“Anything from the airports?” David asked.
The man worked the keyboard, then looked up. “Yes, he landed a few minutes ago at Soekarno-Hatta. You want us to have him detained there?”
“No. I need him here. Just make sure they can’t see him on surveillance upstairs. I’ll take it from there.”
CHAPTER 9
David was studying a map of Jakarta and Clocktower’s safe houses around the city when the surveillance tech walked in. “He’s here.”
David folded the map up. “Good.”
Josh Cohen walked toward the nondescript apartment building that housed Clocktower’s Jakarta Station Headquarters. The buildings around it were mostly abandoned — a mix of failed housing projects and dilapidated warehouses.
He entered the building, walked down a long hallway, opened a heavy steel door and approached the shiny silver elevator doors. A panel beside the doors slid back, and he placed his hand on the reflective surface and said, “Josh Cohen. Verify my voice.”
A second panel, this one level with his face, opened and a red beam scanned his face while he held his eyes open and head still.
The elevator binged, opened, and began carrying Josh to the building’s middle floor. The elevator ascended silently, but Josh knew that elsewhere in the building a surveillance tech was reviewing a full body scan of him, verifying he had no bugs, bombs, or otherwise problematic items. If he was carrying anything, the elevator would fill with a colorless, odorless gas and he’d wake up in a holding cell. It would be the last room he’d ever see. If he passed, the elevator would take him to the fourth floor — his home for the last three years and the Jakarta headquarters of Clocktower.
Clocktower was the world’s secret answer to state-less terror: a state-less counter terrorism agency. No red tape. No bureaucracy. Just good guys killing bad guys. It wasn’t quite that simple, but Clocktower was as close as the world would ever get.
Clocktower was independent, a-political, anti-dogmatic, and most importantly, extremely effective. And for those reasons, the intelligence services of nations around the world supported Clocktower, despite knowing almost nothing about it. No one knew when it had started, who directed it, how it was funded, or where it was headquartered. When Josh had joined Clocktower three years ago, he assumed he would get answers to those questions as a Clocktower insider. He was wrong. He had risen through the ranks quickly, becoming Chief of Intelligence Analysis for Jakarta Station, but he still knew no more about Clocktower than the day he’d been recruited from the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis. And they seemed to want it that way.
Within Clocktower, information was strictly compartmentalized inside the independent cells. Everyone shared intel with Central, everyone got intel from Central, but no cell had the big picture or insight into the larger operation. And for that reason, Josh had been shocked to receive an invitation three days ago to a sort of “Summit Meeting” for the chief analysts of every Clocktower cell. He had confronted David Vale, the Jakarta station director, asking him if this was a joke. He’d said it wasn’t and that all the directors had been made aware of the meeting.
Josh’s shock at the invitation was quickly trumped by the revelations at the conference. The first surprise was the number of attendees: 238. Josh had assumed Clocktower was relatively small, with maybe 50 or so cells in the world’s hot spots, but instead, the entire globe was represented. Assuming each cell was the size of Jakarta Station, about 50 agents, there could be over 10,000 people working in the cells, plus the central organization, which had to be at least a thousand people just to correlate and analyze the intel, not to mention coordinate the cells.
The organization’s scale was shocking — it could be almost the size of the CIA, which had had around 20,000 total employees when he’d worked there. And many of those 20,000 worked in analysis in Langley, Virginia, not in the field. Clocktower was lean — it had none of the CIA’s bureaucracies and organization fat.