Michael Walsh - Early Warning

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 was 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.”