold yet musty shaftway.

A clank resounded through the shaft.

Rising so that he stood parallel to the cables, Fisk snapped open
the Taser’s trigger compartment, automatically activating the system’s laser pointer. Steadying the pointer’s green dot on the closest of the three remaining braided steel cables, he pressed the trigger. With a hiss of nitrogen propellant and a
sproing,
out jumped two fifteen-foot-long wires, each tipped by a barbed probe. The first barb bit into the braided steel wire, right where the laser dot was. The second flew past and burrowed into the wall. Fifty thousand volts’ worth crackled through the wires—forming a circuit including the concrete (a surprisingly efficient electrical conductor), the steel cable, a sheave perched on a rubber vibration damper, and a metal tomahawk.

A bestial scream cascaded down the shaft, along with what sounded like the metal tomahawk dropping to the concrete machine room floor, followed by a body.

Fisk could be gratified later. New York’s average 911 response time was eight minutes and twenty-five seconds, so he was still on his own here. He needed to pry open the door to the fifteenth floor, hoist Mrs. Cooper through the service hatch, and get her to safety. And then he needed to alert other intelligence officers whose home addresses were now public along with the contact information for their secret sources—secret until a couple of hours ago, that is.

W
hen his phone rang, Brad Willoughby was walking past
Alma Mater,
the bronze sculpture of Athena that surveys much of the Columbia University campus from a marble throne. The caller was Douglas Moret, the zillionaire hedge-fund manager known to Willoughby’s eleven-year-old son, Gates, as Coach Doug. Something had to be very wrong to take Moret’s attention from work during trading hours.

Willoughby hit answer and blurted into the mouthpiece, “Hey, everything okay?”

“Good news and bad news, doc,” came Moret’s rapid-fire rasp.

“What happened?” Willoughby braced.

“The good news is, all of the coaches met last night, and Gates made the Greenwich all-star team.”

Relief flooded Willoughby, followed by a bubbly pride. The six hours between now and when he would be able to share the news with Gates would pass like weeks. He stopped next to
Alma Mater,
followed her gaze onto the emerald quad, and breathed in the fresh-mown grass, savoring the moment. Until he remembered: “What’s the bad news?”

“That Gates made the all-star team.” Moret guffawed. “The Little League World Series regionals tournament is next week. Pretty much all of next week.”

“Where?”

“Remember how you said a week in New Hampshire was in the ‘category of desirable problems’?”

Willoughby sat down on the pedestal and leaned back into the shade cast by Athena’s robe. “When I said that, back in April, I didn’t have to make a presentation that’s going to take every minute of next week to get ready.”

“Well, bud, who knows better than a professor how to get an extension? Gatesy on the mound gives us our best chance at Williamsport in sixty-however-many years. But, you know better than anybody, he’s got to be in the right frame of mind.”

Gates believed that their ritual father-and-son long tosses before his starts were indispensable, and that Willoughby himself was good luck. Willoughby hadn’t missed a single one of his son’s games going back to his tee-ball debut eight years ago. He wanted to be in New Hampshire next week for Gates. He wanted to be there for himself too: fatherhood didn’t get much better than that. If only it were as simple as getting an extension. The presentation a week from Monday was in Washington at the Department of Commerce. On the line was a $20 million check to Columbia to develop a new firewall for the proprietary data network shared by the Bureau of Industry and Security and the two other major economic intelligence services, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence.

“I’ll try and work something out,” Willoughby told Moret before ringing off.

He wasted no time texting his two best assistants and inviting them to lunch at the Faculty Club, the private four-star restaurant that was second only to being located in Manhattan among Columbia perks. It would help the sales pitch, he thought. He hoped to convince at least one of them to stay on campus and work in his place through next week’s July Fourth break.

Two hours later, after they’d given the waiter their lunch orders,
he put the question to Mary Ann Hunter. A blonde in the Dietrich mold, Mary Ann might have been a starlet herself if not for her obsession with computer science. She neglected her health, social life, and most everything other than work. In asking her to work through the holiday, he felt as if he were letting an alcoholic stay at the bar past closing time.

“I would totally love to,” she said. “The thing is, my brother’s wedding is next week, in Anchorage. I’ll try, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get out of it.”

“First let’s try Plan Ji.” Willoughby turned to Ji-Hsuan Lin, a titanic intellect concealed in the form of a demure twenty-five-year-old who could pass for twelve. He’d won a full ride here from a town in western China that had no electricity or running water, let alone computers.

Holding his fork and knife in the wrong hands now, Ji appeared to be puzzling over how to attack the still-steaming Yorkshire pudding on his bread plate. “For the Independence Day, I schedule to go to fish in Maine with friends,” he apologized.

“That sounds great,” Willoughby said with all sincerity. It was good to know that the kid had friends. But it didn’t solve the immediate problem. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you could reschedule your fishing trip, with the department reimbursing you for any cancellation fees?”

Ji stared at his Coke. “Possibility,” he said.

He probably meant possibility in a strictly mathematical sense, Willoughby thought, for instance a 1-in-100,000 chance. “If it helps, we can pick up your car rental or hotel—or anything, really—if you wanted to choose another week.”

“I will see.” Ji flashed a toothy smile, although it wasn’t warranted.

“And if you can stay here, I’ll make it worth your while. I have really good Philharmonic tickets Tuesday night that I wouldn’t be using, and I’ll throw in dinner at the restaurant of your choice. Any restaurant, really.”

Ji bit his lip. Willoughby knew the look: reluctant to let down the esteemed professor and mentor.

It was an act.

“How many tickets to Philharmonic?” he asked Willoughby, intentionally dropping the article, as usual.

The professor sat up, as if electrified. “Two, but if you need more . . .” An IQ of 160, yet a fool.

“No, two good. Thank you, sir!”