The Traffickers (Badge of Honor 9)

Payne ran over to the man on the ground, who appeared dazed as he tried to sit up.

“Are you okay?” Payne said.

“Don’t shoot me!” the terrified black man said.

Payne shook his head. “It’s okay. I’m police.”

He then looked down Tioga and saw the tail of the Caprice disappear in the distance. He shook his head.

His mind wandered back to the Platoon Leader’s Program at Marine Base, Quantico.

What’d that wise guy crack in the tactical course at Quantico? “When in doubt, empty the fucking magazine!”

FOUR

Executive Command Center The Roundhouse Eighth and Race Streets, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 11:30 A.M.

“Okay,” Police Commissioner Ralph Mariani said to First Deputy Police Commissioner Denny Coughlin. “Who wants to get me up to speed on where we stand? The mayor is screaming bloody murder, if you will pardon the phrase.”

Coughlin made a motion with his hand, effectively passing the request on to Deputy Commissioner Howard Walker, the two-star Chief of Science amp; Technology. Walker had not been Denny Coughlin’s first choice to work directly under him, but Mariani had said he’d had his reasons for installing him in the job.

Walker was a very tall and slender black man of fifty. He had a cleanly shaven head, a long thin nose, and wore tiny round Ben Franklin glasses. He spoke with a soft intelligent voice like that of a cleric, with a somewhat pious air about him. His domain of Science amp; Technology included the Forensic Sciences, Communications, and Information Systems Divisions-the latter two, of course, with oversight of the Executive Command Center.

The ECC was the nerve center of the Philadelphia Police Department Headquarters. It was situated between the offices of the police commissioner and the first deputy police commissioner, in an area that had once been another office and a large conference room, the wall between them now torn down.

Also present in the ECC were Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, commanding officer of the Detective Bureau; Captain Henry Quaire, Chief of the Homicide Unit; Homicide Lieutenant Jason Washington; and Corporal Kerry Rapier, an impossibly small white man with soft features who looked far younger than his twenty-five years. All wore coats and ties, except Rapier, who was in his police uniform, a pair of silver-outlined blue chevrons on each sleeve.

The cost of the ECC had been paid in large part with federal dollars. It had been built just before the City of Philadelphia hosted the Democratic National Convention. The politicians coming from Washington, D.C., fearing a terrorist attack with so many of them being present in one place at once, wanted proper protection in the City of Brotherly Love. And they were more than happy to let taxpayers from Boise, Idaho, to Tupelo, Mississippi, help pay for the best technology that Philadelphia could acquire.

The room was carpeted in a charcoal-colored industrial carpet, in the center of which were two T-shaped, dark gray, Formica-topped conference tables. Each table seated twenty-six and had accommodations for that many notebook computers beside a small forest of black stalk microphones and the multiline telephone consoles. Gray leather office chairs on casters ringed the table, and forty black armless leather chairs along two walls formed somewhat of a long couch.

On the ten-foot-tall walls opposite the line of armless chairs were banks of sixty-inch high-definition LCD flat-screen TVs, frameless and mounted edge to edge. One bank of nine created a single giant image. Two other banks of nine TVs had different images on each, or eighteen different picture feeds.

These consisted of live video. Broadcasts of local and cable news shows were on a half-dozen. Another half-dozen cycled feeds from the cameras of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. These somewhat grainy black-and-white DOT shots showed traffic on major arteries-such as Interstate Highway 95 along the Delaware River and the Schuylkill Expressway along that river-and on heavily traveled secondary streets. If the Philadelphia Police Department’s Long Rangers were flying, the DOT images would rotate with those of the thermal and standard color videos sent from the Aviation Unit’s Bell 206 L-4 helicopters.

In addition to the network of telephones, the Executive Command Center had secure communications networks with other city and state police departments, as well as the federal law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Secret Service, and all those agencies under the Department of Homeland Security. There was even assigned seating for the liaisons from those agencies.

It was indeed an impressive mass of high technology. So much so that Police Commissioner Mariani was prone to hold all of his press conferences in the ECC just for the gee-whiz backdrop it provided for photo ops.

While it was true that the Executive Command Center served to aid in the collection, assimilation, and analysis of information, not everyone blindly believed the great wizardry of the room to be all that magical in the catching of criminals.

Denny Coughlin, for example, was a devout believer that nothing beat the basics for gathering intel-and the basics meant shoe leather pounding the streets, cops talking with citizens. Or what was in many circles now called “humint,” short for human intelligence.

But Coughlin and his peers were willing to admit that the eyes in the sky (and everywhere else) of the ECC did serve a purpose. Pulling together so many different things in one place did manage to communicate the information of people and places and events in an effective manner. And the ECC also met a political component, that of interagency cooperation. Despite the fact that many felt the term “interagency cooperation” more often than not was an oxymoron akin to jumbo shrimp, working with the feds was necessary, and the ECC provided an appropriate environment for that.

“We shall begin, Commissioner Mariani,” Howard Walker said, “with the Philly Inn.”

He turned to Corporal Rapier. “Kerry, please punch up number thirteen on the main screen.”

All of the TVs were serially numbered, starting with the main bank of nine TVs that showed the one enormous video feed. It was number one. The second bank had numbers two through ten, and the third eleven through nineteen. (In the event the main bank became nine individual images, its screen numbering went to 1a, 1b, 1c, and through to 1i.) On the lower right-hand corner of each TV was a digitally produced numeral in a circle, either a black or a white orb, depending on which provided the best contrast to the main image. TV number thirteen was, of course, in the third bank of TVs.

TV number one, the big one, was showing a real-time feed of the front fa?ade of City Hall.

When Corporal Rapier manipulated his console, his fingers flying across the keyboard, the image that was on TV number thirteen suddenly was duplicated-but much bigger-as the image on the main bank of TVs, replacing City Hall.

It was a color shot of the crime scene at the Philly Inn. It was made by a high-definition camera mounted to the crime-scene lab truck at the back of the motel. The yellow tape was still strung up, but there was no noticeable activity, even when Corporal Rapier used the console joystick to pan and zoom the area.

In the bottom right-hand corner was: