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Day Zero
“John, are you seeing this?”
“Fuck me, is this real?” John was scrolling as fast as his computer would let him, his eyes flying over the list of files, “Surely not? This would be a huge fuck-up.”
“I’ve already got IT scraping it. We’re going to get a copy of everything, whether it’s real or not.” Harry had been John’s work buddy for nearly seventeen years now. Seventeen years of sharing an office in the coldest, most drafty, corner of the office for one of the country’s biggest print newspaper, “Can you start trying to do some verification?”
“I’ll check for agent files. Romanov’s was published when she joined the Avengers right?”
“With redactions, yes.” Harry nodded, “I’ll send over the version we got.”
John skated through the documents. There was no organisation at all - every file was just being dumped at the root level of the server. A complete and utter fucking mess. Which made him think that it was probably real and probably done by someone that had next to no understanding of database management. He hadn’t seen something this fucked up since the SPECTRE controversy back in ‘02.
And the SPECTRE leak was only British intelligence. This was already starting to look like it might be every intelligence agency.
Thankfully, whoever had been responsible for writing the files in the first place had, at least, some kind of system. It took him a few moments to find a staff registry, and a few moments more to dig through it.
“Last name, Romanov. Other names, Natalia Alianovna. Staff ID, one-zero-zero-six-seven-Delta-Charlie-eight-nine. Designation, Agent. That sounds promising.”
“I thought her name was Natasha?”
“No other Romanov personnel with a ‘v’ or an ‘f’ - it’s got to be her.”
John sorted the root level folder alphabetically and grinned. Sure enough, right at the top, a list of files sorted by nine-digit alphanumeric codes. The first one he opened nearly made him puke. There were photos of dead children being stacked inside a grave. He nearly closed it, but morbid - horrified - fascination drove him to the end of the page. Natalia had been sent into deep cover in Yugoslavia to infiltrate a group planning an operation on American soil. Once she got there, she had discovered that they had connections to the Yugoslavian state, and that they were participating in ethnic cleansing at the urging of a major political figure. She was ordered to assassinate a military leader involved, and was then extracted.
It was at this moment that John realised that this was it .
This was really it.
He double-checked in the next ten minutes, of course - pulling up the news articles that had been written about the death of General Goran Petrovich, and the suspected genocides that were taking place.
There were enough details to corroborate at least this story.
He was the first person to prove that the leak might be real, at least in their office in London.
He was the first person to find an actual agent file too, in all its gory details.
By that evening, he had been given seniority over every reporter working on this data leak. He was in control of the newspaper’s entire reporting on what was quietly becoming known as “the SHIELD fuck up.” Sure, there were rumours that SHIELD had been infiltrated by some other group - neonazis, or something - but that didn’t account for the utter catastrophe of every single file they had in their systems being dumped to an FTP server, without encryption or protection of any kind.
Wikileaks had basically been made redundant overnight. Who needed to piece together a story about PRISM when you could just pull up SHIELD’s report on how they intended to use it? About how they had used it?
John didn’t know what to tell his wife that evening. Not really. He had no idea what to tell anyone .
He just knew that this was going to change the world.
Forever.
Day 30
Within a month, John was already beginning to eye the Pulitzer prize. The big one - the Public Service one. His newspaper had been the first to start archiving - and then indexing - the various documents. It had taken some hard work, but they had begun to reconstruct the file structure that the documents had been ripped from. And as they pieced together the file structure, the true depth of the leak had become obvious to them.
There were nearly one hundred and eighty million documents, dating back nearly 25 years.
And then, buried in one of those documents, they found details to access a list of other private servers and dropboxes and cloud drives. Ethics and legal had signed off on it begrudgingly, but they had promptly taken everything else that they could get their hands on. Some of it was just backups - though John had already told Harry to run some checksums and identify what exactly had changed in each backup, especially identifying anything that had been deleted from the initial leak - but some of it was completely new.
Amongst other things, a complete digital archive of every document published by SHIELD since their inception in the early 20th century had been discovered.
And then, they’d discovered that the list of servers included backdoors into half of the world’s major intelligence agencies. That they could take a copy of every bit of confidential information from almost every single major power in the world.
John had hesitated. Then he had hit the button.
There was a legal battle on-going, of course. What intelligence agency wanted to have all their files leaked into the real world? What intelligence agency wanted to face the light of day? The light of the truth ?
It was anathema to those that lived in the shadows.
John had always been fond of flashlights, though. That’s why he was a journalist.
All told, John estimated that there would be nearly four billion documents in the final archive. It was an unfathomable amount. It was more than a lifetime of work. It was so much information that you could hire a thousand people to spend a thousand years trying to organise it and not even come close.
They did some of the obvious things - the nodemap for the email was certainly interesting, highlighting people who were communicating with multiple countries. Some of them were supposed to be. Some of them weren’t. Every single mole in every single intelligence agency had been burnt.
John had been sadly unsurprised to see a number of key names in their research vanishing from the street as the month passed by.
For his safety, the newspaper hired an extensive security team. His children were given home tuition now, his wife at that. It was judged too dangerous for them to be in public - even in a secure building somewhere. John didn’t want to be the next name on the list of names that vanished. He still had memories of some of the journalists who had vanished in the wake of the Panama Papers. Fond memories. They had been good colleagues. Until their names were broadcast to the world, and their lives were put on the line.
Maybe, just maybe, he could find some answers to all those questions they had never been able to answer.
Maybe, just maybe, he could find some answers to his questions about what happened to them.
And maybe, just maybe, there could finally be some justice for their deaths.
Day 100
John never got his answers. Not about that. In the end, the lives of a few journalists were considered small fish compared to information about the lives of every billionaire alive in the world. There had been riots - literal riots - when they stumbled across a database of kompromat .
Their legal team had refused to let them publish.
Someone - John suspected it was probably Harry - had accidentally let it slip to a colleague of theirs at a less reputable newspaper. They had been buried in lawsuits, but the damage was already done. The information was out there. So too were the photos.
It was one thing to believe that you were above the law.
It was another thing entirely to have the world demand that the law drag you back down to their level.
The American presidential campaign had been an absolute disaster. Of the thirteen candidates in the primaries, none of them had been able to escape scandal. Every single one of them had skeletons in their closets, just waiting for someone to haul open the door.
The SHIELD leak had blown the wardrobe doors so far off that they’d taken the house with it.
John didn’t know whether to be excited for the next general election in the UK or terrified for what it might mean for democracy: who do you vote for when every candidate that you can name had been implicated in shady dealings?
John had once heard that every politician was crooked.
Now he could put some numbers on that.
Nearly seventy percent of politicians had been directly involved in at least one scandal. Another twenty-eight percent had been implicated in knowing about at least one scandal. And, honestly, that was enough - who wanted to believe that their public servants wouldn’t have the moral conscience to stand up for what they believed?
Only two percent of politicians in Britain had been able to escape the controversy.
John thought that percentage might go down even further as they dug deeper into the files. They had managed to get through twenty percent. Somewhere around there. And already society was tearing down it’s heroes.
Perhaps the most iconic article of the last few months had been a review of the myths surrounding Steve Rogers. Someone had dug through the scanned documents from the second world war. Found the confidential reports. The character assessments. The medical records. The after-action reports. The man behind the legend had a lot to answer for, whenever they could find him again.
Someone - probably Tony Stark - had started trying to bury stories.
His character assessment had been widely shared as well. Someone even found the video of him “joining” the Avengers.
Tony Stark, no. Iron Man, yes.
It had become a meme - probably as iconic as the historical articles on Steve Rogers. Which was a damning indictment of the average reader’s attention span in John’s opinion, but he understood the feeling of being buried by the constant churn of news and scandal. Weren’t they all feeling a bit like that?
The hacking attempts were also tiresome. They had been aware of Stark’s AI and it’s potential, of course, and multiple air-gapped redundancies had been set-up to ensure that their archive would remain intact. That didn’t stop them. It probably wasn’t even just Stark. There were plenty of powerful people with a vested interest in making sure that the most intact copy of the SHIELD leak archives was destroyed.
John had made his own personal copy, which was stored on six hard drives buried under the floorboards in his house. No one else knew and they wouldn’t last forever there. But he knew that there was a very real chance that he would need them.
Depending on how things happened, there was also a very real chance that he would never tell anyone he had them. Not even Harry. Just in case.
He told his wife though. Not even he was that stupid. Someone always had to know.
Day 250
Nearly a year into his new job, and John was ready to pass on the job of managing the archive and the information to someone else. It had made his career - and secured the Pulitzer - and he wanted to get back to his roots. To actual journalism, rather than glorified data management.
It was his first day back at his old desk, with Harry chewing obnoxiously on the end of his pencil as he stared down at the crossword, that he decided that he had spent too long looking at the international picture. At the big scope. At the direct story.
John had a new idea. An interview, with a retired spy. Interpolate some of the mission files they had. Build up some kind of picture of a year in the life of an agent. Really show the public what their taxes were spent on.
The first step was to check whether anyone else had done anything like it. And, for the most part, they hadn’t. There were a few minor attempts. One Chinese agent appeared to have become a minor celebrity on some true crime shows over in south-east Asia, and the Koreans had made a game show out of it: you get a spy, a fiction author, and a normal civilian and put them on camera, and the contestants guess which one is which. Cash prize, no second guesses.
But no serious portraits. No serious attempts at biography. No attempts at pulling back the curtain to gaze through the looking glass.
John clicked his pen a few times and clicked through some of the archives. They had, at least, managed to make a master registry for the various spies and the agencies they had worked for. He wanted… someone British. Local boys were always more interesting, and there was the chance that the agent had been tied up in something that wasn’t quite foreign disputes.
A good scandal would sell a story too.
He hadn’t forgotten that much in his year away from the writing desk.
Seventeen clicks through four databases later, and he had a list of names. Nearly six thousand names. Every agent that had worked with British intelligence at any stage anywhere in the files. This was going to take a long time.
It wasn’t until the afternoon that he started his phone calls. Aaron Adams didn’t answer the phone. Juliet Blake did, but hung up when he said he was a journalist. Lottie Callow told him he was unpatriotic. And so on. It was like meeting a brick wall.
It was nearly closing time when a knock came on the door frame, and a nondescript man in a suit stepped through into the office.
“John Smith?”
“Can I help you?”
“My name is Ben Daniels. I’m with British Intelligence. I understand you’ve been bothering some of our retired agents. I’m here to ask you to stop.”
“Do I have to stop?”
“No, of course not. You have the right to investigate anything that you believe is in the public interest.” Ben offered a hand, “But it’s to your advantage if you do.”
“What are you offering me?” John shook hands firmly, standing in just the right place for the agent to miss the fact that Harry had turned a dictaphone on behind him, “Because this mostly sounds like an attempt to hide the truth.”
“An interview with an active agent, of course.” The agent had a warm smile, John would give him that. He didn’t trust it though. It didn’t reach the eyes. “I’d be very happy to sit down with you and discuss anything that isn’t classified with you about my career.”
John sat back behind his desk, “Can I have your agent identification number?”
“Sure.”
The numbers that were rattled off checked out. One Ben Daniels, MI6. Marked as active service at the time of the leak. It was believable. John and Harry shared a glance. It was also unbelievable. British intelligence did not just walk into your office and offer you a dream interview.
“How about tomorrow afternoon?” Ben offered casually, “Here or somewhere else?”
“This office. 2pm.” John agreed, “I’ll have the morning to check through your files then. Come up with some good avenues to talk about.”
“Looking forward to it.”
The agent’s smile haunted John. It was genuine. And that terrified him. The agent genuinely thought that whatever they got out of him would be better than whatever they got out of the files.
Day 278
The interview was everything he had hoped for. It made the headlines. Ben Daniels admitted he was retiring from active service soon - he was the perfect patsy. The best person to take the heat off intelligence. And that candour sold with the British public far too well.
John didn’t like it.
He felt like he was being carefully managed. Carefully directed away from the truth. Carefully moved into a position where it seemed like everything had been laid bare before him.
But he did feel like they had made a mistake.
They had given him a name, and a focus, and that meant he had a starting point.
It was Ben Daniels’ career that he dug into, mission by mission, resume entry by resume entry. The guy started in the military. Got through SAS selection. Then migrated to military intelligence. Served with distinction around the world in every single report that had been in the leak.
His colleagues, however? Not so clear cut.
Three of the agents he served with had dishonorable discharges. Ben had been a central figure in the discovery of central moles, including some outside of Britain. There was one very poorly explored mission in Australia which John printed off, solely to be able to highlight all the factual inconsistencies.
It was almost like Ben would have had to be in two places at once.
And that trend continued.
Harry was the one that solved the problem.
“So who is this guy’s partner?” He asked, staring at the map of the globe pinned to the wall, “Because there’s no way that he was in Taipei and Beijing at the same time on that operation there. And those takedowns must have been on the same day right? Otherwise one of the gangs would have vanished before the cops turned up. Triads don’t mess around. Everyone knows that. ”
“Not according to his mission records. One on Tuesday, one on Wednesday.”
“Did you check the news?” Harry suggested, “Maybe they got the dates wrong.”
Harry was right.
The dates were technically correct. One gang taken down on Tuesday. One gang taken down on Wednesday. But only because the Beijing side took two hours longer to process the criminals at the station, and the clock ticked past midnight. Just barely, but enough to have been missed on John's first pass.
Ben Daniels had been caught with his pants down and the word “liar” branded on his arse.
John picked up his phone for a good five minutes, considering ringing the guy, before deciding against it. He would be given some completely reasonable story. That explained everything. Perfectly. Probably give the credit to some obscure Chinese agent that they would be able to just about verify through backdoor channels.
And it would be complete and utter bollocks.
It took nearly two weeks for John to realise that he was looking in the wrong place. It wasn’t about people Ben had worked with at all. It was about people that Ben hadn’t worked with.
Whoever had been removed from Ben’s career had been removed from the entire career. Once you knew what you were looking for, the signs were everywhere. Missions that went just a little too smoothly, with Ben being just a little too efficient at his job.
John started over at the beginning. With the list of soldiers that Ben had worked with. That Ben went through selection with. Most of them were traceable, at least to some extent. They cropped up in one report or another. Not always with Ben, But always somewhere. Good soldiers with a brain in their skulls were hard to find, and Ben had been blessed with a great number of them in his life.
And, eventually, on Day 298 he found the photo. Eight figures, one of whom was clearly Ben, one of whom was blacked out from head to toe - even on the leaked version from the SHIELD files. Even in the leaked version from the SPECTRE files.
The caption, however, had survived. The missing figure was known only as “Cub.”
And, like all jigsaws, once you had the edge of the puzzle, you could start to fill in the missing pieces. Cub became Rider, which turned out to be their real name - Alex Rider.
John didn’t hesitate to pick up the phone this time.
It was picked up almost instantly.
“Who is speaking please?”
“This is John Smith. Is that Alex Rider? I’m a journalist working with a British newspaper. Do you have time for an interview?”
There had been a pause. The sound of static filled the line. John thought that the line might even have died. And then the voice spoke up again.
“You get one question to convince me that I should speak to you.”
“Just one?”
“I’ll give you that one for free.” The voice sounded amused, “But that’s your last freebie.”
“One question it is then. I got it.”
“You can ring back next week. I’m shipping out to the states a week Saturday though. I probably won’t be coming back for a few years. And you want that interview.”
“But I only get it if I know what question to ask.” John closed his eyes, “You’re making this quite hard for me Mr Rider.”
“You’ll know why when you work out what the question is.”
This time the phone line did go dead.
Day 305
It had been a whole week since the first phone call. A week that John had spent doing nothing but digging into the agent file of one Alex Rider. It was sparse, and clearly deliberately so. Mission reports were barely a sentence. A mission about infiltrating a school had a three sentence summary: “School owned by genocidal maniac. Killed maniac. Freed prisoners.”
There had been a follow-up added a month later. “Genocidal maniac cloned me. Clone came to London and attacked me. Clone killed in chemical explosion. Good riddance.”
Alex Rider, contrary to all of his colleagues, clearly did not see the value in detailed mission reports.
It reminded him of his eldest child’s attempts to get out of doing homework.
That was the thought that caught his attention. There was a year on that addendum. And one of the schools in London had lost a science lab that year to an explosion. How many explosions could there be in a single year?
There were three, as it turned out. All three police reports made some reference to a school, or a teenager.
And that was when the sinking feeling started.
In many ways, it was the things that weren't there that gave it away in the end. No date of birth. No university degree. No A-levels. Only six GCSEs, and far more recently than John was comfortable with. They had been taken at the wrong time too - October and January, not May and June. Little things, but things that added up to a big picture.
There was a next of kin listed for Alex in one file. It didn't say what the relationship was. But Jack Starbright turned out to be a twenty-four year old law student from America. Who had vanished for two years when she was about nineteen, presumed dead. Blown up. Too young to be a mother, the wrong nationality to be a sister, and - based on her Facebook profile and the twitter posts - too much of a lesbian to be a lover.
On the rare occasions she appeared in mission files as a person of interest, the reports were short and to the point.
John stared at his phone for nearly an hour after he worked it out. He almost didn't want to confirm it.
It was the idea of his kids being dragged into whatever came next after Alex Rider that made him go for it in the end. It would probably be the end of his career. They wouldn't take it lying down. He knew that. But when they came for him, John intended to go down swinging.
The phone rang six times before Alex picked up.
"Hello John. Have you found your question yet?"
Now that he was listening for it, he could detect some kind of voice scrambler. Enough to hide anything. To hide everything. Necessary once, useful now.
He swallowed once, he swallowed twice.
"How old are you, Alex?"
The interview got him his second Pulitzer in a row.