THE LAST ARK

CHAPTER 37: IMPERSONATION

Metropolitan Club, Washington, DC Two Days Before Temple Ceremony

Jester loathes the real world, preferring the safe, nonjudgmental sanctity of his dungeon data center. Except once in a while, even a digital master must engage with the analogs. Normally, Taylor plays the chameleon, but the f l apjack has fl ipped. To get inside the NIA, Jester will take a chance with only one man. But to meet with him, Jester needs to be invisible. “Welcome to the Metropolitan, Mr. President,” greets the receptionist for one of the most exclusive clubs in Washington. “We’re so pleased you could join us this aft ernoon. Director Adelson is waiting for you. Th is way, please.” “Th ank ya,” he says with a slight smirk. Jester has a theory of the Putin endgame. To be one hundred percent sure, he needs more intelligence. As Taylor said, he needs to get inside the NIA. He’s already cracked most NIA, CIA, and NSA servers, but he needs an update on the current stuff . In retrospect, his choice of disguise may have been a mistake. He wanted easy access to a club with notoriously long reservation wait times, but he’s drawing far too much attention. “Mr. President,” a server greets. Jester smiles and waves. “Mr. President,” greets a diner. He nods. Everywhere Jester looks, eyes greet him with either adoration or burning contempt. Whatever happened to bland indifference? T he maître d’ seats him in a private back room while two of his security team stand watch, just friends with crew cuts, wearing rented black suits and Aviator sunglasses. Director of National Intelligence Matt Adelson stands to shake his hand. “Mr. President, an honor to see you again, sir.” Matt served under each of the past five presidents. Jester accepts the gesture without considering the consequences. An amateurish mistake. He wore tight-fitting faux old man gloves with skin spots to hide his painted fingernails. But there’s no mistaking the difference between an old, boney handshake, and a young, strong one. The director’s eyes instantly turn narrow and suspicious as he takes his seat. “Mr. President, I’m surprised to hear from you,” Matt says, scrutinizing him. “Yeah, like, you sure look surprised, you know,” Jester responds in his normal thick Jersey accent, but quiet. “Uncle Matt, it’s Jester, not W. Like, I really needed to see you. National emergency stuff. Now, now before you arrest me, if I don’t return on time, I set a program to release access credentials for a dozen CIA networks onto the dark web. You know, like, I don’t want to do that, and like, you don’t want that, so let’s all play nice. Cool? Cool? We cool? I know something you need to know. You know?” Jester waits to see the change in Matt’s eyes before proceeding. His uncle sits back and folds his arms, curious and cautious. Matt knows the threat of releasing access credentials could be real. It is. The Jester doesn’t cry wolf. “Cool,” Jester says, sitting back, nodding with a gigantic sigh of relief. “I’ve never eaten here before. Heard it was pretty good, you know, for the old-school meat and potato crowd.” He banters nervously. Matt nods his head. “Nice mask, Jason. We’ve been looking for you. I can only assume that you’re here because you’re desperate or Taylor’s in trouble.” “A little of both,” he snickers. “But seriously, I want to help solve the defense AI haywire problem.” “No, absolutely not.” Matt shuts down the idea. “We’ve got this one, and it’s out of your area of expertise.” “Maybe, maybe not,” Jester nods. “What if I told you I know about your NC3 system ghost alert and the sub power plant issues, and like, how to stop them?” Matt raises an eyebrow. “I’d say that you are breaking the law, and I can no longer protect you if they catch you inside our network.” “Then what if I told you Yuri Yankovic slithered into Israel to abduct your favorite con man-in-chief, the Putin poodle, the Moscow mascot?” Jester pushes one step further, his own chronic habit. While he and the director chat, his phone and the director’s phone are doing a silent dance to see which tech can out-hack the other. Jester has the advantage in that his phone uses unbreakable quantum encryption and doesn’t connect to a network of secret stuff. Even if the director hacks him, he won’t f ind anything useful. Matt’s stone face remains impenetrable. “Are we done here?” he prompts impatiently, without answering the question. He may suspect the hack. Jester needs to stall him. “Oh, you want top-shelf? OK, OK, what if I told you I figured out Putin’s endgame? Inside out. That’s it. He wants to corrupt and defeat us from the inside out. Putin used the SolarWinds and five other software update hacks to establish a network of personas or data sources in order to poison AI data— all of it. And then, like, he’s using agents inside the tech industry H1 visa workforce to feed the bad data so it will look clean. The bad data will create a series of untraceable mishaps.” Jester lays out his theory. Matt doesn’t respond, but still listens. Jester continues. “Then, dig it, dig it, he’s like using the old Epstein videos to squeeze the nuggets of key lawwankers to cut cyber budgets, stall investigations. T he next big one will bring us down from the inside. You need to let me in.” Matt frowns while he plays with a fork. “I would like to see the details behind your analysis, but I can’t, and I won’t let you in.” “Ah come on, does this mean we’re breaking up,” Jester jokes, more curious than ever about what Matt could be hiding. For years, his uncle treated him like a confidential informant, even while he was at the CIA. Jester often follows an intellectual thread ignored by others. “I realize that your chronic curiosity often gets the better of you. You’ve been that way since you were a small boy.” Matt gets up to leave but stops next to Jester. “I’ll have CISA validate your theory. Oh, you should know that your father contacted me a few months ago, wondering if I’d heard from you. Your mother, my poor sister, would never want the rift that has developed between you two since her death. I know he’s a self-righteous a-hole, but consider honoring your mother, Jason, and give the man a call. If you still believe as your mother taught you, and I think you do, then you need to forgive him.” Jester wasn’t expecting that turn of the conversation. It catches him off guard. Matt is right about his gracious mom and his a-hole dad, but it’s not something he can deal with now. “Yeah, sure, OK,” he replies as the aging spy master slips away. After Matt leaves, Jester enters the private men’s room to find an empty stall. His friends will be gone by the time he exits. Jester yanks off the mask, coat, and tie, then shoves them into a trash bag he pulls from his pocket. A skin tone turtleneck unravels to cover his neck tats. A hair net with a wig tucked into his pants now covers his shaved head and earrings. Then Jester dons a dirty apron hidden in the stall to look like a busboy. From a shirt pocket, he puts on the thick-rimmed WITNESS lenses and taps the frame. An iris scan confirms his identity. “WITNESS, identify any federal radio signals in my vicinity.” “The History of Josephus in the original Latin.” WITNESS replies. Another random response entangled with something else. Jester has no choice but to take his chances. “Never mind, Einstein.” Jester exits the men’s room to enter the kitchen, where he grabs another waste bag. Outside the rear exit, he dumps the trash. At the end of the alley, a UPS van waits, driven by his friends. A quick check confirms he hacked Matt’s phone. Good, now the fun starts. Jester needs to pull the data apart and let his AI analytics do some magic. The only way to stop the poison data will be to f ind the hidden network of Russian digital pharmacists. While the entire exchange with his Uncle Matt was interesting, his acknowledgment that CISA will investigate the data poisoning theory means they have no clue how to solve the problem. To be fair, it would take a powerful quantum computer to make sense of the zettabytes of data to reach a definitive conclusion. Too bad his quantum AI has an attention deficit.