by A. G. Riddle
21
Main Situation Room
Clocktower Station HQ
Jakarta, Indonesia
The situation room was busy. Operations technicians typed at keyboards, analysts filtered in and out with reports, and Vincent Tarea paced back and forth, watching the wall of screens. “Are we sure Vale is getting a false location map?”
“Yes, sir,” one of the techs said.
“Tell the safe houses to move out.”
Tarea watched the safe house video feeds as the soldiers marched to the doors and pulled them open.
The sound of the explosions turned every head in the large situation room to the monitors, which now showed fuzzy black and white static.
One of the techs punched a keyboard. “Switching to outside video. Sir, we have a massive detonation at—”
“I know! Safe houses, hold your positions,” Tarea yelled.
No sound came over the speakers. The location map was completely black where the red dots had paced around the safe houses. The only dots left were David’s convoy and the small group left at HQ.
The tech swiveled around. “He rigged the safe houses to blow.”
Tarea rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Thank you, Captain Obvious. Are we in that quiet room yet? Did they find Josh?”
“No, they’re about to start.”
Tarea walked out of the situation room, into his private office, and picked up the phone. He dialed his counterpart at Immari Security. “We have a problem. He took out my men here.”
He listened a moment.
“No, look, I convinced them, but he—it doesn’t matter, they’re all dead. That’s the bottom line.”
Another pause.
“No, well, if I were you, I would make sure you kill him with the first strike, no matter how many men you’ve got. He’ll be incredibly hard to contain in the field.”
He started to set the phone down, but jerked it back impatiently at the last minute.
“What? No, we’re looking. We think he’s here. I’ll keep you posted. What? Fine, I’ll come, but I only have two men I can bring, and we’re staying in the rear in case it goes south.”
22
Clocktower Mobile Operations Center
Jakarta, Indonesia
Kate followed the soldier into the large black truck. Inside, it looked nothing like the delivery truck it had appeared to be. It was part locker room, with weapons and gear she didn’t recognize; part office with screens and computers; and part bus, with rows of sunken seats along each side.
There were three large screens. One showed dots on a map that she assumed was Jakarta. The other displayed a video feed of the front, rear, and both sides of the truck. On the top right picture, the black SUV could be seen leading the truck through Jakarta’s crowded streets. The final screen was blank except for one word:
Connecting…
“I’m David Vale.”
“I want to know where you’re taking me,” Kate said.
“A safe house.” David was fiddling with a tablet computer of some sort. It seemed to manipulate one of the screens on the wall. He glanced up at it, as if waiting for something to appear. When it didn’t, he hit a few more buttons.
“So you’re with the American government?” Kate said, trying to get his attention.
“Not exactly.” He looked down, still working the tablet.
“But you are an American?”
“Sort of.”
“Can you focus and talk to me?”
“I’m trying to conference in a colleague.” The man looked worried now. He glanced around, as if thinking.
“Is there a problem?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” He put the tablet aside. “I need to ask you some questions about the kidnapping.”
“Are you looking for the children?”
“We’re still trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Who’s we?”
“No one you’ve heard of.”
Kate ran a hand through her hair. “Look, I’ve had a very bad day. I actually don’t care who you are or where you’re from. Someone took two children from my clinic today, and so far no one seems to want to find them. Including you.”
“I never said I wouldn’t help you.”
“You never said you would either.”
“That’s true,” David said, “but right now, I’ve got problems of my own, big ones. Problems that could result in a lot of innocent people getting killed. A lot already have, and I think your research is somehow connected to it. I’m not quite sure how. Listen, if you answer some questions for me, I promise you I’ll do what I can to help you.”
“Alright, that’s fair.” Kate leaned forward in the chair.
“How much do you know about Immari Jakarta?”
“Nothing really. They fund some of my research. My adoptive father, Martin Grey, is the Head of Immari Research. They invest in a broad range of science and technology research.”
“Are you building a biological weapon for them?”
The question hit Kate like a slap in the face. She reeled back in her chair. “What? God no! Are you out of your mind? I’m an autism researcher.”
“Why were those two children taken?”
“I have no idea.”
“I don’t believe you. What’s different about those two? There were over a hundred kids in the clinic. If the kidnappers were human traffickers, they would have taken them all. They took those two children for a reason. And they risked a lot of exposure to do it. So, I’ll ask you again: why those two?”
Kate looked at the ground and thought. She said the first question that popped into her head. “Immari Research took my children?”
The question seemed to throw him. “Uh, no, Immari Security did. They’re another division, but same general team of bad guys.”
“That’s impossible.”
“See for yourself.” He handed her a folder, and she flipped through, browsing satellite photos of the van at the clinic, the two black-clad assailants hauling kids into the van, and the van’s registration records that traced back to Immari International, Hong Kong Security Division.
Kate considered the man’s evidence. Why would Immari take the children? They could have asked her. Something else had been bothering her. “Why do you think I’m building a biological weapon?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense, based on the evidence.”
“What evidence?”
“Have you ever heard of The Toba Protocol?”
“No.”
He handed her another file. “This is about all we have on it. It’s not much, but the bottom line is that Immari International is working on a plan to drastically reduce the human population.”
She read through the file. “Like the Toba Catastrophe.”
“What? I’m not familiar.”
She closed the file. “Not surprising. It’s not widely accepted, but it’s a popular theory among evolutionary biologists.”
“Popular theory for what?”
“The Great Leap Forward.” Kate recognized David’s confusion and continued before he could speak. “The Great Leap Forward is probably one of the most hotly contested aspects of evolutionary genetics. It’s a mystery, really. We know that around fifty to sixty thousand years ago, there was a sort of ‘Big Bang’ in human intelligence. We got a lot smarter, very quickly. We just don’t know exactly how. We believe it was some kind of change in brain wiring. For the first time, humans began using complex language, creating art, making more advanced tools, solving problems—”
David stared at the wall, processing the information. “I don’t see—”
Kate brushed her hair back. “Okay, let me start over. The human race is about two hundred thousand years old, but we’ve only been so-called behaviorally modern humans—the really, really smart type that took over the globe—for around fifty thousand years. So fifty thousand years ago, we know there were at least three other hominids: Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis—”
“Homo flor—”
“They’re not widely known. We only recently found them. They were smaller, sort of hobbit-like humans. We’ll just say Hobbits, it’s easier. So fifty thousand years ago, there’s us, the Neanderthals, Hobbits, and Denisovans. Actually there were probably a couple more hominids, but the point is there were five or six subspecies of humans. And then our branch of the human tree explodes while the others die out. We go from a few thousand to seven billion people in the span of fifty thousand years, and the other human subspecies go extinct. We conquer the globe while they die in caves. It’s the greatest mystery of all time, and scientists have been working on it since time began. Religion too. At the heart of the question is how we survived. What gave us such a huge evolutionary advantage? We call this transformation the Great Leap Forward, and the Toba Catastrophe Theory proposes how this great leap forward could have happened—how we became so smart while our cousins, other hominids—Neanderthals, Hobbits, et cetera—they all remained basically cavemen. About seventy thousand years ago, the theory goes, a super-volcano erupted at Mount Toba, here in Indonesia. The ash from the eruption blotted out the sun over large parts of the Earth, causing a volcanic winter that lasted for years. That rapid climate change reduced the total human population drastically, maybe to as low as ten thousand or even less.”
“Wait, the human race was down to ten thousand people?”
“We think so. Well, the estimates aren’t exact, but we know there was a huge population reduction, and that it was marked in our subspecies. We think Neanderthals and some other hominids alive at the time might have fared better. The Hobbits were downwind of Toba and the Neanderthals were concentrated in Europe. Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia took the brunt of the effects of the Toba eruption, and that’s where we were concentrated at the time. Neanderthals were also stronger than we were, and they had bigger brains; that could have given them an additional survival advantage, but we’re still sorting that out. We do know that humans got hit hard by the Toba Super Volcano. We were on the brink of extinction. That caused what population geneticists call a ‘population bottleneck.’ Some researchers believe that this bottleneck caused a small group of humans to evolve, to survive through mutation. These mutations could have led to humanity’s exponential explosion in intelligence. There’s genetic evidence for it. We know that every human being on the planet is directly descended from one man who lived in Africa around sixty thousand years ago—a person we geneticists call Y-Chromosomal Adam. In fact, everyone outside of Africa is descended from a small band of humans, maybe as few as one hundred, that left Africa about 50,000 years ago. Essentially, we’re all members of a small tribe that walked out of Africa after Toba and took over the planet. That tribe was significantly more intelligent than any other hominids in history. That’s what happened, but we don’t know how it happened. The truth is, we don’t actually know how our subspecies survived Toba, or how they became so much more intelligent than the other human subspecies alive at the time. It had to be some sort of change in brain wiring, but no one knows how this Great Leap Forward occurred. It could have been due to a change in diet or a spontaneous mutation. Or it could have happened gradually. The Toba Catastrophe Theory and the subsequent population bottleneck is just one possibility, but it’s gaining followers.”
He looked down, seeming to consider this.
“I’m surprised this didn’t come up in your research.” When he said nothing, she added, “So… what do you think ‘Toba’ stands for? I mean, I could be wrong here—”
“No, you’re right. I know it. But it’s just a reference to the effect of the Toba Catastrophe in the past—how it changed humanity. That’s their goal: to create another population bottleneck and force a Second Great Leap Forward. They want to bring about the next stage of human evolution. It tells me the why, which we didn’t know before. We thought Toba was a reference to where the operation would start. Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, makes sense. It’s one of the reasons I established operations in Jakarta, sixty miles from Mount Toba.”
“Right. Well, history can be pretty handy. And so can books. Maybe even as much as guns.”
“For the record, I read a lot. And I like history. But you’re talking about seventy thousand years ago. That’s not history, it’s prehistoric. Also, guns have their place; the world isn’t as civilized as it looks.”
She held up her hands and sat back in the seat. “Hey, just trying to help here. Speaking of, you said you would help me find those kids.”
“And you said you would answer my questions.”
“I have.”
“You haven’t. You know why those two kids were taken, or you at least have a theory. Tell me.”
Kate thought for a moment. Could she trust him?
“I need some assurances.” She waited, but the man just stared at the other screen, the one with all the dots on it. “Hey, are you listening to me?” He looked concerned now, glancing about. “What’s wrong?”
“The dots aren’t moving.”
“Should they be?”
“Yeah. We’re definitely moving.” He pointed to the seat belts. “Strap yourself in.”
The way he said it scared her. He reminded her of a father who had just realized his child was in danger. He was hyper-focused. His eyes didn’t blink as he moved quickly, securing loose articles around the truck, and grabbing a radio.
“Mobile One, Clocktower Commander. Alter course, new destination is Clocktower HQ, do you copy?”
“Copy Clocktower Commander, Mobile One altering course.”
Kate felt the truck turning.
The man lowered the radio to his side.
She saw the flash on the screen a second before she heard—and felt—the blast.
On the screen, the large SUV in front of them exploded, lifting off the ground and falling in a heap of flames and burning metal.
There was gunfire and then their truck veered off the road—as if no one was driving it.
Another rocket struck the street beside the truck, barely missing it. The force of the blast almost rolled the van over and seemed to pull the air completely out of the room. Kate’s ears rang. Her stomach throbbed where the seatbelt had cut into it. It was like sensory deprivation. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. She felt the truck fall back to the ground and bounce on its shocks.
Through the ringing, she looked over. The soldier was lying on the floor of the truck, not moving.
23
Secure Comms Room
Clocktower Station HQ
Jakarta, Indonesia
Josh had to think. Whoever had replaced the live feed of the door to the quiet room was no doubt outside, trying to get in. The glass room in the giant concrete tomb seemed so fragile now. It hung there, just waiting to explode, like a glass piñata. He was the prize inside.
Was there something on the door? A speck of orange? Josh walked to the edge of the glass room and looked closer. It was a tiny speck growing brighter, like a heating element. It made the metal look wet… yes, the metal was flowing down the door. At that instant, sparks flew out of the top right corner of the door. The sparks slowly crept downward, leaving a narrow, dark rut behind.
They were coming in—with a torch. Of course. Blowing the door—using explosives—would obliterate the server room. It was just one more safety measure, meant to give whoever was inside more time.
Josh raced back to the table. What to do first? The source, the message on Craigslist. He had to respond. His email address, [email protected], was clearly fake: that address had probably been available for all of two seconds after Gmail launched. The source knew Josh would know that, knew he would see it for what it was: just another name with the proper length to decrypt the message using the code. The code… he would have to make up a message and name that followed the code.
He glanced over. The cutting torch was now halfway down the right side of the door. The sparks burned toward the ground like a fuse eating
its way to a bomb.
Screw it, he didn’t have time. He clicked the post button and wrote a message:
Subject: To the man at Tower Records.
Message: I wish we could have connected, but there wasn’t time. I’m afraid I may be out of time again. My friend sent me your messages. I still don’t understand. I’m sorry for being so direct. I really don’t have time to play games with mixed messages. I couldn’t reach my friend on the phone, but maybe you can contact him on this board. Please reply with any information that could help him. Thanks and good luck.
Josh hit send. Why couldn’t he reach David? He still had internet access. It must be on a completely different connection, a connection the Clocktower operatives didn’t know about. That made sense for the secure phone calls and videoconferences. The door camera was easy: they could have cut the cord and connected it to another video source, or simply placed a picture of the hall in front of the camera and let it run.
Out of the corner of his eye, Josh saw the display with the red dots change quickly: the dots in the safe houses were massing at the doors. They were making a move.
Then they disappeared. Dead.
Josh’s eyes returned to the door. The torch was picking up speed. He refreshed the Craigslist page, hoping the contact would respond.
24
Clocktower Mobile Operations Center