Free Early Warning by Michael Walsh

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