Early Warning Page 6

  “What is it?” barked Byrne.

  “DoS,” came a reply from somewhere in the room.

  DoS was the last word any computer operator wanted to hear, much less utter. Denial of service. A call on the system’s resources so great that its servers failed, overwhelmed from the sheer volume of access requests. “Standby main, alternate packets,” barked Byrne. “Secondary servers…what does Langley say?”

  “Langley OotL, sir,” said somebody. Out of the Loop.

  “NSA ditto,” said somebody else. There were new faces, and voices, all the time; the burnout rate was tremendous. Staring all day at computer screens was no job for a real cop, in Byrne’s opinion, but a lot had changed since September 11, including him.

  “NSA is never ditto,” said Lannie settling into his chair. Of all the aces in the room, Lannie Saleh was the ace of aces. That was why he was on the team. “Even if we think they’re ditto, even if they promise us they’re ditto, they’re never fucking ditto.”

  Byrne knew exactly what he meant. Chiefs past and present had fought hard to make the NYPD’s CTU a stand-alone operation, answerable to no one but the residents of New York City. The attack on the Trade Center had happened in their city; the CIA, the NSA, and every other federal agency had let his people down, badly, and they paid for it with their lives-along with the cops and firemen who died alongside them when the towers shuddered and fell. NYPD was often accused of making 9/11 personal, to which their answer was: Damn right it’s personal. And it’s never going to happen again.

  To that end, Byrne had cops stationed all over the world. One was based in Lyons, France, to liaise with Interpol; two more worked with the Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Byrne himself had done a stint in Belfast and Dublin, sharing information and techniques with both the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Irish Gardai. As needed, officers headed to Bombay, or whatever the hell they were calling it today, to the Philippines; even Australia -wherever and whenever a terrorist incident occurred.

  The point was, NYPD did not trust the CIA, nor any of the other dozen-plus intelligence agencies the federal monster had spawned, including the FBI. Byrne had his own, very good reasons for never trusting the FBI, all of them named Tom Byrne, but in general when the Langley Home for Lost Boys told him they weren’t interfering with the CTU he believed them; most of them, in his estimation, were too dumb to tie their own shoelaces, and the thought of them getting a jump on his boys was laughable.

  The National Security Agency, on the other hand, was something else. The former “No Such Agency” had seized an inordinate amount of power in the wake of the terrorist attacks, and even under the reformist President Jeb Tyler, it still wielded a hell of a lot of clout. Was it eavesdropping on their eavesdropping? Of course it was, if the Black Widow was doing her job.

  Lannie was making clucking noises under his breath as he punched the keyboard, which Byrne knew was actually Arabic. He’d learn Arabic someday, he promised himself, right after he learned Irish Gaelic, Urdu, and Esperanto and maybe even French. “Speak English,” he commanded.

  Lannie stopped clucking and wrapped his tongue around words everybody could understand. “Not good. We have a major DoS coming from”-he punched in a blur-“coming from, it looks like… Bulgaria and… Israel…”

  “Typical Arab,” said a good-natured voice Byrne recognized as Sid Sheinberg’s. “Always blaming Israel first.” Sid was Sy’s nephew, a smart lawyer who had dropped his fledgling practice and joined the force when Frankie recruited him for the team. The former Medical Examiner, Sy Sheinberg, had been Byrne’s friend, mentor, and rabbi, and he still missed him after all these years. Almost enough time had passed for Byrne to be able to forget the last time he saw Sy, when he found the body after the suicide…

  “In this case, Sid, I’m blaming Israel second,” Lannie snapped. “And then Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and…”

  Byrne ran an emotionally loose ship. The CTU was no place for hurt feelings; you checked your resentments and entitlements at the door and you elbowed your way to the table like everybody else. Festering grievances were the worst-if anybody had a beef, let him air it out. Byrne and Matt White had worked that way for two decades, and were not about to change now.

  “What have we got-are we blind?” Instead of answering, Lannie turned to Sid. “Gimme a hand here.”

  Sid slid into the seat next to Lannie’s and for the next five minutes, neither of them said a thing. Instead, they worked furiously, in some kind of mental rapport, their agile minds leaping to the same hypotheses almost at once.

  As they worked, the playfulness fell away, to be replaced by a grim, serious look that played around their lips. The CTU computers had been fucked with before-that much was SOP in this business-but something told Byrne that this time it was different, that this time it might be very, very bad.

  “We’ve got a shitload of traffic going across the core switches-forty gigs a sec minimum,” shouted Sid Sheinberg.

  “We’ve got timeouts…we’re out of CPU on the core switches…impossible,” barked Lannie.

  “What’s this ‘multicast’ shit?” said Sid. “Come on, you fuckers!”

  “Is it a virus?” asked Byrne.

  Neither man turned to look at him. “No, external,” said Lannie. “Incoming ports are swamped by ‘bots.’ What the fuck?”

  “Rebooting the cores,” said Sid, and one by one the machines went down. For all practical purposes, the CTU was now blind, if only for a few moments…

  The screens blinked on again. “Fuck,” said Sid. “We’re still greened out, to the max.”

  “Impossible-”

  “Connections dropping like flies off a camel’s ass-”

  “Origination point?”

  “Dunno. Cabinet switches…ten gigs apiece. Fubared.”

  “Isolate.”

  “Isolating now…gotcha suckers!” Sid was nearly out of his seat.

  “Kill the downlink ports.”

  “Killing…”

  “Rebooting now…”

  Everyone in the room held his breath and the screens winked out again…and then blinked back on. One by one they came back up-and held.

  Lannie never took his eyes off the screen. “T1 and T2-quarantine those motherfuckers,” he said. Sid shut the switches down. The crisis was over.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Lannie.

  “You can say that again,” said Sid.

  “Watch your mouth, boys,” said Byrne, “especially seeing as how neither of you believes in Our Lord and Savior in the first place.”

  Applause rippled through the room. Lannie and Sid stood up to take a bow. Byrne cut their end-zone dance short.

  “My office, now,” he said. “On my father’s immortal soul, everybody else, back to work.”

  He didn’t have to say anything more: the older guys in the squad knew, and the newer ones would hear about it soon enough. How Byrne’s father, Robert, a detective first grade, had been shot in the back on the Lower East Side, killed on Delancey Street along with his partner, in 1968. He had lived long enough to draw his service revolver-the same.38 Byrne still used-and might have shot his assailant, but the street was too crowded with innocents. So he died, bled to death on the street in front of the pushcarts, taking the identity of his killer to the grave with him, but sparing the lives of others.

  Like everything else on the floor except for computer operational security, it was informal. Byrne’s office was not one of the glass-walled fortresses the brass had over at One Police Plaza, with the views of Brooklyn Bridge and, if you looked hard enough and used your imagination, into the borough where half the cops in the city had originated. Flat-bush. Bensonhurst. Brownsville.

  “Fingerprints?”

  Lannie looked at Sid, then spoke. “Hard to tell until we take a closer look, but first guess is the Chinese.”

  “First guess is always the Chinese,” Byrne said. “Continue.”

  “But upon further review,” began Sid, who w
as a big football Giants fan, “it looks like somebody’s just trying a little deflection, a juke and okey-doke.”

  Byrne hadn’t heard those terms since O. J. Simpson was playing for Buffalo. “A flea flicker?” he asked.

  Lannie was thoroughly confused. “I thought you said to speak English,” he said.

  “Football,” said Byrne. “It’s as American as baseball.”

  “But there are no feet in your football,” said Lannie.

  “Sure there are,” said Byrne. “You use ’em to kick the other guys in the nards when the refs aren’t looking. Which is what I want to do to these people. So who are they?”

  Sid shuffled through some notes. “They might be Indians. There are some indications of a redirect via Mumbai- Bombay to you-but now that I look at it, I think this is a flea flicker too. So I-we-are going with Azerbaijani. Baku, probably.”

  That was a new one to Byrne. The Chinese were always probing the American cyber-defenses-hell, they attacked the Pentagon every chance they got-but because they bought our increasingly worthless bonds, whichever administration was in power in Washington generally let them skate. And that pussy Tyler was not about to let a little thing like cyber-war interfere with his we-are-the-world foreign policy. Byrne despised everybody in Washington.

  “What happened in the window?” he asked, referring to the moments that their defenses were down. There were times, he swore, when he felt like Captain Kirk on the deck of the Enterprise, shouting to Scotty about the shields being down. Another reference they probably wouldn’t get.

  “Running a recap now,” said Lannie. “And it’s not Baku. It’s Budapest.”

  “Let’s worry about that later. Right now, we need to know how blind we were.”

  Hopefully, the window was as short as possible and their redundant systems and fail-safe backups would have worked. Hopefully, this was not a one-two punch. But as Byrne well knew, hope was never an option, much less a plan. Hope was for losers.

  Lannie stood there for a moment, transfixed as he consulted his secure PDA. It was a knockoff of the ultra-secure BlackBerrys the NSA had developed for the President; supposedly, it was unhackable, but Byrne knew enough about computers and personal digital assistants to know that nothing was unhackable.

  The window was crucial. From this location in Chelsea, the NYPD monitored all its cameras and sensors installed in the wake of 9/11-not just the ones in the subways, but surreptitious monitoring devices at either end of every bridge and tunnel connecting Manhattan either to the Bronx, to Long Island or to Jersey. Not only that-there were also cameras and radioactivity sensors underwater, below river level, on every pier, dock, and jetty. New York had been born a water city and a water city it still was, even if commerce now came by train, plane, and truck. But an island cannot afford to be without its seawall defenses. Pirates had roamed the East River well into the 19th century, and it was up to the NYPD to make sure they never returned.

  Lannie’s brown eyes remained impassive as he completed his readout. “Not good,” he said at last. “Down three, maybe four minutes.”

  “Where?” asked Byrne.

  “Everywhere. City-wide. Somebody just crawled in our ass and shoved a sharp stick up it.”

  “What about overlap?” There was a certain amount of fail-safe built into the system, so that if any one part of it went down, a nearby camera would cover for it. But fail-safe didn’t even kick in until they’d been down for five minutes. A system-wide failure would mean no coverage.

  Command decisions came easily to Byrne; he’d been making them ever since his father was killed and he realized that he, not his older brother Tom, was going to have to be the man of the house. “What do you think, Sid?” he said, requesting the only other opinion that mattered.

  “Think it might be time to liaise with NSA,” he said.

  That did it. If Sid was recommending outside assistance, the shit really must be hitting the fan.

  “We’ve been breached,” barked Byrne. “Go red.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Manhattan -late afternoon

  “Mom! Look at this!” Emma Gardner squealed like the child she once was, not the freshly minted teenager she had so recently become. Standing there on Broadway in SoHo, in front of shops she had only ever dreamed about back in Edwardsville, Illinois, she was again her mother’s little girl, the ghosts of her horrible ordeal for the moment cast off, gone.

  “Yuck!” exclaimed Rory. He was about to turn eleven, and still had no use for girls, much less girlish things. But such was his love for his sister that even he managed to feign interest in the latest fashions that almost entirely occupied the minds of girls.

  “Say cheese!” shouted Hope. Rory and Emma struck a mock-pose as she snapped the picture with her cell phone camera. She didn’t care if she looked like a dumb tourist. She was a dumb tourist, in New York City for the first time in her life, and loving it. “Now, who’s for some lunch?”

  “I am!” “I am!!”

  They walked up Broadway to Houston Street. The plastic map she was consulting indicated that the mysterious and wonderful place called Greenwich Village lay to the west, and a brisk walk should bring them into that legendary land of hippies, gays, poets, and painters in just a few minutes.

  “I like New York,” said Emma. “And I’m getting real hungry.”

  “Me, too,” seconded Rory.

  They crossed Seventh Avenue and soon found themselves in the maze of the West Village. The angles of the streets confused Hope. She was determined to show her kids that she was in charge, but when they crossed the intersection of West 4th Street and West 10th Street, she was sure her world had turned upside down.

  “Mom, are you sure you know where we’re going?” asked Rory skeptically, scratching his head. He didn’t know much about Manhattan streets, but he knew what a grid looked like, and this wasn’t it.

  Hope looked at the map in her hands and realized it wasn’t there. Rory had snatched it away and was studying it like an expert cartographer charting the coast of Malabar. “This way,” he decided, and off he went, heading north by northeast, with Hope and Emma trailing.

  Hope took Emma’s hand as they walked past the rows of brownstones and red brick houses, so unlike her notion of what New York City was. This was one of the oldest surviving parts of Manhattan, and as she walked she began to understand what it was that had attracted so many people to Greenwich Village over the centuries. It really was like a little village, if you didn’t count the whizzing yellow cabs and the trucks rumbling down Seventh Avenue and the…unusual…people on the street.

  They passed restaurant after restaurant, but didn’t stop. Although none of them would admit it, there was something forbidding about Manhattan eateries. It was almost as if they were a series of private clubs, with admittance only to familiars; Hope was sure that the minute she entered one the people inside would immediately spot them for the tourists they so obviously were, and would make fun of them behind their backs, or take advantage of them. Besides, the prices…

  Emma clutched her mother’s hand tightly. It wasn’t that she was afraid-the nightmares had finally stopped a few months ago, and she knew she was as safe here, in the middle of the largest city in the country and the greatest city in the world, as she possibly could be. But there was something reassuring about the physical contract, a warmth that helped dispel the lingering fear.

  Suddenly, she shivered and stopped. “What is it?” asked Hope, and then she heard it: Thwack thwack thwack…The sound of angels’ wings. The sound of a helicopter.

  Hope turned and craned her neck. Emma looked down at the dirty pavement. Rory felt, rather than saw, that they had stopped, and was rushing back to his sister. Thwack thwack thwack…

  Then Hope saw it: high over the Hudson, a police chopper was describing a lazy arc in the sky as it surveyed the area along what the locals still referred to as the West Side Highway, even though the highway was long gone. It was not threatening, not alarming, but
the sight and sound brought back unwelcomed memories for both Hope and Emma.

  “Food!” shouted Rory, rushing ahead.

  In their ignorance, they had wandered north of 14th Street, where Rory had spotted a Sabrett’s hot dog vendor wheeling his pushcart north. A hot dog was far from haute cuisine, but it was certainly better than nothing.

  The vendor, however, didn’t seem to want to stop. From time to time he glanced down at his watch, and then cast a look at the sky, but he kept pushing the cart north on Seventh Avenue, Rory on his heels. “Hey, mister, wait up! We wanna buy some hot dogs.”

  The pushcart vendor, however, didn’t stop, but kept up his steady pace. He wasn’t exactly running-you couldn’t really run with a pushcart, Rory noticed-but his pace was quick, almost double-time, and he either didn’t hear Rory or wasn’t inclined to stop.

  “Hey, mister!”

  The man looked over his shoulder: “Off duty!” he shouted and kept right on moving.

  Hope watched her son chase the man up the avenue. She had already learned the hard way that, in New York, when people said they were off-duty, they were off-duty. A couple of fruitless interactions with yellow cabs and the mysterious dome-light signals had taught her that.

  Still, Rory was not about to give up. When the vendor had to halt at a light, the boy caught up with him. “Three hot dogs, please,” he said, brightly.

  The man turned to look at him. Rory wasn’t much good at guessing grown-ups’ ages-they all looked old to him-but he figured the guy had to be somewhere between 20 and 50, African American, with close-cropped hair and a small mustache. He noticed the man had a couple of tats on his big arms. He looked like he worked out pretty regularly, and you wouldn’t want to mess with him.

  “Off duty,” said the man and started up the pushcart again. Then, suddenly, he changed his mind, flipped open the top, and pulled out three dogs as Hope and Emma approached. “What d’you want on ’em?” the man asked.