JK's Code (Brooks/Lotello Thriller Book 4)

by Ronald S. Barak

  DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE HEADQUARTERS APRIL 16, 2020 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

  THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE DISAVOWS ANY SUGGESTION THAT ANY INDIVIDUAL BY THE NAME OF JAKE KLEIN HAS, OR EVER HAS HAD, ANY DEALINGS OR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. AT NO TIME HAS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY ENGAGED IN ANY COMPUTER MISBEHAVIOR TO CONTROL THE OUTCOME OF THE PENDING ELECTIONS. NOT WITH MR. KLEIN, NOR ANYONE ELSE. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WILL BEAT PRESIDENT BAKER FAIR AND SQUARE THIS COMING NOVEMBER.

  THE NEWS BULLETIN RELEASED EARLIER THIS WEEK BY RED CRIER IS WHOLLY UNSUBSTANTIATED AND PURE FABRICATION, SOMETHING THAT OUR OPPONENT WOULD LABEL “FAKE NEWS.” WE NOTE THAT RED CRIER IS A CONSERVATIVE PUBLICATION FOUNDED BY FRANKLIN KELSEY WHO IS ONE OF PRESIDENT BAKER’S LARGEST DONORS.

  THE DNC HAS NO IDEA WHO MR. KLEIN IS, BUT SUSPECTS THAT HE IS A CO-CONSPIRATOR IN THIS INSIDIOUS SCHEME, OR IS ANOTHER ONE OF ITS INNOCENT VICTIMS. THE DNC NEITHER HAS, NOR HEREAFTER WILL, ENGAGE IN ANY COMMUNICATION OR DEALINGS WITH MR. KLEIN, OR ANYONE CLAIMING TO BE MR. KLEIN, OR TO BE ACTING ON HIS BEHALF.

  BAKER READ THE DNC press release and laughed. “Perfect. The more attention they give this, the more traction it will gain.”

  JAKE’S MIND WAS STILL whirling. Turgenev. Molloy. Gradsky. Nilsen. Cipher. Now he had more to add. Carter. Baker. And Baker’s supporters. The list was endless. And growing. The DNC. Abelson. Anya. Are they all my enemies? Is there anyone I can trust?

  He thought about Anya. He wanted to reach out to her. Find out if she was friend or foe. But how could he bring himself to confront her? Especially if she was what she seemed to be, and was home dealing with her parents. What if Anya was not back in Russia with her family? What if she was here, spying on him? Geez, I remember when I was starstruck and afraid to approach her because she might not be interested. Now, I’m afraid to approach her because of why she might be interested.

  He decided to reach out to the only ones he knew for sure he could trust. His computer. And himself. And to ignore all of the other noise for as long as he could.

  CHAPTER 74

  April 23, 2020, One Week Later

  AUSTIN CHAIRED THE EMERGENCY meeting of EBCOM. The discussion focused on POTUS’s reaction to the pandemic, the stock market’s reaction to the pandemic, the economy’s reaction to the pandemic, and how EBCOM should react to the pandemic.

  The consensus was that POTUS’s and the stock market’s reaction to the pandemic were much the same—irrational—and the economy and POTUS’s position in the polls were much the same—dropping, sort of. As for EBCOM’s position, the consensus was Katy bar the door, full speed ahead, and man the torpedoes.

  As one of the members put it, less than eloquently, “What choice do we have? There ain’t no such thing as being a little pregnant.”

  JAKE WONDERED IF A computer could have writer’s block. Actually, he remembered when one of his favorite high school teachers brought a guest panel into his English class one day. The subject was “blocking”—what it meant to suffer a block, who all could suffer one, and how did you get past it.

  The panel consisted of two bestselling authors and two computer programmers from IBM. Each of the authors acknowledged that all authors suffered from writer’s block at one time or another in their careers, often more than once. Jake’s class seemed to buy into that because writer’s block was a well-known phenomenon. Jake recalled experiencing writer’s block himself when he had to write a short story for an English class.

  Less well received, the programmers professed that the same was true for them. The fact that a programmer knew what he was out to accomplish didn’t necessarily mean he knew how to do it, or that it would be easy. Programmers often suffered what they referred to as programmer’s block. They knew what they wanted to do, to get from Point A to Point Z, but it didn’t mean that it just fell into place because they wanted it to.

  They all agreed on the solution: don’t panic, be patient, change the subject, think about something else, and wait for it to come. Relief. It always did. For most.

  Jake was trying to apply the advice he had heard that day. He now understood Molloy’s software, backward and forward. His interest was more in the backward than the forward. He was working on it, but so far, it just wasn’t happening.

  He wasn’t panicked. Yet. He was trying to be patient. But his patience was starting to run short. The problem was that time was also starting to run short.

  He needed to change the subject. Wait for it—the code he was trying to write.

  He tried to think about different things—Anya came to mind. He thought maybe he should send her a text. But then he remembered what Abelson had said. He pushed Anya to the back of his mind. The next move had to be hers.

  CHAPTER 75

  May 7, 2020, Two Weeks Later

  MOLLOY WAS RESTLESS. SOMETHING had been bothering him since he had first discovered it—the one-hour gap in his security system surveillance tapes. It had never happened before.

  And one hour later, just as it was preset, his backup generator test kicked in and reactivated the computerized security system. The only problem was that when he checked with the local utility authorities, there had been no power outages on the date and at the time his computerized system had shut down.

  Sometimes, things just happen without any rhyme or reason. Not so. There’s always an explanation, even if you can’t figure out what it is.

  Until she knocked on his door.

  “Hello,” she said. “Is Mr. Molloy here?”

  “Who are you?” Molloy asked. “And why do you want to know?”

  “My name is Jaime. My family and I, and our dog, Geoffrey, moved in down the street a few months ago. One night, when I was walking Geoffrey, I met Mr. Molloy out in front of his house here. He was very nice. I just wanted to stop by and say hello to him.”

  “You don’t say,” Molloy said.

  “No. I do say. I just did say. That’s exactly how it happened, but it wasn’t any biggie. I just thought I’d say hello.”

  “What I mean is that there must have been some misunderstanding. I’m Mr. Molloy. You must have met my housekeeper and misunderstood.”

  “No kidding,” Jaime said. “Well, he still was very nice. Could I say hello to him, please?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t work for me anymore. He moved back home to Vancouver. I don’t expect to hear from him any further, but if I do, I’ll be sure to tell him you came by and said hello.”

  “Cool. Thanks.”

  “Have a nice day,” Molloy said and closed the door.

  One hour later, after a meticulous inspection, Molloy found the tiny seam in his dining room window. He called a local glass company and arranged to have the window replaced.

  JAKE COULDN’T BELIEVE IT. It happened just like he had heard back in high school. How people got past blocks. He hadn’t been thinking about it at all. It just popped into his mind. Out of the blue.

  CHAPTER 76

  May 14, 2020, One Week Later

  TURGENEV WAS LOSING HIS patience. All he wanted was to assure Baker’s reelection. He assembled a team of experts to make it happen. He paid their fees, and that was it. He didn’t need—or want—to keep hearing from them. Yet, here they were, again. Gradsky and his weird middleman, Cipher.

  Worse still, the reason for their call was to alert him that Jake Klein had apparently broken into Gradsky’s home in Montreal. And, undoubtedly, Gradsky’s personal computer. Enough was enough.

  Back in November, when Klein was first brought to his attention, his initial thinking was to arrange for this nuisance Klein to be terminated. As his thinking ultimately developed, months later, he decided on a slightly different course of action. Instead of having Klein killed, he’d orchestrate a campaign to make him out to be the one who was going to rig the election. He would in essence kill two birds with one stone—stop Klein’s continuing interference, and deflect attention away from Russia as the true source of the election fraud.

  He and Baker quarreled ab
out the details, but the fake news campaign seemed to have worked very nicely. However, in order to make the deflection work, he had to recall Anya Lebedev back to Russia. If Klein were to draw attention away from Russia, it wouldn’t do for him to have a girlfriend who was a Russian foreign exchange student. It meant he’d no longer have Lebedev to spy on Klein, but that was a small price to pay.

  Nevertheless, Klein continued to be a nuisance. He had fulfilled his deflection purpose. While Turgenev was forced to tolerate—indeed preserve—the well-being of Gradsky and Cipher, the same was not the case with Klein. It was now time for him to address Mr. Klein in a more permanent manner, whether Baker liked it or not.

  CHAPTER 77

  May 21, 2020, One Week Later

  JAKE WAS CORNERED BY Abelson on the way into one of their classes. He was all business, and said they needed to talk.

  “Can’t it keep until after class?” Jake asked.

  “It can’t,” Abelson answered. “When you hear what I have to say, I think you’ll agree.”

  Abelson was silent, until they retreated to a small table and two chairs in the remote park-like area adjacent to the classroom building. Abelson then unloaded. “I thought I told you to lie low. What the hell have you been up to?”

  “Nothing. I have been lying low. Just going to classes and working on a computer program I’ve been designing. I swear, that’s it. What’s going on?”

  “You remember our asset, the one in Moscow who has been passing information to us in Israel? That Turgenev and Baker were planning to make you out as some perverted computer mastermind out to interfere with the November election in order to conceal the real culprit behind all of this—Russia?”

  “Are you kidding me? Do you think I would forget what they have done to me, and my family?”

  “Well, according to our source, you’ve done something to further piss Turgenev off, and now he has decided you have outlived your usefulness to him. He wants you terminated.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Jake asked.

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?” Abelson answered.

  “Other than it being kinda scary,” Jake said, “this seems like something that would only happen in some kind of an international spy novel.”

  “Turgenev kind of is out of an international spy novel. In that vein, let me tell you something even more scary,” Abelson said. “We decided things were getting too hot, and that we needed to bring our mole home to Israel. We have a fail-safe procedure to reach him every day. We’ve not been able to reach him now two days in a row. It looks like he’s been compromised. Seems he’s completely vanished—either gone underground, or worse. You need to stay put.”

  CHAPTER 78

  May 23, 2020, Two Days Later

  JAKE STEPPED OUT OF the shower, looked in the mirror, and wiped the shaving cream from his cheeks. He barely recognized the face that stared back at him.

  He had grown his now former beard to make himself look older, more … worldly. To cover up his youthful face where it had struggled to belong in the first place. In spite of his six-foot-plus wiry frame, whenever Jake tried to cultivate the coeds in his college classes, he had to overcome the impression that he was just some junior high school adolescent trying to score on the older ladies. The sandy-colored beard had definitely helped “age” him.

  Ironically, where he was now headed, he would be better served if he looked like a harmless adolescent who couldn’t possibly pose any threat to those he would be pursuing.

  He finished toweling off, donned his youthful blue jeans, tee shirt, knitted hoodie, and cross-training shoes, and double checked the contents of his duffle bag and backpack. He wouldn’t need more where he was heading. If he did, he had a wad of cash hidden in the false lining of his backpack. He calculated he would be gone about two months—ten weeks tops. Although, the campus “bubble” quarantine might preclude a return indefinitely. That was a chance he would have to take. He reread the note addressed to his roommate and left it on the desk, along with his keys to their apartment and his Honda Civic.

  He threw the backpack over his shoulder, grabbed the duffle bag, and donned a face mask. He stopped momentarily to double check that he had a box of extra face masks in his duffle bag, as well as a couple of bandannas if he ran low on masks. He took one last look around the apartment, sighed, brushed aside his second thoughts, and walked out the door, closing it behind him. He wondered how much more he might be closing behind him.

  TURGENEV BROKE THE SEAL and read the contents of the unusual envelope, the one that bore the handwritten words that had been brought to his attention:

  TO: PRESIDENT TURGENEV

  PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL

  CONTENTS FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

  FROM: JAKE KLEIN

  ADVISE ALERTING KREMLIN OF SENDER

  BEFORE POSSIBLY FAILING TO FORWARD

  AT EMBASSY’S PERIL

  Turgenev’s assistant had been informed of the existence of the sealed envelope and the strange cover message. The assistant scoffed, but knew better than not to bring the message to Turgenev’s immediate attention. With no outward show of emotion, Turgenev directed his assistant to instruct the embassy to determine the safety of the envelope—if possible, without opening it—and to then pouch it overnight. No one was to read or copy the contents of the envelope.

  The envelope arrived with the seal intact—his assistant also knew better than to disobey orders. He handed the unopened envelope to Turgenev and asked whether he should remain while Turgenev opened it.

  “Nyet, no, that won’t be necessary.”

  The assistant departed from Turgenev’s office.

  Turgenev had examined both sides of the envelope, it contained no other words. He confirmed to his own satisfaction that the seal was original and unbroken. He could not see what was inside the wrapper, but it wasn’t heavy. Even though it had been tested in the embassy before being placed in the pouch, he had wondered if the package might still contain anything physically dangerous—an explosive, or some form of deadly gas or powder.

  Turgenev knew that anyone else in his position would summon security personnel to unseal and open the object for him. Some leaders of other countries required that every one of their meals be sampled in their presence before eating—but not Turgenev. He would not allow himself to be intimidated in that fashion.

  He had put on a fresh set of his pandemic protection—a gas mask, a face shield and a pair of gloves. They won’t protect against an explosion, but perhaps some microscopic poison gas or powder.

  He had taken a razor blade and carefully preserved, but opened, the seal. No explosion. No gas. He turned the packet upside down. No powder spilled out. He removed the only contents, a single sheet of paper containing handwritten words that matched the handwriting on the envelope:

  5.21.2020

  MR. PRESIDENT:

  THIS IS BETWEEN YOU AND ME. ONE ON ONE. MANO-A-MANO. IF YOU CAN FIND AND TAKE ME DOWN,—I REPEAT ME—THEN MORE POWER TO YOU, AND YOUR SECRET INTENTIONS THAT I HAVE UNRAVELED WILL REMAIN YOUR SECRETS—ASSUMING NONE OF YOUR STAFF HAVE VIOLATED MY SEAL.

  HOWEVER, SHOULD YOU, OR ANYONE ON YOUR BEHALF, HARM—OR ATTEMPT TO HARM, CONTACT, OR EVEN APPROACH—ANY MEMBER OF MY FAMILY, OR ANY OF MY FRIENDS OR ACQUAINTANCES, I HAVE TAKEN IRREVERSIBLE STEPS TO ASSURE THAT YOUR SECRETS, AND YOUR PERSONAL INVOLVEMENT, WILL BE IMMEDIATELY RELEASED TO THE WORLD, INCLUDING A COPY OF THIS LETTER.

  IF YOU KEEP OUR CONTEST WHERE IT BELONGS, STRICTLY BETWEEN THE TWO OF US, THEN YOUR OBJECTIVES WILL NOT BE DEFEATED, UNLESS I PERSONALLY ACCOMPLISH THAT WHICH IS MY CLEAR INTENTION. IF YOU ARE ABLE TO PERSONALLY DEFEAT ME IN ANY WAY YOU CHOOSE BEFORE I SUCCEED, THEN YOUR OBJECTIVES WILL REMAIN SECRET AND WILL, NO DOUBT, PROVE SUCCESSFUL.

  IT SHOULD BE BENEATH YOU TO STOOP TO THREATENING MY FAMILY OR FRIENDS TO EXTORT ANY UNFAIR ADVANTAGE OVER ME. AGAIN, THIS SHOULD BE BETWEEN YOU AND ME—YOUR INTELLECT AGAINST MINE.

  I’M WILLING TO PLAY. ARE YOU? ARE YOU UP TO THE CHALLENGE?
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  JAKE KLEIN

  That mother fucking son of a bitch! How dare he think he can talk to me that way? Actually, in his position, he was damn clever, and perceptive. Exactly what I would have done. He’s cut me off at my knees. Preemptively extorted me before I could extort him. Kudos to the bastard. Let the games begin!

  CHAPTER 79

  May 28, 2020, Five Days Later

  JAKE COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS eyes. Just when he didn’t think things could sink any lower. But there it was, all over the news: the brutal May 25 death of George Floyd—and all of its aftermath. The protesting and public firestorm growing out of the infamous eight minute and forty-six second video came as no surprise to Jake, but its depth and magnitude did.

  Maybe in death, Floyd will serve a public benefit he certainly never did in life. At least if we can overlook those obnoxious looters disingenuously rationalizing their misdeeds in his name. And those who seek to justify such unlawful behavior with catchphrases such as “Social Injustice” and “Black Lives Matter”. Don’t all lives matter? The pendulum typically overreacts. Hopefully, it will ultimately settle and come to rest in a good place.

  “Amazing Floyd video and pictures,” Amir said to Jake. “Would expect in Russia, not U.S.”

  “There are bad people all over the world, Amir,” Jake said, “not just in your homeland. We have to try and focus on the good ones.”

  Jake’s mind wandered to the fake destination he and his roommate had conjured up for Turgenev and his thugs: Minneapolis, where Floyd coincidentally was killed. The thought of those goons searching for him in Minneapolis among the hordes of demonstrators marching in the streets at this historic moment in time complaining about bad cops is rather ironic, if not downright laughable—genuine bad cops, so to speak, right there in plain sight, among all those who were protesting all cops—the good with the bad.