by Ed Markham
He could see a phalanx of black Chevy Tahoes and Suburbans forming a barrier at the end of the professor’s driveway. It looked to him like there were more vehicles parked in front of Beatrice’s residence than there had been earlier in the day when he had first arrived, and at that point his forensics people—not to mention plenty of Bureau and Menlo Park police officers—were still waiting on the FBI’s tactical unit to finish their sweep of the house.
“What the hell’s this?” Martin asked, leaning forward in his seat.
David said nothing. He had a premonition, which was confirmed when he stepped out of his vehicle and was greeted by two men bearing NSA credentials.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Martin said, frowning at their credentials.
“I’m sorry, sir,” one of the NSA agents said to him. “We’ve become aware that material of the highest classification level is here on these premises, and we have to ensure it remains secure.”
“Yeah yeah, we’ve heard that a lot this week,” Martin went on. “How many times are you clowns going to use that ‘top secret’ line to piss in our swimming pool?”
Ignoring his father’s protests, David said to the NSA agent, “How have you become aware of this classified material?”
The agent glanced at him briefly, but chose to respond instead to Martin’s protestations. As he did, David looked past him and toward Beatrice’s garage. He could see the NSA had escorted members of his forensics unit from the house and had cordoned them off. He scanned their faces, but did not see Carrie Michaels’s among them.
He started to move toward the house, but the larger and more taciturn of the two NSA agents stepped quickly to impede his progress. “I’m sorry, Agent Yerxa. We can’t allow you—”
David didn’t so much as slow his pace. He neither looked at nor otherwise acknowledged the NSA agent who was addressing him as he shouldered him aside and stepped past him. Martin followed close on his son’s heels, and the NSA agents seemed momentarily dumbfounded.
As father and son approached the front door of the house, a second pair of NSA agents—a man and a woman who seemed to be managing the cordon of the FBI’s forensics personnel—stepped forward but seemed likewise unsure of how to handle the two men disobeying their colleagues’ orders. David could tell none of them had anticipated much resistance beyond a little angry carping, and they seemed unprepared to physically restrain two senior members of their sister agency. After a moment’s hesitation, one of them—the female agent—reached out to take David by the arm, but her grip was halfhearted and she released him when it was clear he wasn’t stopping.
Indoors, David found the foyer of Beatrice’s home deserted. Recalling the location of the professor’s home office, he headed for the back of the house. Even before he reached it, he could hear voices and the static of a walkie-talkie emanating from the far end of the home’s central corridor. A man’s figure filled the doorway to Beatrice’s office as David approached.
“Agent Yerxa,” the man said. He was tall—roughly David’s height—and was bald apart from a band of close-cropped stone-gray hair that ran from the sides to the back of his head. His expression was urgent but also somehow congenial, as though he sympathized with David’s frustration. Holding both hands up in a calming gesture, he spoke with a soft Texan twang. “There’s no cause for barging in like this. We’re all on the same team here.”
David looked over the man’s shoulder, and could see Carrie Michaels and another of the Bureau’s forensic technicians standing with their arms crossed, surrounded by four NSA agents. Michaels caught sight of David and immediately lowered her gaze.
Regarding the man blocking his path, David said, “Can I have your name?”
“I’m Len Corliss.” The Texan extended a hand while being careful not to abandon his post in the doorway. “I’m the guy the NSA sends in to be the jerk in these types of situations.”
David neither shook Corliss’s hand nor took his eyes off him. “You have two members of my forensics team in there,” he said, his voice calm and his tone measured. “I’d like to speak with them privately. Right now.”
Corliss withdrew the hand he’d proffered. If he was irked that David had declined to shake it, he didn’t show it. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that, but if you and your father would please step into the kitchen with me”— he looked past David in order to nod at Martin—“I can explain what’s going on here and why this is necessary.”
David could see by the expression on Michaels’s face that it was already too late; even if Corliss granted him a private audience with her, she would tell him nothing. He turned his attention back to Corliss and nodded his assent.
In the kitchen, the NSA agent’s posture relaxed and he stood with his hands on his hips, nodding to himself as though trying to decide where to begin. “You guys are ticked off. I get that. I would be too.” He patted the air with one hand as he spoke, and both his voice and his expression were mellow and companionable.
“Don’t patronize us,” Martin said, his tone loud but not overexcited. “This is the third time the NSA has boxed us out of our own investigation. That’s three more times than I’ve ever experienced working a case, and I’ve been doing this a long damn time.”
Corliss nodded, and he seemed to grow pensive as he leaned back against the kitchen countertop and regarded them for a wordless moment. “I’m going to tell you a few things that I probably shouldn’t,” he said finally. “Michaels and another one of your people discovered a very sensitive document. We’re not at all clear how Vince Beatrice could possibly be in possession of such a document—”
“Maybe your man, Peter Newton, gave it to him,” Martin said, interrupting him.
Corliss let his eyes fall closed as he shook his head. “I can promise you both that’s not the case.” He opened them again, and looked from father to son. “We’re all shook up over Pete’s suicide. I didn’t work with him personally, but I’d met him and I have several colleagues who knew him well and liked him. Pete had access to some sensitive material, which is why we deemed it prudent to handle a review of his email and phone records in-house, but what turned up here is several levels above Pete’s security clearance.”
Another pause as Corliss seemed to be debating with himself about how much he should say to two FBI agents. “I can only draw you a bare outline here, and even that would probably be enough to end my career if my bosses found out about it. But I feel you two are owed an explanation.”
He took a deep breath and ran a hand over his bare scalp before beginning. “A growing number of domestic technology firms, particularly search and social media companies like Ketchy and Pithy, have amassed large and detailed reservoirs of personal data on millions of Americans. For years now, NSA has been aware of foreign entity attempts to place their people at high levels within these tech companies in an effort to build secret access roads into those data pools for exploitation by their respective governments or organizations.” He scratched at an eyebrow with the back of one of his thumbs. “I probably don’t need to lay out for you what a terrorist group could do with that personal data in terms of targeting their recruitment efforts.” He snorted, and flashed them an ominous look. “Normally, when those types of terrorism-related threats are present, we arrest the foreign agent and shut down any possible areas of weakness. But in other instances, NSA has found it advantageous to allow foreign moles a measure of controlled access to these data pools in order to monitor their actions and control the outflow of information. Of course, in order to keep control of the situation, we’ve coordinated our efforts with men like Brad Ketchner and Mark Weissman.”
Corliss crossed his arms over his chest and adjusted the way he was leaning against Beatrice’s quartz countertop. “The Ketchy download that accompanied that gruesome video of Brad Ketchner . . . that included detail on one of these NSA-monitored access roads.” He took a deep breath. “Now, I know what you’re both thinking. Sharing that information with you ea
rlier may have helped narrow the focus of your investigation. I can promise you that it would not have. We’ve been looking into it, and until this document turned up in Beatrice’s possession, we thought you were wasting your time pursuing him. Even after Pete Newton’s suicide, knowing Beatrice was his former professor didn’t connect any dots for us. We went through Newton’s personal records looking for anything that would have implicated Beatrice, and we found nothing.”
“So what are you telling us?” Martin asked. “I’m foggy on a lot of this social media stuff, but it sounds like we’re in agreement that Beatrice is our man.”
Corliss nodded. “We’re still trying to get our feet under us, just like you are, but it seems likely Vince Beatrice somehow learned the details of our decision to allow and monitor a measure of foreign access to the American public’s personal search and social data. I guess he disapproved—particularly with Ketchner, Pool, and Weissman’s complicity in our program—and has gone to extremes to punish them and reveal his discovery to the public.”
The room was quiet as Corliss allowed father and son to absorb this new information. After the pause, Corliss looked at David and said, “I can tell what you’re thinking. What about Mozgov?”
David had in fact been wondering how Corliss could explain Beatrice’s apparent targeting of Kirill Mozgov.
“He doesn’t fit for us either,” Corliss said, “but it’s possible he somehow became privy to NSA’s program through his reporting. Or maybe Beatrice included him just to throw us off. Who knows? Beatrice is obviously psychotic, and I don’t have your experience making sense of psychotic behavior. But bottom line, we’ll do whatever we can to help you find the son of a bitch before he hurts anyone else.”
The three men spoke briefly about the various measures in place to track down Vince Beatrice, and then Corliss walked David and Martin back out to the front of the house, assuring them he would be in touch if his team’s work turned up anything that would help them locate the missing professor.
“So,” Martin said as they slid into David’s vehicle. “How much of what we just heard do you think is BS?”
David was quiet as they pulled away from Vince Beatrice’s house. Outside the car, the orange-yellow light cast by the lights on the houses they passed turned the dark night air a hazy shade of gold.
He considered the possibility that the NSA had bugged his vehicle, but decided there was little he or Martin could do to disguise their intent if the NSA wanted to keep tabs on them. They were government agents, and could not slip off the grid if they hoped to do their job effectively.
“Every word of it,” he said finally.
“So what do we do now?”
After another long pause, David said, “We need to find Vince Beatrice and Mark Weissman before NSA does.” He glanced at his father. “If we don’t, I don’t think we’ll ever find out what’s going on here.”
.
Chapter 40
It was nearly eleven o’clock, and the FBI’s San Francisco office was quieter now than it had been earlier in the day—though most of David and Martin’s team was still around and working through Vince Beatrice’s electronic records.
Alone in the conference room, father and son worked in silence.
Martin stood leaning forward with his palms flat on top of the conference table, doing his best to remain awake and alert as he read through hard copies of Beatrice’s most recent email exchanges. David sat a few chairs down from him and in front of the room’s monitor. He was reviewing new footage from the professor’s ideas summit.
Upon returning to the office, Brandt had informed David that she had turned up the extra footage in an electronic file Beatrice had stored on his university’s network. “We’ve been through it once and nothing jumped out,” she’d told him.
He’d thanked her and spent some time on other matters—mostly digging into Kirill Mozgov, whose refusal to meet with them was still grating David. He’d found a few details in Mozgov’s bio that surprised him, notably that the flame-throwing journalist had once worked as a cyber security analyst for the NSA.
“You joking?” Martin had asked him.
“It was just after Mozgov finished his masters at Cal Tech,” David had told him. “He was only at NSA for nine months before he quit to join the San Jose Mercury News as some kind of web engineer. That turned into part-time blogging on the tech industry for the paper’s website, and then his career took off.”
He’d sat back and considered this revelation for a time before digging back into Mozgov’s files. But as the previous night’s near-sleeplessness began to weigh more heavily on him, he dumped the paperwork and focused his attention on the summit videos—though not before pausing to bring up the live feed of Mark Weissman.
The bound man was mostly still, though David could see his chest rising and falling jerkily, as though his respiration was labored. Weissman’s mouth was open, and at one point his lower jaw pulled to one side unnaturally and seemed to stick in place for a moment before returning to its previous position.
Feeling a sickness in the pit of his stomach, David abandoned the live feed and turned his attention to the new summit footage. The first video he reviewed seemed like B-roll footage of the summit’s participants and guests. The video was broken into several two-minute clips, and included shots of the attendees politely observing the various speakers and expert panels, or chatting together during the introductory cocktail mixer. David was able to pick out Garrison Pool in one of them, and Kirill Mozgov in several.
After the B-roll, the clips seemed mostly like extraneous footage taken during the intervals just before or after the various expert presenters conducted their talks or panels. Beatrice and Derek Gould were nearly ubiquitous in these shots; the professor was often chatting with one of the people preparing to speak, while his graduate__ assistant either stood dutifully a few paces away—a tablet computer and several stapled printouts clutched in his hands—or else busied himself checking the A/V equipment or assisting the speakers with their inconspicuous TED-talk-style headset microphones.
David was reviewing these clips when Martin stood back suddenly from the table and began pacing, his big forearms crossed over his chest. “Reading through these emails, Beatrice seems like a regular Pied Piper,” he said. “Every other day he’s getting messages from old students or apprentices—kids like Newton that he had taught or mentored. And he gets back to all of them.” He shook his head.
“What are you trying to tell me?” David asked him.
“That I see real enthusiasm and kindness in these emails—real dedication to his work and to educating people. No mania. No anger.” David started to speak, but Martin kept going. “I know what you’re going to say. Anyone’s capable of anything. I believe that too. It takes a lot more for some than for others, but you push the right buttons, and any one of us could lose it. But reading Beatrice’s correspondence . . . I feel like it would take an awful damn lot to unbalance this guy and drive him to extremes, and we haven’t seen anything to suggest he was unhinged.”
David considered all this. Finally, he said, “Vince Beatrice is a forty-five-year-old millionaire and public intellectual who, from what we’ve learned about him, has never been married or sustained a long-term romantic partnership—at least not since he’s been at Stanford. He has some close acquaintances and plenty of adoring students and fans, as well as a family that loves him. But he also has zero close friends his own age that we’ve been able to find—just a few colleagues and acquaintances who like him but don’t seem to know him that well.”
As his son spoke, Martin pursed his lips and began to nod. Now he finished David’s thought. “You’re right, and it’s a good point. The lack of close friends or a partner . . . there’s something a little funky going on there.” He paused to scratch at his temples, and then he ran his fingers back through the hair on the sides of his head. “I don’t know, boy. I’m feeling turned around and upside-down on this one.”
; David returned to his laptop and the footage of Beatrice’s ideas summit.
The video was of a mostly full room of people milling about and slowly taking seats in preparation for another expert panel. Near the lectern on the far side of the presentation space, David could see Derek Gould helping one of the upcoming speakers—a man named Alex Guerero—with his wired earpiece and microphone. David knew from the summit attendance files he had received from Brandt that Guerero was CEO of the ride-share firm Mobily. In fact, Guerero’s had been one of the few green-shaded names on Brandt’s list—indicating he was one of the men who matched Brad Ketchner and Garrison Pool’s profiles, and so could potentially be a target.
David watched Gould and Guerero for a moment, and was about to skip forward in the video when a jerky movement grabbed his attention. He clicked back on the video’s timeline and saw it again—only more clearly now that he was looking for it. Guerrero’s right shoulder jerked upward suddenly. As it did, Gould stepped back and seemed to smile as though he was embarrassed. Guerero turned to look at him, and Gould said something to him.
Clicking back and watching the video again, David thought he could make out Gould’s words: Shock, he seemed to be saying. Static shock.
“What are you looking at?” Martin asked, coming over to stand at his son’s side.
David didn’t answer him. He was re-watching the scene—only this time he was paying attention to Derek Gould’s hands. While his right hand toyed with Guerero’s microphone wire, his left slipped down into the front pocket of his pants. Gould withdrew the hand, and then patted Guerero on the shoulders in a gesture that said, “You’re all set.” It was then that the man flinched, and Gould smiled and seemed to say, “Static shock.”
David sat back in his chair as Martin squinted and leaned over him to peer at the monitor. He asked his son, “What is it?”
But David was out of his chair and heading for the door. “We need to find Derek Gould,” he said over his shoulder.
