Michael Walsh - Early Warning

He rifled through the man’s pockets to find his ID: Francis Xavier Byrne, Captain, and chief of the Counter-Terrorism Unit. What were the odds?

Actually, the odds were pretty good. Everyone who had ever lived or visited midtown Manhattan had had the experience of looking up and seeing an old friend from high school across the bar, or encountering a former boss on the subway, which begged the question of how many times could that have happened were it not for fate: that you miss the old flame by a matter of minutes or even seconds; that you turned your head and so didn’t see the guy who’d owed you money for ten years.

So here, in a mostly deserted Times Square, in the middle of a firefight, how unusual was it really that he should encounter the one man he needed to know, the one many who could really be of use to him down the line, either as an ally or as a decoy? Using a hand scanner, he quickly sucked up all Byrne’s personal information and uplinked it to CSS. He also got the numbers of the cop’s department phone and the personal cell phone they weren’t supposed to carry, but all of them did. He felt around for a drop piece, but didn’t find any. This guy was both very honest and very sure of himself.

Devlin cracked some smelling salts-that’s what they still called them-under Byrne’s nose and saw the man’s eyelids flutter. He was going to be fine. He scribbled something on a piece of paper and stuck it in the cop’s inside breast pocket, where he kept his shield.

Then he was gone.

Byrne took a deep breath and staggered to his feet. The noises and shouts and screams and gunfire from the direction of Times Square grew louder. There was no time for reflection, nor for wonderment at miracles. There were still ghosts who were not yet ghosts, and Frankie Byrne had to save as many of them as he could. Then he stopped-

His dad’s service revolver was in his hand, although he couldn’t really remember how it got there. So it was true: this really was the kind of gun they would have to pry from his cold, dead hands. Then he noticed that his wounded shoulder had been expertly field dressed, and that there was little or no pain. He had a vague memory of a man with his face concealed, a brief struggle…but that might have been the morphine talking.

Morphine? Since when were they dealing with terrorists who brought their own corpsmen with them? And why would a terrorist not just kill him, but save him?

So he wasn’t a terrorist then, even though, as memory returned, he was wearing a balaclava, just like the old PLO Fatah guys had worn back in the day. Which meant there was a foreign element in the city, that Manhattan wasn’t truly sealed, and that he could only be a fed of some kind. FBI? No, they weren’t that good…

Then-voices from behind. “Hey, mister,” said one of them and at first Frankie couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. He turned, ready for anything, gun trained-

A boy, then an older girl. Finally, a woman. All three were covered with soot and grime but no blood that he could see.

“Don’t shoot, mister,” said the kid.

“I’m Hope Gardner,” said the woman.

“I’m a cop,” said Francis Byrne. He hadn’t said that in years. It felt good.

And now to work.

The passage through the PATH train tunnel had been uneventful. The cameras might have picked up his presence, but in the half-light of the shut-down tunnel, no one would be able to make him out, even if they bothered to go back and look at the grainy security films, which they wouldn’t. In one of the service bays-the tunnel was lined with them every few hundred yards; they contained emergency equipment, oxygen, firefighting canisters, first-aid supplies-he had found what he was looking for: a spec-ops version of the Lewis Machine and Tool MRP semi-automatic AR rifle with a SOPMOD buttstock and firing the 6.8 SPC (“special purpose cartridge”) round. The rifle was broken down into five component parts, including a suppressor and a Schmidt und Bender 3-12x50 mm scope, which meant he could shoot the eyes out of anything at ranges up to one hundred meters and beyond. The best part was that, with a hex head torque wrench, you could sub different calibers and barrel lengths on the weapon, depending on availability and necessity. There were also a few concussion grenades and some climbing clips in case he needed them, as well as a netbook with a satellite uplink, with which he could access all but the most secure NSA databases.

As in Mumbai, the attackers were coordinating via cell phones, which meant his instincts had been right. The NYPD’s first reaction probably had been to shut down cell service, but his instructions to Seelye had obviously been executed, and he could read them clearly. No point in deactivating the bubble when it was going to be your best friend, and right now they might as well be wearing signs around their necks advertising their locations. As long as his uplink held, and they remained relatively stationary, he’d be able to identify and terminate any of them the cops didn’t get to first.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all.

In Mumbai, the cops had been hampered by a lack of technology: they could record the cell phone conversations of the attackers, but they couldn’t triangulate and track them in real time. As a result, the killers had been left free to roam throughout the city, shooting up the train station, the Jewish center, and the luxury hotel pretty much with impunity until they were finally surrounded and cut down by superior firepower. It was agonizing to listen to, these conversations between the delusional young men who thought they were fighting and dying for Allah and their handler in Pakistan, who so casually sent all but one of them to their deaths. The targets had been carefully selected for maximum object-lesson value, and each gunman had been kitted out not only with armaments but maps and building plans, so as to make his deadly work go as smoothly as possible. The quality of mercy had not been strained, since there was none; Indian, Jew, and foreign tourist alike had been gunned down without so much as a single act of mercy, since the word had no meaning in this context. With the killers on a quest for martyrdom, the victims were nothing more than means to an end, their lives as meaningless as the locks of hair and the scraps of flesh from his victims that a serial killer kept not as a memento but as proof of his own skill and moral rectitude.

The killers had gone to school on the Mumbai attack, that much was clear. The attack on Times Square had been well-coordinated, the timing of the subway explosion perfect, the sealing of at least the Holland Tunnel a masterstroke. In fact, Devlin was counting on their professionalism. Professionals were many things, but one thing above all was that they were predictable. Training had instilled in them discipline and with discipline came adherence to the rules-not arbitrary rules but rules that worked, rules that were proven to keep your ass alive in the toughest spots. Professionals could be dealt with, as he had dealt with Milverton in Paris and London; you might win or lose in direct hand-to-hand combat, but you knew the rules of the game.

Amateurs, however, were a different story. Most of them could be picked off rather easily, since their true-believer rage caused them to blunder time and again, as they hoped to make up for in anger what they lacked in basic tradecraft. Amateurs were like the guy who drove all the way across the country, took the Metro to the Pentagon, and opened fire at the guards at the civilian entrance; he managed to wound two before they cut him down and killed him. He’d made his point, but for what? He should have just shot himself back home in California and saved time.

Tyler had reacted exactly as the attackers had hoped he would, by sealing off the city and leaving the task to the NYPD. That’s what he would have done, thought Devlin, play it right down the middle, leaving it to the pros without making a federal case out of it, but inserting some agents just in case. How many hands Tyler was playing, of course, was known only to him and maybe to Seelye; no doubt there would be other Branch 4 ops involved, plus any military units, probably at the platoon level, that they might have in-filtrated. But there wasn’t going to be any big action-even a reporter would eventually notice that, and Tyler ’s only hope lay in ending this fast without hyping it, mourning the dead and rebuilding the city as quickly as possible. With any luck, he could spin the entire episode to his advantage, have Americans rally round the flag, hand out yellow ribbons to his heart’s content, have his Hollywood buddies organize a couple of telethons, and hope like hell the rebuilding effort didn’t turn out to be Freedom Tower II. It was his only chance if he wanted a second term.