Driving Heat (19 page)

Acquiescing to the pull of her administrative responsibilities, Heat spent the next half hour catching up on paperwork while Rook sat quietly nearby, going over his notes. She put her best foot
forward, but it still felt like a chore—and a distraction from the case that was preoccupying her.

It wasn’t all mindless work, however. A red-banded priority bulletin from Commander McMains of the Counterterrorism Task Force flashed on the NYPD intranet alerting all precinct commanders
of a credible, nonspecific threat of retaliation sparked by the diplomatic conflict over the arrest of Mehmoud Algafari, the Syrian counterfeiter. Captain Heat issued an email memo to all her
department heads in the Two-Oh to brief their personnel on the threat and to report related activity immediately.

On the flip side, however, were the workaday requests for overtime and time off, the usual citizen complaints about noisy nighttime trash collection on Columbus Avenue, and an earful from the
businessman Heat phoned to reschedule the breakfast meeting she had postponed that morning. The owner of two Indian restaurants in her precinct insisted on face time to demand that she do something
about a rash of bicycle thefts from his delivery men. She booked him again for the following morning, secretly hoping something else would come up.

Detective Rhymer stuck his head in to update her on the other Forenetics whistle-blowers, starting with Abigail Plunkitt, the biomechanical engineer. “According to HR at Forenetics,”
Rhymer said, “Ms. Plunkitt resigned her consultancy and told them she was moving to Naples, Florida, to work with a conservation group on saving the manatees. I tried calling her, but she may
still be in transit. Meanwhile, I’ll try to get a contact number for her there.”

“And what about the other one, the test driver?”

“Right, Nathan Levy. He is out of town, too, but not for long. Upstate at some private resort that has its own race car track, can you believe it? We’ve texted and will set up a meet
when he gets back.”

Just as Rhymer left, Ochoa summoned her to the bull pen with an urgent wave. “Just got a check-in from Detective Feller out on Staten Island.”

Heat made a silent bet with herself about what the report would be. She wasn’t wrong.

“Fred Lobbrecht’s house in Dongan Hills? Thoroughly tossed. Somebody got there first and ransacked the whole joint. Files gone, computer missing, even the telephone. You get the
drill.”

Rook sidled up and joined them. “Tangier Swift was with an NYPD captain at the TOD. Guess he has a watertight alibi.”

“Maybe not,” Ochoa said. “A neighbor spotted a cargo van leaving his driveway at…” He surfed his notes. “Eleven-thirty last night.”

“When Lobbrecht was already dead,” Heat said. “Any description of the driver, passengers?” She won another bet with herself when Ochoa shook his head no.
“Where’s your partner?” she asked.

“Right here.” They all turned to find Raley occupying an empty desk instead of his usual one in Roach Central.

Rook piped up. “OK, you two,” he said. “Am I going to have to do some couples counseling, or should we just go over to Central Park and let you have a duel?”

His attempt at levity was wasted on them, as it was on Nikki, who knew she would have to confront this rift sooner rather than later. But not right then. “Rales,” she said,
“where do we stand on bringing in your gait-analysis suspect?”

“Joseph Barsotti. Still searching for him. I’ve got Rhymer and Aguinaldo canvassing his known associates for an address or hangout.”

“And what about the dude who broke in to Lon King’s apartment?” asked Ochoa.

Heat registered Raley’s irritation at being pressed by his own partner in this way, which went beyond a simple request for information to touch upon the dynamics of their
relationship—making her reconsider the wisdom of asking both of them to share the job of squad leader.

To his credit, Detective Raley remained professional, swallowed his anger, and swiveled to his computer. “Real Time Crime said they’d help run facial recog from the F train and tram
cams. They should have gotten back to me by now. It’s not like them.” He tried to launch the intranet, but all that came up was a bouncing app icon, and the page failed to load.
“That’s weird. This usually comes right up.”

“You probably screwed it up when you moved your computer,” said Ochoa. He moved to the computer on his own desk while Raley worked his jaw muscles and watched the spinning hourglass
on his screen. “Huh,” said Ochoa. “Not getting anything here, either.”

Annette Caesar, the precinct switchboard operator, made a tentative step into the bull pen. “Excuse me, Captain Heat? There is a problem with the computers.”

“Here, too,” said Nikki. “Would you please put in an urgent call to MISD?” With so much reliance on technology, the department’s Management Information Systems
Division—cop jargon for IT—was generally first-rate. Whatever this glitch was, they would be all over it.

“I did. They said the entire department is crashing. They’re not sure why, but they said it could be a hacking attack. Either way, all of NYPD tech is shut down, citywide.”

“I
ntranet’s back!” Raley hollered from the hallway. Nikki was in her office, vainly attempting to get a call
connected to her district commander. She raced back into the squad room, where an antsy cluster of detectives and Rook stood around a desktop monitor as if witnessing the historic first broadcast
of color television.

Just as Heat joined the semicircle, something happened to the screen. The dark blue top banner of the NYPD intranet homepage began to pixilate and the white-and-gold letters of its slogan,
“The Nation’s Premier Crime Fighter,” digitally melted and began to streak down the right half of the display like candle wax. The screen went black, then flashed rapid-fire
images of raised fists, bright flames, and a close-up of a human eye. Middle Eastern music blasted, and Raley reached out to turn down the ear-splitting volume on his external speakers.

Ochoa gestured around the room. Every flat screen was playing the same thing in unison. “What the fuck is this?”

The distorted music blared on, but the video gradually pulled back from the close-up of the human eye until a young man’s face came into view, trapped behind Photoshopped black bars of a
jail cell, with bold script in both English and Arabic flashing over it: “FREE MEHMOUD!!!”

Detective Raley, ever the King of All Surveillance Media, circulated around the office, dialing down the tinny musical assault, but leaving the screens alive so that they could be monitored. But
everyone knew what they were witnessing, even if they could hardly believe their eyes. The NYPD had been hacked.

As commander of the Twentieth Precinct, Captain Heat took immediate
action to assess the impact on New York City’s technology
infrastructure. It wasn’t easy. Trying to get in touch with One Police Plaza resulted in nothing but call failures on all cell phone numbers and busy signals on the landlines. In these early
moments of a crisis, even though she wasn’t certain how deep it went, one thing Heat knew for sure was that no police force in the world would be better prepared or more quick to respond to
any incident than New York’s Finest. This was the stuff they spent countless hours prepping for—drawing up scenarios, crafting contingency plans, running drills. Mobile command center
RVs would roll out, personnel would be deployed, rapid-response teams would spring into action.

Now if Nikki could just get someone to answer a telephone.

When the department’s crisis contingency logistics finally engaged—translation: when old-technology landlines got plugged in downtown—Heat’s official telephone briefing
from the Incident Response command basically only confirmed what everyone had known the instant
Habibi Bass
kicked in on the secure NYPD intranet: New York City was under orchestrated
cyber attack, making good on the threats of retaliation for the arrest of Mehmoud Algafari.

The impact was still being assessed, but the early news was stunning: the NYPD intranet, the official platform used by the 53,000 members of the force to communicate, send department email,
broadcast bulletins, post crime alerts and stats, run vehicle checks, and make reports had been completely disabled; MISD also indicated that all department-issued personal devices—including
BlackBerries, tablets, and laptops—were inoperative. One PP was a mess. Although headquarters was finally able to accept and make landline calls, service was sporadic because of the overload.
Worst of all, perhaps, the databases of the Real Time Crime Center, the Enterprise Case Management System, and the Crime Data Warehouse had all been shut down. Also disabled was ShotSpotter, a
network of audio sensors that detected and mapped gunshots in real time throughout the city. Since the repercussions of the problem had not been fully evaluated, it remained too early to tell if
any information in sensitive files had been compromised. That would be sorted out later.

The police department wasn’t the only victim. The mayor’s office, the City Council, the DA, and courts were also hobbled, as were all city surveillance and traffic cams. But not all
services were affected: 911, FDNY, emergency paramedics, city hospitals, subways, and traffic lights were fully operational. So far, consumer Internet and cell phones were still up and running.
Same for the IT capability of the financial markets. At the headwaters of money’s digital river, Wall Street was still buying and selling, in a blink, around the world.

“Welcome to 1965,” said Heat, trying to play it nonchalant and stay big picture in the Homicide Squad Room but, inside, knowing that whatever its cause, there could not be a worse
time for this blackout of tech resources. Nikki didn’t care that more than four million transactions and investigative searches were made on the NYPD’s system every year. Right then,
all she wanted was for nothing to stand in the way of finding a killer who had murdered two people and could be in the early stages of a plan to kill more. “Until this gets fixed,” she
said, “we are going to have to try to catch our bad guy with Cold War technology.”

“Actually, it’s kinda cool.” Heads turned to Rook as he waltzed in from the break room with his hand buried in a bag of kettle corn. “It’s like we’ve hopped
into a classic YouTube clip and we get to be that cool collection of private eyes on
77 Sunset Strip.
Or that sixties TV lawman who was so formative in my development as an
investigator.”

“Barney Fife?” asked Raley.

“Zing. No, I am speaking of none other than that two-fisted loner, Peter Gunn.”

Ochoa said, “I prefer the seventies. I always saw myself in
Starsky & Hutch
.”

“Except you’d want to be both,” muttered Raley, obviously still harboring some serious resentment toward the other half of Roach.

Rook set aside his snack and grew serious. “This has been a shoe waiting to drop. We live by technology, and now technology is the new battlefront in state sabotage. China hacked the
Pentagon’s contractor networks, the Russians breached two systems in the White House—the White House, for God’s sake—by gaining entry first into the State Department’s
computers. The Iranians just hacked a casino in Vegas. So Clooney’s got his plot for
Ocean’s 21
. The Iranians are highly skilled hackers, and are allies of whom? The Syrians.
And here we are, all because young Mehmoud got busted for passing bad currency. So find your carbon paper and stop and smell the mimeo machine. This could be a rough one.”

In her decade-plus at the Twentieth Precinct there had never been a general
roll call until Captain Heat ordered one that evening,
the first, they said, since 9/11. In the hour since the cyber shutdown, not only had more information come in but public safety and that of her officers, detectives, and staff made it important for
Nikki to provide information, direct resources, hear concerns, and answer questions. In other words, to lead.

She held her meeting in the precinct lobby because it was the only indoor area large enough to accommodate all the personnel. It also allowed Annette Caesar to stay at the switchboard behind the
glass and get the same information as the uniformed patrol officers, detectives from various squads, traffic unit, civilian clerks, administrative aides, jailers, and interns. “Let me begin
by saying this is about two priorities: safety and communication. I am going to ask all of you to keep in mind above all that you can’t have one of those without the other.” For a
packed room, it was church quiet. Clearly the group wanted to hear all they could about this bizarre occurrence. There was also a sense of appraisal, and Heat could feel her words and comportment
being judged, even if in silence.

“As for safety, until further notice, I want all uniformed patrols to be in threes only. No pairs, no lone wolves out there. Whoever is watching your back is going to have his or hers
watched, too. All days off and vacations are canceled, TFN. We need all personnel available. One PP has reaffirmed high-alert status. And, given the bulletin from Counterterrorism, be extra
vigilant about potential terror activity now that we are vulnerable.” Of course, Nikki—like just about everyone else assembled there—had her own private suspicions that this
hacking incident
was
terror activity.