LITMIR.BIZ

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around their lips. The CTU computers had been fucked with before—that much was SOP in this business—but something told Byrne that this time it was different, that this time it might be very, very bad.

      “We’ve got a shitload of traffic going across the core switches—forty gigs a sec minimum,” shouted Sid Sheinberg.

      “We’ve got timeouts…we’re out of CPU on the core switches…impossible,” barked Lannie.

      “What’s this ‘multicast’ shit?” said Sid. “Come on, you fuckers!”

      “Is it a virus?” asked Byrne.

      Neither man turned to look at him. “No, external,” said Lannie. “Incoming ports are swamped by ‘bots.’ What the fuck?”

      “Rebooting the cores,” said Sid, and one by one the machines went down. For all practical purposes, the CTU was now blind, if only for a few moments…

      The screens blinked on again. “Fuck,” said Sid. “We’re still greened out, to the max.”

      “Impossible—”

      “Connections dropping like flies off a camel’s ass—”

      “Origination point?”

      “Dunno. Cabinet switches…ten gigs apiece. Fubared.”

      “Isolate.”

      “Isolating now…gotcha suckers!” Sid was nearly out of his seat.

      “Kill the downlink ports.”

      “Killing…”

      “Rebooting now…”

      Everyone in the room held his breath and the screens winked out again…and then blinked back on. One by one they came back up—and held.

      Lannie never took his eyes off the screen. “T1 and T2—quarantine those motherfuckers,” he said. Sid shut the switches down. The crisis was over.

      “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Lannie.

      “You can say that again,” said Sid.

      “Watch your mouth, boys,” said Byrne, “especially seeing as how neither of you believes in Our Lord and Savior in the first place.”

      Applause rippled through the room. Lannie and Sid stood up to take a bow. Byrne cut their end-zone dance short.

      “My office, now,” he said. “On my father’s immortal soul, everybody else, back to work.”

      He didn’t have to say anything more: the older guys in the squad knew, and the newer ones would hear about it soon enough. How Byrne’s father, Robert, a detective first grade, had been shot in the back on the Lower East Side, killed on Delancey Street along with his partner, in 1968. He had lived long enough to draw his service revolver—the same .38 Byrne still used—and might have shot his assailant, but the street was too crowded with innocents. So he died, bled to death on the street in front of the pushcarts, taking the identity of his killer to the grave with him, but sparing the lives of others.

      Like everything else on the floor except for computer operational security, it was informal. Byrne’s office was not one of the glass-walled fortresses the brass had over at One Police Plaza, with the views of Brooklyn Bridge and, if you looked hard enough and used your imagination, into the borough where half the cops in the city had originated. Flat-bush. Bensonhurst. Brownsville.

      “Fingerprints?”

      Lannie looked at Sid, then spoke. “Hard to tell until we take a closer look, but first guess is the Chinese.”

      “First guess is always the Chinese,” Byrne said. “Continue.”

      “But upon further review,” began Sid, who was a big football Giants fan, “it looks like somebody’s just trying a little deflection, a juke and okey-doke.”

      Byrne hadn’t heard those terms since O. J. Simpson was playing for Buffalo. “A flea flicker?” he asked.

      Lannie was thoroughly confused. “I thought you said to speak English,” he said.

      “Football,” said Byrne. “It’s as American as baseball.”

      “But there are no feet in your football,” said Lannie.

      “Sure there are,” said Byrne. “You use ’em to kick the other guys in the nards when the refs aren’t looking. Which is what I want to do to these people. So who are they?”

      Sid shuffled through some notes. “They might be Indians. There are some indications of a redirect via Mumbai—Bombay to you—but now that I look at it, I think this is a flea flicker too. So I—we—are going with Azerbaijani. Baku, probably.”

      That was a new one to Byrne. The Chinese were always probing the American cyber-defenses—hell, they attacked the Pentagon every chance they got—but because they bought our increasingly worthless bonds, whichever administration was in power in Washington generally let them skate. And that pussy Tyler was not about to let a little thing like cyber-war interfere with his we-are-the-world foreign policy. Byrne despised everybody in Washington.

      “What happened in the window?” he asked, referring to the moments that their defenses were down. There were times, he swore, when he felt like Captain Kirk on the deck of the Enterprise, shouting to Scotty about the shields being down. Another reference they probably wouldn’t get.

      “Running a recap now,” said Lannie. “And it’s not Baku. It’s Budapest.”

      “Let’s worry about that later. Right now, we need to know how blind we were.”

      Hopefully, the window was as short as possible and their redundant systems and fail-safe backups would have worked. Hopefully, this was not a one-two punch. But as Byrne well knew, hope was never an option, much less a plan. Hope was for losers.

      Lannie stood there for a moment, transfixed as he consulted his secure PDA. It was a knockoff of the ultra-secure BlackBerrys the NSA had developed for the President; supposedly, it was unhackable, but Byrne knew enough about computers and personal digital assistants to know that nothing was unhackable.

      The window was crucial. From this location in Chelsea, the NYPD monitored all its cameras and sensors installed in the wake of 9/11—not just the ones in the subways, but surreptitious monitoring devices at either end of every bridge and tunnel connecting Manhattan either to the Bronx, to Long Island or to Jersey. Not only that—there were also cameras and radioactivity sensors underwater, below river level, on every pier, dock, and jetty. New York had been born a water city and a water city it still was, even if commerce now came by train, plane, and truck. But an island cannot afford to be without its seawall defenses. Pirates had roamed the East River well into the 19th century, and it was up to the NYPD to make sure they never returned.

      Lannie’s brown eyes remained impassive as he completed his readout. “Not good,” he said at last. “Down three, maybe four minutes.”

      “Where?” asked Byrne.

      “Everywhere. City-wide. Somebody just crawled in our ass and shoved a sharp stick up it.”

      “What about overlap?” There was a certain amount of fail-safe built into the system, so that if any one part of it went down, a nearby camera would cover for it. But fail-safe didn’t even kick in until they’d been down for five minutes. A system-wide failure would mean no coverage.

      Command decisions came easily to Byrne; he’d been making them ever since his father was killed and he realized that he, not his older brother Tom, was going to have to be the man of the house. “What do you think, Sid?” he said, requesting the only other opinion that mattered.

      “Think it might be time to liaise with NSA,” he said.

      That did it. If Sid was recommending outside assistance, the shit really must be hitting the fan.

      “We’ve been breached,” barked Byrne.

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