A patrol sergeant raised his hand. “What happens if this thing grows and knocks out our personal electronics?”
“There’s always a party pooper,” said Heat, winning some relieved chuckles from the group. “We don’t know what course this is going to take. And we live in an era—and a city—not equipped for this. Can anyone here remember the last working pay phone he or she saw?” Nikki held up the walkie-talkie she had placed on the table beside her. “In the meantime, Sergeant, to answer your question, two-way car radios and walkies are still good to go. But that’s going to mean more air traffic, so be mindful of who you are stepping on, and keep it short. As for here in this building, we have located additional landline telephones in the basement and they are being brought up. Hopefully, we’ll have enough jacks.” A glance at her crib sheet. “Oh, for those of us who were here in 2009 and used to make fun of the department for forcing us to still use typewriters to fill out our Complaint Informational Follow-up forms…” She paused while an amused murmur about the old DD5 Pinks circulated among the cops. “You’ll be happy to know that there are about a dozen typewriters with some of your fingerprints on the keys headed up from storage for use in completing reports. What can I say? Even a cyber blackout can’t defeat a bureaucracy.” After the chorus of moans had faded, she added, “For now, we are going back to the way cops did it in the old days.”
“Graft?” said Detective Feller.
“We’re going to have to resort to some retro work-arounds,” Heat told Raley and Ochoa when she called them in to her office after her roll call. “Fewer instant searches and more shoe leather, for starters. Sorry, Your Highness,” she said to Rales. “No surveillance cams makes you a peasant like the rest of us.”
“We’ll find other ways, like you said.”
“And what about you two?” Estranged as they might have felt, the longtime partners continued to share nonverbals. For instance, at that moment, each shifted his crossed legs at the same time. “Well?”
“You don’t need to worry about us,” said Ochoa.
Raley nodded. “We’re all about the job.”
Nikki knew the difference between game faces and masks, but before she could go deeper, they dove in and laid out their plan to deploy their squad, adjusting for the blackout. Detective Aguinaldo would drive down to RTCC and retrieve the raw license-plate video from the Roosevelt Island Bridge cam, hand-search all tags recorded that morning, and run them through the DMV. State cyber structure, so far, remained unaffected by the hacking. With all police databases kaput, Rhymer would go analog and hit the mug books, armed with Sampson Stallings’s artistic rendering to search for the intruder at Lon King’s apartment. Since Joseph Barsotti had gone MIA, Randall Feller would pack a thermos of coffee and an empty milk jug for an all-night stakeout of Fortuna’s Wheel in case the mob soldier showed up to talk with his boss, Fat Tommy. Roach’s own task would be to continue reaching out to the other members of Wilton Backhouse’s cadre of whistle-blowers. When Raley and Ochoa had finished, rather than poke at the wound, Heat just said, “Team Roach,” and let them go to it.
“What’s your take on Tangier Swift?” asked Rook after he had checked in at the hostess station for their ten o’clock reservation at ABC Cocina.
“And…he’s off!” Nikki said with a grin.
“What?”
“What what?”