Coming Dawn (Devin Gray) by Steven Konkoly

Author:Steven Konkoly [Konkoly, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2022-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 31

“Slow down,” said Devin, before glancing over his shoulder at Gupta, who typed frantically on his laptop in the back seat.

Marnie eased off the accelerator, the car dropping from an already painfully slow speed to a brutal fifteen miles per hour, buying them several seconds of time.

“Where to, Anish?” he said. “We’re running out of room. Calvert Street crosses the Penn Station tracks just a few blocks ahead. The police will have something set up on the other side of that overpass.”

“The antenna situation sucks. This portable rooftop unit is barely getting what I need. It’s just going to take a little more time,” said Gupta.

“No problem,” said Devin. “Do what you need to do. Just get us off the streets until you have a handle on this.”

“Take a left here on Federal and look for an alley or some street parking.”

Marnie turned the sedan, careful not to squeal the tires.

“There’s an alley right before that brick building with the graffiti,” said Devin, pointing to the left side of the street.

“I see it,” said Marnie, before guiding the car through an impossibly tight backstreet.

His radio chattered.

“What are we doing?” said Melendez.

“Buying Anish some time,” said Devin.

They emerged in a fully occupied, angled parking lot, which didn’t seem affiliated with either of the buildings that flanked it.

“Stop here,” said Devin, before turning his attention back to Gupta. “Is there anything we can do to help? What if we took the antenna off the roof and climbed up one of these fire escapes?”

“No. It has nothing to do with that. You can pick up police radio transmissions anywhere in the city. I just need time,” said Gupta. “Baltimore PD encrypts their police traffic, which requires every transmission to negotiate with each radio’s encryption key, resulting in a very specific, very brief back-and-forth radio frequency signature when the radio traffic is passed. Once I nail down more of this signature, we just need to start moving again, and I can fix nearby units’ positions. It’s taking time because Baltimore PD has taken some serious steps to prevent criminals from intercepting or spoofing their communications.”

“How long?” said Devin.

“I really don’t know,” said Gupta. “This isn’t like the movies, where I have a status bar counting down the time.”

“Is the nine-one-one system ready to go?”

Gupta checked the laptop on the seat next to him. Graves’s laptop.

“Yep. I just need to figure out where they have a gap in coverage.”

The system in question had been designed by Gupta to divert police resources by simultaneously flooding 911 calls. A tackle box resting in the footwell behind Marnie contained fifteen cell phones, each of them hardwired to some kind of circuit board that fed into Graves’s laptop through a wired connection.

Once they identified a weak spot in the police cordon, Gupta could divert those units to an entirely fabricated, nearby crisis by typing in a street location and a few variations of the crime in progress. The system would dial 911 through all fifteen phones and report

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