Michael Walsh: Early Warning

Houses were like wives, he thought as he sipped his Scotch and sent the smoke from the Sobranie cigarette spiraling toward the extractor fan, in that you didn’t hang on to them for the memories-you tore them down, rebuilt them, or replaced them with somebody’s else’s. Memories, good or bad, were noxious.

He was glad he didn’t have any children. This was an evil world, and it would be criminal to bring an innocent life into it. The thought hadn’t occurred to him that perhaps, in the instant before conception, his own parents had thought this way, and their parents before them. That if, going back to Adam and Eve at the Fall, every prospective pair of parents had thought this way, there would be no human race all.

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World…

“Yum.” He looked around the room for the voice and then realized it was his own. That’s what often happened after a drink or two, and for that he blamed Jenny II. If she let him have a nip every now and then, this wouldn’t have happened. Yes, he definitely was going to divorce her. He made a mental note to call his personal attorney in the morning.

Anyway, fuck Milton. Sinclair had hated it when they made him read Paradise Lost in school, mostly because he found the sentences hard to understand.

In fact, it was Paradise Lost and its lit-class ilk that had set him on his current path. For Jake Sinclair believed two things: that he was always the smartest guy in the room, and anything he couldn’t readily understand would be too hard for his fellow citizens to grasp. Therefore, in the name of humanity, he had made it his life’s work to “dumb down” all of his publications and broadcasts and movies and television shows, so that people less fortunate then he would not have to be confronted on a daily basis with the proof of their own ignorance.

He was so wrapped up in thoughts of his own magnanimity that it took him a few seconds to realize the phone was ringing. He downed the last gulp of scotch and jacked the extractor fan to High. Jennifer would be home from her tennis game at any minute. “Hello?”

The caller ID revealed the identity of every one of his callers and, on the off chance that the ID was blocked, he simply refused to answer: in fact, the phone company bumped it immediately to voice mail heaven. Which he never checked. If it was a solicitor, they could call his business manager; if it was someone trying to evade security, the hell with them; if it was a petitioner, then fuck him.

It was none of the above.

A brief beat as switching and relay systems from Los Feliz to Mars did their thing. This was another perk of the office: a massive security system that, once having identified a legitimate caller-especially this one-encrypted all voice communications into something that nobody, not even the National Security Agency, would be able to readily decode.

Finally, the voice came on the line. As agreed, the chatter was kept to under 2.3 seconds, so as best to avoid the tender mercies of Fort Meade. No matter which political party you bribed, in the end, they were both going to fuck you. But there was no mistaking the sweet sound of her voice:

“They took the offer.”

Sinclair hung up, poured himself another drink, and looked at the clock. What the hell was he worried about? Jenny II wouldn’t be home for at least another half hour. He made it a double. Now he wouldn’t have to calculate how much a divorce would cost him. He’d just made half a billion dollars by answering the phone, and that would be more than enough to take care of her.

Manhattan -afternoon

Byrne and Saleh rode in silence up the elevator, Byrne slumped back against the lift’s wall, watching his subordinate’s agitation. “You know the old joke, right?” he said. “About the old bull and the young bull?”

“Huh? Joke?”

“Yeah, joke. Don’t they tell jokes in Ragville?”

Lannie got that aggrieved look on his face so characteristic of young people these days. “You know, Chief, I could-”

Byrne finished the sentence for him. “Bust me down to buck private for hate speech? Maybe. But I can bust all your teeth down your throat first, so the choice is yours.” They went through this all the time, half-joking, half-serious.

“It’s always the Irish way with you, isn’t is, Boss? Punch first, ask questions later?”

The elevator shuddered to a stop. “It’s the only way that works,” said Byrne, getting off first.

As long as he had been on the force, Byrne had never quite gotten used to his new digs. He was used to shit-ass quarters in precincts around the city, at Police Plaza, which even to his office had just enough room for one desk, two chairs, and a window. Even the city’s best detectives were lucky if they had access to a computer that worked only slightly more often than a civil servant.

This was different. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NYPD had spared absolutely no expense in outfitting the CTU with the finest equipment available, and if it wasn’t available, to create it. How the brass had managed to conceal the vast expenditures it took to get CTU up and running was beyond Byrne. But, over the years, his former partner and permanent friend Matt White had mastered bureaucratic infighting to an extent that Byrne never would have thought possible. Matt was the living reincarnation of the old Irish Tammany bosses-John Kelly, Richard Croker, Charlie Murphy. Not bad for a black guy from Houston.

Byrne and Saleh badged their way in. This was no ordinary cop shop; you couldn’t just waltz past a metal detector, plow through the busted hookers, and get to some sad-sack sergeant to report that your car had been stolen. Instead, a scanner read a microchip on your special NYPD badge, a second scanner zapped your eyeballs, and a third made sure you were not carrying any unauthorized weapons-even Byrne’s daddy’s.38 had to pass muster.

“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.