Deep fake, p.14
Deep Fake, page 14
“You are all right?”
“Yes, I think so,” Arbogast croaked. Fortunately, he’d been wearing gloves—otherwise his palms would have been scraped raw. He tried to rise onto a knee, and was halfway there when two strong hands came to his aid, one under each armpit.
“Thank you, I—” before Arbogast could finish the words, he felt a sharp prick under his left armpit. It felt like a bee sting, but whatever it was, it dissipated quickly.
Still dazed, he tried to steady himself. He turned to face his benefactor, a big amorphous man in an overcoat and baseball cap, who said in accented English, “You are okay. Good night.” The man melded into the crowd and was gone.
Breathing in gasps, Arbogast began to get his bearings. He couldn’t say if the man who helped him up was the one who’d knocked him down, but he decided the point was moot. Gingerly, he moved toward the curb and, as hoped, quickly found a cab.
The drive to his Chevy Chase condo took fifteen minutes. He used the time to continue his self-assessment. Any lingering thoughts of dinner faded, and the prospect of blond escorts had fallen completely off his radar. His hip seemed better, yet he did feel a certain generalized discomfort. By the time the cab pulled in front of his building, he was strangely anxious. His chest felt tight and he was sweating beneath his jacket.
His building was a six-story affair, each floor containing four luxury apartments. Owing to its limited size, a coded entryway took the place of a doorman. He made his way to the elevator, sank the call button, and immediately faced more bad news. It appeared to be out of order.
Arbogast cursed under his breath and headed for the stairs. Because he lived on the top floor, and because he abhorred all forms of exercise, he’d only used the stairs twice before. He took his time, yet was sweating profusely when he reached the third-floor landing. By the time he reached the sixth, he was breathing in ragged gasps. His front door lay thirty feet away. It seemed like a mile. He put a hand on the wall, trying to steady himself as he moved, but was soon overcome by a rush of dizziness. That was when the real pain stuck.
Arbogast clutched his chest, his hand clawing at his overcoat, and collapsed in a great heap in the middle of the hall.
* * *
Arbogast was found twenty minutes later by a woman returning with her dog from “last call.” Seeing her neighbor collapsed and unresponsive, a shaken Mira Rosenbaum set down her Maltipoo, Prince, and dialed 911. The EMTs arrived twelve minutes later—it would have been sooner had they not been forced to take the stairs—and registered no signs of life in the immense body on the hallway floor. They went through the motions all the same, removing Arbogast’s coat and shirt, and made an honest effort to resuscitate him before yielding to the protocols of death on the scene.
At that point it was a matter of removing the body, which presented no small challenge—lifting three-hundred rolling pounds onto a transport gurney. To their relief, a policeman showed up and offered to help. Better yet, by the time Arbogast was loaded and secured, the elevator was again working.
The ambulance made its way to George Washington University Hospital with flashing lights, a few burps of the siren, but little sense of urgency. The same could be said for the emergency room doctor who certified Arbogast to be dead from what appeared to be a massive heart attack.
It would be another forty-eight hours before the cause of death was finalized by the city’s last responder, the D.C. medical examiner. The ME reviewed an incident report that could not have been more telling: one white male, fifty-eight years old, who weighed twice what he should have, and who, in the minutes before his death, had climbed five flights of stairs while deeply intoxicated. The death certificate that bookended the life of Henry Arbogast was little different from a hundred others the ME had signed that year.
IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF DEATH: Myocardial infarction
UNDERLYING CAUSES: Coronary artery disease, morbid obesity
Straightforward as it all seemed, there were three points of interest that might have given the medical examiner pause had he known of them. The first involved a tiny puncture wound deep in a fatty fold of Arbogast’s left armpit. As a rule, it was his duty to seek out such evidences, but in this case the obesity of the victim, perhaps combined with the ME’s predisposed thought process and an impending dinner date, left the needle mark undetected.
The examiner could never had been held responsible for the second missed detail—a malware, inserted into the building elevator’s control software, that had disabled the lift for precisely thirty-two minutes after Arbogast arrived.
The third discrepancy, too, would have necessitated an investigation far beyond any ordinary postmortem. It involved the existence of an account in a Bahamian bank into which an eight-figure deposit had recently been stuffed. As it turned out, this final clue was perishable: by means that not even the bank’s executives understood, the account was zeroed out in an electronic transfer the day after Arbogast’s passing. The bankers were justifiably alarmed, but relief came some months later when they learned that Arbogast’s estate made no mention of the transfer, or for that matter, the very existence of the account. Very quietly, the account was closed and expunged from the bank’s records. No further questions would ever be asked.
28
TRAPPED IN THE BELLY
The room was silent save for the hum of cooling fans venting heat from rows of computers. The air was stagnant, sterile. All hints of the outdoors—pollen, evergreen, pollutants—had been scrubbed away by a high-volume, hospital-certified HEPA filtration system. Glare-free, indirect lighting gave the workspace a clinical aura, even if the effect was ruined by a surfing poster taped to one wall, a lone rider tubed in a near-perfect wave—Atticus’s contribution to the decor.
After spending the previous afternoon logging parameters for the new search, Claire had gone home to let EPIC work overnight. Certain results would come quickly, yet others were more nuanced, requiring the system to manipulate multiple databases and, at times, wait for access authorizations from humans at the host agencies. More critically for Claire, it gave her a shot at a decent night’s sleep.
She returned at nine in the morning to find the lab empty. Atticus, she knew, had been here much of the night programming his own work—he was a classic backside-of-the-clock geek. He’d be home sleeping now, and if he returned before noon Claire would be surprised. Not by chance, this gave her the morning to work alone. In truth, she wished Atticus was here. Alone in the great room, surrounded by banks of soulless hardware, she felt like Jonah trapped in the belly of some great technological whale.
When the results began filling her monitor, Claire immediately saw a problem: having set broad parameters, she was faced with prioritizing nearly six hundred files EPIC had unearthed overnight. Fortunately, this, in microcosm, was the feat for which the system had been designed—to parse oceans of data into something manageable. Or as Atticus carelessly termed it, to cut through the “byte noise.”
She set to her task, narrowing search fields and building new constraints. Bryce’s college transcripts and military records were set aside, along with bank accounts and financial information. Any of that could prove relevant, but for the moment it was little more than clutter that diverted from the central question. Was Bryce seeing another woman?
It occurred to Claire that the search she was performing had recently been echoed by two other D.C. establishments. The Democratic Party would be mining in earnest, exhuming all the dirt they could on a rising Republican star. For two reasons she doubted they would find much. First was that the Republicans would have done their own search prior to backing Bryce. The second was even more persuasive and, uncharacteristically for Claire, completely unanalytical: she had known Bryce Ridgeway half her life, and knew him to be beyond reproach.
The trouble was, she knew Sarah even more intimately than Bryce. If her friend had doubts, there was something behind them. She found herself navigating an awkward crosscurrent of loyalties, and not for the first time, Claire wondered if she was doing the right thing by leveraging the colossus that was EPIC.
The media, of course, would also be scrutinizing Bryce, yet a search using EPIC would make any other pale. She and her team had built a metadata research engine that was without parallel on Earth. The greatest challenge to its inception had not been software design, but rather gaining pathways to an array of highly classified government networks. It necessitated a nightmarish web of legal authorizations, disclaimers, and consent agreements. Through sheer force of will Claire had pushed it all through.
The project was backed by the DOD in the name of cyber research. The principal boundary, which she’d always maintained to a fault, was that no product of EPIC could leave the building. So restricted, Claire and her team had been granted unprecedented freedoms. Privacy laws that had long hampered the military and intelligence agencies, in an increasingly net-centric world, were sidestepped for one carefully crafted experiment.
Without warrants, EPIC could initiate wiretaps and track mobile phones. It could co-opt public and private CCTV networks to monitor cameras, and even recover backdated video. It could monitor banking transactions and trace offshore accounts, at least to the limits of the abilities of the NSA, CIA, and FBI—which was to say, virtually without bounds. The system could command the nation’s intelligence agencies to initiate electronic searches, perform targeted intrusions, and in certain test cases, even insert manipulated data or take control of hardware.
It was cutting-edge work that, if successful, could revolutionize cyber warfare, bringing an information arsenal to the fingertips of a select few: the president, spymasters, or conceivably unique cyber-enabled Special Forces operators. To the nation’s leadership, EPIC was the proving ground for the future of intelligence gathering and warfare. To Claire, however, it was something else altogether. It was a matter of pushing science to the limit.
That is, until today.
* * *
Alves was on the phone when Burke came into the office. He assumed she was working one of their new cases, a money laundering operation tied to an Atlantic City casino.
As he pulled up a chair and waited, he noticed a copy of the Washington Post on their shared desk. Alves read the Post most days—not because she cared about politics, but because, in her words, “No self-respecting FBI agent can work D.C. without keeping an eye on the circus.”
She finally ended her call. Burke looked at her, expecting an update on Atlantic City. It didn’t come.
“What?” he asked.
She nudged the newspaper toward him. “Short article, bottom right.”
He read the headline. “Henry Arbogast? Head of the RNC?”
“That’s the one.”
“He died yesterday.”
Alves waited.
“And this is important because…?”
“A few weeks ago, it was Arbogast who decided to put Congressman Bryce Ridgeway on a rocket to the stars.”
The two looked at each other blankly, an out-of-synch comedy team. “Really? He’s the one who convinced Ridgeway to run?”
“If you read the Post you would understand. Nobody but Arbogast could have punched his ticket. I figure he looked at the cast of duds already in the race and saw trouble. Then he saw the video from the Watergate, like we all did, and recognized a star in the making. Guys like Arbogast, that’s what they do. They spot talent, and when they find it, they act. He probably bundled everything together for a turnkey campaign—manager, pollsters, strategies. Arbogast was a kingmaker.”
Burke thought about it. “How did he die?”
“According to the article, natural causes.”
This time Burke waited.
“I know, it’s pretty vague, so I looked into it.”
“That’s the call you were on? Just now?”
“I have a friend who has a friend at the medical examiner’s office. Apparently Arbogast had a heart attack. He’d just gotten home from a big dinner with some lobbyists. The elevator in his building was broken, so he had to use the stairs. He was a big guy … really big. Made it to the sixth-floor hallway and keeled over. A neighbor walking her dog found him pancaked in the hall. He was already in first stages of rigor by the time the EMTs arrived.”
He shot her a skeptical look. “So why are we talking about this?”
Alves frowned.
Burke couldn’t deny it—he felt the scratch as well. Another nagging coincidence. “Bad luck,” he said, more to himself than to Alves. “Sounds like the guy was a heart explosion waiting to happen.”
Alves said nothing.
He leaned back in his squeaky roller chair and put his hands on the armrests. Burke twisted side to side a few times before asking, “Where’s our boy now?”
“Congressman Ridgeway?”
He gave her a pained look.
“Louisiana, maybe? I think South Carolina later today. It’ll be that way pretty much until November. He’s a hard man to get hold of.”
“Even if I could reach him, I’m not sure what I’d say.”
“Me neither,” Alves admitted. “It just seems … I dunno … weird how fast things happened for him.”
Burke looked at the Washington Post sitting on the desk. Then he looked at his partner. “Huh.”
29
THE FIRST HINT OF A PROBLEM
Claire began with what she knew. Sarah had provided the time and date of the suspicious text she’d seen, and harvesting phone records was EPIC’s version of child’s play. Claire quickly found the text in question: Come to our place this morning. Have something special for you.
Then Bryce’s reply: Will try.
Claire recovered every available message with that contact, and found threads going back seven months. She noted there were no voice dials to the same number which, if it had indeed been a mistress, would have been expected. The other texts were no less insipid than the original.
Thursday at 2.
New furniture arrived.
Back in one week.
On its face the string sounded more administrative than romantic—to the point that it seemed even more suspicious. The contact on Bryce’s phone, designated only as AR, showed no identifying information beyond the phone number. More damningly, when EPIC performed a search on the number it hit roadblocks. Owing to encryption and some unusual security protocols, the owner could not easily be identified or located. Even the world’s best cyber trackers could be stymied by solid encryption, or at the very least delayed. As if thinking along the same lines, the overseeing agency that had supplied the phone information—NSA, Claire imagined—conveniently offered a 53.6% probability that, if tasked and given enough time, it could defeat the encryption to locate the phone and identify its user.
A better than even chance, Claire thought, but not much. And who knows how long it would take.
Having hit a cul-de-sac with the phone number, she switched to tracking Bryce himself. His phone was the primary reference, but that could be augmented by other discrete sources. The most glaringly simple was his car—the Tesla Model 3 was wired to the hilt with connectivity. Aside from a record of its continuously transmitted GPS position, Bryce’s arrivals to and departures from the Rayburn House Office Building were confirmed by security cameras at the House Members parking garage. His car’s license plate had been captured on hundreds of municipal traffic cameras, and passes through toll stations were also recorded.
Car and phone data were only the beginning. Systems accessible to EPIC included nearly half the world’s public and private CCTV networks. By combining facial recognition software with the CIA’s latest application—a somatic-based software that classified individuals through body shape and movement—EPIC identified Bryce at no fewer than three hundred locations, everywhere from the National Air and Space Museum to a Target checkout counter in Fairfax. There were inevitably blanks and gaps in the trail, along with three outlier hits that the system purged via quality assurance filtering. The end result, however, was rock-solid: over a thousand verifiable location plots for Congressman Bryce Ridgeway.
The next phase was where EPIC truly shined. Data from these disparate sources were fused, and in a matter of minutes Claire was looking at a nearly faultless log of Bryce’s movements for the last sixty days. The tapestry could be displayed in any number of ways. Her first instinct was to go with a map, yet because he’d been traveling extensively in the last month, the entire United States was presented. Claire adjusted the timeline, limiting the window of movement to the days before he’d hit the campaign trail.
She saw the expected clusters converge, the most prominent being his home and his office in the Rayburn building. Secondary were a few regular lunchtime haunts, and the Capitol building itself. Finally came the outliers. She saw a visit to a Virginia VFW post, another to the George Washington University conference center. On Veterans Day, the fateful half hour at the Watergate Hotel was recorded, followed by George Washington University Hospital and the Metropolitan Police’s 2nd District Headquarters. Later that week, she noticed two visits to the downtown Mayflower Hotel. This gave Claire pause, but she pressed onward.
The next step was to put it all in motion. Claire wheeled her roller chair sideways in the U-shaped workstation to address a different monitor. She reconfigured the output, arranging things chronologically, and watched Bryce’s computed position move across a map. The days progressed at a rate of ten seconds per hour. She watched him go for a run, an Apple Watch tracking his progress faithfully. After getting home, he took a shower, EPIC registering an uptick in the web-enabled water meter, and shortly thereafter a rise in gas use that correlated to a recharging hot water heater. These were only inferences on EPIC’s part, but delivered with a high level of confidence based on millions of data points taken from regional utility usage—a new feature created by Atticus. After the shower, a Wi-Fi-enabled Keurig brewed two cups of something—technology had its limits—before Bryce left for work. His car and phone were tracked faithfully to a morning meeting at the Longworth House Office Building, and there his face and stride were captured by no fewer than six cameras.
