by Ed Markham
“Lab security footage?” Martin asked her.
“We have it for the last month, which is as far back as their video record goes,” Walker put in. “We’re working through it.”
“What about the video of Beatrice’s office?” David asked.
“News there too,” Brandt said, motioning for them to join her at the conference table.
Working on her laptop, she brought up the campus security footage on the room’s monitor. “Fortunately, their video records go back further than the lab’s. These images are from footage date-stamped April three.” She glanced at David. “That’s a Friday three weeks before Beatrice’s ideas summit.”
As David watched the video, he saw several students wander through the lower portion of the screen. They were walking along the sidewalk that passed by Beatrice’s office. Just behind them appeared a man dressed in slacks and shirtsleeves. He carried a dark satchel over his shoulder.
“Newton,” Martin said as he squinted at the room’s monitor.
“Yep,” Walker answered.
Peter Newton looked back over his shoulder and then around to his other side, as though checking for a tail, before turning abruptly off the walking path and toward the doorway of his former professor’s building. He disappeared into it.
Brandt fast-forwarded seven minutes, and Newton reemerged. Again he looked both ways, and then he quickly moved down the path and out of camera view in the direction from which he had originally come.
“Did you catch it?” she asked, turning to them.
David didn’t know what she was referring to, but Martin said immediately, “Folder’s gone.”
Brandt let out a snort of admiration. “OK, I’m impressed.” She nodded at Walker and said, “We watched this nearly a dozen times before we spotted that.”
“There was a folder?” David asked, trying to catch up.
“Sticking out of the shoulder bag,” Martin said, pointing to the shoulder bag Newton was carrying. He looked his son over worriedly, knowing it was unlike him to miss such a detail.
Brandt quickly rewound the video, and sure enough David saw the top edge of what appeared to be a folder protruding from the bag Newton was carrying.
He asked her, “Do we know if Beatrice was in his office that day?”
“We know from the other surveillance tapes that he parks his bike in back and uses the rear entrance. We’ve checked both that camera and this one, and there’s no sign of him. The next time he visits his office is the following Monday, so presumably that’s when he found whatever it is Newton dropped off for him.”
“Assuming he dropped off anything,” David added.
She looked at him. “You’re saying he may have still had that folder.” She thought for half a second and then nodded. “Sure. He may have pulled it out to give to Beatrice, then, not finding him, did a better job of concealing it when he put it back in his bag.”
“Do we have cameras inside?” Martin asked her.
She shook her head. “Exterior only.”
“Let’s talk with his grad assistant,” David said. “I want to ask him if he knows anything about that folder or Newton.”
Turning to Walker, David asked about their team’s progress digging into Beatrice’s personal and familial connections, and the likely places he might be hiding.
“Beatrice is a popular guy,” Walker told him. “Big family, lots of friends. Many, many professional associates. We’ve been speaking with two brothers and a sister. All of them are out east. They can’t seem to wrap their heads around this. Vince is the oldest, and the whole Beatrice brood has his academic pedigree. All successful, none with criminal records. They don’t understand how he could be involved in anything like this.”
“What about close friends in the area?”
“That’s trickier,” Walker said. “Again, lots of acquaintances—mostly students, former students, and colleagues. But not many people I would call close friends. Seems like the guy was a little too wrapped up in his work for pals or romantic relationships. We spoke with two women he’s dated since living in the area, and both said they had fun when they spent time with him, but that get-togethers were so infrequently they gave up on him.”
“So we’re nowhere,” Martin summarized.
Walker shrugged. “Drawing a bead.”
“We’re not the ones in the crosshairs,” David said.
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Chapter 36
It was early evening when David and his father met with Wes Harris to find out what progress he had made on Beatrice’s email and phone records.
After the professor’s armed interaction with Agent Craig Meredith, the judge who had initially blocked the Bureau’s requests to examine Beatrice’s personal data had promptly reversed course and issued warrants.
“Two things right off the bat,” Harris told them. “Actually, one is a non-thing. I’ve got no recent communications between Newton and Beatrice. Last thing I could find was an email from a few years ago. It’s boilerplate student-professor catching up.”
“Show us anyway,” David said.
As Harris handed him a printout, Martin asked, “What’s the second thing?”
Harris said, “We know Beatrice emailed two of our victims the day after his ideas summit—those ‘we need to talk’ emails—so I looked for more. I found a similar message sent to Mozgov.”
“Did he reply?”
“Not that I could find.”
“And nothing to Weissman?” Martin asked him.
Harris shook his head.
David had scanned the printout of Newton’s old correspondence with Beatrice, and agreed with Harris that it was harmless. “Any news on the live feed?” he asked as he handed the printout back to him.
“Still mind blowing,” Harris said, not smiling. “Seriously, whoever’s doing this has me on my knees. It’s remarkable.”
Father and son left him and returned to the conference room. “We need to speak with Mozgov,” David said to Walker. “Let’s get him down here.”
Before departing by helicopter to help in the manhunt for Vince Beatrice, David had sent agents and members of the San Francisco P.D. to safeguard Mozgov at his home. Although the tech journalist would be nowhere near the rendezvous point Beatrice had stipulated in his text, David didn’t want to take any chances.
“That may be a problem,” Walker said in reply to David’s request to bring in Mozgov.
“Why’s that?” Martin asked.
“The people we have keeping an eye on him just called and said Mozgov’s lawyer showed up and ordered them and SFPD out of his house.”
“What?” Martin asked, looking surprised.
Walker said, “Apparently he doesn’t want our protection.”
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Chapter 37
David couldn’t make sense of what he was hearing.
He stood with his arms crossed over his chest, staring at the phone in the center of the conference table. He asked, “Mozgov understands the text he received this morning fits the pattern of messages we believe Brad Ketchner, Garrison Pool, and Mark Weissman all received before their disappearances?”
Mozgov’s attorney took a moment to answer, as though he were muting his end of the line and taking time to confer with other people before responding. When he finally answered, he spoke slowly and seemed to be laboring over his words. “I can assure you my client is aware of the ramifications of the text messages he received this morning. He has employed his own private security detail, and feels adequately protected under their watch.”
David glanced at his father as Brandt, Walker, and the other agents on their team shifted in their chairs or exchanged looks of incomprehension.
Addressing the phone, David said, “His personal safety aside, we have questions for him about his recent interactions with Vince Beatrice.” He thought about the video Brandt had turned up of Mozgov rubbing his shoulder at Beatrice’s ideas summit, as well as the email Mozgov received from Beatrice—the one the
professor had also sent to Ketchner and Pool.
Again, a long pause on the other end of the line. “Mr. Mozgov respectfully declines your request to speak with him.”
“What the hell is this, Mozgov?” Martin barked at the phone, his face red.
He’d kept quiet until now, but David had noticed his father’s patience was wearing thin.
Martin went on, “I know you’re listening in, pal, and we’re trying to save a man’s life here. We may have already saved yours. Now we need to know what you know.”
There was another long pause on the line, and then the attorney replied, “If you’d like to speak with Mr. Mozgov, you’ll need to secure a warrant to do so.”
Martin looked ready to explode, but before he could, David leaned forward and ended the call. He stepped away from the conference table and began to pace back and forth, considering the possible explanations for Mozgov’s refusal. His mind also returned to the question Beatrice had asked Agent Meredith: Why are you people doing this?
“Let’s get as much as we can on Mozgov,” he told his team. Then, turning back to face the conference table, he asked, “Have we gotten a hold of Gould?”
Brandt spoke up. “We have. He got back to us right away. Our people should have him here in the next hour.”
They spent some time digging through Vince Beatrice’s personal and professional history, searching for anything that could explain his recent behavior. They found no history of psychotic or sociopathic behavior. The media liked to portray him as a computer science genius with a love affair with humanity—not machines—and anecdotes from friends and colleagues seemed to bear that out.
“All of his work,” Brandt summarized at one point, “eventually turns back to people and society, and the effect technology may have on them. At least superficially, Beatrice doesn’t seem to fit the profile of someone who would do this.”
Walker put in, “On the other hand, a guy like Wes Harris . . .”
That drew laughs from some of the San Francisco office’s agents, but they stopped laughing when David didn’t join in. His eyes had shifted to a laptop positioned on a low table in the corner of the room. There, the live video feed of Mark Weissman was up so his people could keep tabs on any changes.
Walker, realizing it had been inappropriate to joke at such a time—while the clock on a man’s life was ticking down—cleared his throat and added, “What I meant was that a lot of the hardcore computer geeks I know don’t like people all that much. But Beatrice doesn’t seem like that at all. Like Megan said, he doesn’t fit the profile.”
Brandt nodded. “Everything I’ve read on Beatrice suggests he’s a humanist, and he’d sooner dump all technological advancement than put people at risk.”
They all turned to David for a reaction, and he said, “Let’s be clear about something. There is no profile.” He looked at each of the assembled agents in turn. His eyes finally came to rest on Brandt’s. “I know we were all taught profiling at Quantico, but thinking that way isn’t helpful.”
Martin put in, “Some of you have probably seen enough to know you’re better off ignoring that behavioral psych BS and sticking to the evidence. Those profiles are off base just as often as they hit home. Spend enough time chasing people who hurt people, and you stop believing you can guess what someone’s like, or what they’re capable of.”
Chasing people who hurt people, David thought to himself. It was his father’s favorite distillation of his life’s work, and one his son had always appreciated. It cut out all the complicated nuance—the constant and often draining chore of trying to understand why people did so many awful things to one another. In Martin’s world, some people were good and some were bad. Trying to tease apart all the whys and what-fors was a fool’s errand. You assembled the clues until they pointed an arrow at someone, and then you made sure that someone couldn’t hurt anyone else.
“A lot of it comes down to hate,” Martin sometimes told him. “Most people are good. But there’s plenty of hate out there, and you can’t look at a man and tell how much of it he carries around with him, or what it’s doing to him or driving him to do to other people.”
They spent more time reviewing transcripts of Beatrice’s calls, and combing his emails and credit card records for clues about where he might be hiding or keeping Mark Weissman hostage. David had even consulted with several architects and building engineers, hoping the scant details of the room that held Mark Weissman might provide some clues to his whereabouts.
They’d turned up a few leads on rental properties Beatrice had booked for the occasional weekend getaway, but thus far a search of those leads had not borne fruit. The architects and engineers had been equally unhelpful.
Around six p.m., there was a knock on the conference room’s door.
The agent who’d done the knocking said to David, “Gould’s here. We’ve got him downstairs in one of the meeting rooms.”
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Chapter 38
Derek Gould sat forward in his chair with his hands folded and his eyes wide in his head.
As he looked at the student, David could feel Gould’s heels bouncing anxiously up and down on the hard floor of the office. He also noticed the way Gould’s big hands were playing with each other on the tabletop; they looked like the hands of a wrestler or a construction worker, not a computer science prodigy.
“So you actually believe Vince has something to do with these murders?” Gould asked him, seeming both disbelieving and also excited.
David had seen this kind of adrenaline-infused curiosity in other young men and women he had encountered during his time with the Bureau. It was, he recognized, a sort of exhilaration bred of proximity to something grand and horrific—like the way people were drawn to the site of a car accident.
“We’re just exploring all possibilities,” he said to Gould.
Martin added, “At the moment we can’t seem to find your good professor, and we told him to stay in touch. Vanishing tends to shoot a guy to the top of our list.”
Gould dropped his eyes to the tabletop and seemed to be suppressing a sigh. He was visibly agitated at the idea that the FBI could hold his professor in such low regard.
“Have you spoken with Vince today?” David asked the student, speaking slowly and calmly in an effort to wind Gould down.
He shook his head. “No, sir.”
“And is that unusual?”
“Yes it is. He told me he was going to be in his office all week, and I thought we were going to spend today fact checking some of the research he’s citing in a new book manuscript he’s trying to wrap up.”
“We didn’t know he was working on a new book,” David said. “What’s the subject matter?”
“Uh, I’m really not supposed to talk about it,” Gould said.
“Top secret?” Martin asked him.
“Just private.”
“Give us the ten-thousand-foot overview,” Martin said. “And don’t say ‘how technology might help or hurt society.’ ”
Gould responded with a subdued smile, and then paused to consider. “It’s about self-recognition,” he said finally. “It’s about understanding what it means to be human, and making sure we hold on to that humanness even as new forms of technology draw us away from it.”
“And what does it mean to be human,” David asked him, “in Vince Beatrice’s view?”
The student didn’t hesitate. “Possessing the ability to form novel ideas and conclusions based on personal interactions with other people and with the wider world.”
“Basically, thinking for yourself,” Martin said.
“Thinking for yourself,” Gould repeated, nodding. “It sounds so simple. But Vince’s book breaks down just how difficult technology has made that for many of us—especially the generation that’s grown up with the Internet.”
“That’s your generation,” David said to him. “Do you share Vince’s concerns?”
Gould smiled. “I want to answer yes, but I’m trying
to take a lesson from his writing. So I’ll have to keep thinking on it.”
“Men go mad in herds,” David quoted, watching him. “Break free, and see again with your own eyes.”
Gould’s mouth tightened. “That’s a rather facile way to tie Vince to this,” he replied.
“Watch yourself, kiddo,” Martin said.
“You can call it facile,” David said, “but we don’t disregard the connections that stand up and wave at us.”
“I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to do your jobs,” Gould said, looking genuinely contrite. “I just know you’re wasting your time if you think Vince is responsible for any of this.”
When Gould had gone, Martin remarked to his son, “Bright kid.”
David nodded.
“Obviously devoted to his professor,” Martin went on.
David started to reply, but then felt his phone ring in his pocket. The call was from Carrie Michaels, the head of the Bureau’s forensics unit working at Vince Beatrice’s home.
“I know you instructed me to route my findings through Agent Walker,” Michaels began. “But we’ve turned up something I felt I needed to share with you directly—something we found hidden in Beatrice’s home office.”
She paused, and David had the sense she was apprehensive about saying more over the phone.
He checked his watch, and said, “If there’s something you’d rather discuss with me in person, I can be back there in ninety minutes.”
After a long silence, she replied, “I think that would be best. What I’m looking at here . . . I really don’t know how to handle this.”
.
Chapter 39
David could tell something was amiss at Vince Beatrice’s house the moment he and Martin turned onto the professor’s block.
