Read Online The Ultimatum: A Jeremy Fisk Novel by Dick Wolf - Free Book Online

notion of assaulting a firewall existed only in Hollywood productions. In reality, firewalls function like a ticket taker. To get the requisite material for his ticket, Lin needed an hour to himself in Willoughby’s secure lab.
    First he needed to gain admission to Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Science Building at Broadway and West 120th Street, an austere blue-gray steel tower that housed science lecture halls as well as laboratories and offices dedicated to as many as twenty classified military and intelligence research projects at a given time. Usually getting in was a simple matter of pushing through a revolving door and into the lobby, the most notable feature of which was an absence of security guards—not even the half-asleep senior citizen checking IDs whom the university posted at the entrances to dorms or the campus grocery store.
    Tonight the lobby was utterly deserted. On his way to the elevators across the skating rink of a white marble floor, Lin reflected that with just a few helpers here, he could take down the entire U.S. economy overnight.
    For now, the fourth floor, the location of Willoughby’s lab and offices, presented his first obstacle. Stationed at the entrance to the main corridor, 24/7/365, there was a security guard. The guards, employed by the Pentagon, were glorified rent-a-cops. The exception was nights, when retired army colonel “Hawk” Griffin, manned the position. Sure enough, when the elevator doors hissed open, Lin found himself the recipient of Hawk’s laser stare and half expectedto see red dots on his body. The guard stood, as usual, despite the table and chair in the elevator landing, his gun hand hovering atop his belted holster. He’d added just two pounds to his sinewy frame in the forty years since he played tight end at West Point.
    Lin knew that Hawk wouldn’t hesitate to unload his Beretta M9 on a foreign spy. If anything, the guard lived for that opportunity.
    In a gravelly baritone, he said, “Ji, howya doin’?”
    “Very good, Hawk. How you?”
    “Better than I deserve, buddy.” Hawk flashed a Texas-size smile. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of working tonight instead of watching the Mets game.”
    Lin had no taste for baseball, but he’d studied it—he’d even endured a game in person at Citi Field—so that he and Hawk might bond over the New York Mets. “I feel bad. Matt Harvey pitch for us. I hope to finish in time to see final innings.”
    “You best hustle, then, partner.” Hawk waved him in.
    Lin made a show of hurrying down the hall until rounding the corner to the western corridor. The lab area was still and silent other than the occasional keyboard click from behind one of the closed doors. Light from the overhead panels caused the gray walls to shimmer purple.
    Stopping at the lab known as DC 2 —Distributed Computing and Communications—he unlocked the door to the antechamber using a common cut key like that to the front door of a typical house. This was another example still, he thought, of the seeming disinterest in security on the part of the Interdisciplinary Science Building planners, even though the building had opened in 2010, when retina and iris scanners had long since become security standards in comparable private facilities in other countries.
    Americans were far too trusting.
    Stepping inside, he swatted on the lights, revealing a generic comp-sci room with a pair of swivel chairs and flat panel monitors on three long tables, everything facing the whiteboard on the front wall.Unlike most labs, however, there were no windows. Odder still, on close inspection, you would see that the cottage-cheese ceiling tiles were suspended from a sheet of Plexiglas. The Plexiglas continued down the wall, disappearing behind the wall paneling, then continuing under the floor, forming a case around the room.
    The result was a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, essentially a vault designed to keep electronic