Ghosts in the Machine (A David and Martin Yerxa Thriller - Book 3)

by Ed Markham

  “The encephalitis antibodies you found,” David asked him. “Did you identify the specific antigens that would explain their presence?”

  The medical examiner’s eyes cut briefly to Dean, who sat stock still in her chair. He turned his attention to David and said, “We compared the antibodies to those known influenza strains that have so far turned up this season, but did not find a match. Of course, that is not surprising, considering the number of encephalitis antigens present in an area this densely populated.”

  David considered Takagi for a moment, and then turned to Dean. “Would you please give me a minute alone with Dr. Takagi?” He looked at his father and added, “You too, Pop.”

  Martin caught the look in his son’s eyes and didn’t protest. Dean didn’t go so quietly.

  “Excuse me?” she said, looking affronted.

  “Yes, that’s exactly right,” he said. “I’d like you to excuse yourself for a moment so I can speak privately with Dr. Takagi.”

  Dean seemed to consider how bent out of shape she wanted to get about this request. She appeared on the verge of more forceful objections, but then something in her unclenched and she stood up abruptly from the table.

  David watched as she and his father left the room. When they’d gone, he turned to Takagi and said, “I can see you shared some of the details of your report with Dean before we arrived here, and that she asked you not to highlight your incomplete analysis of the encephalitis antibodies.”

  The medical examiner regarded David thoughtfully for a few seconds, and then inclined his head in acknowledgment.

  “Is there anything else she asked you to downplay or withhold while speaking with us?”

  “No,” Takagi said.

  David regarded him closely for a moment before handing him a card bearing his name and cell phone number. “The deputy director of the FBI has placed me in charge of this investigation. From now on, you will communicate with me directly, and you will report your findings to me before you pass them on to Section Chief Dean or members of her team. Are we clear?” There was no anger or annoyance in his voice.

  Takagi looked at his card for a moment, and then said, “Yes we’re clear.” He paused, and then began to add, “Agent Yerxa, I apologize if—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” David said. “As long as we understand each other going forward, it’s all forgotten.”

  He thanked Takagi and excused himself to join his father and Dean outside the medical examiner’s office.

  .

  Chapter 8

  Andrea Dean was in David’s face the moment he left Takagi’s office.

  “What the hell was that about?” she said, her eyes wide with anger. “You don’t dismiss me from a room, you arrogant shit. This is my region and my office.”

  Behind her, David could see his father shooting him an amused look that said, “You’ve got her attention now.”

  David could tell Dean had been building up a head of steam since he and his father had arrived in town, and he decided to let her blow some of it off. He did not reply to her questions, and she accepted his silence as license to explain to him that she was positioned several rungs above him on the FBI’s leadership ladder.

  When she had finally finished, David said, “I understand all that.”

  Looking at Andrea Dean, he thought he understood much more as well. He understood she had been frustrated with his insertion into the lead role of an investigation that was in her jurisdiction, and so she had tried to retain some control over the investigation’s course. That action—like most taken during moments of frustration—had been imprudent.

  He spoke to her soberly. “In answer to your question, that was about making sure Dr. Takagi understands who is in charge of this investigation. I wanted him to know that if he or anyone else working on this withholds information from me again, there will be repercussions.”

  He paused, and Dean had the good sense not to fill the silence—though he could see her thoughts chasing each other across her face.

  He went on, “I understand why you feel the way you feel. My father made it clear we share your reservations. But those reservations don’t change the fact that I’ve been assigned as lead on this investigation. So I have to tell you bluntly that if you impede my work in any way from here on out, we’re going to have a problem. I understand and respect that you’re my superior, but we’re still going to have a problem.”

  She pursed her lips and regarded him closely, her anger appearing to subside as she recognized the potential gravity of her decision to obstruct the investigative path of the deputy director’s handpicked agent. After a long pause, she said, “Am I to take it we don’t have a problem now?”

  He shook his head. “What we have now is a misunderstanding. Nothing more. I’d rather put it behind us and move forward.”

  Again, she took a moment to size him up. “All right,” she said. “But I hope our understanding encompasses the fact that I’m section chief of the Northern California office, and your investigation is taking place under my oversight. You’ll have autonomy to conduct your work as you see fit, but I’ll expect regular reports on your progress. I’m sure Carl Wainbridge would demand nothing less.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  Martin, who had observed this exchange first with bemusement and then with a smile of comprehension, said, “Now that we’re all clear on chain of command and jurisdictions, I’d like to find out more about this security team Pool had—and the one who was killed.”

  Dean nodded, and the three of them made their way back outside and into the Bureau’s waiting SUV. As they maneuvered the busy San Francisco streets on their way to the Bureau’s field office on Golden Gate Avenue, she explained to them the specifics of Garrison Pool’s private security detail.

  “He had a regular team of six men, headed by Bowie—the murdered former agent—and contracted through a firm called GrayShield,” she said.

  “Are they popular among Pool’s set?” Martin asked her.

  She nodded. “But before you ask, no, they didn’t handle Brad Ketchner’s security.”

  “Who did?” David asked her.

  “He hired his own people,” she said. “Independent contractors not affiliated until they joined his team. By all accounts, Ketchner was a micromanager to the extreme, and he didn’t like the idea of a private firm vetting and selecting the people he would have to deal with.”

  “Have any of these guys given us something useful?” Martin asked. “A lead maybe? Considering Ketchner and Pool were pals, I’d assume checking out people they both know could focus our efforts.”

  “I wouldn’t say pals,” Dean said. “Business associates, sure. But not close friends. From what my people have told me, Ketchner and Pool had contrasting personalities. This is an oversimplification, but Pool is old East Coast money, and it seems he regarded Ketchner as a parvenu.”

  David could see Pool’s pretension touched an egalitarian nerve with Dean.

  She added, “I agree we’ll want to explore their connections. But I’m not sure how far that will take us. When you inhabit the world these people live in—especially in an insular place like Silicon Valley—social circles grow very small. You could pluck almost any two people—venture capitalists or chief creative officers, or whatever these company heads are calling themselves these days—and you’d find significant ties between them, either personal or professional.”

  “Well somebody plucked these two,” Martin said. “Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I’m going to assume their business relationship had something to do with that until I learn otherwise.”

  .

  Chapter 9

  “This is us,” Dean said as their Suburban pulled up in front of a twenty-story slab of windows and vertically oriented cement.

  While the outside of the building appeared dated, the interior offices of the Bureau’s Northern California branch felt open and contemporary compared to what David was used to back at Quantico. Glass separate
d the few offices and conference rooms from the main workspace, which was segmented into four-desk cubicle pods.

  Dean led them past these pods to one of the conference rooms, where David could see people either conversing with one another or working on laptops.

  “I thought you’d be comfortable setting up a kind of command center in one of these rooms,” she said to David.

  He nodded. “This is perfect.”

  As they entered, the assembled agents—three men and two women—stopped what they were doing and gave Dean their attention. As she had with Takagi, she introduced David and Martin as the “special agents in charge of this investigation”—though this time there was considerably less annoyance in her voice, David noticed.

  “You report to them, not to me,” she added, holding David’s eyes for a beat when she’d finished speaking.

  He nodded to show her he appreciated her emphasis of this point.

  After introductions and areas of specialty had been established, Martin took a seat at the table while David paced near its head.

  One of the agents, a woman named Megan Brandt, had explained that she was the San Francisco office’s liaison with Ketchner and Pool’s private security details. David asked her, “What do Ketchner’s people say about his disappearance?”

  Brandt looked to be in her late thirties. Her jaw-length black-brown hair contained a few strands of gray, and she had the kind of frank, forthright demeanor that David appreciated.

  As she replied to his question, she did not fidget or consult the laptop in front of her. “He had dinner here in San Francisco with a college friend—a woman named Brittany Taylor. He chose to drive himself that evening, and he told his team he didn’t want them supervising him during his time in the city. He had tracking devices in both his phone and his Tesla, but he switched those systems off shortly after departing the restaurant, which we know he left alone.”

  “How do you know that?” Martin asked her.

  Brandt replied, “Both Taylor and the valet working that night said Ketchner left by himself, and we’ve confirmed this from the street camera footage. We know he switched off his personal tracking services shortly before crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. We kept up with him using street cams, but lost him near Sausalito.”

  “Was it normal for him to leave his personal security grid like that?” David asked her.

  Brandt waggled her hand. “It wasn’t a weekly occurrence, but his team told us it happened a couple times a month—sometimes more, sometimes less. So not that atypical for him.”

  “Did they have an explanation for it on that particular night?”

  She shook her head. “Not for them to wonder why. Their boss wanted to be invisible, so he was invisible.”

  “Where did his Tesla turn up?” Martin asked her.

  “Parked on a residential road in Tamalpais-Homestead, but that was nearly forty-eight hours after he had gone missing. We haven’t been able to find any footage of him entering or leaving the area, but then there aren’t many street cameras up there. No one in the neighborhood remembers seeing him or anyone else park the car.”

  “Friends or people he knew in that neighborhood?” David asked.

  “Not that we’ve been able to identify."

  After another ten minutes of hashing out the specifics of Ketchner’s disappearance, they moved on to Pool’s. The details were slightly different, but the result was the same. Garrison Pool had disengaged his security team’s ability to track his whereabouts. Detectives identified his vehicle, which contained his phone, in the Waddell Creek State Park visitors’ lot closest to the spot where Ketchner’s body had been discovered.

  “What do we make of that?” Martin asked Brandt.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “Of course, we checked Pool’s vehicle for signs of Ketchner. We found none. What we did find was a lot of used tissue. Talking with Pool’s wife, she told us he’d been pretty sick leading up to the date of his disappearance.”

  “What else did Pool’s wife have to say?” David asked her.

  “Not much. But to this point we’ve only conducted a cursory interview with her.”

  “We’d like to follow up with her personally,” he said. “This afternoon, if possible.”

  “Face to face?”

  David nodded, and Brandt told him she would set up the interview.

  She stood and started to leave the room, but a loud moan stopped her cold.

  .

  Chapter 10

  At first, David thought the noise was digital reverb—the feedback from a microphone held too close to a speaker. But then the sound consolidated and deepened into something more terrifyingly sentient—somehow both human and animal.

  Standing up from the conference table, he dropped a hand to his weapon and searched the office space for the source of the moaning. But his eyes found only the frightened faces of Brandt, his father, and the other assembled agents. One of these agents—a man who had introduced himself as Guy Walker, the office’s resident tech industry expert—had his eyes plastered to the screen of a laptop.

  “Oh my god,” Walker mouthed. His expression was stricken, and he was furiously banging keys on his computer.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the noise died away.

  David walked quickly to the other side of the conference table so he could look at Walker’s computer.

  On the screen he saw a bare room—gray featureless floor, white walls. The room contained a single bed, on which a man lay writhing. The man was wearing a strait jacket, which was harnessed to the bed’s posts in a way that allowed him to move, but only a foot or two in each direction. He thrust his hips and stomach into the air as his head thrashed from side to side. A ball gag muffled his cries—turning them from shrieks into moans.

  Despite the gag, David could see that spittle was expectorating from between the man’s forced-apart lips. Leaning toward the screen, he realized the images he was looking at were overexposed and monochromatic, and very likely taken using a night-vision lens.

  “What is this?” he asked, addressing Walker without moving his eyes away from the computer screen.

  “I don’t know,” the frightened agent said. He was rubbing a hand furiously against his brow, turning it red. “It just came up without warning. I tried turning it down, but that didn’t do anything, so I hit mute to kill the audio.”

  Martin, Brandt, and the other agents in the room had joined David at Walker’s side, and they all watched as the man on the bed continued to convulse and pull fruitlessly against his restraints.

  After a few seconds, the video faded to black. In its place appeared the words:

  MEN GO MAD IN HERDS. BREAK FREE, AND SEE AGAIN WITH YOUR OWN EYES.

  As the words hung suspended in the middle of the computer screen, David asked Walker, “What prompted this?”

  “I have no idea,” he replied. He reached forward and moved his finger on his track pad, but nothing happened. His screen remained frozen.

  “What were you doing when this came up?”

  As David spoke, Walker clicked on his mouse pad, and the words faded to reveal the landing page for Ketchy.com.

  “I was going here,” Walker said. He tapped on his laptop screen. “Right before that video popped up, I’d clicked on the bookmark for Ketchy’s search page.”

  “Click it again,” David said.

  Walker did as he was told, and the landing page for Ketchy.com refreshed itself. The video of the restrained man did not restart.

  David looked around the room and saw Brandt’s laptop sitting open at the other end of the conference table. He walked to it and navigated the browser to Ketchy.com. For the second time, the relative tranquility of the FBI’s San Francisco office was obliterated by distortion-soaked moans.

  David tried to turn down the laptop’s volume, but as Walker had said, the clamor would not be calmed. Rather than muting the laptop, David put hands up to his ears to dampen the noise. He wanted to hear it all the
way through. As he listened, he leaned toward the laptop’s screen, focusing on the man’s face.

  He couldn’t be sure, but the man in the straightjacket looked like Bradley Ketchner.

  .

  Chapter 11

  When the video ended and the accompanying MEN GO MAD IN HERDS message had faded to reveal the Ketchy landing page, David stood back from Brandt’s laptop. Outside the conference room, he could hear the already familiar moans emanating from other computers elsewhere in the building.

  Turning to the other agents in the room, he asked, “Does the person in that video resemble anyone to you?”

  Walker nodded, and Brandt—who had moved to David’s side as he reviewed the video on her computer—said without hesitating, “That was Brad Ketchner.”

  After a long silence, David asked her, “Who’s head of CITU for this office?”

  CITU stood for Communication and Information Technology Unit, which was the group that handled the collection and analysis of any cellular or digital data related to an investigation.

  “Wes Harris,” Walker said.

  “Where’s Wes’s office?” David asked him.

  Walker led David and Martin out of the conference room and across the main office area to one of windowless rooms adjacent to the elevators.

  The space was small and cluttered with laptops, desktop towers, and miscellaneous computer equipment.

  Wes Harris was clean-shaven and rail thin. He sat wedged between the back wall of the office and his desk, which held four monitors.

  “Leave me alone, I’m working on it,” Harris said, though no one had asked him a question.