by A. G. Riddle
“Who are you? I want to know—”
“Hang on just a second,” he said.
The man walked over to the short interrogator who had accused Kate of buying the children. The soldier handed the little man a folder and said, “I hear you’re in line for a promotion.”
The little man shrugged. “I just do what I’m told,” he said sheepishly.
“Your case officer says you’ve been a good source. If you’re smart enough to know what to do with this, maybe you’ll be a better police chief.”
The interrogator nodded. “Anything you want, boss.”
The soldier walked back to Kate and motioned toward the large black delivery truck. “I need you to get in the truck.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who you are and what’s going on.”
“I’ll explain, but right now we have to get you to a safe location.”
“No, you—”
“Here’s a tip. The good guys ask you to get in the truck. The bad guys put a black bag over your head and throw you in the truck. I’m asking. Look, you can stay here or go with me. It’s up to you.”
He walked toward the truck and opened the double doors at the rear.
“Hold on. I’m coming.”
19
Primary Conference Room
Clocktower Station HQ
Jakarta, Indonesia
Vincent Tarea, the head of field operations for Clocktower Jakarta, massaged his arm muscles as the station’s staff filed into the room. His arms and legs still ached from the attack from those two fools at the clinic and those feral children. And the day had gotten worse from there. But he could put it back on track. He only needed to convince a few of the Jakarta staff to go along with the attack; the rest were already on the Immari payroll.
Tarea held his hands up to quiet the crowd. Everyone at Clocktower HQ was there: all the analysts, all the case officers, and all the field operatives—everyone except David Vale and the five operatives with him. Josh Cohen, the head of analysis, was also missing, but they would find him soon enough. The large screens on the conference room wall showed three crowded rooms, full of field operatives confined to safe houses across the city.
“Okay, listen up, everyone. Can you all hear me on the video links?” Tarea said.
Heads nodded, followed by a series of “yeah” and “we’ve got you.”
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: Clocktower has been compromised.”
You could hear a pin drop in the room.
“And we’re under attack. I received reports earlier today that several cells, including Cape Town, Mar del Plata, and Karachi, have been completely destroyed. Several other stations are fighting for their lives as we speak.”
People began talking in low tones. Some shouted questions.
“Hold on, everybody. It gets worse. I’m afraid the enemy we’re fighting is one of our own. Here’s what we know at this point: several days ago, David Vale, along with several other station chiefs, organized a meeting of all the chief analysts. Obviously this is strictly against protocol. We believe they told the analysts there was some new threat. We now know that over half the analysts never returned from the conference. The entire charade was a mass execution, we believe, to cripple our intelligence analysis before this larger attack. The analysts who returned to their cells are now actively working against Clocktower.”
Tarea surveyed the doubtful looks around the room. “Look, I know this is hard to believe; and like you, I don’t want to believe it. In fact I didn’t believe, not until this morning, when David spread our field operatives out throughout the city. Think about it—he’s spreading us out so we can’t defend against an attack. He’s preparing to take down Jakarta Station. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Why?” someone said. “He wouldn’t do that,” another person added.
“I asked the same question. I said the same thing,” Tarea said. “He recruited me, I served with him, I know him. But there’s a lot about David Vale we still don’t understand. We all come to Clocktower for our own reasons. From what we can gather, David was seriously injured during the attacks on 9/11. I didn’t know that until today. Since then, he’s harbored a conspiracy theory about 9/11, some wild ideas about military contractors instigating the attack for their own gain. He may even be the victim of a lie himself. Someone could be using him. Either way, he’s sick, turned around. And he’s brought a lot of other people into the conspiracy. We think Josh Cohen has returned from the analyst conference and is working with the chief.”
Everyone was silent, seeming to take the news in. A soldier at one of the safe houses on the video screen said, “What’s the operation? Bring him in?”
“That may not be possible. He’ll fight to the end. The priority is to minimize the collateral damage. And we’re going to have some help. Immari Security has offered to lend us some men. They’re aware of the situation and they want to see this contained as much as we do. It seems Immari is the target of David’s vendetta. We know that David has captured a scientist who works on an Immari-funded project. She could be a co-conspirator or just a victim in his plans; we’re not sure yet. The plan is to recover the woman, a Dr. Katherine Warner, and neutralize the chief.”
20
Secure Comms Room
Clocktower Station HQ
Jakarta, Indonesia
Josh waited nervously to find out whether his theory about the coded message David had given him was correct. It was Josh’s best idea. Really his only idea.
He tried not to stare at the main computer screen on the long wall of the glass room. For the last thirty minutes, the screen had said the same thing: Searching…
He glanced at the two screens beside it: a video feed of the door outside, and the city map with twenty-four red dots representing Clocktower Jakarta’s field operatives. He didn’t know which display made him more nervous. They might as well be giant countdown screens, ticking away the seconds to his death and some terrible, unknown catastrophe… The other screen still simply said, Searching…
Should the search have taken this long? What if he was wasting time?
Something else made him nervous. He glanced at the field box David had left on the table. He stood and grabbed the box, but as he lifted it, the bottom fell open. The gun and cyanide capsules tumbled onto the table, the clanging noise shattering the silence. The sound seemed to echo for hours. Finally, Josh reached for the gun and two pills. His hands were shaking.
On the wall, a beep snapped him out of the moment. The larger screen read:
5 results
Five results!
Josh sat down at the table and worked the wireless keyboard and mouse. Three results from the New York Times, one from the Daily Mail in London, and one from the Boston Globe.
Maybe he was right. From the moment he had seen the names and dates, his first thought was: they’re obituaries. Obituaries and classifieds were classic spycraft: operatives after World War II routinely used them to send messages across spy networks spread across the globe. It was old school, but if the message had been passed in 1947, it could have been a viable method. If it was true, this terrorist network was over sixty-five years old. He pushed the implications of that to the back of his mind.
He looked at the coded message David had given him:
Toba Protocol is real.
4+12+47 = 4/5; Jones
7+22+47 = 3/8; Anderson
10+4+47 = 5/4; Ames
Then he turned to the results. It was more likely the terrorists had used one paper—one paper that was available in cities around the world. The New York Times was the mostly likely candidate. Even in 1947, you could walk up to a newsstand in Paris, London, Shanghai, Barcelona, or Boston and get the day’s copy of the New York Times, paid obituaries included.
If the obituaries were coded messages, they would have been flagged in some way. Josh saw it immediately: each of the Times obituaries had the words clock and tower.
He leaned back in his chair. Was it possible that Clocktower was that old? The CIA wasn’t formally established until the National Security Act of 1947, although its precursor organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), was created during World War II, in June of 1942.
Why would the terrorists mention Clocktower? Maybe they were fighting Clocktower back then—in 1947—sixty-six years ago?
He needed to focus on the obituaries. There must be a way to decode them. The ideal encryption system would feature a variable cipher: there would be no one key that could decrypt a message. Each message would include its own key—something simple.
He opened the first obituary, dated 4/12/1947:
Adam Jones, Pioneering Clockmaker, Dies at 77 Working on his Tower Masterpiece
Adam Jones, leading Gibraltar clockmaker, died Saturday in British Honduras. He was found by his valet. His bones will be interred near his late wife’s—a site they selected together. Please send a card or advise family if visiting.
The message was here somewhere. What was the key? Josh opened the other obituaries and scanned them, hoping for some sort of clue. Each obituary contained a location, and each one was early in the text. Josh ran through several possibilities, rearranged several words, then sat back and thought. The obituaries were written awkwardly, like certain words were out of order. Or forced, like they had to use those words. The order, the intervals. He saw it. The names were the cipher—the lengths of the names. It was the second part of the code.
4+12+47 = 4/5; Jones
The 4/12/1947 obituary was for Adam Jones. 4/5. The first name was four letters; the last name was five. If he took the fourth word of the obituary, then counted five words after that, and repeated, it yielded a sentence.
He re-examined the obituary:
Adam Jones, Pioneering Clockmaker, Dies at 77 Working on his Tower Masterpiece
Adam Jones, leading Gibraltar clockmaker, died Saturday in British Honduras. He was found by his valet. His bones will be interred near his late wife’s—a site they selected together. Please send a card or advise family if visiting.
Together, the message read:
Gibraltar, British found bones near site, please advise.
Josh studied the message for a moment. He didn’t see that coming. And he had no idea what it meant. He searched the internet and came up with a few results. Apparently the British had found bones in Gibraltar in the 1940’s, in a natural sea cave called Gorham’s Cave. But they weren’t human bones. They were Neanderthal bones—and they had radically changed what the world knew about Neanderthals. Our pre-historic cousins were actually much more than archaic cavemen. They built homes. And they built huge fires on stone hearths, cooked vegetables, spoke a language, created cave art, buried their dead with flowers, and made advanced stone tools and pottery. The bones at Gibraltar also changed the Neanderthal time line. Before the Gibraltar find, Neanderthals were thought to have died out around forty thousand years ago. The Neanderthals at Gibraltar had lived roughly twenty-three thousand years ago—far later than previously thought. Gibraltar was likely the Neanderthals’ last stand.
What could an ancient Neanderthal fortress have to do with a global terrorist attack? Maybe the other messages would shed some light. Josh opened the second obituary and decoded it.
Antarctica, U-boat not found, advise if further search authorized
Interesting. Josh ran a few searches. 1947 had been a busy year in Antarctica. On December 12th, 1946, the US Navy sent a huge armada, including thirteen ships with almost five thousand men to Antarctica. The mission, code-named Operation Highjump, was to establish the Antarctic research base Little America IV. There had long been conspiracy theories and speculation that the US was looking for secret Nazi bases and technology in Antarctica. Did the message mean they hadn’t found it?
Josh turned the thick glossy page with the message over and examined the photo. A massive chunk of ice floated in a blue sea, and at its center, a black sub stuck out of the ice. The writing on the sub was too small to read, but it had to be the Nazi sub. Based on the likely size of the sub, the iceberg was maybe ten square miles. Big enough to be from Antarctica. Did this mean they had found the sub recently? Had the discovery set events in motion?
Josh turned to the last message, hoping it would provide a clue. Decoded, it read: Roswell, weather balloon matches Gibraltar technology, we must meet
Together, all three messages were:
Gibraltar, British found bones near site, Please advise
Antarctica, U-boat not found, advise if further search authorized
Roswell, weather balloon matches Gibraltar technology, we must meet
What did it mean? A site in Gibraltar, a U-boat in Antarctica, and the last one—a weather balloon in Roswell that matched technology in Gibraltar?
There was a larger question: Why? Why reveal these messages? They were sixty-five years old. How could it be connected to what’s happening now—to the battle for Clocktower and an imminent terrorist attack?
Josh paced; he had to think. If I were a mole inside a terrorist organization, trying to call for help, what would I do? Trying to call for help… the source would have left a way to contact him. Another code? No, maybe he was revealing the method—how to contact him. The obituaries. But that would be inefficient, newspaper obituaries would take at least a day to appear, even online. Online. What would be the modern equivalent? Where would you post?
Josh ran through several ideas. The newspaper obituaries had been easy: there were only a few papers to check. Aggregating all the past obituaries had taken some time, but he had one key advantage: he knew where to look. The message could be anywhere online. There had to be another clue.
What did the three messages have in common? A location. What was different about them? There were no people in Antarctica, no classifieds, no… what? What was different about Roswell and Gibraltar? Both had newspapers. What could you do in one and not the other? To post something… the source was pointing him to a posting system as ubiquitous today as the New York Times was in 1947.
Craigslist. It had to be. Josh checked. No Craigslist in Gibraltar, but yes—there was a Craigslist board for Roswell / Carlsbad, New Mexico. Josh opened it and began reading through the messages. There were thousands of them, in dozens of categories: for sale, housing, community, jobs, resumes. There would be hundreds of new postings each day.
How could he find the source’s message—if it was even there? He could use a web aggregation technology to gather the site’s content—a Clocktower server would “crawl” the site, similar to the way Google and Bing indexed web sites, extracting content and making it searchable. Then he could run the cipher program, see if any of the postings translated. It would only take a few hours.
He didn’t have a few hours.
He needed a place to start. Obituaries was the logical choice, but Craigslist didn’t have obituaries. What would be the closest category? Maybe… personals? He scanned the headings:
strictly platonic
women seeking women
women seeking men
men seeking women
men seeking men
misc romance
casual encounters
missed connections
rants and raves
Where to begin? Was he on a wild goose chase? He didn’t have time to waste. Maybe a few more minutes, one more group of messages.
“Missed connections” was an interesting category. The idea was that if you saw someone you were interested in, but didn’t get a chance to “make a connection”—ask them out—you posted here. It was popular with guys who, in the moment, couldn’t find the courage to ask a cute waitress out. Josh had actually posted to it several times. If the person saw the message and replied, then there you were, no pressure. If not… it wasn’t meant to be.
He opened it and read a few entries.
Subject: Green Dress at CVS
Message: My god you were stunning! You’re perfect
and I was totally speechless. Would love to talk to you. Email me.
Subject: Hampton Hotel
Message: We were getting water together at the desk and got on the elevator together. Didn’t know if you wanted to get together for a little extra exercise. Reply with what floor I got off on. I saw your wedding ring. We can be discreet too.
He read a few more. The message would be longer, if it followed the same pattern: a message within a message, decoded by the name length as a cipher. Craigslist was anonymous. The name would be the email address.
On the next page, the first entry was:
Subject: Saw you in the old Tower Records building talking about the new Clock Opera single
Promising… Clock and Tower in the subject line. Josh clicked the posting and read it quickly. It was longer than the others. The email address was [email protected]. Josh scribbled down every fourth word then every fifth word from the posting. The decoded posting produced:
Situation changed. Clock tower will fall. Reply if still alive. Trust no one.
Josh froze. Reply if still alive. He had to reply. David had to reply.
Josh picked up the sat phone and dialed David, but it wouldn’t connect. He had called him earlier. It wasn’t the room or the phone. What could— He saw it. The video feed from the door outside. It wasn’t changing. He watched closely. The lights on the servers were staying on. But it never happened that way; they always blinked occasionally as the hard drives were accessed, as network cards sent and received packets. It wasn’t a video feed, it was a picture—a picture put there by whoever was trying to get into the room.
