by Gabriel Kron
“And what?”
“What are they doing about it?”
“They’ve given me another number to call tomorrow morning,” Lee said distantly as he considered what was happening. Was this because of the Lockridge device?
Sinclair Residence. Day 35.
It soon became apparent that other than Becs, everyone else involved with the Lockridge device had been hacked in some way.. Our bank details, phone and any internet accounts had all been scrubbed. This was something I had already experienced whilst recuperating at the Friedmann’s in Germany. Every account I held had been frozen along with my bank account and telephone service. I figured it was standard practice by the police to do this, but to freeze Clive’s and Lee’s accounts as well seemed suspicious.
For us here in the UK at Clive’s house, we were able to quickly put aside coincidence. We had been hit.
How many of the OTG had been affected we didn’t know. Between Lee, Clive and myself we had a handful of contacts beyond email addresses for the members of the OTG. Telephone numbers were available for five of them, but none of them worked, which suggested they had also been hit.
This left postal addresses for three of the group: Mario Kragg of Switzerland, Chuck Farrar of the USA, and Liam Zeman of the Czech Republic.
Out of twenty members, we only had addresses for six, including our own. We agreed that the only way of communicating now was snail mail, but at least we could still do so.
Clive printed out a short and concise letter:
Dear Mario,
Please forgive me for writing to you about the dire situation we are in. As you are aware from the now deleted group, the device that DB found in Stuttgart has put us and everyone else within the OTG, in grave danger.
Here in the UK we have all had our bank, telephone and internet accounts deleted. It has left us unable to communicate with anyone and we figured that if the rest of the group was also being targeted in the same way then we are left with only snail mail. Hence this letter.
It appears that our accounts are retrievable, but the hassle and disruption is great.
We fully understand if you want to distance yourself from any of this. However, if you have been targeted, then you may want to join us in investigating and ensuring complete disclosure of the device and those trying to suppress it.
Please write and let us know.
Yours sincerely,
Clive
“Now we wait.” Lee said.
“Not so sure I can wait,” I said. “It’s becoming apparent that I can’t stay here. They will soon enough come here looking and asking questions. Think about it, you’re already linked to this case Clive, you’ve lost your job and you’re an OTG member, so it’s only a matter of time before they come here. It’s not like they’re not going to know this address.”
After a long silence, Clive said “You’re right. You’re not safe here.”
“And you’re not safe while I’m here. I need somewhere else to stay.”
Lee immediately tried using his smartphone before remembering it no longer worked.
With no communications other than Brenda’s pay-as-you-go phone and no immediate access to money, even the option of a local Bed & Breakfast was beyond us all.
“Hang on, we can do this,” Lee said as he opened his wallet and rifled through the cards until he found the one he wanted. “We can use this, the company has a Travelodge account, is there one local?”
It was ideal. Lee said he would have to settle it with his finance department, but being in his name it wouldn’t notice for a while.
Travelodge. Days 35 – 38.
Over the next few days, I settled down into a new routine. A routine born of a new world a few of us now lived in. A world where reality included the suppression of knowledge by deadly force. Something that, before Stuttgart, I had believed didn’t happen any more and maybe never did in the first place, the stories being deeply embedded in the minds of conspiracy theorists. Hidden and denied, there was a war against forbidden technologies and we were on the front-line.
We didn’t know who the enemy was or how many there were but they were out there and this put us on guard and on-edge. I became especially aware of my surroundings and the people around me, avoiding anything or anyone that looked remotely suspicious or threatening. I continued my own personal training. I was beyond training for getting fit again and having to pace my way through the moves — now I was training for survival. It had already helped me once at the Locke farm.
Lee and Clive didn’t have much trouble sorting their bank accounts out. The banks couldn’t provide a reasonable explanation as to why the accounts had been deleted, but at least no monies had been lost.
The telephones and internet accounts had proved more difficult to re-establish. Clive had found getting the internet back was as frustrating as ever with the service provider insisting that it was going to take four weeks before re-activation.
For now, the only real tasks that needed to be done were finding a long term safe house, the translation of the Locke notebooks, and decoding the Locke Cipher.
The notebook translation was a long arduous process, but in addition to the observations and measurements Kaspar Locke had made notes about, a back story was beginning to emerge about the inventor of the device.
Locke had started his investigation of the Lockridge device after Jack Welch had returned one to his sister. It was a device that Locke knew about already. The Locke farm had been using one since the mid-1930s along with other small-holdings, homesteads and businesses in the local area of Remsek. They were being sold to locals by a local mechanical engineer working over a hundred miles away at the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, now commonly known as LMU or the University of Munich.
The device wasn’t known as the Lockridge device, a label established through the internet. Kaspar Locke referred to it as Die Festung Glocke, German for The Fortress Bell.
The engineer, only referenced by the letter D in the notebooks, had developed the Festung Glocke around a modified Bosch dynamo and supplied them to the local villages as a means of providing light.
There was a lot of internet matter on a Nazi device called Die Glocke, the Bell. Could the Fortress Bell be related to the infamously reputed secret weapon of the Third Reich? It was certainly possible and would explain some vague notes about D’s later disappearance.
On the table were all three notebooks. They were all different. The main notebook had a black hard cover with thin lined pages. Kaspar wrote in ink most of the time and his handwriting was quite small. There was a smaller but just as thick notebook which had similar writing, but had page after page of test results and other relevant data.
The third notebook was altogether different in a way that I hadn’t really noticed before. It was a lot thinner, more like a small school exercise book. Its cover was a mid-blue card and was older and more worn, but the main difference only became apparent when compared directly to either of the other two. The handwriting was different and there was only writing, no drawings, tables, graphs or mathematics, just solid writing. My first thoughts were that it was Kaspar Locke’s brother, Johann’s, notebook. Sophia had said that they both spent many hours trying to work out how the device worked.
As soon as I started translating it I realised how important it was. It soon became clear that this was written by the inventor of the Fortress Bell. This was D. I stopped translating the main notebook and concentrated on this smaller but hopefully more significant work.
Translating was becoming easier. I was recognising the common words and starting to understand the structure of the language. What wasn’t getting any easier was trying to read the handwriting.
The Translation
If you are reading this it means that I am either dead or have been incarcerated by the Gestapo. You are one of several who have a copy of this and I know I can trust that you will use this information for the good of the German people when the time is right.
> I, Diethelm Krammer, leave this to you so that you can know that I have not betrayed either our own roots or that of the German nation and despite what you may be told, my intentions have always been good.
As you know, I served my apprenticeship with Bosch. In order to supplement the meagre apprentice wage, I designed and sold a small generator that would provide enough electricity for most homes. The generator was a modified Bosch starter motor and employed ideas that I had seen at work whilst working for Professor Gerlach. I must state here that I did not steal any intellectual property of Bosch or anyone I worked with. The principles that make my generator run are my own and when I set out on building these I was unaware of any controversy. I was a mechanical apprentice and understood little about electrics until my fifth year at Bosch. As part of my sixth and last year of the apprenticeship and in order to get my Deeds, we had to design and develop an innovative machine. Obviously I decided to present my modified generator. I named the generator the Fortress Bell.
In July 1939, I started Out-Station work and was assigned to a new department within Bosch that was investigating the new science of Nuclear Physics. Professor Walther Gerlach, of the Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, was a regular visitor to our laboratories and visited the workshop on the same day I had one of the Fortress Bell generators on the bench for testing.
Professor Gerlach asked me several questions about the generator, although I was guarded about the key principle employed as I knew now that it was a new innovation.
That afternoon, four men in trench coats turned up from the Gestapo and arrested me for treason against the German nation. They would not tell me why they thought I had committed treason.
They took me to the headquarters of the Gestapo in Berlin, 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, a frightful building that everyone feared, where the screams of its victims could be heard from the street outside and victims would often never be seen again.
I was held captive at Gestapo HQ for many months. At first I was interviewed over and over again, being asked the same questions repeatedly;
“Who told you how to build the generator?”
“Who have you told about the generator?”
“Who sold you the two two six?”
“Who have you sold the generators to?”
“Where did you learn how to make it work?”
“How does it work?”
“Who else knows about it?”
“How many did you make?”
“Who have you told about the generator?”
“Who sold you the two two six?”
“Where are the generators now?”
I answered the questions as best I could, but after a couple of weeks of this passive interrogation, a new approached was employed.
The interrogators had been quite civil and would often try and strike up conversations that appeared to have nothing to do with the generator, but on this particular day a new interrogator was used.
When he first met me, he asked me my name and before I could answer he punched me in the face. It knocked me out and when I came to, I found I had been moved to another interrogation room and had been tied naked to a chair.
I was being asked the same questions as before, but now my answers appeared to provoke an onslaught of torture. It started with being punched and kicked repeatedly. Soon my eyes had both closed up with the swelling and I could barely talk without spluttering blood.
Then instead of being questioned for hours every day, I was left in a cell, the lights permanently on and the consistent background noise of screams as other prisoners were tortured.
One time, they positioned the chair I was tied to in front of a large metal bath full of water. They tilted me forward and forced my head under the water. At first I held my breath, so the interrogator, using a knuckle duster, punched me repeatedly in the kidneys. Each time I passed out, they dragged me back out and revived me.
Still they asked me the same questions over and over.
“Where did you learn how to make it work?”
“How does it work?”
“Who else knows about it?”
“How many did you make?”
“Who have you told about the generator?”
I don’t remember answering or being able to answer at this point. I remember looking at the interrogator’s holstered Luger and wishing he would use it and end the hell I was in.
On another occasion they took me into yet another room. I remember looking around and feeling relieved that there was no bath. The relief was short lived. I was stripped naked again and tied to the chair, my ankles were strapped to the legs and my arms were shackled behind. Then one of the interrogators using special wooden-handled paddles with wire-wool electrodes applied them to various parts of my body delivering high voltage electric shocks. I passed out after the interrogator stuffed the wire-wool into my mouth and the other paddle jammed between my legs. I remember how my body reacted as he delivered the shock, my legs trying to kick out wildly and the rest of my body involuntarily locked in complete rigidity.
I can’t remember how many times I was tortured, but that last session of being electrocuted in the mouth was the last.
It was the last time they tortured me. I hadn’t told them anything different than before, but I was told that I was to work here at the secret Wenceslas mine nuclear research labs.
In the pages that follow, I will document the steps necessary to convert a standard Bosch MkII twenty-four volt starter generator.
The construction of a fully working Fortress Bell will require further steps once the basic unit is built.
1/ Fully disassemble a Bosch MkII starter motor, part number 1314-3422-24S.
2/ Remove all four irons from casing.
3/ Remove and discard field windings.
4/ Mill four slots, 5/16ths in width midway between irons.
5/….
6/….
.
.
240/ The generator can now be started using a rip cord.
All of the above I have shared here and at the AEG labs. However, their machines will never work until they incorporate one key component and tune it as follows:
~~~
The translated instructions had continued for over twenty pages and ended with the above paragraph, the pages after this had been torn out. What was the key component? Surely the Locke Cipher was related to this.
Travelodge. Day 38.
The instructions were precise and described the basic modifications necessary to the Bosch MkII starter motor. These notebooks were more valuable than I had imagined. I sat back and reviewed my translation efforts.
It had taken all the previous day to translate the third notebook. I had stopped for a bite to eat and drink, but had then just put my head down and got stuck into the translation, losing track of time until Clive arrived.
Clive sat in the only chair the small single hotel room had and read my translation.
“This is a big leap forward Daniel,” Clive said as he scanned through the pages again.
“It is. But one I’m worried we can’t take yet,” I said.
“Why?”
“Money, basically. I’ve got no job and probably won’t be able to get one until I can prove my innocence. You’ve lost your position at the college, and we need access to a lathe, mill, pillar drills, tools, and materials,” I said.
“I have to admit, I have been wondering about the finance side a bit. My state pension and Brenda’s wages won’t go very far just on a day to day basis. Hopefully Lee and Wendy will be able to get the fund-raising going soon.”
“This is when access to the OTG would be useful. They’d soon raise the funds for a project like this through crowd funding. It’s too risky to start it up again.”
“I would tend to agree on that, but maybe once everyone has new user-names we could start it up again on a secure host.”
“Still too risky I think, and talking of risky, I’m going to take a trip back to my old p
lace today. I want my own notebooks, spare laptop and I’ve got several grand emergency cash we could really use.”
“I’ll come,” Clive said.
“No. Not this time. No need to risk both of us. But I was hoping you’d let me use your car?” I said.
“And what happens if you run into danger again?”
“Unlikely I think, but I’m ready for it now. They’re not going to catch me off guard again. If anything looks suspicious, I’ll just walk away.”
Reluctantly Clive agreed.
SIS HQ - Vauxhall Cross, London. Day 38.
General Rourke did not like the short underground service tunnel between Whitehall and Vauxhall Cross, the Secret Intelligence Service new home since 2005. He signed in at the main desk and made his way to the S6O, Section 6 Operations, floor.
With SIS officially investigating the Bateman Case, mobilising resources to help was a lot easier, and ironically, far fewer questions were raised.
Section 6 Operations was basically a corridor of control rooms, each assigned to a specific operation. Each control room had complete access to any electronic intelligence available from the DVLC databases, ISP audits, banks, telephones, CCTV feeds and most crucially, direct access to the PRIZM Dictionary computers. If a suspect or target used any electronic communications, S6O had the facilities to capture and monitor it live, provided they knew where to look.
General Rourke insisted on using his own field agents to supplement the technical team in the operations room. He knew his own agents would work to his orders only and not ask questions.
He entered the hermetically sealed room to a bustle of activity as the half dozen tech. ops were finishing preparations for the operation to go live.
“Okay people, attention please,” Rourke said as he walked to the large wall-mounted smart boards. He preferred the days of pin boards where they would pin up paper reports, photos, and other data relating to the case.
“We have a level four man hunt for Daniel Bateman, forty two, British Caucasian.”