The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel (23 page)

T
he hit man took the bait, but then, improbably, escaped. It was shaping into a banner night, Fisk thought. What were the odds of losing the quadrocopter and the human targets of two different major investigations in the span of five minutes?

At least there was still a chance of finding Verlyn. Texted status reports from the surveillance team in the parking garage began to pepper the monitors.

1E NEGATIVE

2W NEGATIVE

5W NEGATIVE

“A positive would be a sighting of him,” Fisk explained to Chay, sitting next to him at the 1PP—One Police Plaza—ops-center viewing room.

“Do any of them have handheld thermal imaging units?”

“You mean, so that they can detect him even if he’s hiding behind a car?”

“That’s what I was thinking, yeah.”

“The Department does have those. They would have come in handy now if we’d thought to bring them . . .” He paused to read two incoming reports.

1W NEGATIVE

2E NEGATIVE

It went against Fisk’s nature to just sit here, the texting equivalent of waiting by the phone. He thought about going and getting a cup of coffee from the machine. If only for an excuse to move. What he really could use, he thought, was the opposite of coffee. Whiskey.

Finally, something: a Domain Awareness camera on the street showed a Lincoln Navigator, the one that had taken Verlyn into the garage, rolling toward the cashier by the exit. Through the windshield Fisk saw only the driver in the dark SUV.

The tech, R2, reported, “The cashier’s one of our guys, Detective Fisk. He’s got the one handheld thermal imaging sensor we had, and it’s picking up nobody in the Navigator now except the driver.”

“What about him?”

“He’s a Kelly Limousine employee, been there eight months. One of our people talked to him, and he didn’t seem to have the first clue. Want us to hang on to him?”

Hell yes, Fisk thought. The guy is the closest thing we have to Verlyn now. But because Chay was there, he said, “Make sure his license and registration are in order.” That would buy twenty or thirty minutes. A driver who allegedly knew nothing wasn’t likely to recall something of use—but stranger things had happened.

More texts appeared:

3W NEGATIVE

4E NEGATIVE

3E NEGATIVE

Each one irked Fisk.

“Detective Fisk, your guest is in the waiting area,” said R2.

“Send him in.”

One of the officers from the street brought in the kid who had
shot down the drone, minus his weapon—he wore a scabbard on a thick black belt that was an amalgam of military and Goth. He was slight and baby-faced, his eyes too big for his head to begin with, and magnified by thick glasses.

“Detective Fisk, meet Shane Poplowski,” the policeman said.

Flashing a salesman’s smile, Poplowski started toward Fisk, a bony right hand extended.

Fisk remained in his seat. The kid got the message and stopped, his eyes widening as he took in the dark room and the monitors streaming thermal imagery. He stood straighter. The old animal instinct, Fisk figured. To dissuade an attacker, you make yourself appear bigger. Why cats arch their backs.

“Why do you think you’re here?” Fisk asked. Such open-ended questions played to the subject’s fear that you already knew. Often in defending himself, he filled in the blanks for you.

“At first, I thought you were going to thank me,” Poplowski said, his voice high-pitched, the words rushed.

“Why?”

“For defeating the drone, of course.”

So that was what the kid was up to, Fisk thought. “How’d you do it?”

“It’s a secret weapon, literally.”

“A bazooka?”

“It’s not a bazooka. It’s a modified TALI.” The kid said “TALI” as if Fisk ought to know what that was.

Fisk turned to Chay, who raised her shoulders. “Threat assessment laser illuminator?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Poplowski said. “We’ve been calling our version the LightningRod. Essentially it’s a laser fitted with focus-adjustable collimating lenses.” He appeared to rein in a grin. “I took out the quadrocopter by flooding its sensors.”

“With what?” Fisk asked.

Poplowski seemed to enjoy the stage. “In layman’s terms, the
LightningRod sends a beam that analyzes the target’s sensors. My company’s proprietary system sends the exact blend of light from the spectrum to confound the system. Tonight the quad was firing its infrared, so all it took was white light.”

Fisk was reminded of the trouble his flashlight beam had caused the men wearing infrared night goggles.

“Should we know your company?” Chay said to Poplowski.

“Good question,” Fisk said, putting it to the kid with a wave.

“Lightning Factory, LLC,” Poplowski said. “We would think nothing of going to the mattresses at our facility in Portland to produce as many LightningRods as New York needs, at a reasonable price.”

“How did you know where the quadrocopter was?” Chay asked. Also a good question, Fisk thought.

“I, uh . . .” Poplowski eyed his shoe tops. “I hacked the Iron Apple system—well, not hacked, technically, because the X-band radar transponder beacons respond to radar using horizontal polarization.”

This kid was somebody the city wanted on its side, Fisk thought.

“Looks like we’ve got our rabbit on monitor four,” R2 said over the speaker.

Fisk looked to monitor four, which showed a Domain Awareness cam’s view rendered in shades of greens and gray by an infrared filter. On the screen was a man driving a Honda Accord on Spruce Street. A light-skinned guy of medium build, but with a thick mustache, sideburns and a goatee, and dark, curly hair.

To Poplowski, Fisk said, “Thanks for coming. I hope we can do business.”

The kid called out Lightning Factory’s Web address as the police officer steered him out of the room.

Fisk caught Chay’s grin and responded with one of his own. Sharing a thought with her had a unique and exhilarating intimacy. Which he could look forward to experiencing again some other time. For now, his attention shot back to the view on the monitor of
the Honda Accord (New York City’s most popular car, with Honda’s similar-looking Civic a close second). The driver slowed at the end of Spruce and squinted through bulky eyeglasses as he turned left onto Park Row.

“That can’t be Merritt, can it?” Chay said.

“It doesn’t look like him, but evidently it is.”

“What’s the evidence?”

Watching the Accord turn left onto Worth, Fisk hit the intercom and put the question to R2, who replied, “The measured distance between the geometric centers of the Accord driver’s pupils and Merritt Verlyn’s pupils is the same to one one-hundredth of a millimeter. The width of the noses is exactly the same too. Ditto the depth of the eye sockets. The length of the jawline is off by the amount added by the fake sideburns. He did a fine job of fooling humans, but old-school disguise doesn’t get you very far against Elastic Bunch Graph measurement-based facial recognition software. And you really need to cake on the makeup to thwart the new dermal analytic apps. I’d input the facial presets for Merritt Verlyn into Domain Awareness essentially as search terms, and the system gave us this guy in this car.”

“Whose car is it?” Fisk asked.

“Check monitor two,” said R2.

The middle monitor on the top row showed a freeze frame of the license plate. The data crawl at the bottom of the picture streamed New York DMV information. The 2012 Honda Accord was registered to Car-Go!, a local knockoff of Zipcar, the popular car-sharing club.

“Who signed it out?” Fisk said.

R2 apologized. “No additional information.”

Which was additional information to Fisk. It meant that Verlyn had capable help from the First Amendment Society or a foreign spy service or, possibly, Yodeler. Could Yodeler be the agent or a construct of an enemy intelligence agency?

Motion drew Fisk’s attention to one of the monitors, on which
appeared an overhead view of the Accord, the video shot from above by one of the Aviation Division’s Bell 412s. Verlyn was turning left onto Ann Street, at the top of the financial district, bringing the total number of vehicles on the narrow commercial block to two. This late at night, the financial district was all but closed. The Accord took another left onto William Street, disappearing from the helicopter’s view, but reappearing on the adjacent monitor courtesy of DOM-CAM WM-WGOLD.

Chay’s brow knitted. “It looks like he’s headed right back to the correctional center.”

“It looks like he’s running a surveillance detection route,” Fisk said. “In Driving Training, you’re taught to take a series of consecutive left turns.”

“Why?”

“The odds of anyone staying with you for more than two lefts are astronomical.”

“But why would he bother to lose the cars tailing him if knows about your surveillance cameras?”

“He’s already eluded the cameras once.”

Verlyn took two more lefts, onto Beekman Street and then onto Barclay, where, as if satisfied that he wasn’t being followed, he continued crosstown. Block after block, God’s Eye picked him up. He gripped the wheel with both hands and kept his eyes on the street ahead, and, to Fisk’s eye, displayed none of the self-consciousness people usually do when they’re aware that they’re being filmed.

The Accord finally took a right turn, onto West Street, which a few blocks later became the West Side Highway. The smattering of traffic there allowed him to cruise at sixty miles per hour. Within minutes, with Manhattan in his rearview mirror, he shot onto the Henry Hudson Parkway and zoomed north, the monitors showing the Accord periodically from the vantage point of the Bell 412.

“What’s preventing him from disappearing altogether now?” Chay asked.

“The surveillance team has a helicopter and fourteen vehicles, including this truck.” Fisk pointed to the overhead view of a lumbering pickup truck piled high with rusty coils of wire and other scrap metal, but still capable of keeping pace with the Accord.

Along with a Ford Taurus, the pickup truck followed Verlyn into Westchester, but it would have been too conspicuous had it also turned with him onto the Hutchinson River Parkway. They soon came to the Connecticut border, where the Hutch became the aptly named Merritt Parkway.

In Connecticut, two cars took the pickup truck’s place, a Honda Civic and a white utility van. All-white vans were America’s most common, which made them a staple of surveillance and reconnaissance ops (in a distant second place were vans that featured utility-company names or logos). A third car pulled onto the highway ahead of the Accord, from Round Hill Road in Greenwich, Connecticut, a wealthy coastal suburb that Fisk knew well. He was surprised that the median home value was $1,260,200—at least according to U.S. Census data on the crawl beneath the helicopter’s infrared display. He would have guessed a lot higher.

The Merritt Parkway was striking, lined by old New England trees, crossed by a series of historic landmark overpasses, and divided by a grassy median so inviting that motorists used to stop for picnics on it. Verlyn pulled over at the first gas station he came to, a Mobil. He parked in front of the minimart, got out of the car, and looked around. Evidently satisfied with what he’d seen, or hadn’t, he locked the car and went inside the store.

“Monitor three,” R2 said, a moment before grainy high-angle video of Verlyn appeared in the upper right monitor. He was coming through the minimart door.

The only other person in the store was the clerk behind the register, a turbaned graybeard who barely looked up from his magazine when Verlyn walked past.

“Is that the minimart’s security camera?” Chay asked.

“One of them.”

Verlyn plucked a five-dollar can of Sapporo from a refrigerated case, then carried it back toward the counter, with a bounce in his step that Fisk hadn’t seen before. A good sign, he thought.

“But how can you access Mobil’s security system?” Chay asked.

Fisk bit back a grin. “Mobil rents the property from the government.”

Apparently whistling, Verlyn inspected a personal-size cherry pie in a rack by the register, then added it to his purchase.

“What do you think he’s doing?” Chay asked.

“They don’t have beer at the Manhattan Correctional Center. He’s probably been dreaming of this. Or maybe he’s celebrating.”

Verlyn returned to his Accord with his purchases, leaving the beer in its paper bag as he started the Accord and drove back onto the parkway. Fisk bet himself that Verlyn wouldn’t pop the Sapporo, unwilling to risk drawing the attention of a Connecticut state trooper. It would be a good sign if he felt relaxed enough to go at the cherry pie, though.

Two tails picked him up, a Toyota SUV and another Civic, this one silver.

The Toyota was equipped with a dashboard-mounted video camera with forward-looking infrared that transmitted to monitor 3. In Fisk’s experience, these cameras rarely offered anything that the surveillant himself couldn’t see. In this case, however, the dashboard camera showed Verlyn devouring the cherry pie with a ferocity that suggested he had no inkling that he was on camera.

A few miles later, he shifted from the left lane into the right and began to slow the Accord. The next exit, 36, was in New Canaan, Connecticut, another coastal New York bedroom community, with a population of 19,682 people.

“He grew up in New Canaan, didn’t he?” Fisk asked.

Out of the corner of an eye, he caught Chay’s nod. She too remained rapt on the monitor. He suspected that, as he did, she smelled blood.

The surveillant in the Toyota, who would have been conspicuous dropping to fifty miles per hour along with Verlyn, continued north on the parkway, passing him. The silver Civic, driven by a woman, was now tabbed to tail Verlyn. Women, statistically, are slower drivers—they typically drive five miles per hour over the speed limit versus ten—making her the less likely of the two surveillants to rouse Verlyn’s suspicion.

Another car, a black late-model Nissan, sped from a mile back to take the Toyota’s place. The driver of the Civic waited until the Nissan was behind her before turning to the right lane.