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.
Monroe followed the PFC as he wound his way through the harrowing scene towards a man wielding a saw behind a jury-rigged curtain of opaque plastic sheeting. He looked up. ‘CIA?’
‘Yes, sir. Atticus Monroe.’ It wasn’t necessary to present identification.
‘Captain Stokes. I won’t shake your hand.’
Monroe nodded. The doctor’s hands were sheathed in gloves streaked with gore.
‘Someone over here you should talk to,’ said the doctor.
Stokes handed the saw to his assistant, an Indonesian, and moved to another gurney. A woman dressed in filthy battle fatigues lay on it, both legs ending in bloody cotton gauze dressing just below the knees. A morphine drip fed into her arm.
‘This is Sergeant Jane Hennert. She was on the front entrance when the bomb went off. Whoever did this went through her.’
‘Sergeant…’ said the doctor quietly. The woman opened her eyes.
In a whisper, she said, ‘Cameras…cameras.’ The woman’s eyes closed, moistened with tears, as the morphine took her away.
The doctor peeled off his gloves and dropped them in the bucket under the gurney. He put a hand on her forehead and stroked it. The sergeant’s conscious mind had retreated way back from the light, where it was dark and cool and safe.
The doctor looked up. ‘She didn’t want me to give her morphine,’ he said, indicating the drip, ‘but the shock of the injuries would have killed her. She told me she let the bomber in, a photographer. Something about the feel of the cameras. It’s not much…’ he said again.
‘Okay, thanks, doc,’ said Monroe. ‘Will she live?’
‘Hard to say,’ said the doctor. ‘Four broken vertebrae, broken arm, her legs gone. She also has a sub capsular bleed in her spleen.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Monroe.
‘It’s not as bad as a ruptured spleen, but almost. Extremely painful and dangerous, but,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘we’ve got worse on our hands and she’ll have to wait. As to whether she survives or not…’ The doctor looked her over as if considering the verdict. ‘Well, she’s fit, but…who knows? A lot depends on her mental fitness. If she holds herself responsible for this…I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry, Mr Monroe. Gotta get back to it. Find your own way out?’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘If we get anything else, I’ll send for you,’ said the doctor behind him as he walked off to settle a man who had started screaming.
An Indonesian nurse scurried past carrying a bucket of water with a hand towel in it. Atticus stopped her and took the towel, squeezing the excess water from it. He wiped the streaked dirt from the sergeant’s face and whispered. ‘It’s not your fault…not your fault…’