"I'm telling a very powerful, very expensive computer in a bunker in Virginia to wake up and pay attention to you guys," I narrated, partly for his benefit and partly for my own. "It's like a long-distance booty call for data. You have to whisper all the right sweet nothings to get it interested."
Finally, I arrived at my destination: the command line interface for the regional COOP network switch. I had the power. I typed the commands, my fingers moving with a speed and confidence that came from years of doing this:
Plaintext
enable
configure terminal
interface gi 1/0/48
description **EMERGENCY ACTIVATION - SERENITY SPRINGS SUBSTATION - LOCAL INFRASTRUCTURE SABOTAGE**
no shutdown
ip address dhcp
exit
I hit the final enter key on my screen. I started a simple timer script.
Now, we waited for the network to do its thing: for the request to travel to the satellite, get authenticated, for the switch here to be provisioned, and for the data to start flowing. The technical term is propagation delay.
One minute passed. Sergeant Davis's impatient voice echoed from the main room: "Anything yet, computer man?"
"Patience is a virtue, Sergeant!" I called back. "Greatness takes time."
Two minutes. Three minutes.
The little light on the DHS port on the switch remained a stubbornly dead orange. Miller was shifting his weight, the skepticism returning to his face. Three minutes and fifty seconds. My own heart was beating a little faster. Come on, baby. Talk to me.
Then, at three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, it happened.
The orange light flickered once, twice, and then it turned a solid, brilliant, beautiful green. A second later, the other lights on the switch connected to the station's internal network began to flash frantically, like a string of Christmas lights having a seizure.
Data was flowing.
"And we have propagation," I said, a triumphant grin spreading across my face. "Three, two, one..."
The effect in the main room was immediate and dramatic. The overhead fluorescent lights, which had been off, flickered to life as the building's network-connected power management system came back online. The monitors on the desks all lit up in unison, displaying their familiar login prompts. A laser printer in the corner, silent for hours, whirred to life and began spitting out a huge backlog of queued print jobs, the paper cascading onto the floor.
Sergeant Davis, who had been staring at his blank screen with the expression of a man defeated by life, now just stared dumbfounded as the familiar logo of his operating system appeared. He slowly reached out and touched the screen as if to confirm it was real. He looked up, his eyes wide, and met my gaze through the server closet doorway.
Miller, standing behind me, let out a slow, astonished breath. "Did you... did you just fix the whole police department with your laptop?" he whispered in awe.
I leaned back in the cramped closet, closing my laptop with a satisfying click.
"I rerouted you through a billion-dollar federal backup network that's normally reserved for surviving a nuclear apocalypse," I said, savoring the moment. "So, yeah. Just try not to use it all streaming Netflix during your lunch break. I think DHS frowns on that."
With the station humming back to life, the atmosphere shifted from one of panicked despair to bewildered efficiency. Cops were logging into their computers, the dispatch radio was crackling with voices, and the printer was still chugging away like it was trying to single-handedly deforest Canada.
Sergeant Davis now looked at me with a completely new expression. The suspicion was gone, replaced by a healthy dose of fear and grudging respect. He was a man who understood blunt force, and I had just hit his problem with the digital equivalent of a tactical nuclear strike.
True to his word, he picked up his now-working desk phone and made a call. "Yeah, it's Davis. I need a crew out at Serenity Springs. No, not for a bust. I need a construction guy. Someone who knows digging. Yeah, right now. It's an infrastructure issue."
An hour later, a beat-up Ford F-150 that looked like it had personally survived several apocalypses pulled up to the curb. The logo on the side, faded and caked with mud, read: Digs-A-Lot Construction.
A large man with a magnificent beer belly, a coffee-stained shirt, and the easygoing confidence of someone who had seen it all hopped out. This was Dave.
Davis, Miller, and I met him at the crime scene: Brenda's petunia bed. I had been forced to stick around as their "technical consultant," which mostly meant I stood there trying to look useful while enjoying the show.
"All right, Sarge, what's the emergency?" Dave asked, taking a sip from a giant thermos. He looked at the severed orange cable on the ground. "Oh."
He knelt down, his knees cracking audibly. He examined the cut for no more than five seconds.
"Oh yeah," he said, nodding with the authority of a seasoned pro. "That's a clean cut. Did that with a pair of $50 anvil loppers from Home Depot. See the pinch marks on the sheathing here? No way that was a shovel. A shovel mangles. This was personal." He pointed a thick finger at the soft dirt of the flower bed. "And look here. Footprints. Small ones, size seven, maybe. See the tread pattern? That's a woman's gardening clog. I'd bet my lunch on it."
Davis looked at me. I just shrugged and smiled. Dave, the Digs-A-Lot guy, had just done more effective forensic work in thirty seconds than a whole CSI team.
"All right," Davis grunted. "Let's go have a chat."
The four of us—a grim-faced sergeant, a nervous rookie, a smug network architect, and a folksy construction expert—made our way up Brenda's perfectly swept walkway. It felt like the weirdest posse in history.
Davis knocked firmly on the door. A moment later, it swung open to reveal Brenda herself. She was holding a small, elegant watering can, and she had a beatific smile on her face—the smile of a benevolent ruler surveying her perfect kingdom.
"Sergeant," she chirped, her voice dripping with condescending sweetness. "To what do I owe the pleasure? I was just about to file another report about the Hendersons' unapproved wind chimes. The dissonance is simply dreadful for the neighborhood's feng shui."