Adam Jones, Pioneering Clockmaker, Dies at 77 Working on his Tower Masterpiece.

Adam Jones, leading Gibraltar clockmaker, died Saturday in British Honduras. He was f ound 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.

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 1940s, 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 40,000 years ago. The Neanderthals at Gibraltar had lived roughly 23,000 years ago — far earlier 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.

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 13 ships with almost 5,000 men to Antarctica. The mission, codenamed 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:

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 65 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 was 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 obituaries had been easy: there were only a few papers to check. 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

He knew a few of these. ‘casual encounters’ was notorious as a way for prostitutes to find clients and promiscuous people from every walk of life to find each other. He’d read articles. It usually involved a few anonymous emails, followed by an exchange of photos, and then, if both sides continued to email, a meeting, usually at a cheap hotel.

Where to start? 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 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.

Message: My god you were stunning! You’re perfect and I was totally speechless. Would love to talk to you. Email me.

Message: We were getting water together at the desk and then got on the elevator together. Didn’t know if you wanted to get together for a little extra exercise. Tell 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.

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 much longer than the others. The email address was andy@gmail.com. Josh scribbled down every fourth word then every fifth word from the posting. The decoded posting produced:

Josh picked up the satellite 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 always 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.

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?”

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—”

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.

Tarea rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Thank you, Captain Obvious. Are we in that quiet room yet? Did they find Josh?”

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, well, if I were you, I would make damn 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.”

Kate followed the soldier into the large black truck. Inside, it looked nothing like the delivery truck it 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 she assumed was Jakarta. The other showed a video feed of the front, rear, and both sides of the truck. On the top right picture, the black SUV led the truck through

Jakarta’s crowded streets. The final screen was blank except for one word: Connecting…

“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.

“I’m trying to conference in a colleague.” The man looked worried now. He glanced around, as if thinking.

“Yeah. Maybe.” He put the tablet aside. “I need to ask you some questions about the kidnapping.”

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I don’t believe you. What’s different about those two? There were over a hundred kids in 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.”

“See for yourself.” He handed her a folder and she flipped through several pictures, including 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?”

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 closed the file. “Not surprising. It’s not widely accepted, but it’s a popular theory among evolutionary biologists.”

“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 50-60,000 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—”

Kate brushed her hair back. “Ok, let me start over. The human race is about 200,000 years old, but we have only been so called behaviorally modern humans, the really, really smart-type that took over the globe, for around 50,000 years. So 50,000 years ago, we know there were at least three other hominids — Neanderthals, Homo Floresiensis—”

“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 50,000 years ago, there’s us, the Neanderthals, Hobbits, and Denisovans. Actually there were probably a couple more hominids, but the point is there were say five or six sub-species of humans and that 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 50,000 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, etc — they all remained basically cavemen. About 70,000 years ago, a super-volcano erupted at Mount Toba, here in Indonesia. The eruption and ash as well as the resulting climate change, reduced the total human population drastically, maybe to as low as 10,000 or even less.”

“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 down-wind 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 mutate to survive. 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 60,000 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 100, 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 population bottleneck is just one possibility, but it’s gaining followers.”

“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, 60 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 70,000 years ago, that’s not history, it’s prehistoric. And by the way, 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.”

“You haven’t. You know why those two kids were taken, or you at least have a theory. Tell me.”

“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?”

“Yeah. We’re definitely moving.” The soldier pointed to the seat belts beside her. “Strap yourself in.”

The way he said it scared her, but not like the man before, who had taken the children. He reminded her of a parent who had just realized their child was in danger. He was hyper-focused. His eyes didn’t blink as he moved quickly, securing loose articles around the truck, then grabbing a radio.

“Copy Clocktower Commander, Mobile One altering course.” Kate felt the truck turning.

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.

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 spec of orange? Josh walked to the edge of the glass room and looked closer. It was a tiny spec growing brighter, like a heating element. It made the metal look wet, yes the metal was flowing down the door. In that instant, sparks flew out of the top right corner of the door. The sparks slowly crept down the door, 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, andy@gmail.com, was clearly fake — that address had probably been available for all of 2 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 1/2 way 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:

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. It made sense for the secure phone and video conference. 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.

He pushed her aside and got to his feet. The monitors revealed the scene outside: the suburban with three of his field operatives lay in burnt pieces scattered about the deserted street. He didn’t see the two men who had been driving the truck — the second blast must have gotten them. Or a sniper.

David shook his head to try to clear it, then stumbled over to the weapons lockers. He pulled out two smoke canisters, ripped the pin out of each one, and walked to the double doors at the rear of the truck.

Slowly, he pushed one of the doors open, then quickly dropped one canister and rolled the other a little further out. He heard the soft hiss of smoke escape the cylinders as they spun around on the street. A small wisp of the gray-white smoke wafted into the truck as he carefully closed the door.

He had expected at least one potshot when he opened the door. They must want the girl alive.

He returned to the weapons locker and began arming himself. He slung an automatic assault rifle over his shoulder and stuffed magazines for the massive gun and his side arm into the pockets of his pants. He pulled a hard black helmet on and re-strapped his body armor.

“Stay here and keep the door shut. I’ll be back when it’s safe,” David said as he started for the door.

“Look we’re sitting ducks in here; it’s just a matter of time before they reach us. I have to fight in the open, get to cover, and find a way out. I’ll be back.”

He turned to her. She was scared, but he had to give her credit, she had guts. “No, you cannot have a gun.”

“Because you’re the only person you’re likely to hurt with it. Now close this door behind me.” He pulled his goggles down from his helmet, covering he eyes. In one fluid motion, he opened the door and jumped out into the smoke.

Three seconds into his sprint, the bullets began raining down on him. The rifles’ report told him what he needed to know: the snipers were on the tops of the buildings to his left.

He darted into an alley across the street, unslung his rifle and began firing. He hit the closest sniper, saw him go down, and fired two blasts of automatic shots at the other two. Both withdrew behind the brick edifice at the top of the old building.

A bullet whizzed by his head. Another dug into the concrete plaster of the building beside him, spraying shards of brick and concrete into his helmet and body armor. He pivoted to the source: four men on foot, running toward him. Immari Security. Not his men.

He dove to the other side of the alley as the rocket-propelled grenade exploded ten feet from where he had stood a second ago.

He had to get to a defensible position. Bullets ricocheted off the alley walls, and he turned, pulled out his side arm and fired a few rounds, forcing the two men following him to stop and take refuge in doorways in the alley.

Ahead of him, the alley opened onto an old dusty street that ran along one of Jakarta’s 37 rivers. There was a river market, with produce vendors, pottery dealers, and vendors of all sorts. They were in full flight, pointing, yelling, and gathering the day’s take in cash and hurrying away from the shots.

David cleared the alley and more gunfire engulfed him. A shot caught him dead in the center of the chest, throwing him violently to the ground, knocking the wind out of him.

At his head, more gunshots dug into the ground — the men in the alley were closing fast.

He took out two grenades. He pulled the pins, waited a full second, then threw one behind him, in the alley, the other around the corner, toward the ambush.

Behind him he heard the muffled sound of the alley explosion, then the louder blast in the open at the ambush.

Just before he reached the banks of the river he heard another explosion, this one much closer, maybe eight feet behind him. The blast threw him off his feet, out over the river.

Inside the armored van, Kate sat again. Then stood again. It sounded like World War Three outside: explosions, automatic gunfire, debris hitting the side of the truck.

She walked to the locker with the guns and bulletproof vests. More gunfire. Maybe she should put on some kind of armor? She took out one of the black outfits. It was heavy, so much heavier than she’d thought. She looked down at the rumpled clothes she had slept in at her office. What a weird day.

It wasn’t his voice, the one who had gotten her from the police. It wasn’t David.

Three men in black armor, like the men who had taken the kids. They approached her.

They inched toward her. She took another step back. She could reach the gun. Could she fire it?

“It’s alright Dr. Warner. Just come on out of there. We’re taking you to see Martin. He sent us.”

“What? I want to talk to him. I’m not going anywhere until I speak with him.”

The man in the back pushed past the other two and said, “I told you Lars, you owe me fifty bucks.” Kate knew the voice — the gruff, scratchy voice of the man who had taken her children. It was him. Kate froze, fear running through her.

When the man reached her, he grabbed Kate’s arm, hard, and spun her around, sliding his hand down to her wrist. He grabbed her other wrist and held them together with one hand as he zipped-tied them with the other.

She tried to pull away, but the thin plastic cut into her, sending sharp pains up her arms.

The man pulled her back by her long blond hair and jerked the black bag over her head, sending Kate into complete darkness.

Josh watched the other red dots on the screen wink out. The men at the safe houses — they had moved to the door, then disappeared — dead. A few minutes later he saw David’s convoy turn around in the street, then they were gone too — except for David. He saw his dot move around quickly, then one last sprint, and it went out too.

Josh exhaled and slumped in the chair. He stared through the glass walls at the outer door. The torch burned up the other side of it now, the burn mark a backwards J. Soon it would be a full U, then O and they would be through, and his time would be up. He had two, maybe three minutes.

The letter. He turned, rifled through the stack of folders and found it: David’s “open when I’m dead” letter. A few hours ago, Josh had thought he would never need to open it. So many illusions had died today: Clocktower couldn’t be compromised, Clocktower couldn’t fall, David couldn’t be killed, the good guys always won.

Don’t feel bad. We were way behind when we started. I can only assume Jakarta Station has fallen or is on its way.

Remember our goal: we must prevent the Immari end game. Forward whatever you’ve found to the Director of Clocktower. His name is Howard Keegan. You can trust him.

There’s a program on ClockServer1 — ClockConnect.exe It will open a private channel to Central where you can transmit data securely.

One last thing. I’ve collected a little money over the years, mostly from bad guys we put out of business. There’s another program on ClockServer1 — distribute.bat. It will disburse the money in my accounts.

I hope they never found this room and that you’re reading this letter in safety.

He typed quickly on the keyboard, first uploading his data to Clocktower Central, then executing the bank transactions. “A little money” had been an understatement. Josh watched 5 transactions, all five million dollars each, go to first the Red Cross, then UNICEF, and three other disaster relief organizations. It made sense. But the final transaction didn’t. A deposit of five million dollars to a JP Morgan bank account in America — a New York branch. Josh copied the account holder’s names and searched. A man, 62, and his wife, 59. David’s parents? There was a news article — a piece in a Long Island newspaper. The couple had lost their only daughter in the

9/11 attacks. She had been an investment analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald at the time of the attacks, had recently graduated from Yale, and was engaged to be married to Andrew Reed, a graduate student at Columbia.

Josh heard it — or didn’t hear it — the torch had stopped. The ring was complete, and they were ramming the door, waiting for the metal to break free.

He gathered the papers, ran to the trash can and lit them on fire. He moved back to the table and opened the program that would erase the computer. It would take over five minutes. Maybe they wouldn’t find it. Or maybe he could buy it some time; he looked at the box with the gun in it.

Something else, on the screen, the location map. Josh thought he’d seen it — a flash, a red dot. But now it was gone. He stared again.

A boom, boom, boom at the door jolted Josh almost out of the chair. The men were beating on the door like a war drum, trying to make the thick iron come free. The pounding matched the throbbing in Josh’s chest as his heart beat uncontrollably.

The dot lit up for good: D. Vale. It drifted slowly, in the river. Vitals were faint, but he was alive. His body armor housed the sensors; it must have been damaged.

Josh had to send David what he’d found and a way to contact the source. Options? Normally they would establish an online dead-drop: a public web site where they exchanged coded messages. Clocktower routinely used eBay auctions — the pictures of the product for sale included embedded messages or files that a Clocktower algorithm could decrypt. To the naked eye, the picture looked normal, but small pixel changes throughout added up to a complex file Clocktower could read.

But he and David hadn’t established any system. He couldn’t call. Emailing would be a death sentence: Clocktower would monitor any email addresses, and when David checked it, Clocktower would trace the IP of the computer he used. The IP would give them a physical address, or a very close idea. Video surveillance feeds nearby would fill in the rest, and they would have him within minutes. An IP… Josh had an idea. Could it work? Erasing… 37% Complete

Josh opened a VPN connection to a private server he used mostly as a relay and staging area for online operations — transforming and bouncing encrypted reports around the internet before delivering them to Central. It was just added security to make sure Jakarta Station’s downloads to Central weren’t intercepted. It was off the grid, no one knew about it. And it already had several security protocols he’d written. It was perfect.

But the server didn’t have a web address — it didn’t need one — just an IP: 50.31.14.76. Web addresses like www.google.com, www.apple.com, etc really translated to IPs — when you type an address in your web browser, a group of servers called domain name servers (DNS), match the address to an IP in their database, and send you to the right place. If you typed the IP into your browser’s address bar, you’d actually end up in the same place without the routing; 74.125.139.100 opens Google.com, 17.149.160.49 opens Apple.com, and so on.

Josh finished uploading the data to the server. The computer was starting to run slowly. Several error messages popped up.

The drumming had stopped. They were using the torch again. A round bulge of strained metal had formed in the center of the door.

Josh had to send David the IP. He couldn’t call or text. All the sources and case officers would be monitored by Clocktower, and besides, he had no idea where David would end up. He needed somewhere David would look. Some way to send the numbers in the IP Address. Something only Josh knew about…

Josh also maintained a private bank account; he imagined almost everyone in their line of work did.

The cry of bending metal filled the cavernous room like a dying whale. They were close.

Josh opened a web browser and logged in to his bank. Quickly, he keyed in David’s bank routing number and account number. Then he made a series of deposits to David’s account:

It would take a day for the transactions to post, and even after they did, David would only see it if he checked the account. Would he know it was an IP address? Field operatives weren’t exactly tech-savvy. It was a long shot.

Josh lunged for the box on the table, knocking it off. It crashed to the glass floor and he followed it. His shaking hands reached inside, grabbing the gun. How did it go, slide, shoot, press here. God. They were at the entrance to the glass room, three men.

He raised the gun. His arm shook. He steadied it with his other hand, and squeezed the trigger. The bullets ripped through the computer. He had to hit the hard drive. He fired again. The sound was deafening in the room.

Then the sound was all around. Glass was everywhere, tiny pieces. Josh was rushing to the glass wall. Then glass fell all around him, on him, cutting him. He looked down, seeing the bullet holes in his chest and the blood running from his mouth.

The fishermen paddled the boat down the river, toward the Java Sea. The fishing had been good the last several days, and they had brought extra nets — all they had in fact. The boat sagged with the weight, riding lower in the water than it normally did. If things went well, they would return as the sun set, dragging the nets behind the boat, full of fish, enough for their small family and enough to sell at the market.

Harto watched his son Eko paddling at the front of the boat, and pride washed over him. Soon, Harto would retire and Eko would do the fishing. Then, in time, Eko would take his son out, just like this, just like Harto’s father had taught him to fish.

He hoped it would be so. Lately, Harto had begun to worry that this would not be the way things would come to pass. Every year there were more boats — and less fish. They fished longer each day and yet their nets carried fewer fish. Harto pushed the thought from his mind. Good fortune comes and recedes, just like the seas; it was the way of things. He must not worry over things past his control.

Harto yelled to him, “Eko, you must paddle, the boat will turn if we don’t paddle evenly. Pay attention.”

Harto looked. There was… something black, floating. A man. “Paddle quickly, Eko.”

They pulled up beside him, and Harto reached out, grabbed him, and tried to pull him into the narrow boat loaded with nets. He was too heavy. He wore some kind of shell. But the shell floated. Some special material. Harto turned the man over. A helmet, and goggles — they had covered his nose, kept him from drowning.

“No, he’s… a policeman, I think.” Harto tried to pull him into the boat again, but it nearly tipped over. “Here Eko, help me.”

Together, Father and Son dragged the water-logged man into the boat, but as soon as he cleared the side, the boat began taking on water.

Water rushed over the boat’s side. What to throw out? The man? The river flowed to the sea, he would surely die there. They couldn’t drag him, not far. The water rushed in more quickly now.

Harto eyed the nets, the only other thing with any weight in the boat. But they were Eko’s inheritance — the only wealth his family had, their only means of survival, of putting food on their table.

The young boy followed his father’s orders without question, throwing the nets over one-by-one, feeding his birthright to the slow-moving river.

When most of the nets were gone, the water stopped, and Harto slumped back into the boat, staring with absent eyes at the man.

When his father said nothing, Eko scooted closer to him and the man they had rescued. “Is he dead? Did—”

They turned the boat and paddled back up the river, against the current, toward Harto’s wife and daughter, who would be preparing to clean and store the fish they brought back. There would be no fish today.

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