Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  “Whoever these fuckers are,” Lannie was shouting, “I am personally going to fuck up their shit two times.”

  Through his pain, Sid Sheinberg smiled. Lannie was such a Brooklyn boy.

  Byrne managed to grab his radio, but he knew before he tried that he wouldn’t get through. Everything around him was on fire, and he knew enough from all the war-gaming they’d done that Times Square probably wasn’t the only place in the city that was burning right now.

  What was it Sid Sheinberg had said about the cyberattack-a redirect through Mumbai. Byrne’s mind raced, trying to intuit what was going on. In 2008, a group of ten Pakistani-trained terrorists had attacked Mumbai and held the entire city hostage for nearly three days, killing nearly three hundred people before the Indian police managed to take them down, killing nine and capturing one.

  As Byrne tried to shake some sense back into his head, he repeated that to himself: ten gunman had held one of the world’s largest cities hostage.

  Oh, Jesus.

  A Mumbai-style attack was one of the CTU’s worst nightmares. A handful of killers who didn’t care whether they lived or died could do tremendous damage, not simply in human terms, in the number of lives taken, but in psychological damage. The Indians had been used to it, since their country, with its huge Muslim minority, had been subjected to ongoing horrific attacks of terrorism for years. Mumbai had been hit repeatedly, including a nasty series of train bombings in 1993 that killed more than two hundred and fifty people and wounded seven hundred others. True, periodically the Hindu majority wreaked its terrible revenge, but even bloody retaliation hadn’t stopped the ongoing conflict between two irreconcilable beliefs and political systems.

  And we thought it couldn’t happen here, thought Byrne. Secular America was beyond such petty religious squabbles; nobody, not even the twelve nuns left in the United States, took their faith that seriously anymore; we mourned Michael Jackson, not Jesus, and suffered along with the contestants and judges on American Idol. And yet we worried. Which was one of the reasons why, in the wake of 9/11, Manhattan ’s defenses had been hardened and strengthened. And what good had it done?

  He realized he had his.38 in his hand, his father’s gun, and was running toward to the destruction now, east, toward the wreckage that could only have come from a car bomb, and toward the gun battle he could hear in the distance at Times Square.

  And then he heard the explosion behind him, to the south, and he knew they were in for it now.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Washington, D.C.

  Tyler ’s reeling presidency couldn’t take much more of this, thought Army Seelye as they gathered in the Oval Office: the president, Seelye, and Byrne; plus the SecDef, Shalika Johnson; Celina Sanchez, the National Security Advisor; the DNI, Lamont Sutton; Colangelo from Homeland Security; and General Higgins from the Joint Chiefs. Even Col. Grizzard, the man with the football, was present.

  Seelye felt a sense of despair wash over him. These were the best minds of the Republic, or should have been. They owed that, at least, to the American people who were paying their salaries and trusting in them to do the right thing, which was, first and foremost, protect them. Instead what the great American people got was this collection of hacks, time-servers, and affirmative-action appointees, most of whom couldn’t get a job in the private sector unless it had something to do with their brother-in-law or a government contract. It really was pathetic when you thought about it: that more than two centuries of American History had come to this.

  The old Tyler ’s first instinct would have been caution, wait and see; the new Tyler, emboldened by his success last year in stopping the EMP attack on the east coast, would want to hit back, strike out. But this Tyler was already a different man-one who saw his political death staring him in the face. There was no way out of this. No matter how much worse things got in New York, the damage was already done. Hassett might as well start measuring the Oval Office for new drapes, especially with the endorsement that sonofabitch Jake Sinclair already ringing over the airwaves.

  “What’s the situation?” asked the president, as if he didn’t already know. He looked at Seelye to begin the briefing.

  “A short while ago, the Counter-Terrorism Unit of the New York City Police Department came under a coordinated denial-of-service attack from various points overseas,” Seelye began. “As you know, NYPD has been given extraordinary latitude in defending the city, especially after we all let them down so badly on 9/11. And, as you also know, they’ve been extraordinarily successful in preventing further attacks-at least fourteen that we know about.” On the silent TV screens, images of a burning New York danced to the unheard words of the network anchors’ professional, dispassionate concern.

  “But today was different. We’ve seen coordinated cyber-assaults before-hell, the DoD gets them on a daily basis, mostly from China. Our infrastructure is also routinely probed, including the electrical grid, computer networks, and the water supply. While we’re sleeping, our enemies are awake, trying to take us down, and no amount of kumbaya is going to change that. You’d think we’d all learned that by now, from 9/11.”

  That part was bureaucratic ass-covering. Seelye knew that Tyler would now turn on Sutton and Colangelo, and he was right.

  “God-fucking-damn it!” exclaimed the volcano, exploding from his chair behind the Resolute desk. “Ladies and gentlemen, the American taxpayer spends a hellacious amount of money on us annually, and the only thing that John and Jane Q. Fucking Public expect in return is that we keep their asses safe. And now,” he gestured at the TV sets, “we’ve let them down again…I’ve let them down again.”

  “Sir,” began Colangelo. This was not going to look good for Homeland Security, and the Secretary was leaping to the defense of his turf. Would that he would leap to the defense of his country with such alacrity. “With all due respect, my department has done everything in its power to-”

  “Shut the fuck up, Bob,” shouted Tyler and Seelye flashed back to the late Senator Bob Hartley, Tyler ’s friend from across the aisle, whom he had left to hang out to dry in the interests of state, and so caused his death. Seelye wondered how heavily that weighed on the man behind the desk.

  “If I may, sir,” interjected Sutton. The Director of National Intelligence was another accretion from the aftermath of 9/11, part of the defensive political reaction to the disaster: the creation of yet more bureaucratic bullshit, sold to the American public as a great leap forward in the defense of democracy.

  “You may not,” snapped Tyler. “I know what you’re going to say, what you’re all going to say. We don’t have the right equipment. We don’t have enough manpower. We don’t have enough money. Nobody in this town ever has enough men and matériel; nobody ever has enough money. The American people throw it at you like women throwing their panties at a rock star, and still it’s not enough. It’s never fucking enough. I sign the budget authorizations and yet we still have secretaries that don’t talk to each other, crap-assed equipment that sucked back in 1984, and a metastasizing bureaucracy of vampires that hoovers the life out of our countrymen while it fucks them in the ass and doesn’t even give ’em the courtesy of a reach-around.”

  “So,” Tyler concluded, “what are we going to do? And don’t give me any bullshit. Give me your best recommendations and make sure they’re good, because if they aren’t I am going down. But before I do, I am taking you all with me.”

  The usual boilerplate. Homeland Security wanted to send in the Army. General Higgins pointed out that sending in the Army was basically unconstitutional. The Director of National Intelligence had no particular intelligence. Defense Secretary Johnson kept her mouth shut, waiting for Seelye’s turn. But Tyler turned to Byrne first.

  “Deputy Director Byrne, what do you say?”

  Tom Byrne looked around the room. He’d had long experience with the Soviets and their surrogates and cutouts, and while everybody else’s attention was directed to the Arab world by the spectacular
example of the crashing Twin Towers, Tom had kept his eye on the ball. He knew that the old enemy was not really dead, just sleeping, reconstituting, lying in wait. The Soviets had had extensive dealings in the Islamic world. People forgot that the Tudeh Party, Iran ’s communists, had allied themselves with the Ayatollah against the Shah as the Soviets sought hegemony both in the Iranian oil fields and in the Caspian Sea -only to see the whole thing fall apart in the wake of mass executions as Khomeini turned on his erstwhile allies and liquidated them.

  All this Tom Byrne laid out in a calm and rational voice. He had always been the calculating one; emotion he left to his brother, Frankie, the hotheaded cop, who at least once too often had shot first and asked questions later. Frankie still had plenty on him, but in this world, where every e-mail was read and every phone conversation was recorded, who didn’t? Lack of privacy was just something the world had to live with. Brass balls would have to see him through.

  “So what’s your recommendation, Director Byrne?” asked Tyler, who seemed impressed. If Byrne’s reputation as a major-league asshole had preceded him, today’s appearance severely diminished it.

  Tom welcomed the attention. It wasn’t often he got to tell off the brass, and he was going to make the most of his moment. And get back at his brother, although that was incidental at this point. “My recommendation is nothing,” he began. “First, you can’t send in the Army, not just for legal reasons but for political ones. You send in the Army and it tells the country that you’ve lost all control of our borders. You think that fight over illegal immigration was bad? It was nothing.

  “Second, you have to let NYPD handle this. We don’t know how many gunmen there are, or-”

  “What the hell difference does it make?” shouted Colangelo, manning up. “We’ve already lost Times Square and the Holland Tunnel, and for all we know they might have smuggled a nuke or two into the city while our pants were down, so-”

  “That’s precisely correct, Mr. Secretary. We don’t know. We should but we don’t. You send troops in there and you’re going to have an even bigger catastrophe on your hands.” Byrne wished he could light a cigarette, but in the new fascist-friendly America, everything that was not expressly allowed was forbidden. “I grew up in New York. The city’s never been part of America, not really. We rooted for the Brits during the Revolution, faked patriotism during World War II, when half my Irish people were working for the Germans, and have supported every commie notion since before they fried the Rosenbergs. A lot of New Yorkers hate America, more or less, which is why God gave us the New York Yankees to beat the crap out of the rest of the American League. Whatever happens, happens. But let them handle it.”

  “Director Byrne’s bother, Francis, is the head of the CTU of NYPD,” interjected Seelye, hoping to sound like the voice of reason. For his own purposes, he had no desire to see Tyler send in the caissons; as bad as this thing was, they had to let it unfold, to find out who was behind it. Not that he had much doubt and neither, he suspected, did Tyler. “I think we should listen to him.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Shalika Johnson. Over the past few months, Seelye had gradually been sizing her up, and he liked what he saw. He could work with her. “You’re telling me that the National Security Agency is seconding the motion to let New York fry?”

  “‘Fry’ is not the way I’d put it, but-”

  “Well, how do you put it?” retorted Johnson. “I mean, it’s your agency that’s supposed to ensure cyber-security. It’s your agency that reads every e-mail, listens in to every phone conversation. It’s your agency that’s supposed to-”

  “You’re talking about classified information, Madame Secretary,” responded Seelye, coolly.

  “I’m talking about the damn Black Widow,” said Johnson. “That’s what I’m talking about. And I want to know why it didn’t work, why it failed us at this crucial moment and why New York City ’s on fire right now.” She gestured empathically toward the televisions and then turned back to Tyler. “With all due respect, Mr. President, please don’t give us some song and dance about the Kaypros in the Commerce Department and the Trash-80s at IRS. We all know that NSA gets whatever it wants, and a lot of times it gets it under the table, off-budget and off the books. That’s why NSA has stuff like the Black Widow while we make do with whatever.” She paused, and then, almost as an afterthought, added: “And God only knows what CSS gets.”

  Well, there it was: the Central Security Service. Tyler wondered if she knew; certainly he had never told her. He glanced over at Seelye, but the longtime NSA chief was his usual impassive self. Well, if the Sec Def was ignorant, she wouldn’t be for long. He would see to that, right after this meeting was adjourned. Which would be very soon, since he had made up his mind.

  He liked this Tom Byrne character, found him a man after his own heart. Sure, he’d made his career faking both sympathy and empathy, whereas Byrne had clawed his way to the top despite everybody’s loathing of him at nearly every step. To get that far, Byrne either had to be ruthless, or have something on everybody in town or, more likely, both. In any case, they could do business together.

  Why Byrne seemed to want to abandon Manhattan to its fate was still a little puzzling, but he assumed the man had his reasons. Being from Louisiana, Tyler only knew New York the way the rest of the nation knew it, as a tourist. Byrne was the genuine article.

  Which meant his brother was likely to be as well. In fact, if what he’d read and been told was true, his brother was even tougher than he was. Frankie Byrne was nobody’s idea of the kindly cop on the beat, but he’d caught the nastiest assignments on the force and distinguished himself in every one. Oh, there’d been trouble along the way, but F. X. Byrne-the altar boy’s name hardly seemed suitable-had been both tough and smart, tough enough to get out of tight spots, with firepower when necessary, and smart enough to hitch his wagon to the only star brighter than his in the department when they came up together: to J. Arness White, the Commissioner of Police. The man who sat where O’Ryan and TR once sat, the man who was the odds-on favorite to be the next Mayor of the City of New York and was goddamn sure to be even now figuring out a way to salvage this situation from the shit. What Tom Byrne knew, what he felt, Frankie Byrne knew and felt, too. They’d been through too much together, and Tyler instinctively grasped that neither of them was likely to let the other go down, and sure as hell not without a fight. If he’d had a brother, he’d want their relationship to be exactly the same.

  “Cut off the island of Manhattan,” said Tyler. “Seal all the tunnels and blockade the bridges-all of them, not just the toll roads. Railroad bridges, too. Nothing and nobody goes in or out of the island until we get our arms around this thing.” He had to pretend to get the others involved and so he looked at Colangelo and Sutton. “Keep your ears to the ground. Use every asset you have, HUMINT or ELINT. I want to know what the world is thinking and saying about this. Every little detail, no matter how innocuous, could potentially be helpful. And, for God’s sake, keep NORTHCOM out of this until I say so.” That would keep them busy for a while.

  “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?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  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.”