Michael Ledwidge: Alert

“Yevdokimov’s the link. We needed to find him yesterday,” I said as I almost knocked over my china coffee cup while fumbling out my phone to call New York. “He’s the only one who knows who the real bombers are.”

The line of massive steel pylons forming the truck-bomb barrier were built directly into the asphalt across the width of Broad Street. They glinted dully in the morning sun as we pulled up in front of them eight hours later.

Beyond them to the north, up the man-made slot canyon of Broad Street, you could see the reason for all the security — the iconic columned edifice of the New York Stock Exchange.

We were down here in lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes territory not for a ticker-tape parade or to engage in insider trading but to head into the new FBI headquarters across the street from the exchange, at 23 Broad.

The whole block around the exchange already had incredible security, so it was a no-brainer after the fall of 26 Federal Plaza for the FBI to rent out space at what had to be one of the safest blocks in the entire city, if not the planet. Still, as we waited for our turn at the checkpoint, I frowned at the oak-trunk-thick steel rods that formed a line across the street. There was something depressing and barbaric about them, something medieval.

“You know you’re living in some interesting times,” I said to Emily, riding shotgun, “when they’ve actually brought back the drawbridge.”

The pylons retracted into the street after we showed our creds to federal cops manning the checkpoint, and we drove up and parked in 23 Broad’s underground lot. We’d been able to catch some sleep and actually shower on the mayor’s incredible plane, so we weren’t looking too bad as we rode the fancy financial building’s mirrored elevator up to the thirty-first floor.

I looked down at my suddenly vibrating phone to see that Fabretti was trying to call me. He’d texted me earlier to try to coordinate a media strategy, of all things. The raid on the island had been leaked to the press, apparently, and they wanted details.

Leaked by whom? I wondered. I hadn’t texted him back, nor did I answer his call. He didn’t seem to understand that we were still very much in the middle of this. It wasn’t mission-accomplished time.

Emily smiled at me in the elevator mirror as I looked up. We held eyes for a moment. Then two moments. Her eyes were nice to look at.

“What?” I finally said.

“Your kids,” she said.

“Oh, them,” I said, smiling back.

After we’d gotten off the plane, we’d been by my apartment to squeeze in a happy-reunion-slash-power-breakfast with my kids. Seamus had done God’s work by having piles of scrambled eggs and toast and Irish sausages hot and ready for us. As we devoured them, the gang had regaled us about their incredible failed Escape from New York odyssey in the van. I laughed the hardest when they said they had to practically carry poor Martin, completely exhausted, into his dorm room back at Manhattan College.

He was probably still sleeping, I thought. Or looking for a new job.

“What about my little tykes?” I said to Emily as we ascended. “What did they do this time? Was it Eddie?”

She shook her head and smiled. “They’re just terrific. All of them. So alive and funny and happy and good. They actually care about each other. No one even has kids anymore, and you have ten. Ten! That’s a lot of love. They’re so lucky.”

“I’m the lucky one,” I said. “They practically take care of me now.”

Off the elevator in the hall on thirty-one, there was an incredibly stunning airplane-like view of the city. Outside the floor-to-ceiling glass on the east side, you could see the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, and down the corridor was a clear shot of the gleaming Freedom Tower and Lady Liberty out in the harbor.

“This city doesn’t quit, does it?” Emily said, walking over and pressing her forehead to the glass like a little kid.

“All the people and motion and money and work and art and history. Dizzying, jaw-dropping skyscraper after dizzying, jaw-dropping skyscraper everywhere you turn. I mean, look at it. It’s... a wonder.”

“It sure is,” I said, looking down with her at the slants of light on the buildings and the ant-size people on Broadway. Out in the wide, sparkling bay, a bath-toy tugboat was drawing alongside Liberty Island, chugging earnestly toward Bayonne.

“But you know what the bigger wonder is?” I said after a beat.

“What’s that?”

“Why all these losers keep lining up to destroy it.”

I followed Emily around a corner, where she pressed some buttons on an electronic keypad beside an unmarked door. On the other side of it was a huge busy bull pen of desks and cubicles with phones ringing and FBI agents tapping at computers and running around.

Without saying anything to anyone, Emily guided me through the office maze and around another corner to another unmarked door beside another keypad. She typed in another combo, and then we were in a cramped, too-bright windowless room where there were rows of servers on shelves and wires on racks and eight or nine people typing at computer terminals.

Emily introduced me around to the agents of the FBI New York office cyber investigative squad. CIS supervisory agent Chuck Jordan was a young, intense, clean-cut guy who, in his sharp Tiffany-blue button-down dress shirt and gray slacks, looked more like a young finance guy than a cop.

Jordan had called Emily as we were finishing breakfast. He said he might have found a possible lead on Yevdokimov’s whereabouts.

“So you think you have something for us, Chuck?” said Emily.

Instead of saying anything, Chuck handed us a photograph. It was a shot of a cluttered table with papers and books piled on it. There was a pair of glasses, a magenta Sharpie, and a crumpled napkin on an egg-crusted paper plate. Beyond the messy table was a room with bare, paint-chipped plaster walls and dirty hardwood floors. The space struck me as vaguely industrial.

In the top left-hand corner of the photo, you could see a shadeless window. In the window was the stone edifice of an old office building on the other side of a narrow street.

“This is the PC where the ransom demand originated from,” Chuck said. “This shot is from the PC’s webcam.”

“Where is it?” I said.

“That’s the rub,” Chuck said. “We don’t know. They sent the signal through Tor, the underground computer network. It bounces things around so you don’t know the actual physical location or owner of a particular computer. Basically, we can find the original computer. Unfortunately, we just don’t know whose it is or where it is. That’s why we turned on the PC’s camera to get a clue from the room.”

“You turned on the camera on the bad guy’s computer? How?”

“After the judge gave us a warrant, we sent in our Trojan horse,” Chuck said.

“Trojan horses are the investigative malware we use,” Emily explained. “It looks like a regular program on the surface, but behind the scenes, it’s secretly able to contact the PC’s internal controller to allow backdoor access to the target PC.”

“Like a virus or something?” I said.

“Technically, no,” said Chuck. “Technically, a virus attempts to inject itself into other files. A Trojan is its own file.”

“But how do you get in?” I said. “What about firewalls and stuff?”

“Most people have one or two popular antivirus programs, so we usually send the Trojan through a pretend update to one of them,” Chuck said. “But in this case, the target didn’t seem to have an antivirus program on the list, so we used an exploit in their browser’s PDF parser.”