It was an ambush. Had to be. Somehow the Swedes had caught the feds flat-footed, comparing war stories instead of watching for trouble.
He looked for his own footprints, already smoothing over under fresh snowfall. He saw a drop of blood, from his own finger, and knew he was headed in the right direction.
Then another controlled burst of gunfire. Fisk stopped and froze, listening. The sound was so crisp and near, everything seeming dislocated, eaten up quickly by the swirling snow.
Were those thumps behind him? Another small clump of snow dropped from the trees. He looked back at the dim black trunks. Then back in front of him.
Two figures. Barely visible. Slashes of color—black and brown—moving in the whiteness. Maybe a scarf, a cap . . . a weapon.
They were shooting at him now. They had seen his footprints leading away. They were following his blood trail. Their first burst had missed, two rounds thudding in the tree trunks behind him.
Fisk turned fast. He was vulnerable out in the open. Only distance would obscure him. He tossed the branch and tore back toward the trees, waiting for the next burst of gunfire.
It came just as he bladed himself behind the first tree. He looked back, unable to see them for the moment. Focus, dammit! He hadn’t heard a car motor, or the crunching of tires. The only thing that made sense was that they had left their vehicle somewhere and come on foot.
The silence was excruciating. Because it told him that, regarding the feds, the fight was over. If they were still alive, he’d hear something, yelling, anything.
The three people he had just been sitting in the car with, swapping boasts and drinking coffee—Ari Schaefer, Ralph Carver, and Mary Rose Palestrina—they were all dead. Of this much he was certain.
He had three brother law enforcement officers down.
And with this realization, his momentary confusion and self-disgust evaporated, replaced by a wave of cold, hard anger.
He glanced down at his hand. He was still clutching the sharp, broken stub of pink ice scraper. It wasn’t exactly a Glock 17. But it was something.
A burst of nausea. That’s how quickly the adrenaline surged. These two guys—if there were only two—were out to finish the job now.
Voices. Singsong, at least to Fisk’s ears. Fisk spoke Arabic like a native, fluent Spanish, high school French, a little German, a little Thai, some Bahasa Indonesia. His father had been a diplomat; Fisk had traveled a lot as a kid and had a natural ear for languages.
But he didn’t speak Swedish. He couldn’t tell what they were saying.
One man’s voice, low and terse. Another responding. They sounded near, almost on the other side of the tree . . . but it was a trick of the snow. They couldn’t see Fisk if he couldn’t see them.
They sounded like soldiers to him: calm, self-possessed. He could tell from the sound of the ambush that these two Swedes had military training, as opposed to being amateur goofballs who’d taken up jihad because they were bored with their jobs in IT.
His phone was in the car, too, charging. But it didn’t matter. Zero cellular service here in the ass end of nowhere. Mary Rose had a satellite phone, didn’t she? He needed that phone as much as he needed a handgun.
He saw the colors reappear, vague against the white. Under even sparse tree cover, their visibility would improve dramatically. Fisk tightened his grip on the broken plastic window scraper and took off running through the trees. The snow cover was more shallow here, around a foot deep. He expected gun reports at his back yet heard none.
He felt something expanding inside him, something he had experienced a half-dozen times before in his life but had never been able to put a word to. The threat of imminent death has a way of uniquely focusing the mind.
CHAPTER 2
After the episode with Magnus Jenssen, the NYPD had mandated that he attend counseling sessions. Not only because he had been in a violent confrontation—what the department called a “major incident”—but because his partner and girlfriend had been murdered. In a case like that, counseling was mandated.
Fisk had talked to the counselor about the episode, about racing through the tunnel to stop Jenssen, who was strapped with several kilograms of C-4 explosive, a trigger hidden inside a cast wrapped around his left arm.
“You know, Detective Fisk,” the counselor had said, “there are a lot of people who might say what you did was crazy. How would you respond to that?”
“I was just doing my duty, Doc,” he said.
Dr. Rebecca Flaherty was a redhead, not the brassy orange kind, but a darker, autumn red. She was very attractive, and Fisk thought that was part of her power, sitting there like an ideal, someone beyond reproach. She tilted her head and looked at him. “Well, that’s obviously bullshit,” she said. “Are you contemptuous of the process or of me?”
Fisk’s eyes widened. She had him.
“Now tell me how you really felt?” she asked.
Fisk closed his eyes. Part of his resistance to this process was having to go back there at all, even for answers. “It felt amazing.”
She held her expression in check, but there was no way she absorbed that without the mental equivalent of a deep breath. “Care to elaborate?”
“You ask me how I felt, and you insist on the truth. It felt amazing. It was the right thing to do. No equivocation. No choice, really. I had to do it. To go all out. All or nothing. And something else.”
A tiny smile licked at the corner of her mouth. “Go on.”
“I thought I was going to win. Check that. I knew I was going to win.”
“Knew this how?”
That, he had no answer for. “I just did. I suppose . . . what’s the alternative? If I lose, I’ll never know it. I’d be obliterated. So no recriminations. No ‘Aw, shucks.’ Either I’d succeed, or nothing. Look at it this way. What if I did fail? What if I got blown up along with a lot of innocents and some glass and steel? And this is my little dream-state afterlife.” He shrugged. “Same result.”
“And same pain,” she said.
Fisk nodded. Dr. Flaherty was good indeed, and he was willing to open up now. “A lot of pain. She is gone. Were she to walk in the door right now, then I’d know I was dead. Or dreaming.”
“And would you prefer that?”
“Not that I have a choice . . . but sometimes. Absolutely sometimes.”
Dr. Flaherty shifted in her chair. She was wearing a business suit with pants. The chair made no noise as she moved in it. “Mightn’t I be her, were this some sort of afterlife episode?”
“Very likely,” said Fisk. “But if you’re going to ask me to speak to you as though you were my dead girlfriend . . .”
Dr. Flaherty was already waving that off. “No, no. Just trying to draw a line between fantasy and reality.”
“I know the reality,” said Fisk. “All too well. The bottom line is that when I ran toward Jenssen, I felt pure. That’s the best way to put it. Clean. Pure. That sprint through the tunnel? At the time, it was pure hell. But now looking back, I think it was the best feeling I’d ever experienced. Following the worst feeling I’d ever experienced.”
Dr. Flaherty brushed back her hair, which had fallen over one eye. “And how do you feel now? On that register, from what you describe as a peak experience to the lowest moment perhaps of your life.”
“Now?” said Fisk. “Right now?”
“Generally. These days.”
Fisk crossed his arms. The air conditioner hummed, raising little bumps of gooseflesh on his arms. He held the counselor’s gaze because it seemed important to do so. This process was akin to a polygraph, except instead of a lie detector, he was sitting with a truth detector.
He was stumped.
She said, “You’re trying to cook up the answer that gets you back to work the fastest.”