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

by Ed Markham

  Amelia Pool sat in an upholstered chair at the head of a glass-topped table, her arms folded tightly across her chest. She did not attempt to smile or exchange pleasantries with David and Martin as they sat down.

  “You’re not dressed like the other FBI agents,” she said when they’d taken their seats. Her voice and expression were not admonishing; she seemed merely to be making an observation.

  “Work your way up the ladder far enough and eventually they let you hang up the suit,” Martin said, smiling kindly at her.

  David noticed that, for once, his father had tempered the volume of his voice. He was grateful for it. Amelia Pool was clearly a woman in a state of deep distress; there were gray-blue circles under her brown eyes, and her lips were dry and broken open in places as though she had been chewing them incessantly. David thought she looked like an aging beauty queen—a former stunner whose shape and looks time had smudged, though it didn’t require much imagination to see how lovely she had once been.

  She looked from him to Martin and said, “You two look very much alike.”

  “That’s not a very nice thing to say to my son,” Martin said.

  She managed a wan smile and withdrew a tissue from the sleeve of her sweater. As she dabbed at her nose, she said, “What can I do to help you find Gary?”

  “Let’s start with the last time you spoke with him,” David said.

  She returned the tissue to her sleeve and said, “That was the night before he disappeared. He’d had a cold, and he had been sleeping in one of our guest bedrooms. He wasn’t feeling well, so he’d gone to bed early. Around eight-thirty I think.”

  They worked their way back through the evening and the previous week. Amelia Pool said her husband had started to feel under the weather sometime on Thursday. “He had a fever and a stomach ache, and was very tired,” she said. She smiled and shook her head. “It put him in a rotten mood. He’s always been such a baby when he catches something.”

  “Anything else that might have fouled his mood?” Martin asked her. “Anything he seemed agitated about?”

  She ran a hand through her golden hair before re-crossing her arms over her chest. “Honestly, nothing comes to mind. Of course he was anxious about Bradley’s disappearance. But so was the whole country.” Her mouth twisted up into a pained wince. “It’s so awful, that video today.” Tears filled her eyes, and again she withdrew the tissue from her sweater sleeve.

  “What had he said to you about that?” Martin asked. “About Brad Ketchner’s disappearance?”

  She stared at the tissue in her hands for a moment. “Really not a lot, apart from the fact that it wasn’t like Bradley—to disappear like that.”

  “Did he seem concerned that anyone might want to harm Mr. Ketchner?” David asked her.

  “Harm him?” she said, raising her eyebrows. She considered this for a moment. “You mean physically harm him?”

  David could see where her thoughts were headed. “Not necessarily,” he said. “But maybe professionally, or financially. Anyone who Mr. Ketchner—or your husband and Mr. Ketchner—might have considered an adversary?”

  “Oh, Gary and Bradley had plenty of adversaries. I mean, they’re leaders in a very competitive industry.” She furrowed her brow. “You know, your putting it like that—that word adversary—the first person who popped into my head was Kirill.”

  “Kirill?” Martin asked, looking confused.

  She nodded. “Kirill what’s-his-name—something Eastern European and vulgar sounding.” She paused to think. “Musgov. Or Mozgov. Something like that.”

  “Who is he?” David asked her.

  She pruned her lips at them. “You mean you don’t know Kirill? He’s some hacker turned technology writer—or I suppose journalist is the appropriate term. He’s the one who hates Silicon Valley and thinks the Internet is inherently evil. The one who called Brad ‘the antichrist.’ That Kirill.”

  .

  Chapter 15

  The bartender set down their drinks—a beer for David and a George Dickel on the rocks for Martin. Each man took a swallow.

  Martin smacked his lips contentedly. “Your old man needed that.”

  It was just after midnight. Including the change in time zones, they’d both been up for more than twenty hours. Sleep would come easily, David knew, but his father had insisted on a nightcap “to take the edge off.”

  After meeting with Amelia Pool, the two of them had returned to the Bureau’s San Francisco office. They’d asked Walker what he knew about Kirill Mozgov—the tech journalist and Silicon Valley naysayer Pool’s wife had mentioned. Walker had informed them that Mozgov was something of a celebrity, and that his guiding philosophy was that the Internet was a net harm to civilization. Walker also told them Mozgov was especially critical of those dot-com business owners and entrepreneurs who tried to present their work as somehow benevolent, or even humanitarian.

  “Mozgov’s a reformed hacker,” Walker had said. “He’s also a flamethrower and an antagonist in a place where very few journalists are critical of these tech companies and their owners. And I can understand some of his vitriol. A few of these guys—and Ketchner was one of the most prominent—act like they’re saving the world. They’re certainly changing it. But Mozgov rejects and belittles the language they use to describe their products and their intentions.”

  “Sounds like my kind of guy,” Martin had said.

  “Who does he write for?” David had asked Walker.

  “He writes a column for The Digital Times, and he sends out a weekly newsletter that’s pretty popular. It’s partly a kind of tech industry gossip rag, but it’s also very respected and influential. He’s credible, and he’s privy to a lot of inside information.”

  David had asked Walker to set up a meeting with Mozgov for first thing the following morning. He and his father had then met with Brandt and a few of their other team members to go over Ketchner and Pool’s email and phone records.

  Brandt told them, “On Martin’s suggestion we looked for calls to or from doctors. We turned up a few between Ketchner and his physician, who told us Ketchner had been displaying flu-like symptoms for a couple days before his disappearance. He said that’s been going around, so it didn’t alarm him.”

  “What else?” Martin asked her.

  “Both Ketchner and Pool attended the same event on May fifth,” she said. “Some kind of ideas summit”—as she said this, she made air quotes around “ideas summit”—“hosted by a prominent Stanford neuroscientist named Vince Beatrice.”

  “What’s an ideas summit?” Martin had asked her.

  “It’s a dressed-up name for a very exclusive industry seminar,” she said. Liberally employing more air quotes, she said, “So-called thought leaders explain to each other and the rest of us how they’re going to save the world through the latest gadget or app. Ketchner was the headliner. One or two other chief visionary officers—another industry euphemism—also spoke, along with the Stanford professor who hosted the event. Pool was just an attendee, but that’s the last time we can put them together.”

  “Do we have a full guest list?” David asked her.

  Brandt had said she would pull one together for them.

  Now David sat back in his chair and regarded his beer, though he wasn’t really seeing it. Behind his eyes, images of Brad Ketchner—straightjacketed and writhing—were playing in his head.

  “What are you thinking about?” Martin asked him.

  David took a swallow of his beer. “I’m thinking about that video of Brad Ketchner.”

  His father sighed through his nose, and then winced as he sipped his drink. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.” He set down his whisky. “Actually, that’s not true. I’ve seen something like that.”

  “You said something to that effect earlier,” David pointed out. “Tell me.”

  Martin was silent for a time. “It was when I was with the engineers in Vietnam—some little village we worked our way through.
” He squinted at the bottles lined up behind the bar, his memory working. “We didn’t turn up any Viet Cong, and the locals we ran into were calm while we searched their properties, all except for one hut they had kind of barricaded. They waved us away when we tried to enter, which spooked us and might have gotten a couple people killed if not for our translator. He told us the people were trying to protect us from what was inside.” He paused and took another swallow of his whisky. “When we finally got in we found a kid caged up like some kind of animal. And that’s exactly how he was acting—like a wild animal, snarling and shrieking at us and drooling all over the place. The villagers all seemed scared shitless that we were anywhere near him, and they kept saying the same thing over and over again—something I couldn’t understand but that I’ve never forgotten. It sounded like mar-vin kwi thu. They kept saying it over and over again—mar-vin kwi thu, mar-vin kwi thu—and our interpreter said it meant something like the black beast.” He paused and shook his head. “Shit, I haven’t thought about this in years. But it haunted me at the time. Mar-vin kwi thu. Really scared the shit out of all of us, to be honest. And what we saw today—the way Ketchner was acting—something about it reminded me of the caged kid in the village.”

  For a while neither man spoke. They just sat and sipped at their drinks, letting their weary minds unfold and organize the day’s events. When Martin had finished his whisky, he crossed his arms and furrowed his brow. “I’m too tired to make sense of anything right now,” he said, “but I still don’t understand what the hell we’re doing here working this case.” He put a hand on David’s shoulder and said he was going up to his room to sleep.

  When he had gone, David withdrew his phone and called Lauren. He remembered only after he heard the sleep in her voice that it was three A.M. back in Northern Virginia.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be,” she answered. “When a phone call wakes you up in the middle of the night . . . I’m just relieved you’re not dead.”

  “You’re not getting out of this engagement that easily,” he said.

  “Give me the update.”

  He filled her in on his day. When he’d finished, she said, “We’ve all been talking about it here. No one gets why you and Martin are out there.”

  “It’s hard to work out.”

  “And the NSA invasion? Some of our people here said they saw them rolling into CITU like they were commandeering the whole lab. There’s no way they do that without Reilly and the other higher-ups’ say-so, which I can’t believe they’d get. Just a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense.”

  “I agree,” he said.

  David related to her his tacit instruction to Omar Ghafari to keep working on the Ketchy auto-download and to contact him through private channels.

  Lauren was quiet a moment before replying. “Listen, David. Be careful all right?”

  When he didn’t answer right away, she added, “I know that worked out once—your staying involved when you were expressly told to take a seat. And I know you’re always going to do what you think is best. Just be careful.”

  He felt a rush of annoyance, but it subsided quickly as he realized it was the day’s fatigue working on him. “I’ll be careful,” he said to her.

  “Good. Now I have to go to bed. We can talk tomorrow about all the wedding details you and your dad worked out on your flight out.”

  He smiled. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  When Lauren had hung up, he lifted his glass off the bar and examined the amber glow of what remained of his beer. As he swallowed it, he saw the news programs on the televisions behind the bar were broadcasting video of the bound and shrieking man above the words, “FRIENDS, RELATIVES CLAIM VIDEO IS OF KETCHNER.”

  He turned away from the television, his blood turning cold despite the beer. He made his way upstairs to his room. It would be a very early morning, he knew.

  .

  TUESDAY, MAY 4

  Chapter 16

  Kirill Mozgov had a small, round, nearly bald head on top of which he had perched a pair of black horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

  His face was densely carpeted with dark stubble, through which it was only just possible for David to make out the smirking shape of Mozgov’s mouth.

  “You’re lucky I don’t have a deadline this morning,” Mozgov said. “That’s a rarity.”

  “Good things happen to good people,” Martin said, returning the man’s smirk with an amused grin. “And we’re good people.”

  Mozgov forced a laugh. David could tell the journalist found his present company distasteful.

  The three of them were sitting outside a coffee place in North Beach, a few blocks from the offices of the Digital Times, where Mozgov was employed as a columnist. It was a little after eight a.m., and David thought the morning light seemed granular and too bright, as though it were being intensified by the saline breeze blowing in from the bay.

  “I’m not on deadline,” Mozgov said, his affected cheer transforming in an instant into annoyance. “But I am very busy, so I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me what this is about.”

  “We’re investigating the death of Brad Ketchner and the disappearance of Garrison Pool,” David said.

  “Ah, I should have known,” he said, his smirk returning. “I’d assumed the FBI would be better informed than the national media, but apparently I was mistaken.” He paused to rub his eyes with the heels of his hands, and then he shifted his glasses down from his forehead. “The networks and cable news outlets have been calling me non-stop to fill them in on Ketchner’s relationship with Pool, and to ask me who might have had an axe to grind with both men, and blah blah blah.”

  “And what have you been telling them?” Martin asked.

  Mozgov shrugged. “Nothing more than any other Silicon Valley journalist could tell them, which is that Pool had made a lot of money by investing early in Ketchy, but that he and Brad Ketchner weren’t close. Also, that the list of people who wouldn’t mind if either or both of those men were gonzo is very, very long.” He shook his head. “You ever want to make people hate you, make a billion or two and try to tell them you’re empowering their minds or unshackling information or—this is my favorite—fighting evil. Men like these two—and there are plenty of them littered all over Northern California—have the gall to dress up what they’re selling as socially enriching, and to fancy themselves as altruistic. But of course they’re just in it for the money. I mean, these are men like Carnegie and Rockefeller and all the old robber barons who rode the wave of the industrial revolution to obscene amounts of private wealth. They’ve watched the way we’ve deified Steve Jobs—who was an asshole and a techno-plagiarist, by the way—and they all have visions of Sorkin-penned biopics dancing in their heads.”

  “Sounds like we should put your name at the top of that list,” Martin said to him. “The one of people who wouldn’t mind seeing these two gonzo.”

  “Are you kidding?” Mozgov said, an expression of feigned shock spreading his compact features. “Guys like Ketchner are indispensable to me and my writing. You can call what I do journalism or social commentary or whatever, but really it’s just storytelling. And every good story needs a villain or two.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t ask for better ones than men like Brad Ketchner. I mean, this guy accepted a fucking humanitarian award for donating $20 million to help impoverished people in third-world countries gain access to the internet, when it’s obvious to me and anyone else with a brain that this is just a PR stunt and a way to bring a hundred million more unsuspecting people into the unholy church of Ketchy.”

  “You don’t think people benefit from access to information?” David asked him, knowing he would get a big reaction.

  Mozgov groaned. “Wow, you’re really drinking the Ketchy Kool-Aid, man. I mean, the kind of access a search engine like that grants you, me, and every other Joe Schmo out there is undeniably fettered. We’re privy to what their algorithms decide to show
us, and that’s not like looking through a clear pane of glass. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope, and they’ve decided which colors and shapes you see and which ones you don’t.”

  Mozgov’s words recalled for David what Wes Harris had told them the previous day about the download that had accompanied the video of Brad Ketchner—the “trapdoor” in Ketchy’s search algorithm that seemed to allow for some sort of manipulation. He also thought of the message that had accompanied the Ketchy video: Men go mad in herds. Break free, and see again with your own eyes.

  “What about Garrison Pool?” Martin asked Mozgov. “Why is he one of your villains?”

  “Because he’s the financier!” Mozgov shouted. “He’s the money, which makes him the gatekeeper. If you’re just getting off the ground as a startup, you need men like Pool to back you or you have no shot. None.” He leaned forward, and his tone tightened. “And here’s the crazy thing about Pool. His luck betting on these tech companies was horrible until he landed on Ketchy, which at the time looked like another bad bet. But then Ketchy’s competitors imploded for various unpredictable reasons. Pool found himself riding a legitimate winner, and since then he hasn’t missed. I mean, he’s been batting a thousand for a decade now. It’s insane.” He leaned back again and sipped his coffee aggressively. “My point is that, from a career standpoint, I loved these two. I think they’re duplicitous, noxious human beings, but they’re great bad guys. Now I guess I’ll have to find new ones.”

  “Assuming Pool doesn’t turn up,” David said.

  Mozgov shook his head. “Aren’t we all assuming that? I saw that video yesterday just like everyone else. You’re chasing one sick sadist.”

  “So what sick sadists do you know who might want to target Ketchner and Pool?” Martin asked him.