"And you are?" he growled.
"Alex Evans. I live three doors down. I'm a network architect." I paused for effect. "Look, I can get you back online."
Davis let out a short, bark-like laugh. It was a sound completely devoid of humor. "Oh, you can? And how are you going to do that, computer man? You got some magic tape in your pocket? Going to sprinkle some pixie dust on the wire?"
I smiled. It was the smile I reserved for executives who asked if we could just make the cloud faster.
"No," I said calmly. "I have administrative access to a federal Continuity of Operations network—COOP. Think of it as the internet's panic room. The Department of Homeland Security has a web of redundant, high-bandwidth satellite and terrestrial backhauls for situations just like this one: natural disasters, major infrastructure failures..." I gestured vaguely at the world outside the window, "...or when an HOA president decides to go rogue with a pair of hedge clippers."
Miller was staring at me, his mouth slightly agape. "A federal network? Is that... is that legal for you to use?"
"It's 'break glass in case of emergency' legal," I explained. "The thing is, your station is already a designated Point of Presence, or POP. You have the physical connection. It's a requirement for municipal services in a community this size. But you don't have the hardware or the software protocols enabled to fail over to it automatically. It's a manual switch. A switch I know how to flip."
I pushed off the doorframe. "All I need is five minutes in your server closet, your word that you'll look the other way, and for you to pretend you didn't see what I'm about to do."
A tense silence filled the room. Davis stared at me, his mind clearly warring with itself. Decades of by-the-book police procedure were screaming at him to throw me out. But the dead, silent room around him was screaming louder. He was the captain of a sinking ship, and I had just shown up with the only lifeboat.
"You touch anything that messes up my evidence logs, my case files, anything at all," he finally said, his voice low and dangerous, "and I will personally throw you in a cell so fast your head will spin. You'll be explaining network architecture to a cellmate named Bubba."
"Fair enough," I said with a nod. "It's a deal. But when I get you back online, you owe me. You're going to march over to Brenda's house and have a little chat with her, and I get to be there. I want to see her face."
A flicker of something—maybe grim satisfaction—passed over Davis's face. He grunted. It was the closest he would ever come to a smile.
"Fine," he conceded. "Miller, go with him. Babysit. If he so much as looks at a file, tase him."
Miller gulped, his eyes darting between me and the sergeant. "Uh, roger that, Sarge."
I grinned. "Don't worry, Officer. The only thing I'll be zapping is your network switch."
The server closet at the Serenity Springs Police Substation was less of a closet and more of a vertical coffin. It was cramped, smelled of dust and overheated plastic, and was lit by a single flickering fluorescent bulb. A rat's nest of blue and gray Ethernet cables spilled from the walls and ceiling, a testament to two decades of neglect and quick fixes. Officer Miller hovered nervously in the doorway behind me, casting a long, wavering shadow.
"Oh, my sweet Lord," I whispered, taking in the scene. My professional soul wept. "It's a graveyard."
Stacked in a cheap, wobbly rack were ghosts of technologies past: a Dell PowerEdge server from 2008, its fans grinding with arthritic protest; a Netgear switch that looked like it had been salvaged from a high school computer lab; I was pretty sure I saw a dial-up modem. It was a digital atrocity.
"Is this bad?" Miller asked, his voice echoing slightly in the small space.
"Bad?" I scoffed, pulling my own ruggedized laptop from my backpack. "Officer, this isn't bad. This is a cry for help. This is what happens when you let the lowest bidder handle your IT for twenty years. I'm surprised you guys could run Solitaire, let alone a criminal database."
I got to work. Miller watched me as if I were performing a strange and arcane ritual—which, in a way, I was.
First, I located the station's primary network switch. It was warm to the touch—a bad sign. I traced the dead fiber optic line from the wall plate and unplugged its connector from the port. It was like pulling a life support plug from a patient who was already dead.
Next, my eyes scanned the switch panel, and there it was, just as the public infrastructure blueprints had indicated: a single port set apart from the others, covered by a bright red plastic dust cap. A tiny label above it, almost faded to illegibility, read: DHS COOP E-LINK.
This was it: the secret passage, the gateway to the good stuff. This port didn't lead to the local ISP. It led to a hardened, shielded conduit that snaked its way to a discreet satellite dish on the roof.
I unplugged the dust cap, blew on it for good measure, and plugged the station's main fiber line into this new port. Nothing happened, as expected. The physical link was there, but the port wasn't provisioned. It was asleep. Time to wake it up.
I popped open my laptop. My own connection was long gone, so it was time for Plan B. I tethered my laptop to my phone's 5G signal, the last bastion of connectivity in this digital wasteland. A black window with green text popped onto my screen: a Secure Shell, or SSH, terminal.
"What is all that?" Miller whispered from the doorway, mesmerized by the cursor blinking in the dark void. "Is that code?"
"I'm dialing a phone number," I said, my fingers dancing across the keys: ssh [email protected] -p 2200. "A very, very secure phone number."
A prompt appeared: Password. I typed in my ridiculously long passphrase.
Another prompt appeared: Enter YubiKey 2FA code. I pulled the small, key-shaped device from my keychain and plugged it into my laptop's USB-C port. I tapped its gold disc. A long string of characters filled the screen, and I hit enter.
I was in.
The terminal prompt changed. I was now inside a gateway server, a digital lobby in a very secure, very secret building somewhere deep in the hills of Virginia. From here, I had to hop through two more layers of security—a process that involved authenticating my credentials against a different server in Colorado and passing a cryptographic challenge-response test.
To Miller, it just looked like I was typing gibberish.