THE LAST ARK

CHAPTER 9: MEMORIES AND MOTIVES

Scott Family Home, Palisades Five Days Before Temple Ceremony

“Hey, Morgan, when was the last time Ms. Galvin fed you?” Jenn greets her dad’s fat orange tabby at the front door. Shivering in the wind, she hurries to insert the same house key she’s had since grade school. “Better get your furry butt inside before the temperature drops again.” Captain Morgan scurries in under her feet as she quickly closes and deadbolts the door. An assassin may still be out there. Just the idea sends a shiver through her veins. Th ere have been countless times Jenn came home to an empty house while her mother was in the hospital and the admiral was away on command. Th is time feels diff erent, like a whole extra dimension of emptiness has opened into a lifeless chasm. Another voice she will never hear again, sending another tear to dribble down her left cheek until she wipes it away with her sleeve. Th e admiral would say she was leaking, and too much leaking leads to rust. It suddenly dawns on Jenn that a trace of a nerve agent may still be in the house. She should check with Matt later to find out if a hazmat team has cleared the interior. In the meantime, she doesn’t plan to stay long, so she dons a pair of latex gloves left over from the early days of the COVID scare. Jenn opens a can of food for the cat and then a bottle of wine for herself—a chardonnay, the only wine the old beer-drinking sailor would buy for parties. Opening the bottle triggers a memory of the expensive, earthy French Bordeaux that Taylor served aboard his jet while she investigated him. With a twinge of regret for pushing him away, she reminds herself that a relationship with Taylor can never happen, not that one ever really started. He leads an illegal group, and Jenn has a respectable career to recover. Taylor intrigues her, perhaps nothing more. She needs to move on. With a flip of a switch by the mantle, Jenn turns on the living room fireplace and flops onto the old couch. After a long sip of wine, she opens her father’s will, given to her yesterday. As an only child, Jenn inherits everything: the house, the car, and the modest Schwab portfolio. “Darjeeling,” she exclaims. “I thought he sold that boat years ago.” When Jenn was young, the family used to go sailing on a Hans Christian 38 called Darjeeling. Her mom loved that ship and so did Jenn. But after her mom passed away, the sailing trips stopped. Jenn had always assumed that the admiral couldn’t handle the painful memories and sold the boat. It seems he saved it for her, and then either forgot or chose not to tell her. T he will includes another surprise: her father had a safe room with a floor safe with the access code provided. “This should be interesting,” she says, getting off the couch, followed by Morgan with a loud complaint. Entering the admiral’s room, Jenn stalls a moment to remember the Christmas she woke both of her parents before daybreak, overly eager to open gifts. In retaliation, they made her wait until noon. Too many years ago now to feel real, and still too real to forget. Time together as a family ended far too soon. With a heavy sigh, Jenn pushes the memory aside to enter the walk-in closet. Half the closet still features her mom’s clothes, untouched. On the admiral’s side, he had hung every uniform he ever wore since he was a cadet in an orderly row. The Navy wasn’t just a career; it was the essence of his soul, the very core of his self-identity. A patriot, a sailor, a warrior, a leader. Now he’s gone, and a part of her left with him. No matter what Jenn accomplishes in life, she will never live up to his astounding legacy. With a gentle shove aside of the neatly hung uniforms, Jenn discovers a door cleverly blended into the closet paneling. A keypad on the wall provides an entrance. Since the will includes only one sequence, she tries the code, and then nudges open the door. Automatic lighting illuminates a secret attic room. “Oh my god, I never knew this place even existed,” she murmurs, stepping inside the insulated and sound-proofed office. Crammed with electronic equipment—a HAM radio, surveillance equipment, multiple monitors, and several computers—it resembles a covert operation station. The admiral was tech-savvy, but she didn’t know how savvy. Unsure if the workstations were personal or connected to the Pentagon, she could try the same passcode later. T he floor safe is not immediately visible in the cramped space until Jenn pulls the chair aside and lifts the floor mat. Another keypad, which opens a large safe. Besides two handguns with ammo, she finds his copy of the will, the house deed, yacht and car titles, a bunch of old stock certificates, expired passports, a boot box, and a personal journal. A floor safe seems an odd place for a boot box and a journal, so she grabs those first. To her surprise, the box contains her mother’s end-time prophecy notebooks from before she passed away. Jenn had always dismissed her mom’s morbid obsession as a way of dealing with her cancer. At least Jenn thought that way until her encounter with the SLVIA code. Jenn shakes off the memory and places the box aside for when she’s feeling more optimistic. “Why would the admiral keep a personal journal in a difficult-to-access floor safe?” she wonders aloud, realizing that Morgan had stayed in the bedroom. An intensely private and proud man, the admiral rarely opened up on a personal level. It wasn’t even until Jenn returned from investigating Taylor that she learned the admiral was a secret contact in the SLVIA SNO network. Conspiracies of a deep state are hogwash, but those who give their lives to serve the nation can certainly accumulate a fair share of deep secrets. “What else don’t I know about my family?” T he words of Matt Adelson linger in the back of her mind like a hostile stalker. The admiral died of a nerve agent, and while that alone points toward the Kremlin, they lack a motive. A journal may contain that information. It could also explain why he kept it in the safe. “Buck up, Jenny,” she scolds herself as the admiral would. “Justice takes sacrifice.” With trembling, sweaty hands, safe inside the gloves, Jenn fingers through the first few journal pages dating back to her birth. The comments skip to her school years, and then her mom’s cancer diagnosis. The admiral worried he could never be a good enough single parent. About that time, he also wrote of conversations with the SLVIA code, whom he met online as a grief counselor named Sister Sylvia. They had conversations about Jenn, grieving a loved one, and the meaning of life itself. Interspersed, she finds bits of foreign intelligence shared by the SLVIA. Those insights tipped the admiral to the SLVIA identity. Jenn skips to the end where a set of entries drive spikes of fury through her chest. Dec 10 SLVIA shared a video. POTUS asked Putin about the national ID backdoor. Putin didn’t deny. Dec 13 POTUS signed Executive Order requiring INVISID for all federal employees. Jan 16 I’ll give POTUS a chance to do the honorable thing. Otherwise, I may resign and whistle blow. T he last entry was well over a year and a half ago. The battle over the national ID platform rages on. Video evidence of a conspiracy would be a motive for the assassination. Jenn needs to contact Matt Adelson in the morning. Emotionally spent, she takes the journal and box before closing the safe. A search of the computers can wait for a security clearance. The devices may contain the video evidence. Jenn closes the hidden door and arranges the admiral’s uniforms in the orderly fashion he would prefer. On her way through the bedroom, Jenn spots Morgan in the corner, asleep on the rug. A little odd, since the lazy cat normally sleeps on the admiral’s bed. T hen she notices a trickle of blood pooling from his mouth onto the carpet. Jenn looks at her gloves and tries to think of something that Morgan had touched that she didn’t until she remembers sitting on the couch. A couch her father almost never used. Jenn needs to call Matt right now.