by A. G. Riddle
On their way home, Jin’s father told them that tomorrow, he would go and find better work. That with his skills, he could surely make supervisor somewhere. He’d make good money. Jin and his mother simply nodded.
That night, Jin heard his mother crying, and shortly after, his father shouting. They never fought.
The following night, Jin slipped out of his room, wrote them a note, and left for Chongqing, the nearest major city. The city was filled with people looking for work.
Jin was turned down at the first seven places he applied. The eighth place was different. They didn’t ask any questions. They put a cotton stick in his mouth and made him wait in a large holding room for an hour. Most of the people were dismissed. After another hour, they called his number—204394—and told him they could hire him at a medical research facility. Then they told him the pay. He signed the forms so fast his hand hurt.
He couldn’t believe his luck. He assumed the conditions would be dire, but he couldn’t have been more wrong—it was practically a resort. And now he had screwed it all up. Surely they were kicking him out. They had called his number.
Maybe he had enough for a new farm. Or maybe he could find another research place. He’d heard that the big factories in China exchanged lists of bad workers. Those people couldn’t find work anywhere. That would be the kiss of death.
“What are you waiting for!” the orderly shouted. “Find a seat.”
Jin and the other fifty or so white-clad, barefooted workers scrambled for chairs. Elbows flew, people pushed, and several people tripped. Everyone seemed to find a chair but Jin. Every time he reached a chair, someone would sink into it at the last second. What if he didn’t find a chair? Maybe it was a test. Maybe he should—
“People. Relax, relax. Mind the equipment,” the orderly said. “Just find the closest chair.”
Jin exhaled and walked to the next row. Full. In the last row, he found a seat.
Another group of staff entered. They wore long white coats and carried tablet computers. A young-looking woman came over to him, hooked the bags to his arm valve, and attached the round sensors to his body. She tapped a few times on her screen and moved to the chair beside him.
Maybe it’s just a new test, he thought.
He suddenly felt sleepy. He leaned his head back and…
Jin awoke in the same chair. The bags were detached, but the sensors were still connected. He felt groggy and stiff, like he had the flu. He tried to lift his head up. It was so heavy. A white coat came over, ran a flashlight across his eyes, then unhooked the sensors and told him to go and stand with the others by the door.
When he stood, his legs almost buckled. He steadied himself on the arm of his chair, then hobbled over to the group. They all looked half-asleep. There were maybe twenty-five of them, about half of the group that had entered. Where were the rest? Had he slept too long—again? Is this punishment? Would they tell him why? After a few minutes, another man joined them; he seemed in even worse shape than Jin and the rest.
The orderlies ushered them through another long passageway and into an enormous room he’d never seen before. The room was completely empty and the walls were very smooth. He got the impression that it was a vault or something.
Several minutes passed. He fought the urge to sit down on the floor. He hadn’t been told he could sit. He stood there, his heavy head hanging.
The door opened, and two children were escorted in. They couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old. The guards left them with the group, the door closing behind them with a loud boom.
The children weren’t drugged, or at least Jin didn’t think so. They looked alert. They moved quickly through the crowd of people. They were brown. Not Chinese. They both wandered from person to person, trying to find a familiar face. Jin thought they were about to begin crying.
At the far end of the room, he heard a mechanical sound, like a winch. After a few seconds, he realized something was being lowered. His head was so heavy. He strained to lift it. He could barely see the device. It looked like a massive iron chess pawn with a flat head, or maybe a bell with smooth, straight sides. It must have been four meters tall and heavy because the four cables that lowered it were huge, maybe a quarter of a meter around. When it was about six meters off the ground, it stopped, and two of the cables moved down the wall along a track Jin hadn’t noticed before. They stopped about level with the huge machine and seemed to tighten, anchoring it at each side. Jin strained to look up. There was another cable running from the top of the machine. It was even fatter than the ones at the sides. Unlike the others, it wasn’t metal, or even solid. It seemed to hold a bundle of wires or computer cables, like some sort of electronic umbilical cord.
The children had stopped in the middle of the crowd. All the adults tried to look up.
His eyes adjusted, and Jin could just make out a marking etched into the side of the machine. It looked like the Nazi symbol, the… he couldn’t remember the name. He felt so sleepy.
The machine was dark, but Jin thought he could hear a faint throbbing sound, like someone rhythmically beating on a solid door—boom-boom-boom. Or maybe the sound of the picture machine. Was it a different picture machine? A group picture? The boom-boom-boom grew louder with each passing second, and a light emerged from the top of the giant pawn—its head apparently had short windows. The yellow-orange light flickered with each pulse of the boom, giving it almost the effect of a lighthouse.
Jin was so entranced by the machine’s sound and light pulses, he didn’t notice the people falling around him. Something was happening. And it was happening to him too. His legs felt heavier. He heard a sound like bending metal—the machine was pulling against the cables at each side; it was trying to lift.
The pull of the floor got stronger with each passing second. Jin looked around but couldn’t see the children. Jin felt someone grab his shoulder. He turned to find a man holding on to him. His face had deep wrinkles, and blood ran from his nose. Jin realized that the skin from the man’s hands was coming off on Jin’s clothes. It wasn’t just skin. The man’s blood began to spread over Jin’s shirt. The man fell forward onto him, and they both collapsed to the ground. Jin heard the boom-boom-boom of the machine blend into one constant drone of sound and solid light as he felt blood flow from his nose down his face. Then the light and sound suddenly stopped.
In the control room, Dr. Shen Chang and his team stood and watched as the test subjects collapsed into a pile of wrinkled, bloody bodies.
Chang slumped into his chair. “Okay, that’s it, shut it off.” He took his glasses off and tossed them on the table. He pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled. “I have to report this to the director.” The man would not be happy.
Chang rose and walked toward the door. “And start the cleanup; don’t bother with autopsies.” The result had been the same as the last twenty-five tests.
The two-man cleanup crew swung back-forth-back-forth and released the body, hurling it into the rolling plastic bin. The bin held around ten bodies, give or take. Today would probably mean three trips to the incinerator, maybe two if they could stack them on top.
They had cleaned up a lot worse; at least these bodies were intact. It took forever when they were in pieces.
It was hard to work in the hazmat suits, but it was better than the alternative.
They lifted another body and swung forward, then—
Something was moving in the pile.
Two children were struggling under the bodies, fighting to crawl out. They were covered in blood.
One man began clearing bodies. The other turned to the cameras and waved his arms. “Hey! We’ve got two live ones!”
12
Brig
Clocktower Station HQ
Jakarta, Indonesia
“Josh, can you hear me?”
Josh Cohen tried to open his eyes, but the light was too bright. His head was throbbing.
“Here, give me another one.”
/> Josh could barely make out a blurry figure sitting by him on a hard bed. Where was he? It looked like one of the station’s holding cells. The man brought a pellet to Josh’s nose and cracked it open with a loud pop. Josh inhaled the worst smell of his entire life—a sharp, overwhelming ammonia smell that coursed through his airways, inflated his lungs, and sent him reeling backward, hitting his head against the wall. The constant throbbing turned into a sharp pain. He closed his eyes tight and rubbed his head.
“Okay, okay, take it easy.” It was the station chief, David Vale.
“What’s going on?” Josh asked.
He could open his eyes now, and he realized that David was in full body armor and there were two other field operatives with him, standing by the door to the cell.
Josh sat up. “Someone must have planted a bug—”
“Relax, this isn’t about a bug. Can you stand up?” David said.
“I think so.” Josh struggled to his feet. He was still groggy from the gas that had knocked him out in the elevator.
“Good, follow me.”
Josh followed David and the two operatives out of the room with the holding cells and down a long hallway that led to the server room. At the server room door, David turned to the other two soldiers. “Wait here. Radio me if anyone enters the corridor.”
Inside the server room, David resumed his brisk pace, and Josh had to almost jog to keep up. The station chief was just over six feet tall and muscular, not quite as beefy as some of the linebacker-esque ops guys, but big enough to give any drunken bar-brawler pause.
They snaked their way through the crowded server room, dodging tower after tower of metal cabinets with green, yellow, and red blinking lights. The room was cool, and the constant hum of the machines was slightly disorienting. The three-person IT group was constantly working on the servers—adding, removing, and replacing hardware. The place was a pigsty. Josh tripped over a cord, but before he hit the ground, David turned, caught him, and pushed him back to his feet.
“You alright?”
Josh nodded. “Yeah. This place is a mess.”
David said nothing, but walked a bit more slowly the rest of the way to a standing metal storage cabinet at the back of the server room. David pushed the cabinet aside, revealing a silver door and a panel beside it. The red light of a palm scan flashed over his hand, and another panel opened and performed a facial and retinal scan. When it finished, the wall parted, revealing a dark metallic door that looked like something from a battleship.
David opened the door with a second palm scan and led Josh into a room probably half the size of a high school gymnasium. The cavern had concrete walls and their footsteps echoed loudly as they approached the center of the room, where a small glass box, about twelve feet by twelve feet, hung from thick twisted metal cords. The glass box was softly lit, and Josh couldn’t see inside it, but he already knew what it was.
Josh had suspected the cell had such a room, but he’d never seen it in person. It was a quiet room. The entire Jakarta station headquarters was a kind of quiet room—it was shielded from every manner of listening device. There was no need for further precautions within the station—unless you didn’t want another member of the cell to hear you.
There were certainly protocols that required it. He suspected the chief talked with other station chiefs via phone and video in this room. Maybe even with Central.
As they approached the room, a short flight of glass stairs descended and quickly retracted after they climbed into the room. A glass door closed behind them. A bank of computer screens hung on the far wall of the room, but other than that, Josh thought the room was surprisingly sparse: a simple fold-out table with four chairs, two phones and a conference speaker, and an old steel filing cabinet. The furniture was cheap and a bit out of place, like something you might see in the on-site trailer at a construction site.
“Take a seat,” David said. He walked to the file cabinet and withdrew several folders.
“I have a report to make. It’s significant—”
“I think you better let me start.” David joined Josh at the table and placed the files between them.
“With due respect, what I have to report may change your entire perspective. It may cause a major reassessment. A reassessment of every active operation at Jakarta station and even how we analyze every—”
David held a hand up. “I already know what you’re going to tell me.”
“You do?”
“I do. You’re going to tell me that the vast majority of the terror threats we’re tracking, including operations in developed nations that we don’t yet understand—aren’t the work of a dozen separate terrorist and fundamentalist groups as we’d suspected.”
When Josh said nothing, David continued, “You’re going to tell me that Clocktower now believes that these groups are all simply different faces of one global super-group, an organization with a scale exceeding anyone’s wildest projections.”
“They already told you?”
“Yes. But not recently. I began putting the pieces together before I joined Clocktower. I was officially told when I made station chief.”
Josh looked away. It wasn’t exactly a betrayal, but realizing something this big had been kept from him—the head of analysis—was a punch in the gut. At the same time, he wondered if he should have put it all together, if David was disappointed that he hadn’t figured it out on his own.
David seemed to sense Josh’s disappointment. “For what it’s worth, I’ve wanted to tell you for a while now, but it was need-to-know only. And there’s something else you should know. Of the 240-or-so attendees at the analysts conference, 142 never made it home.”
“What? I don’t understand. They—”
“They didn’t pass the test.”
“The test…”
“The conference was the test. From the minute you arrived until you walked out, you were under video and audio surveillance. Like the suspects we interrogate here, the conference organizers were measuring voice stress, pupil dilation, eye movement, and a dozen other markers. In short—watching the analysts’ reactions throughout the conference.”
“To see if we would withhold information?”
“Yes, but more importantly, to see who already knew what was being presented; specifically, which analysts already knew there was a super-terror group behind the scenes. The conference was a Clocktower-wide mole hunt.”
At that moment, the glass room around Josh seemed to disappear. He could hear David talking in the background, but he was lost in his thoughts. The conference was a perfect cover for a sting. All Clocktower agents, even analysts, were trained in standard counter-espionage methods. Beating a lie detector was standard training. But telling a lie, as if it were true, was much easier than faking an emotional response to a surprise, and sustaining the reaction, with credible body metrics, for three days—it was impossible. But to test every chief analyst. The implication was…
“Josh, did you hear me?”
Josh looked up. “No, I’m sorry, it’s a lot to take in… Clocktower has been compromised.”
“Yes, and I need you to focus now. Things are happening quickly, and I need your help. The analyst test was the first step in Clocktower’s firewall protocol. Around the world, right now, the chief analysts who returned from the conference are meeting with their station chiefs in quiet rooms just like this one, trying to figure out how to secure their cells.”
“You think Jakarta Station has been compromised?”
“I’d be shocked if it wasn’t. There’s more. The analyst purge has set events in motion. The plan, Firewall Protocol, was to screen the analysts for moles and for the remaining chief analysts and station chiefs to work together to identify anyone who could be a double.”
“Makes sense.”
“It would have, but we’ve underestimated the scope of the breach. I need to tell you a little about how Clocktower is organized. You know about how many cells there are: 200 to 250 a
t any given time. You should know that we had already identified some of the chief analysts as moles—about sixty. They never made it to the conference.”
“Then who were—”
“Actors. Mostly field agents who had worked as analysts before, anyone who could fake it. We had to. Some of the analysts already knew the approximate number of Clocktower cells, and the actors provided an operational benefit: they could facilitate the three-day lie-detection, ask pointed questions, elicit responses, get reactions.”
“Unbelievable… How could we be so deeply compromised?”
“That’s one of the questions we have to answer. There’s more. Not all the cells are like Jakarta Station. The vast majority are little more than listening posts; they manage a small group of case officers and send Central the HUMINT and SIGINT they collect. A compromised listening post is bad—it means whoever this global enemy is, they have been using those cells to collect intel and maybe even send us bogus data.”
“We could be essentially blind,” Josh said.
“That’s right. Our best-case scenario was that this enemy had co-opted our intelligence gathering in preparation for a massive attack. We now know that that’s only half of it. Several of the major cells are also compromised. These are cells similar to Jakarta station, with intelligence gathering and significant covert ops forces. We are one of twenty major cells. These cells are the last line of defense, the thin red line that separates the world from whatever this enemy is planning.”
“How many are compromised?”
“We don’t know. But three major cells have already fallen—Karachi, Cape Town, and Mar del Plata have all reported that the cell’s own special forces swept through their HQ, killing most of the analysts and the station chiefs. There have been no communications from them for hours. Satellite surveillance over Argentina confirms the destruction of the Mar del Plata HQ. The Cape Town insurgents were assisted by outside forces. As we speak, firefights are ongoing in Seoul, Delhi, Dhaka, and Lahore. Those stations may hold, but we should assume they will be lost as well. Right now our own special ops forces could be preparing to take over Jakarta Station, or it could be happening this second, outside this room, but I doubt that.”
