Early Warning by Michael Walsh

Tyler had nearly blown one of the nation’s most valuable resources—the Central Security Service’s Branch 4 clandestine operation, and in particular the agent known as Devlin. And then there was Bill Hartley’s suicide, which had left him without a single Senator he could either trust or reliably bribe. The presidency thing was a lot harder than it looked. No wonder Caesar had nudged the Roman Republic toward the Empire.
    “Sir?” Manuel’s question brought him out of his fog.
    “Yes, Manuel?”
    “Will there be anything else this evening?”
    Tyler looked at his manservant; funny how here, in the heart of the world’s greatest democracy, the president still had man-servants. He was about to say something when the phone buzzed softly. That was Manuel’s signal to leave. He bowed and backed out of the room, closing the door and leaving the president alone with whatever problem was now announcing itself.
    It was Millie Dhouri, his private secretary, calling from the Oval Office. “Yes, Millie, what is it?”
    “Mr. President, I have Director Seelye on the line. He says it’s urgent.”
    Tyler wished that Manuel had made it a double. Calls from Seelye could never be good news. “Patch him through, please.”
    “Yes, sir.” There was a short pause, with a faint crackle on the line, as the security of the connection was verified and the scrambling devices activated, and then Lt. General Armond “Army” Seelye—the Director of the National Security Agency—came on the line.
    Tyler spoke first: “How bad is it?”
    Seelye did not seem surprised in the least by the president’s opening gambit. “Unknown at this time. Apparently, there’s been a major security breach at NYPD CTU. They were blinded for several minutes by a coordinated DoS attack, most likely Chinese in origin.”
    “The Chinks are always doing that sort of thing,” Tyler interrupted. “They’ve been in our shorts for years: at DoD, the Agency, even the power grid and water supply. I thought you guys were supposed to be doing something about that.”
    “Yes, sir,” replied Seelye’s voice; even scrambled, the sting was audible. “We are, sir. But as you know, despite the reorganizations post 9/11, interservice agency cooperation is still a reformer’s fantasy and a bureaucrat’s nightmare. And, in any case, NYPD acts alone.”
    That much was true. The New York Police Department had become a stand-alone, off-the-shelf operation, completely independent of the nation’s intelligence establishment. How exactly that had happened was unclear, but it didn’t really matter at this point. The clannish Irish—and every cop on the NYPD was at heart Irish, no matter what his or her ethnicity—were deeply suspicious of the Washington outsiders and, after Atta & Co. punched two huge smoking holes in the ground of lower Manhattan, were in no mood to trust Langley, Fort Meade, or the Pentagon ever again.
    “Who’s in command of the CTU these days?” asked Tyler.
    “Captain Byrne, Francis X. Byrne,” replied Seelye. “Old-school to the end. Father was a cop, KIA. Plenty of write-ups and citations. He’s also been best buds with the commish since they were young detectives together. He’s bulletproof.”
    “So we know nothing about their operation.”
    “Not really, no sir.”
    Tyler sighed. What the hell was the point of having multiple intelligence agencies under the vague aegis of the Director of National Intelligence and the cumbersome Department of Homeland Security? The whole thing was a giant cluster fuck. If he survived the fall campaign, it was something he was going to have to fix. Especially when a city cop shop could tell all of them to go pound sand.
    The hell of it was, the CTU was probably the best-equipped counterterrorism operation in the world, even better than the Israelis’. They had the latest equipment, state-of-the-art computers, and the top techies, including a cadre of former hackers who had been persuaded to