Silent Night - By Tom Barber Page 0,5
flicking on.
He pushed the second door open and walked into the Counter Terrorism Bureau for the New York Police Department.
The bustle and hum of activity inside the building couldn’t have been in greater contrast to the quietness of the street. To the left as you walked in was a large technical area containing a team of some twenty analysts. On the wall in front of them was a myriad of LED news tickers, electronic maps, digital world clocks and television screens tuned to various news channels both from within the United States and from all over the world. Some of the analysts were wearing headphones, monitoring foreign broadcasts and communications, constantly on their guard for anything that so much as hinted at a threat. Others were working closer to home, running key words through domestic calls and internet searches, scouring communications for anything that seemed at all unusual. The rest were working on a variety of jobs such as threading through intelligence, tracking potential suspects or working with field teams based out of the building. Open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, the Bureau epitomised both the way the world and technology had changed in the last few years and also how the NYPD now conducted its affairs.
Since that terrible day in September 2001 when the city had come under attack, New York’s security systems had undergone a multi-million dollar transformation. The Mayor, Commissioners, Police Chiefs, Lieutenants and street police had collectively done one hell of a job. Crime-wise, New York was now regarded as the safest big city in the United States, just ahead of El Paso in Texas, a real triumph considering where the place had been back in the 80s and early 90s. The number of criminal incidents across the city had plummeted in the past decade and scores of gangs had been driven out of the State due to intensive policing by city law enforcement.
However, New York was still the number one US target for terrorist activity. With over eight million residents, its standing as the financial and business capital of the nation and with a subway system used by three and a half million people every day, the city knew it had a large red target painted on its chest. Protecting it was a constant and sometimes almost overwhelming challenge. But it was one that was an absolute necessity.
The work was relentless. Like most counter-terrorist work, ninety-nine per cent of the time the public never knew about the successes. They only knew about the failures. From his position near the entrance Archer watched the tech team work. They were like their own tribe, working on assignments, talking to each other in a foreign language of technical jargon, coding and in-house slang, surrounded by some of the most advanced technology available to any police force in the world. The information they gathered was invaluable. It both protected the millions of people who lived in the city and also enabled the 125 detectives who worked out of the building to do their job effectively.
Given that the NYPD had precincts spread across the five boroughs and around 35,000 officers to call upon, the detectives in the Counter Terrorism Bureau had different responsibilities. Much of their work involved threat assessment on major city landmarks, public and private properties and areas in the city deemed vulnerable to terrorist attack. They conducted security audits, ensuring that every appropriate defensive measure was in place and that there weren’t any chinks in the armour that could be exploited. They had informants and undercover detectives infiltrating the criminal element in the city, their objective to gather any information on terrorist sleeper cells.
It was like a deadly game of chess. Although the city was now protected like a fortress, it was a certainty that there were groups out there desperate to find a weakness in its defences. The 125 detectives were separated into divisions with various assignments. Archer was part of a five-man detail which was at the top of the food chain when it came to emergencies and casework. Given that he’d been a counter-terrorist task force cop in the UK just seven months ago, how Archer happened to land here now was partly luck, but was mostly down to a stroke of good timing and his old boss in the UK.
Archer had left his police team in London, the Armed Response Unit, in May. Being half-American and therefore bypassing any visa issues, he’d decided to move to New York City