Michael Ledwidge - Alert

I arrived early enough to score a precious visitor parking spot at One Police Plaza, which was no small feat, considering how many people worked in the neighborhood’s courthouses and government buildings. On the crowded eighth floor of the brown brick monolith, I spotted Chief Fabretti in the hallway. Instead of giving me his usual hail-fellow-well-met routine, he blew past me with his iPhone glued to his ear and an evil look glued to his face, like I was empty air.

I actually didn’t really care or really even blame him. The situation and the stress level everyone was under had reached the impossible zone. I knew we all wanted the same thing — for the killing to stop and for this horror to be over.

I had a little time before the meeting, so I hit the break room, where I managed to score the last three survivors in a box of cinnamon Munchkins. There was no more coffee, so I had to settle for green tea that I made semitolerable once I poured in a lot of half-and-half and sugar.

I took my grub over to a corner window overlooking the Foley Square courthouses to the northwest and gave Emily a call.

“Hey, Agent. There you are,” I said when she answered. “I tried to call you earlier, but you must have been in the shower or something. I’m down here at One PP at the latest big emergency meeting. Are you heading over or what?”

“Not this time,” Emily said. “Like dogs and people without shirts, feds aren’t allowed, apparently. The press is asking questions about what they’re calling ‘shortsighted and brutal’ tactics at the Queens raid yesterday, and now everybody involved is working overtime to throw anyone they can grab under the bus. So much for our happy task force. Looks like the feds and the department are so pissed at one another this morning they’re no longer talking.”

I laughed grimly.

“Great. Dissension and infighting are just what we need while the city is being dismantled brick by brick. So what are you doing?”

“I’m at our VIP emergency meeting, of course. Just a couple of blocks from you at Twenty-Six Fed.”

“So close and yet so far,” I said, looking at the federal building two blocks away, above the courthouses. “Hey, after our respective ass-covering sessions, how about Chinese for lunch? Wo Hop. My treat.”

“Wo Hop?” Emily said. “How could I turn that down?”

So... how’s your morning going?

Gary Friedman smiled as he dropped his mop in the corner of the stairwell landing. He sat down, light-headed, as he looked at the text that had just come in on his phone from Gina.

He couldn’t stop smiling. Or reading the text.

“Thank you, Lord,” he said, kissing his Galaxy.

He really wasn’t one for screwing off and getting lost in his phone like a lot of the other guys on the maintenance crew. Especially after his rat bastard of a boss, Freddie, busted him playing Angry Birds two weeks back and chewed him out in front of everybody. Just because they worked in a law enforcement building, Freddie thought he was in law enforcement, the stupid jackwad.

But after last night, after the best night of his life, Gary didn’t care, he thought as he reread Gina’s text. Things were changing in the life of Gary Irving Friedman — for the better, finally.

Like a lot of his classmates at Brandeis, he’d moved to Brooklyn from Boston straight after graduation. With his cinematography degree and his award-winning short film under his belt, he’d thought it’d be just a matter of hooking up with other young artists in the borough’s vibrant arts scene, then it would be Hollywood, here I come.

But he soon woke up and smelled the fair trade coffee, because practically everybody he knew in Williamsburg had a cinematography degree and a short-film award or was in a band or had a writing MFA. What none of them had were connections. Or jobs in their respective winner-take-all fields.

Six months in, when his summer job money ran out and the janitor job came up through a friend of a friend, he was dumbfounded. A fucking janitor? It was a government job, with job security and benefits and all that, and it actually paid pretty well, but his father was an eye doctor, for the love of Pete, and he was going to be scrubbing urinals?!

But in the end, he took it. Swallowed his pride. Because it was either start mopping or go home to Dr. Friedman’s musty beige basement in Brockton. He’d decided to stick it out and mop it up.

And the whole time he’d been trying to meet girls, but it had been one depressing strikeout after another. Until last night. There he was, wallowing in the misery of his Xbox as usual, when the doorbell rang and the black-haired Katy Perry look-alike from downstairs was standing there, drunk. She’d broken her key in her door, and could he help her? Why, yes, as a matter of fact he could! Five minutes later, he was knight-in-shining-armoring it down the fire escape into her apartment window.

In thanks, she poured him a Grey Goose, and they started talking, and the rest of the night was a blur of vodka shots and telling her his life story and showing her his short and her going gaga over it and then they were making out on her bed. They didn’t go all the way but damn close. Damn, damn close.

And now she was texting him!

Gary stared at the screen again, still not completely convinced it wasn’t a mirage. There was probably some advice about what to do next, play hard to get or something, but he didn’t give a shit. She was hot and she liked him. Told him he was talented and funny, and it was like his Brooklyn dream was finally coming true and—

That’s when Gary heard it. It was a weird sound. It seemed to be coming from above him, on the ceiling of the stairwell. It was a little whirring sound followed by a couple of metallic clicks.

He looked up as he heard it again. It seemed like it was coming from inside the rectangular AC duct above him. Then there were more of the sounds. A lot more. “What the hell?” Gary said, standing. It sounded like someone had dumped a box of Chiclets into the aluminum duct, only weirder.

“Freddie?” Gary said, keying his radio.

“What now?” said his perpetually surly bastard of a boss, who was outside hosing the sidewalk.

“I don’t know. There’s something weird up here. I’m on the sixth floor in stairwell C.”

“Weird how?”

“I don’t know, but you should come up.”

“This better be good,” Freddie replied.

The ambulance was on Park Row beside a coffee cart when the sun came up. They’d had to move twice during the night to avoid suspicion. It didn’t matter where they were as long as they were within the two thousand feet of the bots’ radio receiver.

“Hey, what the hell is that?” said Mr. Beckett around a crumbling apple turnover as he suddenly saw something on the screen.

The tablet screen was divided into a grid of hundreds of little boxes now, a view from the camera on each individual bot. Mr. Beckett didn’t know how Mr. Joyce was keeping track of them all. It looked like a lot of gobbledygook to him, but then again, he wasn’t a mathematical genius with an IQ of 170, like Mr. Joyce.

“Which? Where? What?” said Mr. Joyce, who was as frazzled as Mr. Beckett had ever seen him. The guy had been a ball of sweat and nerves all night as he clicked at the keyboard, moving all the bots around. It was a miracle he didn’t have carpal tunnel syndrome.

“It’s a face, I think. In this one. Can you make it larger?” Mr. Beckett said.

Mr. Joyce hit a button and, lo and behold, a confused-looking Hispanic guy wearing a maintenance uniform appeared on the screen, as if he’d just snapped a puzzled selfie.