Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  “Are you in contact with him?”

  “No, sir,” replied Tom. “Frankie speaks only to God and his squad. Mere mortals like us need not apply.”

  Tyler looked Byrne over closely, trying not to let his distaste for the man show. He’d read the files, heard all the stories. But Washington was a tough, unforgiving town, and sometimes you had to climb into bed with people you’d otherwise cheerfully strangle, just to get the job done. This was one of those times.

  “Director Byrne, let me be blunt. I need to know what your brother knows, in real time, and I don’t much care how you do it, so long as that information pipeline is up and running A-sap. No matter how much you know, or think you know, about me, Director Seelye, members of my cabinet, or the dog I had when I was twelve, it doesn’t matter to me a bit. Your job depends on opening up a channel of communication for me to Captain Byrne. Do I make myself clear?”

  Seelye expected to watch with satisfaction as the wind went out of Byrne’s sails, leaving him becalmed on the shoals of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, he looked as if Tyler had just handed him a present. “Rat out my own brother? The pleasure’s all mine. I’ll need your authorization though-in writing.”

  Seelye saw the play right away, even if Tyler didn’t. What Tyler had just done was crack the wall of separation that the NYPD had so assiduously erected between it and the feds; by ordering the FBI, in the person of Tom Byrne, to breach NYPD security, he had effectively just delivered the New York City cops to their ancient enemies, the Bureau: the street Irish versus the Notre Dame Irish, pigs in the parlor vs. the lace curtains. The same fucking tribal animosities, imported from the Ould Sod to the New World, most likely with the same sad results. Both sides would lose.

  “Director Byrne,” replied Tyler, coldly, “I am the President of the United States. My word ought to be good enough for you. And Director Seelye is your witness. Now get out of here and get me an inside channel to the CTU. I don’t give a rat’s fucking rear end how you do it, whose toes you have to step on, or whose balls you have to break. Are we clear about this?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now give me your assessment before I have the AG fire you right now and give the job to somebody else.”

  “Yes, sir.” Byrne collected his thoughts. He was pretty sure Tyler was bluffing about firing him. After all, it was he who had successfully transformed the FBI from a bunch of lawyers with guns chasing bank robbers in Omaha into a pretty fair imitation of Britain ’s MI5, the domestic security service, and the front-line counterterrorism soldiers in the ongoing war against the jihad. Not to mention the fact that the Director was a moron, and the AG couldn’t indict a ham sandwich even if he caught it standing over the dead body with a smoking gun between two slices of rye bread. On the other hand, Tyler was known to do some pretty strange things, and with a tough election fight coming up, Tom’s scalp might just turn out to be a campaign collectible.

  “From what we can tell,” he began, “there are at least a dozen terrorists on the ground in New York at the moment. There may be more. There may be sleeper cells, waiting to go into action after we tip our hand. In fact, I would say that is entirely likely. But right now, that’s our best guesstimate, and they’re armed with some pretty formidable firepower.”

  “Can the NYPD take them?” asked Seelye.

  The intercom buzzed. “What is it, Millie?” barked Tyler, annoyed.

  “Pam Dobson on the line, sir. She says the media is clamoring for a statement.”

  “Tell her to keep her panties on,” said Tyler. “And I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ms. Dhouri’s voice. “I’ll phrase it more artfully.”

  “See that you do, thanks,” said the president. He turned back to Byrne. “Well, can they?”

  “Of course they can. And if they can’t, the Guard is on the way, and with those reinforcements-”

  At that moment, a terrific explosion could be heard from the TVs. All three men turned to look.

  A huge plume of smoke was rising over the Hudson and lower Manhattan around Canal Street on the west side. It looked like half the city was on fire.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Tom Byrne. “They bombed the Holland Tunnel.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Los Angeles

  Even in his semi-buzzed state, Jake Sinclair was on the phone in a flash when it vibrated in his palm. He had seen the first news reports-sketchy, incomplete things born of panic and fallibility and gossip and rumor, full of the mistaken details that would later give rise to a thousand conspiracy theories-and was clutching the instrument even before it rang. He pushed the talk button and spoke: “Flood the zone. Everybody in the field. I don’t care how dangerous it is.”

  The voice on the other end of the line crackled with something very like fear. It was Bill Connolly, the head of his cable news division. “We’re on it, Mr. Sinclair.”

  Sinclair tossed a glance at one of the video feeds. Huge billows of smoke were ascending into the sky from what had once been Times Square, and farther to the south, another conflagration had started. The only question now was how much worse it was going to get. A lot worse, was his guess. “Status report,” he commanded.

  “ Times Square is cut off. Looks like some kind of bomb just sealed the entrance to the Holland Tunnel on the Manhattan side. Jesus Christ, what are they doing, taking out all the-?”

  “That’s your job to find out,” snapped Sinclair, “so get to it. Put Principessa on the air-let her anchor. People like to see a pretty girl when the shit hits the fan.”

  “Um, sir? Principessa’s just getting back to the city now. She did a hell of a job just getting to within a hundred miles of Manhattan.”

  Sinclair’s mind raced. He would have preferred to have that magnificent rack front and center on America ’s TV screens; she wasn’t terribly smart but she was pretty, had a great body and was absolutely unafraid of her own stupidity. In fact, she was stone-cold brave, a quality you didn’t find in many women.

  “Okay, then track her. Get another crew with her. If she starts to mix it up in the shit, we need to be there to cover her.” He’d hate to lose Stanley if anything happened to her, if she caught a stray bullet or got clipped in an explosion, but hey, this was war. Ernie Pyle made a great career move when he bought the farm in the Pacific, and as far as Sinclair was concerned, today’s reporters were a bunch of pussies anyway, covering stories from the studio or, in a pinch, from their satellite vans. Good to see the girl on the streets.

  “I’ve got another call.” He punched the talk button again. This time it was Ben Bernstein, the editor in chief of the Times. “Give it to me straight, Benny,” he said.

  “We’re under attack,” shouted Bernstein-

  “Calm down,” he soothed. The man sounded like he was having a heart attack. “It’s happening right in your own backyard. Chance of a lifetime. Who’ve you got on it?”

  “Everybody-”

  “Good. See that they stay there. Tear the paper up and get ready for a Pulitzer.”

  Bernstein was practically sobbing. “But, Jake, it’s…it’s terrible.”

  “Of course it’s terrible. It’s news. Forget 9/11-we own this story.” He rang off. Alert now, he punched up Firefox. Almost immediately, the tabs to his principal websites popped up so he could watch what was happening in real time. Under the guise of providing “traffic cams” and “beauty shots” of various cities, Sinclair had been one of the first to install and link a series of private spy cams around the country. Gradually, sub rosa and through discreet bribery, he also managed to install “news feeds” in Europe, the principal Asian cities, and a couple of places in South America, precisely against moments like these. People didn’t trust the news much anymore-not that he could blame them; after all, he didn’t trust it much anymore, and the reporters were mainly employed by him-and they were more likely to believe the evidence of their own senses than some silly blow-dried mouthpiece doing a standup from a safely secured
“war zone.” This way, the anchors could perform their voice-overs while the remotely controlled cameras gave the viewers a grunt’s-eye view of what was really going on. Needless to say, the viewers loved it, even if the reporters didn’t, and his network’s ratings soared. Besides, who cared what the reporters thought? He had fired half of them already and looked forward to the day when he could fire them all and use 3-D animated avatars, just like in the movies.

  One glance was enough to tell him this was very, very bad-which meant for the news business, it was very, very good. It mattered not if he lost a day, or a week-hell, even a month’s worth of revenue. He would make it up in the numbers of eyeballs delivered to advertisers down the line, and in prestige by his Nielsens. And he would make it up on the back end when he eventually drove his competitors completely out of business, leaving the field entirely to himself. Too big to fail was just fine by Jake Sinclair, and, if anything, he planned to get even bigger.

  Which was why he had left New York, and wasn’t that looking like a smart idea? Not like the poor guy who had leased the old World Trade Center a few weeks before the nineteen holy warriors leveled it. Part of his considerable fortune had been based on smart real-estate deals, and the close of the sale of the New York corporate headquarters to some European interests was his smartest deal yet. The building he had purchased quietly in Century City -the retrofitting was almost complete-would be a beacon for all other corporate moguls, and with better weather.

  “Oh, my God-have you heard?” That would be Jenny II, coming in the door from the porte cochere. He could hear her rustling around in the kitchen, dropping her Maxfield’s bags and her keys; in a few seconds, she’d be in the room, and then he was going to have to feign shock and horror at what was transpiring three thousand miles away instead of gloating about how he’d just made a fortune, and that his network’s rating were sure to soar. “Yes,” he shouted, hoping his voice had just the right amount of concern. “It’s terrible. I’ve got it on right now.” Sinclair linked his computer’s screens to the huge flat-screen television that dominated one wall of the room.

  “I thought the president was supposed to keep us safe,” said Jenny. The look on her face was so real and so sincere that for just a moment Sinclair felt a little embarrassed at his own conflict of interest.

  He put his arms around her and held her close. It was at times like these, when she was the vulnerable girl he had first met playing tennis at her father’s house, that day he had come to consummate his business relationship with the father and eventually wound up marrying the daughter, that he actually enjoyed her company again.

  “What can I do? What can one man do?” he whispered softly. Like most Hollywood wives, she gladly accepted the often brutal violence of the torture-porn movies his and other studios made, yet in the face of the real thing became completely unglued.

  “You can fight him,” said Jenny, softly. “You fight him with everything you’ve got. With everything we’ve got.” She pulled away and gestured around. “I mean, why have you worked so hard to acquire this business, your newspapers, your whole media empire, if not to use it to save our country?”

  Sinclair pulled Jenny II close to him. It was at moments like this that he was grateful he didn’t have to remember a new name. Over her tender, soft shoulder, he could see New York burning.

  It was surreal, a sight he had seen hundreds of times before in his studio’s movies. Disaster movies were ten cents a dance these days, when filmmakers looked for any excuse to blow up the White House and the Vatican (but never anything Muslim), but that was only because nobody ever expected their cinematic visions to actually happen. Fiction was only fun when it stayed fiction.

  There wasn’t much left in Jake Sinclair other than greed and a vague, free-floating animus against various wrongs, both real and imagined, but whatever it was welled up inside him, and he found himself once again making promises that he could not keep. Still, as always, it felt good to make them. “I’ll get them,” he said.

  Jenny II pulled back, her face still turned away from the disaster unfolding in New York. He would try to shield her from it as long as possible; holding fast to progressive belief meant denying reality as long as one could. “Will you, Jake?” she asked, her face streaming. “Promise me you will.”

  Still holding her in his arms, Sinclair maneuvered her as far away from the flatscreen as he could. “You know I will,” he whispered. “When have I ever lied to you?” From this angle, he could just manage to reach out and hit the computer, shutting off the video feed to the other twelve televisions in the house.

  They had moved toward the French doors, which led out to the patio. Sinclair spent most of his life indoors, in a car, or on an airplane; the fresh air felt good.

  “You can do it, Jake,” Jenny said. “You can get them, those bastards.” Somewhere, on somebody’s TV, Manhattan was still under attack, but that was not what Jenny meant. “You can get them, hold their feet to the fire, make them live up to our American ideals.”

  The relaxation of monopoly rules under a succession of presidents and congresses had given men like him an opportunity. Most Americans never thought at all about where their information was coming from, how it was filtered, interpreted, refashioned, and corrupted until it landed on their computer screens, BlackBerrys, iPhones or, diminishingly, in newspapers. Sinclair’s genius was that he owned them all. In fact, some of them he had purchased from a man named Emanuel Skorzeny, a well-known financier who had mysteriously gone missing the year before after selling off many of his media assets at fire-sale prices.

  “Get in the game, Jake,” Jenny was saying. “Use your empire. Take that bastard Tyler down.”

  Jenny II or no Jenny II, he had just about had it with the party in power. The man had been elected on an “anti-” platform. Anti-everything that had come before, most especially his predecessor, whose invincible ignorance and smug moral certainty had enraged every almost segment of society except Flyover Country. And yet, something had caused Tyler to turn away from Blame America First. Once in office, he had disappointed many of his supporters and enraged others by refusing to move his social reforms along as quickly as he had promised, and they had hoped. Some devil had snuck into the White House in the dead of night and climbed under the covers with the Bachelor President. Sinclair wondered who it had been.

  There were plenty of stories about Tyler on hold. Stories in the newspapers, the magazines, stories ready for broadcast, awaiting just the pushing of the “publish” buttons on the net. But progressives weren’t supposed to attack their own, certainly not the matter of sexuality, or even of speculative sexuality, and certainly not when they were supposed to take the side of the “anti-” party, whatever its current positions were. It was unseemly to attack any member of the party, any potential ally, any useful idiot, which Tyler had always been. But now, with New York aflame, it was time to take the gloves off.

  Gently, he released Jenny II. Thoughts of divorcing her had fled his mind; his field of vision had room only for the devastated heart of midtown Manhattan and her father’s bank account, most of it still unplundered, ripe for the taking. “I’ll get the bastard,” he told Jenny II. “You can count on me.”

  As they moved toward the pool, he unfastened the halter top of her simple shift, which dropped to the ground. As he stroked her bare back, he guided her toward the spa.

  She slipped into the water like a sleek mermaid. It was amazing how much better, how much sexier, naked women were in the water, so smooth, so unencumbered, their skins glistening as they cut through the water like seals. It was their natural element.

  He sloughed off his shirt and slid out of his trousers. One thing left to do.

  He punched a single key on his Surge, the one that connected him directly to the newsroom of his flagship paper in Manhattan. He was getting ready for another round of down-sizing, but they didn’t have to know that now. All they had to think about at the moment was the Pulitzers they were going to wi
n. Might as well live it up.

  “Endorse Hassett. Yes, tomorrow morning. No, I don’t care how this ends, it’s not going to change my mind. You have my standing editorial. Set the agenda. Do some damage. It’s the American way.”

  He turned to Jenny II, so seductive. His hand brushed the button for the spa. The bubbles leapt to life. So did he.

  By God, he still had it. He still had it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Manhattan

  In his heart, nearly bursting from the exertion of his sprint, Frankie Byrne had always known he would be too late, but he didn’t know what else to do. “First through the door” was the motto of New York ’s Finest, Irishmen to the core no matter what their ethnicity. He had lived by this motto for his entire career on the force, and he was not about to give it up now. Not even when the danger was greatest, which made the urgency all the more fierce. First through the door meant first through the door, whether the door was real or figurative, whether a shithole in the Bronx or a Park Avenue apartment, whether the door opened onto a swanky restaurant, an East Village head shop, a Queens crack house, or the Archbishop’s fuckpad across from MoMA. It was all the same to him. You went in to sort the situation out, or you died in the attempt. There was no sense rationalizing it. You just did it, and if the devil got you, well, you hoped you’d be in heaven long before the cocksucker knew you were dead. That was the Paddy way, and it was the only way he knew.

  Why this was true was a mystery, but it was departmental lore and so every cop on the force abided by it. For Byrne, however, it went deeper. His father had died in the line of duty. In a firefight, you shot first or you died, and Robert Byrne had had been shot in the back, and even though he managed to turn on his unknown assailant he had not fired his weapon, out of fear of hitting a civilian. And so he died. Byrne honored his father’s memory, but he had no intention of ever letting that happen to him.