The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel by Dick Wolf

tracksuit and a pair of cross-trainers that had been within arm’s reach of her bed, her fluidity suggesting she’d woken up and dressed in a flash before. Without turning on a light, she snatched the MacBook from the kitchen counter, stuffed it into a neoprene case, and hurried toward the door.
    Just shy of the door, however, she stopped and knelt, putting her weight into one of the stacks of moving boxes and sliding it a few inches, revealing a wall outlet about a foot and a half from the floor. She dug her fingernails beneath the edge of the plate, which turned out to be hinged; it opened outward like a laundry chute door.
    From the miniature safe the wall plate concealed, she withdrew a necklace and—Lin zoomed in—a flash drive.
    He zoomed in further. HOYAS , it said in big letters. He had no idea what that meant, but he would find out. Unless HOYAS was of significance or immediate national security importance, his people would either procure a flash drive just like it within an hour, or produce a duplicate themselves.
    Two taps at the control panel and he photographed the Hoyas drive and sent the image (a proprietary steganography app automatically concealed the image within the pixels comprising a comma) to the team.
    After Chay left her apartment, he counted ten seconds and texted again, MAKE THAT 72 UNITS, the key this time being the 7.
    Within half a minute of his sending the message, the klaxon faded to a faint echo and then to nothing, the alarm company evidently having received the diagnostic message that purportedly had been generated by the Montana’s system.
    The Montana staff would now inform the residents that it had just been a false alarm. Like most of them, Lin supposed, Chaywould go back to bed—as soon as she returned the flash drive to its hiding place.
    He was wrong, he realized, when the door to Starbucks opened, and one of the baristas, a plump Hispanic woman, called out, “Chay, how’re you doing, sweetie?”
    Lin cursed himself for coming here rather than his standby, Burger King. None of his targets went near the place.
    “Rude awakening,” said Chay, entering the café with a look of resolve, as if she were bent on capitalizing on the klaxon’s early wake-up. “But I’m up. How are you?”
    A flood of morning light through the big front windows brought her necklace to a glow. She surveyed the tables, flashing a smile Lin’s way. He responded in kind, watched her advance to the counter, then resumed reading MLB, losing himself in the statistical league leaders while she ordered her caffeinated drink.
    She soon returned to her apartment and replaced the flash drive, along with the necklace, then got dressed for work and hurried off.
    Lin had no trouble finding a courier, a Wall Street runner who was elated at the prospect of being paid to have his job done for him. Lin passed muster at the Montana front desk and delivered an envelope to a yuppie lawyer in 20C, who tipped him ten dollars.
    Everything was going freakishly well, he thought. Maybe too well. The inevitable hitch came at Chay’s door.
    The door was protected by a biometric lock requiring a fingerprint scan as well as a five-digit code in order to turn the handle. It was the only such lock Lin had seen in the building. In fact it was the first time he had ever seen a biometric lock in an American residence; first time he’d ever heard of it. Rare and expensive. The flecks of sawdust atop the door-handle plate and on the carpet by the door suggested to him that the new biometric lock had been installed recently—perhaps as an additional security measure Chay had undertaken to protect something. Good, he thought.
    He had a contingency plan in his back pocket: a small crowbar.However, there were workmen from AT&T working on an apartment near the elevator, and a valet was watching them. Certainly the valet would hear him prying open Chay’s door. If the valet even saw Lin in the hall, it wouldn’t be long before a cop was