Early Warning (6 page)

Los Angeles

Jake Sinclair had a choice: to stay sober or to get drunk?

Not just drunk, but, like Elmer Gantry, eloquently drunk, lovingly drunk. Elmer Gantry was one of his favorite characters in literature—not that he had ever read the novel, but he had seen the movie many times over, and he loved Burt Lancaster’s performance, even if the movie left out most of the novel. He loved it so much that he owned a print of it—not a DVD, but an honest-to-God movie print—and had it shown in the screening room at his house in Loughlin Park whenever he wished. It was easy; he owned the studio.

From his custom-built, body-contoured easy chair, Sinclair looked longingly across the room at the built-in wet bar, a relict of a time when real men not only drank but also smoked.

Loughlin Park was the Beverly Hills of Los Feliz. Sinclair was very proud of himself for living in Los Feliz. Los Angeles had moved as far west as it could go without actually trying to build houses in the Pacific Ocean—although there were more than a few movie industry types of his acquaintance who were convinced they could walk on water—so now the smart money had begun to move back east, or at least as far east as Griffith Park Boulevard, where houses that might go for twenty million dollars in the bird streets above Beverly Hills could be snapped up for two or three, and yet you were still dozens of blocks away from the nearest Mexicans. Now that was what he called smart shopping.

Now, about that drink…after all, it was always five o’clock somewhere.

The house had been built by W. C. Fields when he decided to follow Hollywood’s path westward and move in next door to Cecil B. DeMille. Although Sinclair had “modernized” the place, Mrs. Sinclair had insisted on sparing a few of the period touches, and so the wet bar still stood, its hidden refrigerators filled with designer waters like Saint-Géron, which was supposed to be a prophylactic against anemia. Mrs. Sinclair was enamored of the distinctive long-necked Alberto Bali–designed bottles. But there was no booze in the wet bar, nor anywhere else in the house, in keeping with Hollywood’s new, healthy, raw-foods-and-Brita-filtered-water lifestyle. Thank God tennis and sportfucking were still allowed.

The reason Sinclair wished he was drunk had to do with business. Almost everything in his life had to do with business, including the current Mrs. Sinclair. She was, of course, not the first Mrs. Sinclair; Jake Sinclair eagerly subscribed to the Hollywood custom in which every man of significance is or was married to some other man of significance’s wife, and every man owned, at one time or another, a house that had formerly belonged to one of his rivals, colleagues, or mortal enemies, and then either totally remodeled it or tore down. As the saying went: Hollywood is a relationship business. And, as far as relationships went, he’d had quite a few.

Luckily, the current, although soon-to-be-ex Mrs. Sinclair was Jennifer, just like the first Mrs. Sinclair, which is why he thought of her as Jennifer II or Jenny the Second. Like some arranged marriage between European potentates in the 16th century, she had come to him as a kind of reverse dowry. Jennifer Gailliard was the daughter of one of the biggest investors in the country, an investor Sinclair had been wooing with even greater ardor than he would later woo the man’s daughter. The three-day celebration of their marriage on the island of Corfu was in all the gossip magazines—the photo rights alone went for more than $2 million to
People
—and it was quickly followed with the news that the bride’s father had invested upwards of $500 million in Jake Sinclair’s media company for acquisitions, with which money he partly financed his hostile takeover of Time Warner and thus now owned
People
. So the two million bucks was money well spent, especially since it had landed back in his pocket. Plus he had some really great family photos.

He liked Jenny the Second well enough, but he would have liked her more had she allowed him his favorite Scotch at a time like this. Which was the closing of yet another deal. For even by Jake Sinclair standards—Sinclair often thought of himself in the third person, although he rarely slipped into that particular locution, at least in public—it was a big deal. As his father often told him, it was a stupid man who could not make financial hay in an economic meltdown, and Jake Sinclair’s father had not raised a stupid child.

Which was why, at this moment, he had just decided to divorce her.

Since he had been a kid, he had anticipated this day. Not just to own a major newspaper chain, a major newsweekly, a major television network, and even a major Hollywood studio—but to own all four. The superfecta of media, made possible by other men’s blind greed, blinkered overreaching, and sheer sightless stupidity. During the 1980s, when corporations were merging faster than actors on a movie set, Sinclair—then a junior executive in a media mini-conglomerate—had watched, listened, and learned. Watched as one moron after another, so fearful of being left behind in the tsunami of M&As, had yanked the cord on his golden parachute and sold out his company for a mess of pottage and a face-saving seat on the board, which was soon revoked. One dope after another had fallen for the snake-oil salesman’s charms of “high tech” whispers and “transformative transaction” pornography. Most of them, like his principal rival, had ended up padding the beach at Santa Monica with their New Age replacement wife in tow, spouting some holistic bullshit and telling
Us Weekly
how glad they were to finally be out of the rat race and living on a mere million dollars a year.

Well, fuck them. They were out and he was very much in, and glad to be here. For it wasn’t an honor just to be nominated—for Jake Sinclair, the only honor that counted was to see his face on the cover of as many magazines as possible, to have his minions chart how many hits his name garnered on Google every day, to ferret out references to himself in novels, television shows, and movies, where he often appeared, thinly veiled as an Important Tycoon or a Media Mogul.

Well, fuck that, too. He was not just an important Media Mogul. He was
the
Media Mogul. He could afford to divorce Jenny II and get seriously involved with the Other Woman.

That was another thing. Most people laughed at him when, during a time of collapsing “old media” value, Sinclair Holdings, LLC, had snapped up failing properties like Time Inc. and the
New York Times
. Well, they were as dumb as the people who bailed on New York City during the Abe Beame administration, when Gerald Ford famously told the city to drop dead.

He could taste the Scotch. The cigarette, too. And, if he tried real hard, he could taste her.

Jake Sinclair rose and padded toward the bar. He pressed a switch under the sink, recessed behind the garbage disposal. The false back of one of the cabinets slid aside, revealing his private stash of Oban Scotch and Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, the ones with his initials monogrammed on each coffin nail.

Houses were like wives, he thought as he sipped his Scotch and sent the smoke from the Sobranie cigarette spiraling toward the extractor fan, in that you didn’t hang on to them for the memories—you tore them down, rebuilt them, or replaced them with somebody’s else’s. Memories, good or bad, were noxious.

He was glad he didn’t have any children. This was an evil world, and it would be criminal to bring an innocent life into it. The thought hadn’t occurred to him that perhaps, in the instant before conception, his own parents had thought this way, and their parents before them. That if, going back to Adam and Eve at the Fall, every prospective pair of parents had thought this way, there would be no human race all.

Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World…

“Yum.” He looked around the room for the voice and then realized it was his own. That’s what often happened after a drink or two, and for that he blamed Jenny II. If she let him have a nip every now and then, this wouldn’t have happened. Yes, he definitely was going to divorce her. He made a mental note to call his personal attorney in the morning.

Anyway, fuck Milton. Sinclair had hated it when they made him read
Paradise Lost
in school, mostly because he found the sentences hard to understand.

In fact, it was
Paradise Lost
and its lit-class ilk that had set him on his current path. For Jake Sinclair believed two things: that he was always the smartest guy in the room, and anything he couldn’t readily understand would be too hard for his fellow citizens to grasp. Therefore, in the name of humanity, he had made it his life’s work to “dumb down” all of his publications and broadcasts and movies and television shows, so that people less fortunate then he would not have to be confronted on a daily basis with the proof of their own ignorance.

He was so wrapped up in thoughts of his own magnanimity that it took him a few seconds to realize the phone was ringing. He downed the last gulp of scotch and jacked the extractor fan to High. Jennifer would be home from her tennis game at any minute. “Hello?”

The caller ID revealed the identity of every one of his callers and, on the off chance that the ID was blocked, he simply refused to answer: in fact, the phone company bumped it immediately to voice mail heaven. Which he never checked. If it was a solicitor, they could call his business manager; if it was someone trying to evade security, the hell with them; if it was a petitioner, then fuck him.

It was none of the above.

A brief beat as switching and relay systems from Los Feliz to Mars did their thing. This was another perk of the office: a massive security system that, once having identified a legitimate caller—especially this one—encrypted all voice communications into something that nobody, not even the National Security Agency, would be able to readily decode.

Finally, the voice came on the line. As agreed, the chatter was kept to under 2.3 seconds, so as best to avoid the tender mercies of Fort Meade. No matter which political party you bribed, in the end, they were both going to fuck you. But there was no mistaking the sweet sound of her voice:

“They took the offer.”

Sinclair hung up, poured himself another drink, and looked at the clock. What the hell was he worried about? Jenny II wouldn’t be home for at least another half hour. He made it a double. Now he wouldn’t have to calculate how much a divorce would cost him. He’d just made half a billion dollars by answering the phone, and that would be more than enough to take care of her.

Manhattan—afternoon

Byrne and Saleh rode in silence up the elevator, Byrne slumped back against the lift’s wall, watching his subordinate’s agitation. “You know the old joke, right?” he said. “About the old bull and the young bull?”

“Huh? Joke?”

“Yeah, joke. Don’t they tell jokes in Ragville?”

Lannie got that aggrieved look on his face so characteristic of young people these days. “You know, Chief, I could—”

Byrne finished the sentence for him. “Bust me down to buck private for hate speech? Maybe. But I can bust all your teeth down your throat first, so the choice is yours.” They went through this all the time, half-joking, half-serious.

“It’s always the Irish way with you, isn’t is, Boss? Punch first, ask questions later?”

The elevator shuddered to a stop. “It’s the only way that works,” said Byrne, getting off first.

As long as he had been on the force, Byrne had never quite gotten used to his new digs. He was used to shit-ass quarters in precincts around the city, at Police Plaza, which even to his office had just enough room for one desk, two chairs, and a window. Even the city’s best detectives were lucky if they had access to a computer that worked only slightly more often than a civil servant.

This was different. In the aftermath of 9/11, the NYPD had spared absolutely no expense in outfitting the CTU with the finest equipment available, and if it wasn’t available, to create it. How the brass had managed to conceal the vast expenditures it took to get CTU up and running was beyond Byrne. But, over the years, his former partner and permanent friend Matt White had mastered bureaucratic infighting to an extent that Byrne never would have thought possible. Matt was the living reincarnation of the old Irish Tammany bosses—John Kelly, Richard Croker, Charlie Murphy. Not bad for a black guy from Houston.

Byrne and Saleh badged their way in. This was no ordinary cop shop; you couldn’t just waltz past a metal detector, plow through the busted hookers, and get to some sad-sack sergeant to report that your car had been stolen. Instead, a scanner read a microchip on your special NYPD badge, a second scanner zapped your eyeballs, and a third made sure you were not carrying any unauthorized weapons—even Byrne’s daddy’s .38 had to pass muster.

“What is it?” barked Byrne.

“DoS,” came a reply from somewhere in the room.

DoS was the last word any computer operator wanted to hear, much less utter. Denial of service. A call on the system’s resources so great that its servers failed, overwhelmed from the sheer volume of access requests. “Standby main, alternate packets,” barked Byrne. “Secondary servers…what does Langley say?”

“Langley OotL, sir,” said somebody. Out of the Loop.

“NSA ditto,” said somebody else. There were new faces, and voices, all the time; the burnout rate was tremendous. Staring all day at computer screens was no job for a real cop, in Byrne’s opinion, but a lot had changed since September 11, including him.

“NSA is never ditto,” said Lannie settling into his chair. Of all the aces in the room, Lannie Saleh was the ace of aces. That was why he was on the team. “Even if we think they’re ditto, even if they promise us they’re ditto, they’re never fucking ditto.”

Byrne knew exactly what he meant. Chiefs past and present had fought hard to make the NYPD’s CTU a stand-alone operation, answerable to no one but the residents of New York City. The attack on the Trade Center had happened in their city; the CIA, the NSA, and every other federal agency had let his people down, badly, and they paid for it with their lives—along with the cops and firemen who died alongside them when the towers shuddered and fell. NYPD was often accused of making 9/11 personal, to which their answer was:
Damn right it’s personal. And it’s never going to happen again.

To that end, Byrne had cops stationed all over the world. One was based in Lyons, France, to liaise with Interpol; two more worked with the Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Byrne himself had done a stint in Belfast and Dublin, sharing information and techniques with both the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Irish Gardai. As needed, officers headed to Bombay, or whatever the hell they were calling it today, to the Philippines; even Australia—wherever and whenever a terrorist incident occurred.

The point was, NYPD did not trust the CIA, nor any of the other dozen-plus intelligence agencies the federal monster had spawned, including the FBI. Byrne had his own, very good reasons for never trusting the FBI, all of them named Tom Byrne, but in general when the Langley Home for Lost Boys told him they weren’t interfering with the CTU he believed them; most of them, in his estimation, were too dumb to tie their own shoelaces, and the thought of them getting a jump on his boys was laughable.

The National Security Agency, on the other hand, was something else. The former “No Such Agency” had seized an inordinate amount of power in the wake of the terrorist attacks, and even under the reformist President Jeb Tyler, it still wielded a hell of a lot of clout. Was it eavesdropping on their eavesdropping? Of course it was, if the Black Widow was doing her job.

Lannie was making clucking noises under his breath as he punched the keyboard, which Byrne knew was actually Arabic. He’d learn Arabic someday, he promised himself, right after he learned Irish Gaelic, Urdu, and Esperanto and maybe even French. “Speak English,” he commanded.

Lannie stopped clucking and wrapped his tongue around words everybody could understand. “Not good. We have a major DoS coming from”—he punched in a blur—“coming from, it looks like…Bulgaria and…Israel…”

“Typical Arab,” said a good-natured voice Byrne recognized as Sid Sheinberg’s. “Always blaming Israel first.” Sid was Sy’s nephew, a smart lawyer who had dropped his fledgling practice and joined the force when Frankie recruited him for the team. The former Medical Examiner, Sy Sheinberg, had been Byrne’s friend, mentor, and rabbi, and he still missed him after all these years. Almost enough time had passed for Byrne to be able to forget the last time he saw Sy, when he found the body after the suicide…

“In this case, Sid, I’m blaming Israel second,” Lannie snapped. “And then Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan and…”

Byrne ran an emotionally loose ship. The CTU was no place for hurt feelings; you checked your resentments and entitlements at the door and you elbowed your way to the table like everybody else. Festering grievances were the worst—if anybody had a beef, let him air it out. Byrne and Matt White had worked that way for two decades, and were not about to change now.

“What have we got—are we blind?” Instead of answering, Lannie turned to Sid. “Gimme a hand here.”

Sid slid into the seat next to Lannie’s and for the next five minutes, neither of them said a thing. Instead, they worked furiously, in some kind of mental rapport, their agile minds leaping to the same hypotheses almost at once.

As they worked, the playfulness fell away, to be replaced by a grim, serious look that played 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.