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.