The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (4 page)

A
rooster’s crow woke Fisk, who didn’t immediately know where he was. So what else was new? Lately he’d become Manhattan’s answer to George Washington, sleeping in one place after another on account of a digital trail that he couldn’t turn off.

He was growing unhealthily paranoid, and he knew it. The usual cop eyes he brought to the street were becoming prey’s eyes as he watched each face and clocked each passing car. He was becoming squirrelly. In his least healthy moments, he wondered if it was penance for his own misdeeds: a Sartrean punishment for having exacted his revenge upon Magnus Jenssen.

Flecks of dawn skirting the steel window gates outlined tall bare brick walls against the darkness. The fishy smell of old glue was the tip-off: the building was a onetime book bindery in an old printing house just off Tenth Avenue, two blocks west of Madison Square Garden. The fact that the building was zoned for commercial and not residential use didn’t stop the owner from renting out spaces fitted with crude showers and hot plates. For cash, of course. Which aligned with Fisk’s interests. The Department had wanted him to get out of town and lie low until there was some closure in the leak case, meaning he was out of harm’s way from the Cartel. Fisk maintained that there was no better place for him than Manhattan, with its multitudes—on each block. Also he wanted to be here in order to work the leak case.

Because he needed a name to rent this place, he’d chosen Reynolds. Common enough. The choice was also an homage to Scottie Reynolds, the leading scorer in Villanova basketball history. Fisk figured there was little risk that anyone would make the association: he himself had sunk a pair of free throws in the first varsity game he played at Villanova, the eighteenth game of the season during his sophomore year. At last check, his two points placed him in a twenty-three-way tie for 533rd place on the school’s all-time scoring list. Because he’d topped out at five-eleven and, mostly, because he was short on talent, he never made it into a second varsity game. Two points in a Division I game gave him celeb status in his rec league, though.

He snapped on his trusty Pelican 7060—the compact, rechargeable mega-lumen tactical flashlights, popular in law enforcement. Pelicans retailed for about $150 apiece, which, if you asked cops, was a bargain. The 7060 featured a control switch on the barrel and a second one on the butt end so an officer could switch from low beam to high while tracking a perp, holding the light under his weapon or above his head. Fisk’s Pelican had become perhaps the most important home-furnishing element.

The rooster’s crow was the default ring tone, evidently, on his latest prepaid cell phone, which sat on the pitted hardwood floor beside his new inflatable bed. Goddamn. With three rows of three giant app icons, the phone looked like a toy. Recognizing the number as an NYPD exchange, he hit answer and said, “Walker.” Kenny “Sky” Walker had been his favorite Knick as a kid.

“Good morning, Detective Fisk,” came a familiar, grandmotherly voice. “It’s Sally in Chief Dubin’s office.”

So much, thought Fisk, for his Walker alias, and the phone, notwithstanding the voiceprint and GPS scrambling apps on which he’d spent $29.98 and forty minutes of download time. He knew of four different electronic signal intelligence collection and analysis networks on which her mention of his name might raise the digital
equivalent of a red flag, if so desired by one of five hundred thousand people with the requisite clearance at seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies. Or by a single person at one of those agencies that the Cartel had gotten to. With that information, tracking him could be as simple for a hit man as using GPS.

Here was the source of his paranoia: he knew too much about finding people like himself who did not want to be found. Fisk had never been a fan of karma.

Fisk set the concern aside because a call of any sort from the Department at this hour almost certainly meant urgent business. “What’s up?” he asked.

“The chief wants you to go to a meeting at eight thirty.”

“Okay,” said Fisk.

“At the
New York Times
.”

Fisk wondered if Sally had called him in error. “A meeting at the
Times
?”

“On West Fortieth.”

Times
men referred to NYPD Intel as the NYKGB, and Fisk as Jeremy Badenov. Was Dubin, conscious of public image to a fault, offering him as a sacrificial lamb?

“Any idea what this is about?” he asked Sally.

“A homicide.”

F
isk liked the printing house’s broad selection of exits—front, service/delivery, basement, and courtyard. Someone waiting outside in ambush had his chance of success reduced by 75 percent right off the bat. This morning, he chose the courtyard exit door, throwing a hip into the crash bar and drawing his Glock as he backed out.

“Courtyard” was a euphemism for a two-hundred-square-foot patch of crumbling cement patio surrounded by a high iron rail fence. Empty now. Weeds coated the fence, depriving someone in the surrounding brownstones of a view of the door to the courtyard, for instance through a rifle scope.

Stepping onto the patio, Fisk was hit by the blare of engine noises and horns and people trying to talk over them—a typical
A.M.
rush hour, unless you were feeling like a fugitive.

He proceeded down a narrow back alley, at the end of which he peered onto Thirty-Fifth Street, spotting several doorways and other choke points ideal for an ambush. A hit man might also be lying back so that his head was beneath the window line in any of fifty parked cars. And there were hundreds of dark windows behind which a sniper might be readying a rifle.

If so, Fisk thought, holstering the Glock, then they had him.

Starting up the sidewalk, he had the discomfiting sense, whichever way he looked, of someone sneaking up behind him.

The heat slowed the stream of professionals on their way to work, making it that much easier for him to pick up a tail. Tails are easier to spot than most people think. Sometimes they have no good reason to be where they are. Sometimes they even use hand signals to communicate with teammates. The key is the other times, when they’re imperceptible.

Feel them, Fisk exhorted himself, heading up Tenth.

When choosing the printing house, he had composed a mental list of the pros and cons of the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

Pros: Proximity to Madison Square Garden, which is to say, Knicks games.

Cons: Everything else.

In taking inventory of his surroundings now, he began to reassess that stance. Hell’s Kitchen’s gritty reputation was rooted in a preponderance of soot-blackened industrial buildings, the Westies gang, and Damon Runyan stories.

Yet this part of the city had exploded into a district of upscale and exotic restaurants. In and around them were brownstones that had recently been restored to their full nineteenth-century Greek Revival luster. The warehouses had yielded to glossy television studios and extensions of Silicon Alley. Vacant lots had morphed into community gardens and playgrounds. And directly ahead, emblematic of this urban revival, stood the city’s fourth tallest building, a stunning metallic cruciform completed in 2007 and known to locals as the Times Tower.

It was Fisk’s first time inside the tower, and he was surprised by the relative blandness of the interior, especially within the paper’s office. The open newsroom looked like a call center or an insurance agency within a generic suburban office park, its sea of repetitive office-drab gray workstations and cabinets lit by too-sharp fluorescents. On the far end of the newsroom was a conference room that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a frequent traveler’s lounge at a minor-league airport.

He made out eight-by-ten crime-scene photos scattered atop the conference room table. Like most law enforcement agents, he never liked murders, but he brightened at the prospect of working one now. In the two years prior to his promotion to Intel, at the rank of NYPD detective investigator, he’d worked primarily on homicides, but he hadn’t gotten his fill of the one-of-a-kind puzzles. Intelligence work consisted of preventing crimes, a process that lacked the game-winning-home-run rush that came with solving them. In Intel, if you do your job, no one notices; you’re more like a good umpire.

The old-school crime-scene glossies, as opposed to digital images, told him that at least one of the ten people around the conference table was a fed. Expect to see time travel before a paperless Bureau, agents there often grumbled. Their presence here signified that the crime involved spies, terrorists, hackers, pedophiles, mobsters, gangs, or serial killers.

On entering the room, Fisk recognized the man seated at the head of the table, FBI special agent Burt Weir, a balding, middle-aged remnant of a high school jock. Weir was assigned to the Bureau’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, an organization of agents, investigators, analysts, and various specialists from other law enforcement and intelligence agencies who, alongside FBI agents in field offices all over the country, combated terrorism. Weir wore a dark suit and tie—the G’s all did—but looked out of place in anything but sweats.

Waving Fisk into the vacant chair at the foot of the table, he said, “Glad you could join us.”

Fisk took this as grudging inclusion; the Bureau wanted something from Intel, probably the contents of a secret dossier or the use of an informant. In any other city, the police would already have provided Weir whatever he wanted. New York was different, not just because of its eight million residents or the stock exchange or 9/11, but because of its singular Intelligence Division, created by a CIA deputy director of operations—David Cohen—and backed by the most potent police department in the world. Intel’s resulting autonomy
often created a competition with the Bureau, bruising more than its share of FBI egos and sometimes even impeding investigations.

More often, the relationship was like a strained marriage. Federal law prohibited FBI agents from constitutionally protected arenas like religion and political speech. Forget sending plainclothes agents into mosques to gather intelligence, they weren’t even permitted to grab a bite at a place like New Persia Diner in Astoria. New Persia served a devout clientele, including two men currently suspected of administering the Jihad Joe website whose content included exhortations to join al-Qaeda in its fight against “infidels” in none other than Queens. Intel knew this because one of the rakers had secured a gig redesigning the New Persia Diner takeout menu and parleyed it into a job administering the Jihad Joe site. Two days later, at a nearby mosque, a Staten Island resident named Abdel Hameed Shehadeh told a friend about his plan to wage violent jihad and die a martyr. Fortunately the friend was an informant, recruited by another NYPD Intel raker.

Weir rattled off introductions. To Fisk’s left and right were an FBI computer forensics guy Fisk didn’t know, and FBI special agent Dan Evans, whom he did. Evans had earned quite the badass reputation while serving in the Bureau’s Las Vegas field office, cemented after successfully going toe-to-toe with a heavyweight-boxer-turned-goon. You wouldn’t guess it to look at him, though: slight of frame, clean-cut white-blond hair, the innocent face of a Mormon missionary. Together, Evans and the boxy Weir were a sight gag. They were a natural good-cop-bad-cop team, though in Fisk’s experience, they amounted to two bad cops. In fairness, their intentions were good; they just suffered from overexposure to red tape.

Also at the table were the editor of the
Times
’s online edition, the paper’s director of security, four representatives of the legal team, and, in the seat across from Fisk’s, Chay Maryland, who wore a no-nonsense black business suit that somehow accentuated her steely good looks. Unlike the others, who greeted him with a nod born of the exigency of getting down to business, she smiled.

It wasn’t a particularly welcoming or friendly smile, Fisk noted. More of an I’m-going-to-enjoy-this-more-than-you-are smile.

“Thanks to all for coming,” said Evans. “This is an unusual situation, so listen up. This is Harun Ahmed, thirty-three years old, who was shot and killed while he was jogging yesterday in Central Park, on a path through the woods approximately two hundred feet south of the reservoir gatehouse.”

He held up a photograph of the bloodied victim lying between trees beside the heavily wooded path.

“Our ballistic tests suggest that two shots were fired from a high-powered rifle. We haven’t determined the shooter’s location yet, but it was at a point of considerable elevation—one of the low-caliber rounds entered the victim’s left parietal, at the top of his skull, and drilled almost straight through the left hemisphere of the brain, starting with the parietal lobe, then the occipital lobe—”

Impatiently, Weir cut in, “The point is, it was a sniper that got him. The question is: Why this guy, Harun Ahmed, a doorman at a fancy white-glove building on Central Park South, with nothing in the way of a record or anything close? One possible answer is that his wife Durriyah’s first cousin is Mahmoud Amr, who, as of two weeks ago, is a resident of the Federal Correctional Institution in Fort Dix.”

Fisk remembered reading about the Mahmoud Amr case. Amr bought a fifteen-year-old Chevy Trailblazer SUV listed on craigslist in New Jersey. At $2,000, he probably overpaid, given that the Trailblazer had more than 300,000 miles on it. He hollowed out the SUV’s running boards, stuffed them with $800,000 in hundreds, then resold it for $525 to a car exporter who shipped it, along with fifty-odd vehicles in similar condition, to Lebanon. There, each vehicle sold at auction for around two million Lebanese pounds, or $1,500. Amr’s thinking had been that, even if an extreme bidding war were to ensue over the Trailblazer, if it sold for a record $5,000, his al-Shabaab confederate in Tripoli would still come out $795,000 ahead.

“Other than Muslim heritage, is there reason to believe that the victim had ties to al-Shabaab?” Fisk asked Weir.

Chay grinned. “Doesn’t Muslim heritage automatically place someone under NYPD Intel suspicion?”

“Actually, Muslim heritage can get you hired by NYPD Intel—my mother was Lebanese, so I learned Arabic. Wish I could’ve told you that before your story about our racial-profiling practices.”

Weir broke it up. “Our theory is that the victim objected to al-Shabaab, but because of something he’d learned, posed a threat to an al-Shabaab operation.”

“So is that what I’m doing here?” Fisk asked. “You want our Shabaab dossier?”

“It would sure help if we could get a read on his sympathies,” Evans said.

“Then I guess the question is what I’m doing here.” Fisk indicated the newsroom with a sweeping gesture. “At the
New York Times
.”

Weir nodded to Ed Norman, the
Times
’s director of security. Even with close-cropped black hair, a gray business suit and silk tie, the stocky Norman had the windblown look of an old-time sea captain. Fisk recalled that Norman had retired from the FBI after twenty-six years, which was unusual. Most agents who’d been at the Bureau for more than twenty years hung on until thirty, for the obvious pension benefits. After that, they commonly left to cash in, as director-of-security positions like Norman’s paid two or three times the GS-15 pay grade of $99,000, starting salary, not including the annual bonus. Rumor was that Norman’s wife’s affinity for the country-club lifestyle had won out. Norman wore a suit now that looked decent enough; Fisk had the sartorial equivalent of a tin ear, but he recognized Norman’s shoes. The distinctive boat-shaped Bettanin & Venturi loafers, handmade in Italy and fetching in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars a pair for a reason Fisk couldn’t even guess at. He’d seen them before on investment bankers, at their trials. So either Norman had materialistic inclinations of his own, or the shoes had been a gift from his wife.

“This is the reason you’re here, Detective Fisk,” said Norman, aiming his cell phone at the whiteboard on the front wall. The whiteboard filled with an all-type version of NYTimes.com—devoid of photographs or graphics. Norman scrolled to a brief Metro section story entitled “Jogger Shot and Killed in Central Park.”

“You guys are seeing our internal version of the paper, what we call the backstage. Reporters file here, editorial goes over copy here, and, after the piece goes live, moderators come here to choose which reader comments to post.” He lowered the cursor to the comments box, where, beneath each incoming reader comment, there were two buttons, a green one labeled
APPROVE
and red,
DISAPPROVE
. Settling on a comment awaiting moderation, he read aloud:

Greetings, so-called authorities. I am Yodeler. I have been watching you, watching your campaigns of propaganda and disinformation, watching your suppression of dissent. You have used deception to gain the trust of our citizenry. I have decided to dismantle that trust, starting with the two Hornady 9mm Makarov bullets fired from an AR-15 at the runner at 2:18 yesterday afternoon. For the greater good of the citizens of America, each and every day I shall sacrifice one person in New York City chosen completely at random.

Evans shook his head, bewildered. “See, here’s the thing. None of the articles or news coverage anywhere said a word about the bullets.”

“Except that the victim was shot,” added Weir.

“Do we have any idea where the comment originated?” asked Fisk.

“Every comment comes with communications metadata, which our system records,” said Norman. “We have this Yodeler guy’s IP address, and we have the data center his comment was passed through.
Apparently he used a Verizon cell phone in midtown Manhattan.”

So they had next to nothing, Fisk thought. From time to time, a perp kept a disposable phone on him, or in his car, mistakenly believing that if the device were powered off, it couldn’t be tracked. If Yodeler were at all clued in, he would have dedicated a burner phone to his single
New York Times
comment, then flung the thing into the Hudson.

“So is Yodeler right about the bullets?” Fisk asked. Makarov 9x18mm pistol and submachine-gun cartridges had long been a standard Russian and Eastern Bloc counterpart to the Western 9x19mm Parabellum, and they were widely available everywhere in the world. They were designed to kill at relatively short range, fifty yards or so, but a sniper firing from a longer distance in an urban setting might prefer such a low-caliber round for noise reduction. “Could be difficult to trace. Dozens of manufacturers produced 9mm Makarovs.”

“The slug recovered largely intact from the dirt near the victim weighs ninety-five grains, or .217 ounces.” Evans looked up from the ballistics report. “Usually Makarovs are ninety-four grains, but Hornady’s are ninety-five.”