by A. G. Riddle
“Oww.” David winced and reeled back from the alcohol swab the tech had dabbed on his face. “Thank you, really, but let’s do this after. I’m fine. Flesh wounds.”
Across the room, Howard Keegan stood up from the bank of computer screens and walked over to David. “It was a setup, David.”
“Why? It makes no sense—”
“It does. You need to see this. I received it right before the blast.” Keegan handed him a sheet of paper.
<<< EYES ONLY >>>
<<< CLOCKTOWER >>>
<<< CENTCOMM >>>
Clocktower under attack.
Cape Town and Mar del Plata Stations destroyed.
Karachi, Dehli, Dakha, and Lahore breached.
Recommend initiate Firewall.
Please advise.
<<< END BULLETIN >>>
Keegan tucked the page back in his coat pocket. “He lied about our security problem.”
David rubbed his temples. It was a nightmare scenario. His head was still throbbing from the bomb blast. He had to think. “He didn’t lie—”
“Underestimated at the very least, or more likely a lie of omission to cripple and distract us for this larger attack on Clocktower.”
“The attack on Clocktower doesn’t mean the terrorist threat isn’t real. It could be a prelude—”
“Maybe. But the only thing we know is that Clocktower’s back is against the wall. Your first duty is to secure your station. You’re the largest operation in Southeast Asia. Your HQ could be under attack right now.” Keegan picked up his bag. “I’m going back to London to try to manage things from there. Good luck, David.”
They shook, and he saw Keegan out of the safe house.
On the street, a kid carrying a stack of newspapers ran up to David, waving them in the air and screaming, “Have you heard? Jakarta is under attack.”
David pushed him away, but the kid shoved a rolled up newspaper in his hand and darted off around the corner.
David started to toss the newspaper aside, but… it was too heavy. And there was something wrapped inside. He unrolled the paper. A round black pipe, about a foot long. A pipe bomb.
CHAPTER 6
BBC World Report - Wire Release
Potential terror attacks in residential neighborhoods in Mar del Plata, Argentina and Cape Town, South Africa
*** Breaking News Update: additional blasts reported in Karachi, Pakistan and Jakarta, Indonesia. We will update this report as details emerge. ***
Cape Town, South Africa // The sound of automatic gun fire and grenade explosions shattered the early morning calm in Cape Town today, as a group estimated at 20 armed assailants entered an apartment building and killed 14 people.
Police have released no official information about the attack.
Eye witnesses at the scene described it as a special-operations-style attack. A BBC reporter onsite took this eyewitness statement: “Yeah I seen it, looked like a tank or something, you know, one of them armored troop carriers, rolling up on the curb and then they was dudes pouring out it like ninjas or robot soldiers or something, moving all mechanical like and then its like the whole building exploded, glass falling all over the place and I ran up on out of there. I mean, it’s a rough neighborhood, but man, I ain’t never seen nothing like that. I figured, at first, it was, you know, a drug raid. Whatever it was, it done gone real wrong.”
Another witness, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the group had no official insignia on their vehicle or uniforms.
A reporter with Reuters who briefly gained access to the scene before police removed him, described it this way: “It looked to me like a safe house, maybe CIA or MI6. It would have to be somebody very well-funded to have that kind of technology: a situation-room with wall-to-wall computer screens and a massive server room. There were bodies everywhere. About half wore plain-clothes; the rest were dressed in black body armor similar to what witnesses say the attackers wore.”
It remains unclear if the attackers incurred any casualties and were forced to leave anyone behind or if the bodies were those of individuals defending the location.
The BBC sought a comment from both the CIA and MI6 for this report. Both declined.
The incident in Cape Town follows a similar story earlier today in Mar del Plata, Argentina, where a massive explosion in a low-income neighborhood killed 12 people at approximately 2 AM local time. Bystanders say the explosion followed a raid by a heavily armed group that no one could identify.
As with the attack in Cape Town, no one has claimed responsibility for the attack in Mar del Plata.
“It’s very concerning that we have no idea who’s involved,” said Richard Bookmeyer, a Professor at American University. “Based on the initial reports, if either the victims or the perpetrators of the attacks are part of a terrorist network… it would indicate a level of sophistication not currently thought possible by any known terror entity. It’s either a new actor or a significant evolution of an existing actor. Both scenarios would require re-examining what we think we know about the global terrorism landscape.”
We will update this story as details unfold.
CHAPTER 7
Autism Research Center (ARC)
Jakarta, Indonesia
West Jakarta Police Chief Eddi Kusnadi mopped sweat from his brow as he walked into the crime scene — some science lab on the west end of town. A neighbor had reported a gun shot. It was a nicer neighborhood, the type where neighbors had political connections, so he had to check it out. The place was obviously some kind of medical facility, but some of the rooms looked almost like a day care.
Paku, one of his best plain clothes police officers, waved him to a room in the back where he found an unconscious woman on the ground, a dead man in a pool of his own blood near her, and several cops standing around.
“Lover’s quarrel?”
“We don’t think so,” Paku said.
In the background the chief could hear several kids crying. A native Indonesian woman entered the room, and upon seeing the bodies, instantly began screaming.
“Get this lady out of here,” the chief said. Two officers corralled her out of the room. He said to Paku, the only remaining policeman, “Who are they?”
“The woman is Dr. Katherine Warner.”
“Doctor? This is a medical clinic?”
“No. A research facility. Warner is the head of it. The woman you just saw is one of the nannies for the children — they’re doing research on retarded children.”
“Doesn’t sound very profitable. Who’s the guy?”
“One of the lab technicians. The nanny says another technician offered to watch the kids, so she went home. The nanny says two kids are missing.”
“Run aways?”
“She thinks not, says the building has safe guards.”
“Security cameras on the building?”
“No. Some observation cameras in the rooms with the kids. We’re checking footage.”
The chief bent down and looked the woman over. She was skinny, but not too skinny. He liked that. He felt for a pulse, then turned her head side to side to see if she had any head trauma. He noticed minor bruises on her wrists, but she seemed otherwise unharmed. “What a mess. Find out if she has any money. If so, bring her to the station. If not, dump her at the hospital.”
CHAPTER 8
Clocktower Station HQ
Jakarta, Indonesia
David peered at the pipe through the narrow window of the blast shield. Turning the cap on the pipe had taken forever with the manually operated arm. But he had to look inside. It was the weight — the pipe was too light to be a bomb. Nails, buckshot, and bee-bees would weigh a lot more.
Finally, the end fell off, and David tipped the pipe to one side. A rolled up paper slid out. A thick, glossy page. A photo.
David unrolled it. It was a satellite image of an iceberg floating in a deep blue sea. In the center of the iceberg, there was an oblong black object. A submar
ine, sticking out of the ice. On the back, a message read:
________________________
Toba Protocol is real.
4+12+47 = 4/5; Jones
7+22+47 = 3/8; Anderson
10+4+47 = 5/4; Ames
________________________
David slipped the photo into a thick manila folder and walked over to the surveillance room. One of the two techs turned from the bank of screens. “No sign of him yet.”
“Anything from the airports?” David asked.
The man worked the keyboard, then looked up. “Yes, he landed a few minutes ago at Soekarno-Hatta. You want us to have him detained there?”
“No. I need him here. Just make sure they can’t see him on surveillance upstairs. I’ll take it from there.”
CHAPTER 9
David was studying a map of Jakarta and Clocktower’s safe houses around the city when the surveillance tech walked in. “He’s here.”
David folded the map up. “Good.”
Josh Cohen walked toward the nondescript apartment building that housed Clocktower’s Jakarta Station Headquarters. The buildings around it were mostly abandoned — a mix of failed housing projects and dilapidated warehouses.
He entered the building, walked down a long hallway, opened a heavy steel door and approached the shiny silver elevator doors. A panel beside the doors slid back, and he placed his hand on the reflective surface and said, “Josh Cohen. Verify my voice.”
A second panel, this one level with his face, opened and a red beam scanned his face while he held his eyes open and head still.
The elevator binged, opened, and began carrying Josh to the building’s middle floor. The elevator ascended silently, but Josh knew that elsewhere in the building a surveillance tech was reviewing a full body scan of him, verifying he had no bugs, bombs, or otherwise problematic items. If he was carrying anything, the elevator would fill with a colorless, odorless gas and he’d wake up in a holding cell. It would be the last room he’d ever see. If he passed, the elevator would take him to the fourth floor — his home for the last three years and the Jakarta headquarters of Clocktower.
Clocktower was the world’s secret answer to state-less terror: a state-less counter terrorism agency. No red tape. No bureaucracy. Just good guys killing bad guys. It wasn’t quite that simple, but Clocktower was as close as the world would ever get.
Clocktower was independent, a-political, anti-dogmatic, and most importantly, extremely effective. And for those reasons, the intelligence services of nations around the world supported Clocktower, despite knowing almost nothing about it. No one knew when it had started, who directed it, how it was funded, or where it was headquartered. When Josh had joined Clocktower three years ago, he assumed he would get answers to those questions as a Clocktower insider. He was wrong. He had risen through the ranks quickly, becoming Chief of Intelligence Analysis for Jakarta Station, but he still knew no more about Clocktower than the day he’d been recruited from the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis. And they seemed to want it that way.
Within Clocktower, information was strictly compartmentalized inside the independent cells. Everyone shared intel with Central, everyone got intel from Central, but no cell had the big picture or insight into the larger operation. And for that reason, Josh had been shocked to receive an invitation three days ago to a sort of “Summit Meeting” for the chief analysts of every Clocktower cell. He had confronted David Vale, the Jakarta station director, asking him if this was a joke. He’d said it wasn’t and that all the directors had been made aware of the meeting.
Josh’s shock at the invitation was quickly trumped by the revelations at the conference. The first surprise was the number of attendees: 238. Josh had assumed Clocktower was relatively small, with maybe 50 or so cells in the world’s hot spots, but instead, the entire globe was represented. Assuming each cell was the size of Jakarta Station, about 50 agents, there could be over 10,000 people working in the cells, plus the central organization, which had to be at least a thousand people just to correlate and analyze the intel, not to mention coordinate the cells.
The organization’s scale was shocking — it could be almost the size of the CIA, which had had around 20,000 total employees when he’d worked there. And many of those 20,000 worked in analysis in Langley, Virginia, not in the field. Clocktower was lean — it had none of the CIA’s bureaucracies and organization fat.
Its specials ops capabilities likely dwarfed that of any government on Earth. Each Clocktower cell had three groups. One third of the staff were case officers, similar to the CIA’s National Clandestine service; they worked undercover in actual terror organizations, cartels, and other bad-guy-run groups or in places where they could develop sources: local government, banks, and police departments. Their goal was Human Intelligence, or HUMINT, first-hand intel.
Another third of each cell worked as analysts. The analysts spent the vast majority of their time on two activities: hacking and guessing. They hacked everyone and everything: phone calls, emails, and texts. They combined that Signals Intelligence, or SIGINT, with the HUMINT and any other local intel and transmitted it to Central. Josh’s chief responsibility was to make sure Jakarta Station maximized its intelligence gathering and to draw conclusions about the intel. Drawing conclusion sounded better than guessing, but his job essentially came down to guessing and making recommendations to the Station Chief. The Station Chief, with council from Central, then authorized local operations, which were conducted by the cell’s covert operations group — the last third of the staff.
Jakarta’s covert ops group had developed a reputation as one of Clocktower’s leading strike teams. That status had afforded Josh something of a celebrity status at the conference. Josh’s cell was the de facto leader of the Asia-Pacific region and everyone wanted to know what their tricks of the trade were.
But not everyone was star-struck with Josh — he was glad to see many of his old friends at the conference. People he had worked with at the CIA or liaised with from other governments. It was incredible, he had been communicating with people he had known for years. Clocktower had a strict policy: every new member got a new name, your past was destroyed, and you couldn’t reveal your identity outside the cell. Outbound phone calls were computer voice-altered. In-person contact was strictly forbidden.
A face-to-face meeting — with every chief analyst, of every cell — shattered that veil of secrecy. It went against every Clocktower operating protocol. Josh knew there must be a reason — something extremely compelling, and extremely urgent — to take the risk, but he never could have guessed the secret Central revealed at the conference. He still couldn’t believe it. And he had to tell David Vale, immediately.
Josh walked to the front of the elevator and stood close to the doors, ready to make a bee line for the station chief’s office.
It was 9 am, and Jakarta Station would be in full swing. The analysts pit would be lit up like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, with analysts crowded around banks of monitors pointing and arguing. Across the floor, the door to the field ops prep room would be wide open and likely full of operatives getting ready for the day. The late arrivals would be standing in front of their lockers, donning their body armor quickly and stuffing extra magazines in every pocket on their person. The early risers usually sat around on the wood benches and talked about sports and weapons before the morning briefings, their camaraderie interrupted only by the occasional locker room prank.
It was home, and Josh had to admit that he had missed it, although the conference was rewarding in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Knowing he was part of a larger community of chief analysts, people who shared the same life experience as he, people who had the same problems and fears as he did, was surprisingly comforting. In Jakarta, he was head of analysis, he had a team that worked for him, and he answered only to the Station Chief, but he had no real peers, no one to really talk to. Intelligence work was a lonely profession, especially for the people in charge.
It had certainly taken its toll on some of his old friends. Many had aged well beyond their years. Others had become hardened and distant. After seeing them, Josh had wondered if he would end up that way. Everything had a price, but he believed in the work they were doing. No job was perfect.
As his thoughts drifted back from the conference, he realized the elevator should have opened by now. When he turned his head to look around, the elevator lights blurred, like a video in slow motion. His body felt heavy. He could hardly breathe. He reached out to grab the elevator rail, but his hand wouldn’t close; it slipped off and he saw the steel floor rushing up.
CHAPTER 10
Interrogation Room C
West Jakarta Police Detention Center
Jakarta, Indonesia
“Why won’t you listen to me? Why the hell aren’t you out looking for those two boys?” Kate Warner stood, leaned over the metal table and stared at the smug little interrogator who had already wasted twenty minutes of her time.
“We are trying to find them. That is why we are asking you these questions, Miss Warner.”
“I already told you, I don’t know anything.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” The little man tilted his head side-to-side as he said the words.
“Maybe my ass. I’ll find them myself.” She stepped toward the steel door.
“That door is locked, Miss Warner.”
“So unlock it.”
“Not possible. It must be locked while a suspect is questioned.”
“Suspect? I want a lawyer, right now.”
“You are in Jakarta, Miss Warner. No lawyer, no call to the American Embassy.” The man continued looking down, picking dirt off his boots. “We have many foreigners here, many visitors, many people who come here, who do not respect our country, our people. Before, we fear American Consulate, we give them lawyer, they always get away. We learn. Indonesians are not being as stupid as you think, Miss Warner. That is why you do your work here, is it not? You think we are too stupid to figure out what you are up to?”