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 first base. But telling a lie as if it were true was much easier than faking an emotional response to a surprise, and sustaining the reactions, 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 — 200-250 at any given time. You should know that we had already identified some of the chief analysts as moles — about 60. 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 3-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 20 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 on-going in Seol, Dehli, 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.”