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

by Ed Markham

  Mozgov stared down at the lid of his coffee, his smirk returning. “I really can’t help you there, Agent Yerxa.” He looked up. “I mean, I probably wouldn’t even if could, because I think the FBI is a fascist, Patriot Act-wielding, self-important collection of assholes. But this is unbelievable. Fantastical. Men like Brad Ketchner aren’t disappeared and killed. It just doesn’t happen. And now Pool may be in the same boat? Absurd. I couldn’t begin to speculate.”

  David considered the man for a moment. “We spoke with Amelia Pool. I asked her if her husband had any adversaries, and you were the only name she could come up with.”

  Mozgov laughed. “That’s professionally flattering.”

  David just looked at him.

  “Listen,” Mozgov said, leaning forward conspiratorially. “Men like Garrison Pool have men like me killed, not the other way around.”

  “You think Pool was that kind of man?” Martin asked.

  Mozgov suddenly seemed exasperated with their questions. “Only in the sense that he was powerful.” He looked from Martin to David. “So what? Should I be concerned here? I mean, should I be refusing to speak with you two without a lawyer present?”

  David made a gesture to suggest they were finished with the topic. “We’ve learned that the last time Ketchner and Pool were together they were attending some kind of technology conference at Stanford. This was a few weeks ago.”

  “You mean Vince Beatrice’s ideas summit? Sure, I was there too.”

  “How’d you score an invite?” Martin asked him.

  Mozgov waved his hand. “I’m invited to all these things. It’s not a success unless Kirill the Malcontent is there to cast stones. But Vince and I are kind of kindred spirits. Like me, he’s a big critic of the Internet’s supposed benevolent influence on human existence, though he’s a lot more subdued in his criticisms than I am—at least most of the time.”

  “Do you remember seeing Ketchner and Pool together?” David asked him.

  Mozgov thought for a moment, and then shook his head dismissively. “I have no idea. Maybe. Who remembers something like that?”

  “Did anything about the event stand out to you?”

  That question got a big chuckle.

  “What’s funny?” Martin asked him.

  “You two should read my back-dated columns,” he said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Halfway through one of the expert micro-panels, Beatrice and Ketchner got into a shouting match.” He smiled. “It was so awesome. I thought Vince was going to slap Ketchner across the face. I wanted to myself.”

  “What were they arguing about?” David asked.

  “Ketchner was talking about rolling out some new kind of personalized search algo—something tailored to the user. Vince rightly questioned how this could be seen as anything more than a ploy to create more consumer-specific ad targeting—which it absolutely fucking is, by the way—and when Ketchner kept insisting on calling it a ‘service’ and a ‘benefit,’ Vince got seriously pissed at him. I mean red-faced, fist-fighting pissed. It was pretty unexpected. Vince is usually a study in cheerful equanimity. Anyway, he told Ketchner to save his marketing jargon for his sycophants, and things went a little bananas from there. Just the choicest mudslinging. It’s not often you get to see two billionaires trade blows like that, and it was a sight to behold.” He paused to take a sip from his coffee, his eyes smiling and adrift on the scenery as he recalled the angry exchange. “You two should really talk with Vince. I know he’s not your guy, but he sure seemed to hate Ketchner’s guts that day.”

  David felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He saw the call was coming in from Omar Ghafari, and he excused himself to answer it.

  “I’ve got some more info for you on that auto download from yesterday,” Omar said. “It’s hard to describe, but it looks like some kind of search manipulation tool. By inputting and linking certain search terms or phrases, you could ensure some links or categories of content would be promoted higher or lower in the results Ketchy spits out than would occur organically.”

  “Give me an example,” David said.

  Omar was quiet for a moment. “You could link up the terms ‘best cereal’ and ‘Frosted Flakes,’ and the Kellogg’s website would come up first if you searched for best cereals.”

  David thought of what Mozgov had just told him and his father about Brad Ketchner’s personalized search “service.”

  Omar went on, “But that’s really not that surprising. I’m sure that kind of promotion has been going on for a while. But suppression of an idea or a term is new to me. The potential ramifications of that are a lot more far-reaching and fucked up, you know?”

  “No I don’t know. Explain it to me.”

  Omar hummed in thought. “People find pretty much everything online. So if Ketchy were purposefully tanking certain pages linked with keywords, that could cost targeted companies millions.” He paused. “Marketing and consumer products aside, this kind of tool could theoretically be used to stifle the free flow of ideas. We’re talking the digital equivalent of burning books.”

  David heard a beep in his ear, and, looking at his phone, saw a call was coming in from a San Francisco number. He thanked Omar and took the call, which was from Andrea Dean.

  As she began to speak, David recognized immediately the tone of someone who was trying to conceal strong emotion. “I just got off the phone with the sheriff up in Marin County,” she said. “They found a body on Stinson Beach. They’re fairly certain it’s Garrison Pool.”

  .

  Chapter 17

  Mark Weissman set his phone down on his desk and sat back in his chair. After a long pause, he reached forward, picked it up, and re-read the text message.

  Have just learned Pool dead and our mutual friends may have knowledge. Must meet w you asap. You’re only person I trust. Delete this, go offline including personal detail, meet me on ecology trail in 90 mins. Just walk and I’ll find you. We are not safe.

  He thought for a moment, and then sent a text to the San Francisco chief of police.

  Heard terrible news about g. pool. Hoping it’s false?

  A reply came back to him in less than a minute.

  Not yet confirmed, but looks likely. Cant provide more detail at this time.

  Weissman groaned out loud and deleted the texts, turned off his personal cell phone, and again sat back in his chair. He withdrew a tissue from his pocket and wiped his nose, then turned and looked out of the floor-to-ceiling window of his twelfth-story penthouse.

  It had been a sunny morning, but now he could see dark, slow-moving rain clouds collecting over San Francisco Bay.

  Weissman was forty-one but looked a decade younger, partly due to his thick, curly blonde hair. He was unmarried and lived alone, though he was seldom without company.

  As creator and CEO of Pithy, a text-centric social media company that limited users’ posts to 160 characters, he had amassed an immense fortune during the scant eight years his online entity had been in operation. Following Pithy’s initial public offering in 2013, Weissman’s net worth had never dropped below $2 billion.

  Forty minutes after he had received the message about Pool, Weissman stepped from his building’s maintenance elevator and exited the ground floor via the trash collection garage. He wore gym clothes, sunglasses, and a Giants baseball cap, and carried an umbrella wedged under one arm. Heading down an alley and out to the street, he walked for half a dozen blocks before hailing a taxi, which he took to the corner of Arguello and Pacific Avenue in Presidio Terrace. He paid the cab driver in cash, and picked up the nearby trailhead just as a light rain began to fall.

  The wooded path wound for four miles into the Presidio, a National Park located on the northern fingernail of the San Francisco Peninsula. As he moved down the dirt trail and past the clusters of cypress and eucalyptus trees, Weismann kept stopping to sneeze, curse, and blow his nose—in that order. He felt horrible, and had since the previous evening. His nose was
running like a faucet, but he knew he couldn’t miss this meeting.

  The rain was falling steadily now, but he didn’t mind it. There was little wind thanks to the trees and the trail’s distance from the bay, and so he could keep dry by staying under his oversized umbrella. The precipitation had also cleared the trail of the usual joggers and dog-walkers who would have littered it on a sunnier morning. He was glad of the isolation; in his state, he didn’t feel like seeing other people.

  He reached into his pocket to check the time on his phone, and was momentarily disoriented to find it missing. Of course, he thought. He’d left it at home per the text’s instructions. But now he felt strange and exposed, as though he had forgotten a coat or some other essential barrier against the elements. It took him a moment to remember he also wore a wristwatch—a $90,000 Patek Philippe that he seldom used to actually verify the time. He looked at it and saw it was still a few minutes before ten a.m., and so he continued to walk farther on down the trail.

  He considered the text and its sender, and particularly the words we are not safe. He’d felt concerned and mildly uneasy after Brad Ketchner’s disappearance—emotions that had intensified when Ketchner turned up dead and Garrison Pool went missing. When the Ketchner video had appeared the previous day, his anxiety—and his cold—had both shifted into overdrive. There were far too many puzzle pieces slipping together to ignore the picture they were forming.

  You knew this would come back to bite you, he thought.

  There were very few times during the last ten years when he had been forced to confront the ramifications of his actions. But their memory was always there. Like a heavy vest he could never shrug off, what he’d done had continued to weigh on him despite the lengths to which he had gone—donating millions to charity, ensuring his employees were among the most well-compensated and generously benefited in the world—to ease his conscience. Part of him had always felt he was living on borrowed time, and that a reckoning was inevitable. If such a reckoning was at hand, he knew another part of him would welcome it.

  As he crested a small hill, he emerged from the woods into a clearing. On one side, the cleared hill sloped up until it flattened to an area he could not see. The forest still loomed to his right and up ahead, where the trail again curved into its shade. Looking up the hill, Weissman had the sense someone was watching him. He stopped and searched for a figure, but found none. He checked his watch again and saw it was the appointed time, and considered working his way back to the trailhead. But looking ahead to where the trail curved into the woods, he decided to press on.

  He guessed he was roughly a third of the way down the trail, which was most remote at its midpoint. If the person he was meeting was hoping to keep their rendezvous private, Weissman thought he might be waiting another half mile or so ahead.

  As he reached the elbow where the trail turned into the woods, he felt again the sensation that he was not alone. It was accompanied by a feeling of foreboding. He stopped and craned his neck to see into the shadows of the trees ahead, but could make out no figure.

  He took a few cautious steps into the shadows, and was confronted only with an empty segment of trail. His foreboding was replaced by relief, and, after turning to check the trail behind him, he started to press on.

  He made it only a few feet before his legs caught in something and he pitched forward. Even as he was falling, he knew there was a tripwire strung tautly across the trail. As he landed, he saw the figure emerge from a thick brush of pine tree branches on his right. There was a shuddering pain in his neck, and then darkness.

  .

  Chapter 18

  Two Marin County police officers stopped David and Martin and asked them to identify themselves and sign in before proceeding beyond the barricades.

  Though it had grown overcast in San Francisco by the time father and son had departed their meeting with Kirill Mozgov, here at Stinson Beach the sun was shining between large, benign mountains of cumulus clouds.

  Past the barricades, David could see roughly two dozen detectives, forensic technicians, and other crime scene workers hovering around an oblong shape that lay on the beach, shaded by a temporary police canopy.

  At David’s back and on the other side of the barricade, another dozen police officers were working hard to keep the assembled news reporters and onlookers from getting too close to the scene.

  The shape on the beach resembled a slug, or a cocoon. As he moved closer, David could see it was a black sleeping bag. Before he reached it, Andrea Dean stepped away from a cluster of suited detectives and FBI agents. She walked to meet him and his father.

  With hardly a word of greeting, she escorted them to the edge of the police canopy and waited there as they examined Pool’s body.

  Someone—probably the person who had discovered the body, though it might have been a forensic tech—had pulled back a corner of the sleeping bag to reveal the corpse inside. Pool’s mouth was clenched and yanked to one side as though he were groaning. David could see dried blood on and between his teeth and in his nostrils, and the veins on his neck seemed unnaturally livid, as though even in death he was still straining against some unseen force. His eyes were half open, but only the whites were showing; his pupils were lost somewhere in the back of his skull.

  Martin took a cursory look at the body before shaking his head and stepping away.

  After seeing dozens—maybe hundreds—of cadavers during his time with the FBI, Martin now spent little time examining bodies. “I’m leaving that to you and the ME,” he often said to his son, referring to the medical examiner’s office. “I’ve spent enough of my life staring at dead flesh.”

  Bending down for a closer look, David could see frothy spittle had collected at the corners of Pool’s mouth. He also noticed what appeared to be salt-encrusted sweat stains on the collar of the dead man’s shirt. As he looked Pool over, he felt wind off the ocean whipping the sand around him. Waves of granules were sliding across the corpse, making it look as though Garrison Pool’s face was disintegrating into the air.

  David spent another minute examining the body before joining his father. He found Martin speaking with Andrea Dean and Megan Brandt, who had accompanied her superior on the morning’s grim errand.

  Martin said to his son, “From what these two have been telling me, nothing much to go on so far. No body here last night. Body here this morning. Police discovered it when some uptight runner phoned in that someone was sleeping on the beach, which is illegal.”

  “Before you ask, we’ve checked out the runner,” Brandt said. “He’s owned a place here for a decade, and locals say he jogs the beach almost every morning at sun-up.” She looked down the shoreline in the direction of the small strip of restaurants and shops that served as the beach’s quaint locus of commercial activity. “We’re talking with everyone in the area to find out if they saw something. Also looking for security cameras, though the low crime rate here isn’t helping us on that front.”

  David felt the heavy beach wind on his back and knew checking for prints or tracks would be useless. “Are we doing anything yet with cell data?” he asked.

  Dean nodded. “Wes Harris is working on it. There are two towers in the area, and he’s planning to run the data from those against what we have from the forest area where Ketchner’s body was discovered.”

  “That reminds me,” Brandt said, “as I was leaving the office, I stopped to speak with Wes, and he told me he found something odd while he was looking though Ketchner’s cellular records. Apparently there are gaps. It was a little overly technical for me, but Wes made it sound like there were signs someone had managed to cut out segments of Ketchner’s cell and email data.” She squinted at David. “He seemed a little flustered by it, actually. I got the impression it was some big-league computer hacking and data manipulation.”

  “What’s Harris’s number?” David asked her. He typed it into his phone as she dictated it to him from her own. Just as he was saving the number, a call
came in from Guy Walker.

  “Are you and Martin still at Stinson?” Walker asked him.

  “We are. Are you calling about Beatrice?”

  “Yeah, I just got off the phone with his personal assistant.”

  After leaving their meeting with Kirill Mozgov, David had phoned Walker to ask him to track down Vince Beatrice—the Stanford neuroscientist who’d butted heads with Ketchner at the technology summit a few weeks earlier.

  Walker went on, “Beatrice is down in Carmel right now for some kind of retreat, but he said he would be glad to speak with you and your dad any time he’s not in meetings.”

  “Good,” David said. “Tell him we’re coming down to meet with him this morning.”

  .

  Chapter 19

  David watched the shadow of the helicopter as it arrowed along the rocky California coastline. Ahead, he could see a great kelly-green expanse sloping up and away from the crashing Pacific waves.

  Speaking to David and Martin through their headsets, the chopper’s pilot said, “That’s Pebble Beach you see coming up. We’re almost to Carmel.”

  Gazing through the pilot’s windshield, Martin said, “We’re not big golfers.”

  The pilot smiled. “Me neither, but you don’t have to be a golfer to appreciate it. Fucking spectacular, man.”

  “You got us there,” Martin said.

  “You should see it when the fog rolls in,” the pilot said. “From up here it looks like something out of a fairy tale.” He pointed ahead at a cliff-side section of the course. “I heard some guy drove his golf cart right off there a few years back. Got lost in the fog and didn’t realize where he was headed.”

  They touched down ten minutes later on a landing pad located in an inland area called Carmel Valley. An FBI vehicle was waiting there for them, and fifteen minutes later they arrived at Mission Ranch.