Annabelle Gilbert’s immaculately made-up features were replaced on TV screens by scenes of chaos at the bombed embassy. Indonesian soldiers joined police to remove injured people from the rubble. Wounded people wandered around dazed, their clothes torn and streaked with blood.
‘Authorities are mystified by how a person carrying explosives could have passed unnoticed through two checkpoints, both equipped with x-ray scanners. It’s believed the bomb or bombs were detonated somewhere deep inside the building, possibly the visa section.
‘Indonesian police who worked on the successful pursuit of the Bali bombers and the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta have been called in to investigate this new attack, and American experts are rushing to the scene to join them.
‘So far, no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, although al Qa’ida, Abu Sayyaf and Jamaah Islamiah, the groups responsible for other attacks throughout South East Asia, are currently the prime suspects.
‘Australian embassies and consulates throughout South East Asia are now on full alert.
‘In Canberra, Prime Minister Mr William Blight…’
Jakarta, Indonesia
Kadar Al-Jahani spent the night in a safe house before making his way to the airport. The sirens had wailed all night, as he knew they would. The sounds were as familiar to him as ordinary traffic noise. He glanced up at the departures board. The Singapore Airlines flight to Frankfurt via Singapore was boarding on schedule. There was time. He took a seat at the Internet kiosk and checked to ensure the connection was live. He called up the website for the Sydney Morning Herald and checked the front page. He was pleased by what he saw. At the bottom of the main article was an invitation to email it to a friend.
Amman, Jordan
The Saudi woke refreshed and early after getting in from the airport quite late. He travelled so much that it had long since ceased to be an adventure. Instead it was a chore, and it was good to be home. He stretched out in his bed, searching for the cold corners with his toes, and delighting in the scent of the young woman lying beside him. He turned to look at her, a flight attendant for Emirates, facing away from him. She had worked in first class and there had been a certain frisson between them from the start. Perhaps he reminded her of her father? He was always surprised when a woman almost half his age found him attractive. She had said that she was Iranian. He marvelled at the flawless skin of her back and the hint of muscle in her upper arm stretched out beyond her head. He had performed well for her last night and they had both slept the exhausted sleep of lovers.
He slipped out of bed and went to the home office off his bedroom. The cold flagstones and dark indigo Belouch rugs, a present from an old Soviet client, felt good under his bare feet. He checked the screen of his computer. He had mail. After twelve hours without checking his in-tray, as usual he had quite a bit of it. There was one email that intrigued him. Its subject read, ‘A sign from Allah’. The Saudi opened it. No message, just a URL. He doubleclicked on it and a connection was made to a newspaper he’d never heard of before called the Sydney Morning Herald. The headline roared, ‘ATTACK’.
He reached for the television remote and touched the button, the dark rectangle that hung on the wall coming quietly to life. He switched to Al Jazeera. The picture instantly caught his eye. He increased the volume several bars so that he could hear the accompanying sound but not wake the woman snoring softly. A building had been blown up somewhere. A US embassy…but where, which one? More than eighty dead…many wounded…structural damage…suicide bomber…Jakarta. The Saudi smiled. The sign. This would certainly boost the confidence of his partners in the Indonesian enterprise.
‘What’s on?’ asked the woman, looking at the television. His movement about the room had woken her.
The Saudi turned to look at her and his heart skipped a beat. She was naked, sitting up unself-consciously in bed, pink nipples the colour of her lips on cream-coloured breasts that pointed towards the ceiling.
The Saudi was reminded of an ice-cream sundae with cherries on top. Oh happy day, he thought, licking his lips. He said, ‘Nothing, moonshine, just the news.’
‘I think you should come back to bed right now,’ she responded, pouting.
The Saudi was suddenly aware of his erection. Was it the event in Jakarta or the fact that the woman was now tickling her breasts lightly with her fingertips? He shrugged. It was a joyous dilemma.
Jakarta, Indonesia
Atticus Monroe arrived at the bombsite around twenty-four hours after the blast and was shattered by the devastation. Most of the bodies had been removed but there were still thought to be possible survivors trapped in air pockets under the rubble. The entire face of the building appeared to have fallen into the front courtyard. There was a large hole blown out of the ground floor, the epicentre of the explosion: the visa section.
Senior embassy staff had all been absent, attending a conference for regional cooperation in Seoul, South Korea. That, at least, was something. Most of the fatalities were clerks, secretarial staff and US citizens, many of them tourists, going about their business in and around the building.
Indonesian forensic and bomb experts were picking over the scene, collecting evidence in bloody plastic bins. The local army and police were getting pretty good at this kind of job now; they’d certainly had enough practice over the past few years. Nevertheless, the US had asked the Indonesian government for permission to send in its own battery of experts and investigators. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust the locals to do a good job, but it was felt that many hands would make lighter work of finding clues and, ultimately, tracking down and punishing the perpetrators. Jakarta agreed.
Monroe was by no means the first outside American on the scene. Two US Army majors, bomb disposal experts on an information exchange program with Australian law enforcement officers in Darwin, had been flown immediately to the embassy, arriving within hours. As chance would have it, there was also an international forensics seminar being held in Jakarta, and half a dozen of America’s top forensic experts from various law enforcement agencies had rushed to the scene. They were busily helping their Indonesian counterparts with the gruesome job of identifying bodies and sifting for clues. Fire had not been a major factor in this attack, making the identification process easier than it otherwise might have been, although there were many victims crushed and cut beyond recognition by falling masonry and glass.
Atticus Monroe didn’t know where to start. CIA Canberra had sent him there to get a leg up on the investigation, but the scene was still too chaotic to extract much sense out of anyone. So he rolled up his sleeves and busied himself helping the rescue effort, removing and tagging body parts and listening for trapped survivors. So far, none had been found.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said a US Army soldier covered in concrete dust and streaked with sweat. ‘Are you Atticus Monroe, CIA?’
‘Yes,’ said Monroe, swinging a chunk of broken brickwork behind him and standing up.
‘Sir, Captain Stokes, one of the doctors, wants to see you if you can spare a moment.’
‘Sure,’ said Atticus, wiping the sweat on his forehead with the inside of his shirt. ‘Let’s go.’
Monroe followed the young soldier to the makeshift medical facility set up in the courtyard of the nearby French Embassy. It was like a battlefield. The survivors were people who, moments before the explosion, had every expectation that the day ahead of them would be like all the days behind them, unaware that within seconds their lives would be irrevocably changed because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Family, friends and relatives were crying over victims sedated by morphine, their bodies crushed, makeshift tourniquets above bloody, shattered limbs. There were people wandering around dazed between the stretchers, searching for loved ones amongst the pathetic survivors, hoping to find them here rather than in the flyblown morgue out the back.