Michael Walsh - Early Warning

“Otherwise, we let NYPD play this one out. I want to let the American people know that politics has nothing to do with this. The easy thing, the telegenic thing, would be to send in the Army or the National Guard. But that’s probably exactly what they’re expecting us to do-and then who knows what will happen, or what they’ve got? For too long we’ve worried about the death of a single soldier or civilian, and let hundreds, thousands of our people die for our prissy precaution. Well, as Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. May God have mercy on the souls of the people who will die, that others might live. God bless America. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen,” said Tyler, rising and signaling that the meeting was over.

Puzzled looks were exchanged. “Secretary Johnson, Director Seelye, will you kindly remain after the others leave?”

Nobody said a word as the room emptied. Byrne lingered a little, as if half-expecting to be spoken to. In this, he was not disappointed. “Thank you, Director,” said Tyler, shaking his hand. “I’m sorry that your brother is in the shit, but-”

“Frankie can handle it, Mr. President,” said Byrne. “In the shit is where he lives.”

“I don’t know your brother, Byrne,” replied Tyler, “but from everything I’ve read he’s a hell of a guy. I look forward to welcoming him to the White House when this is all over.”

“I’ll be sure to tell him that, sir,” said Tom.

“I’m counting on it,” said Tyler, ushering him out. Once the door was shut and Ms. Dhouri signaled that the coast was clear, Tyler spoke again to his remaining confidantes.

“Army, I think there’s something you need to tell Secretary Johnson?”

Los Angeles

“Dad?”

Danny Impellatieri heard the voice of his nine-year-old daughter, Jade, as if in a dream. It was not that he didn’t hear it-no parent can ignore the sound of his own child’s voice-or that he didn’t care, but he was riveted to what was going on in Manhattan.

Jade stuck her head around the corner of his study and made a face at him. He was sitting at his desk, several computers going at once; instinctively, he minimized the video feeds on one of the screens, and turned toward her as she spoke: “Did you know that operating two computers at once is one of the telltale signs of nerd-dom?” she asked playfully. “It is. You can Google it. What are you watching?”

Danny tried not to let the concern he felt, both professional and personal, show in his face. Jade had already been through a lot in her young life, and there was no point in putting her through this, however remotely, unless he absolutely had to. She’d find out soon enough.

“Just some stuff for work.”

She didn’t fall for it. He didn’t expect her to. “I thought you were off work. You just got home.”

“I am,” he lied. “Or, rather, I was. But, you know…”

“Duty calls, right?” She was a sharp kid, with sharp eyes and ears. It hadn’t been as hard raising her by himself the past nine months as he thought it was going to be, as everybody had said it would be. Although they had both taken Diane’s death hard, they had also realized that the only way to get through the grief and the loss was to do it together, and so they had made an unspoken pact: Diane would live, forever, in their hearts, and life would go on.

Jade stepped into the room, a little hesitant as she crossed the threshold and stopped. This had always been his inner sanctum, a place she had been trained to stay out of, not from fear of punishment, but because it was her father’s private space. The big house on Hobart Street had plenty of places for a kid to play in, to get lost in, and when all else failed there was always the swimming pool and the big, overgrown yard beyond it. “What is it?” she said, with that tone in her voice. The tone that said: I know something is wrong.

“Nothing.”

“Don’t nothing me, Dad.” She was right: he should never nothing her again. He owed her that much. He owed Diane that much.

“There’s some trouble, back in New York.” There, he said it. He knew it wouldn’t take long for her young mind to make the leap, the leap straight toward his heart.

“ New York? That’s where Mrs. Gardner is, right?”

He nodded. “Yes. And Rory and Emma.”

“Are they okay?”

“I’m sure they are. New York ’s a big city, bigger than L.A. ”

“You should check.” She was right. He already had.

And nothing. Cell service was spotty and was likely to be for a long time. That was one of the lessons of 9/11, the instant disruption of communications not simply by a terrorist act, but by the sheer volume-a kind of self-inflicted denial-of-service attack. The Emergency Services units had learned from that disaster and had developed relatively secure methods of communication, but theirs would be just about the only signals working reliably on the island of Manhattan. He was going to have to hack into them to find out what the hell was going on.

He looked at his iPhone, as if expecting it to say something. Why hadn’t he called? If the hostage situation in Edwardsville had been enough to activate Danny and a hand-picked unit from Xe, the old Blackwater group, then surely an assault on Manhattan would-

“Have you reached her?” He shook his head. “But you’ve tried?”

He nodded. He hadn’t expected things to move this quickly, felt there was something unseemly about it and had resisted. But the heart did what the heart did, and although neither of them had so much had hinted at it, he suspected that not only did they know, but that their children did, too.

He looked at Jade. You could hardly see a trace of her injuries, except for a few scars on her face. In a city filled with great plastic surgeons, Dr. Kamin had made all the scars disappear; you practically had to look at her face under a microscope to see the tiny pitting caused by the flying glass in the Grove bombing. The bombing that had taken Diane’s life and changed his world forever. Nine months on, the Grove’s rubble had long since been carted away and a new and better high-end shopping center was going up on the site. But the hole in his heart had only just begun to mend. Hope had lost her husband as well, not at the Grove but during the Edwardsville school-hostage crisis that had immediately preceded it; that was the act of war that had brought them together, and that was the bond that was pulling them ever closer.

And now he couldn’t reach her. Where the hell was “Linus Larrabee” when he needed him?

Not that “Linus Larrabee” was the man’s real name. Danny had worked with his mysterious colleague for years, most recently on the Budapest snatch, where they had both used Humphrey Bogart character aliases. But that didn’t mean he knew who he was. They had always engaged each other only through cutouts, with “Larrabee,” or whichever randomly generated alias he was using for that particular mission, always initiating contact.

He stared at his iPhone. That was how they communicated with one another. The most compromised popular technology on the planet, and at the same time the most useful.

Most people didn’t realize that every time they used their iPhone, the SKIPJACK chip gave the NSA access to everything the phone users generated: phonebooks, websites visited, photos, the works. As the so-called “warrantless wiretapping” program had proven, the telephone companies, such as AT &T, were in bed with the government, and despite all the lawsuits that the American Civil Liberties Union could bring against what was left of Ma Bell, in the end it didn’t really matter. In the sacred name of national security, the National Security Agency was going to get its way. Devlin would have nearly instant access to any message on the iPhone that rang the bell back at The Building, even while the Black Widow was still chomping down on the data.