Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  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.

  The Black Widow. Not the fastest supercomputer in the world anymore-that honor probably went to the Cray XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, one of the principal birthplaces of the American nuclear program during the Manhattan Project, which boasted a processing rate of 1.759 petaflops. Home computer users had gradually accustomed themselves to bits and bytes and megabytes and even gigabytes, but supercomputing took speed to an astronomical new level. FLOPS-floating point operations per second-were the new benchmark, measured in teraflops (1012 flops) and petaflops (1015), or one quadrillion flops. But the dreaded Widow was still plenty fast enough, and she never slept, on guard against America ’s enemies throughout each dark, dangerous night.

  Most of the bed-wetters at the New York Times and elsewhere in what was left of the American establishment took it as a given that the Black Widow and other components of the “illegal eavesdropping” program were listening to them. In the solipsistic world of the Good Gray Lady and other pillars of the Democrat-Media Establishment, everything was about them. They woke up in the morning and went to bed at night believing in vast right-wing conspiracies; in forces bent with hostile intent on depriving them of their civil liberties; of the presence in America of a huge, inimical mass of people who were only a beer and a shot away from joining the KKK and the Michigan Militia. From dawn til dusk they shook with terror at the hidden-but so transparent!-motives and emotions of their fellow citizens, and fled to the embrace of their shrinks and grief counselors and the hosts on MSNBC at the first available opportunities. It was so much easier than facing the reality that people they didn’t even know-enemies they hadn’t met yet-were out to kill them. Much more comforting to suspect the couple down the street, the ones with the New Hampshire flag on their car bumpers: “Don’t Tread on Me.”

  For his part, Danny and the rest of his old crew from the 160th SOAR had learned from bitter experience to fight the battle in front of them. And then hit the bars instead of the psychiatrists’ couches. Easier that way, cheaper, and if the medical reports were to be believed, healthier all the way around. He wished he could have a drink, but it was still too early and besides, his daughter was standing right there in front of him. Not the enemy, but the person he loved most in the entire world.

  He punched in the magic words. “Now I have,” he said.

  She was wiser than he, and probably smarter. She had had to do a lot of growing up fast in the past nine months, part of her rude and premature confrontation with the everyday horrors of the world. No matter how you tried to protect your child from reality-and wasn’t that what parenting was, in the end, all about?-reality had a way of intruding whenever it wished, as if God or the universe of whatever was hell-bent on reminding mere puny human beings that they controlled the ongoing nihilist narrative, not the snarky screenwriters, not the smarmy politicians, not the small-minded editorialists who left downtown Los Angeles and went home not to Angelino Heights, which would have been a five-minute drive, but to Br
entwood, or West L.A. or Flintridge or Pasadena or even Montecito or Santa Barbara.

  Jade declined to follow his thoughts. Instead, she stood there in the doorway, waiting. Finally he understood. He opened his arms to his daughter, and she ran to him.

  For a long time, they held each other, no words necessary.

  He made up his mind quickly. “Honey,” he said, “we have to go now.”

  Jade was young, but she was smart. She didn’t have to ask where they were going. All she knew was that, this time, he was taking her with him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Teterboro, New Jersey

  Devlin felt the pingback before he heard it. “Showtime,” he said to Maryam.

  He took out a PDA, a special, modified BlackBerry just like the one the president used. Tyler famously did not want to give up his mobile device, and so rather than go without he’d asked some of the best minds at the agency to come with an uncrackable device. Whether it was in fact uncrackable was open to conjecture, and in any case Devlin assumed that the NSA could crack it anytime they wanted to; if Tyler thought no one would be monitoring his conversations he was probably very much mistaken. The point was, Devlin had one just like it, but insofar as he could make it, it was better and even more secure.

  The message was from Seelye, officially authorizing him into action. Not that that really mattered, since he’d already decided on his course of action, knew they had no other choice. Under the terms of his deal, he could do what he wanted when he wanted and if the government didn’t like it it had two choices: terminate him or live with it. It was not a privilege he abused, but rather insisted upon, and there was no one to gainsay him. As long as Seelye held his job, Devlin was both his boy and his master.

  “Punch up every point of subterranean access to Manhattan,” he told Maryam, who was already working the computers, calling up every map the NSA and other governmental databases had on file.

  Few civilians realized it, but the island of Manhattan was riddled with tunnels: automobile tunnels, steam tunnels, train tunnels, subway tunnels, water tunnels, electrical tunnels; it was a wonder that the island hadn’t collapsed into New York Harbor of its own weight. But Manhattan bedrock was stern stuff.

  “That’s how we get in, huh?” she said. Her eyes were aglow with an eagerness to get into the fight, an eagerness that nearly matched his own, although he would never let it show. The Angel of Death had no emotion when it was time to wield his sword.

  “That’s how I get in,” he corrected. “The zone is red hot, and you’re more useful to me elsewhere.” Her face fell, but she said nothing. There was nothing to say: he was the boss.

  At another computer, Devlin took stock of the situation: Times Square was a battleground, with the cops engaged in a running firefight with an unknown number of assailants. Inwardly, he shuddered. This had been one of the planners’ worst nightmares for years, but the attack on Mumbai a few years back had upped the stakes significantly. Conventional wisdom had been that a suicide bomber or two might self-detonate near the TKTS booth, killing scores of tourists and causing panic. But the Pakistani-directed attacks on Mumbai by members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization, changed everybody’s thinking: Mumbai, like New York, was surrounded by water, and it was by water that the attackers had come, putting ashore in small boats and bringing death with them. And now they were here.

  He punched in Seelye’s secure number on the computer and waited for the randomly generated redirects to conclude. “Are you ready?” came the voice from the computer speakers.

  “Assessment.”

  “The attacks are still coming; they’re not just limited to Times Square as we first thought. There’s been reports of gunfire on the Upper East Side, at the 92nd Street Y. We’ve got all the bridges and tunnels sealed, except for the Holland, which has been bombed.”

  “How bad?”

  “The Manhattan side; otherwise, the structure is intact. Remember they plotted to do this at least once before, back in 2006, when they thought they could flood lower Manhattan by taking out the tunnel. The FBI broke up that plot, and the sensors, plus the no tractor-trailer rule, have kept the bad stuff out.”

  “ Mission objective?”

  There was a pause as the man who had raised him after the deaths of his parents at the 1985 airport massacre in Rome considered his next words. “I don’t know. Tyler thinks you’re a miracle worker.”

  “Why hasn’t the National Guard been called in?”

  “The president thinks the cops should handle it. And for what it’s worth, so does the DD of the FBI, Tom Byrne Seems his brother, Francis, is the chief of the CTU. One of the city’s top cops, and a real Irish warrior.”

  “Great,” said Devlin. “We’ve got family pride being brought to bear on a major emergency.”

  “Or family rivalry, I can’t tell. The point is that you’re to get in there, assess the situation for us without being made, take out as many of them as you can, and get the hell out. You know the drill.”

  He knew the drill. As the lead operative of the Central Security Service’s Branch 4, Devlin lived a life on the edge, not simply of danger but of existence itself. Branch 4 ops were unknown to each other, and their existence was known only to three officers of the U.S. government: the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the director of the National Security Agency, or DIRNSA. A loss of anonymity was a death sentence, whether carried out by an enemy agent or, cruelly but necessarily, by a fellow member of Branch 4. That was the blow you would never see coming.

  For a moment his mind flashed back to Milverton, the most potent adversary of his career, lying dead in his small house in London, put in his grave by Devlin himself, with both relief and regret.

  “You want me to clean them all?”

  “For starters.”

  “But what you really need to know is who’s behind it. How much time have I got?”

  “Not much. You can imagine the firestorm we’re in the middle of. The President’s-”

  “-ass is in a sling, mostly of his own making. Hassett is going to hammer him no matter which way this thing shakes out, and he’ll have the faces of the dead staring at him right through the election. He doesn’t want to invoke the Posse Comitatus act and get the military involved if he doesn’t have to. This is law enforcement, not war. Otherwise it’s just what the terrorists want. If we call in the Marines, the terrorists win; if we don’t call in the Marines, the terrorists win. Who thought up that play? The Marx Brothers?” Devlin paused. He was urgently aware of the need to bring the situation under control as quickly as possible, but he couldn’t let himself be distracted by emotion. Somehow, he was going to have to get into Manhattan, identify this Byrne guy, and work with him without ever giving himself away. “What about NORTHCOM and the Rock of the Marne and the Sea Smurfs? The rules don’t apply to them.”

  NORTHCOM-the United States Northern Command-was the Army command created after 9/11, and explicitly tasked with the defense of the homeland. Few Americans knew anything about NORTHCOM, and fewer still knew that since 2008 it had controlled the Third Infantry Division’s First Brigade Combat Team, which was charged with controlling the civilian population in the wake of civil unrest or a terrorist attack. Based in Fort Steward, Georgia, the Third Division, known as the “Rock of the Marne ” thanks to its valorous service in World War I, had seen its 1st Brigade essentially seconded to the feds to deal with domestic disturbances. The brigade, which now also included sailors, airmen, and Marines, had been renamed the “Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive Consequence Management Response Force (CCMRF), which was immediately dubbed the “Sea Smurfs.”

  “So far they’re staying out of it. But if things go south…”

  Now Devlin understood. He had to give it to the man: Tyler got smarter and more devious every day. “So you’re sending me in to keep Tyler looking good on his left while I’m supposed to keep him looking good on his right.”

  “That�
��s about the size of it-secondarily speaking, of course.”

  “I don’t know which of you I hate more.”

  “It’s a tough choice, I’ll give you that. We can sort it out later. In the meantime-”

  “They’re communicating by cell phone.”

  “Were,” corrected Seelye. “We bubbled it down.”

  “Then bubble it back up-we need to know where each of these clowns is, so locate them and start tracking them. In the meantime, they’re probably using something like BBM, so tap that net, too. I’ll want a real-time map once I’m in. Weapons?”

  “Everything you can need, including a judge. Sending you the code now.” An instant, and then the unlocking codes for the armory appeared on his screen. “What about your partner?”

  Not for the first time, Devlin felt like reaching through the ether and throttling Seelye. As secure as their communications were-and they were as secure as the best minds in NSA/CSS, including his, could make them-they were still not secure enough, could never be secure enough, for him to safeguard Maryam the way he wanted to. He had brought her into this, and she had willingly joined him, but her safety was now his prime concern-more so than his own and, God help him, maybe even more so than his country’s.

  “Who?” he said. Point made.

  Devlin glanced up and caught her look. Silently, he shook his head at her: it’s not what you think. Her eyes stayed liquid, reproachful as the voice went off inside Devlin’s head:

  “Do you trust the bitch? I don’t see why you should. She was on to you in Paris before I was. You don’t even know her real name, do you?”

  Devlin shook his head, trying to clear the webs, to get a dead man’s voice out of his consciousness, trying to ignore the question, the first question, the only question, about her that really mattered, and the one question he didn’t want an answer to: not because he didn’t want to know, but because he didn’t want to have to face the consequences of his knowledge.

  “Right,” said Seelye. “So off you go. Good luck, son.” He rang off, if you could call disconnecting from a nearly infinite network “ringing off.”