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

  GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

  A David and Martin Yerxa Book

  By Ed Markham

  .

  Text Copyright © 2017 Ed Markham

  All Rights Reserved

  .

  For My Brothers

  .

  Table of Contents

  Sunday, May 2

  Monday, May 3

  Tuesday, May 4

  Wednesday, May 5

  Thursday, May 6

  Friday, May 14

  Author’s Note to Readers

  .

  SUNDAY, MAY 2

  Chapter 1

  Garrison Pool squinted into the mist, trying to make out a figure among the dark tree trunks and surrounding foliage.

  “Yes, all right,” he said, attempting and failing to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “Here I am, as bidden. Would you please tell me what I’m doing here?”

  Morning was just breaking along the Northern California coastline, rousting the birds and insects from their hiding places. Thick, ancient redwoods dimmed the morning light, and there was scant breeze to break up the fog.

  Pool stood quietly for a moment, trying to be patient.

  When articles about Garrison Pool appeared in the national media, it was always pointed out that he was a devoted practitioner of transcendental meditation. In truth, his practice habits were sporadic at best. And so now—when he needed it most—he couldn’t summon a state of calm.

  The fact that he had been suffering from some kind of flu didn’t help ease his agitation. For going on forty-eight hours, his head and throat had ached and his stomach had grown increasingly tender following his frequent, rushed trips to the bathroom.

  When he still heard no reply, his annoyance forced itself to the surface. “All right, this is ridiculous,” he half-shouted. “I’m going to leave if—”

  “You broke my rule,” a man’s voice interrupted from somewhere in the fog.

  “What?” Pool said quickly. “I broke your rule? What rule? What does that—”

  “Walt, this is Garrison Pool,” the voice recited. “The gentleman we were just speaking about Thursday evening has contacted me and asked that I meet him tomorrow at five-thirty a.m. at a location inside Waddell Creek State Park . . .”

  “How did you get that?” Pool asked, stunned to hear his private telephone conversation being read back to him. He wasn’t sure of the exact amount of money he spent each year to secure his digital identity and communications, but he knew it easily exceeded six figures. The idea that someone could be listening in on a call he made on his personal cell phone was stupefying.

  “How the hell did you get that?” he asked again, his voice grown meek with confusion and disbelief.

  When there was no reply, he took a few seconds to absorb this turn of events—to reassess the fragility of his position. Finally he poked his patrician chin up into the morning air and scratched at his freshly shaved throat. He nodded quickly and said, “All right, I admit it. I notified the head of my security team about our meeting this morning. But Jesus, can you blame me? You know as well as I do that Ketchner’s disappearance has us all on edge. There aren’t a lot of men in this world worth $20 billion, and the few who are don’t just disappear.”

  He knew he was rambling now—that he sounded desperate. But he was not a man accustomed to feeling uncomfortable. He went on in the same rushed tone, “A sudden summons to the middle of nowhere with the precondition that I tell no one—not even my wife—is unnerving, considering.”

  He waited. When no answer came, he felt his indignation return. “Listen, this is absurd. If you’re not going to come out here and speak with me, I’m leaving. I came here out of respect for you—”

  “You came out of concern for your reputation. Respect had nothing to do with it.”

  Pool took a step forward, staring hard into the curtain of fog from which the voice seemed to be emanating. He thought now that he could make out a figure; the person seemed to be squatting at the base of a tree twenty yards away.

  “Fine, I’ll admit that too,” he said, moving toward the squatting figure. “But tell me what all of this is about—”

  He stopped abruptly as the figure by the tree came into focus.

  It was Ketchner. The missing Ketchner. Brad Ketchner of Kaskade Enterprises and Ketchy, the ubiquitous internet behemoth that had gotten its start in search before eventually extending its tentacles into data analysis and aggregation, social media, and dozens of other web-based enterprises.

  Pool took a step closer and realized Ketchner wasn’t squatting; he was sitting with his feet propped against a large root and his knees pulled up toward his chest. His arms lay slack at his sides. He wore sweat pants, a stained long-sleeved shirt, and a blank, hollow-cheeked expression that sagged unnaturally below his two unblinking eyes.

  Pool felt his bowels constrict, and his heart begin to race even before his mind had taken hold of the fact that he was looking at a $20-billion corpse.

  “Oh my god,” he said, his mouth falling open.

  He turned to flee, but before he could take a step he felt the Taser’s electrodes slam into his abdomen.

  He fell to the forest floor, and the world went dark.

  .

  Chapter 2

  David Yerxa stood with his weight forward and his knees slightly bent, just as he had been instructed to stand. He looked through the pistol’s sights at the dark silhouette hanging twenty-five yards away, and slowly squeezed the trigger of his Bureau-issued Sig Sauer P226.

  The pistol fired, and a small hole appeared in the lower right section of what would have been the silhouette’s hip, had the silhouette been a man.

  “You flinched again!” a voice shouted at his side.

  He turned and looked at Lauren Carnicero.

  As she stepped toward him, Butch pulled down her earphones and blew up her dark bangs.

  David could tell she was growing exasperated with him. But since she had been the one to insist on these shooting lessons—had insisted despite his objections—her exasperation didn’t bother him much.

  “Every time,” she said, shaking her head at him.

  David removed his own earphones.

  “Did you hear me?” she asked him.

  “You’re having a great time?” He didn’t smile, but Lauren was used to his bone-dry sense of humor.

  She laughed a little, mostly to conceal her frustration. “You’re rock steady right up until the moment you fire, but then you flinch.” She bugged her eyes out at him. “Stop doing that!”

  He didn’t reply. He watched her face as she looked him over and tried to work out an explanation for his inexplicably flawed shooting tendencies.

  “Butch,” he said, using the nickname other agents at the Bureau had bestowed on Lauren years earlier. Back then, someone had pointed out that her name was Spanish for “butcher,” and the handle had attached itself to her and never let go.

  “Maybe it’s your grip,” she said. She reached out and replaced the earphones on his head. She took his hands in her own and arranged them on his pistol grip before stepping back. As she pulled her own earphones back on, she nodded at him to try again.

  He shot again, and again his bullet ripped through the silhouette well off the mark.

  “God dammit!” he heard her shout at his side.

  He almost smiled, but he didn’t want to goad her.

  Both David and Lauren were principal investigators within the Bureau’s Serial Crimes Division, based at the FBI’s compound at Quantico, Virginia. Both were in their thirties, and bo
th were tall and dark-haired, though David’s complexion was fairer than Lauren’s, and his features sharper. While he had her beat in terms of his experience as an investigator, Lauren was hands-down the better marksman.

  In fact, she was among the best shooters in their section of the FBI, while David was unquestionably the worst—a distinction that seemed to irk Lauren because it so contrasted with his even temperament and peerless record in all other aspects of his role at the FBI. He’d pointed out to her more than once that fine marksmanship was not among the essential assets a good investigative agent need possess. But it did no good; his poor shooting really pissed her off.

  He knew he could have explained his lousy marksmanship to her in a sentence or two. But he chose not to. One day, he thought—and soon—he would tell her that long ago, as a student, he had murdered another young man in cold blood. Every time he raised a weapon and attempted to pull the trigger—he saw that dead man’s face.

  Not even David’s father, Martin Yerxa, knew his son’s secret.

  He thought of his father now as he removed the magazine from his service pistol and stepped off the range. Martin was driving down to D.C. to spend the weekend at his son’s house in Alexandria, and David had some errands to run before he arrived.

  A Philadelphia native and resident, Martin Yerxa was also a semi-retired FBI investigator. He’d worked in his son’s capacity at the Bureau for nearly thirty years before moving back to his hometown with David’s mother, Angela, who had died of lung cancer.

  Even before Angela’s death, now two years past, Martin had occasionally worked investigations alongside his son—an arrangement the FBI allowed because of Martin’s sterling record as an investigator. His participation in David’s work had only increased since his wife’s death.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with myself if I’m not down here with you, keeping you out of trouble?” Martin liked to ask his son, unprompted. “Sit around the house, playing with my wood and getting old? No thanks, pal.”

  This tongue-in-cheek reference to “playing with his wood” was Martin’s oldest joke about his woodworking habit. When the elder Yerxa wasn’t in his basement workshop—or working alongside his son—he tended to spend his time reading about American history or nursing a whisky at the neighborhood bar near his home in South Philly.

  David never wondered why his father hadn’t fully retired. He knew Martin loved the work—that he lived for it—and that he wouldn’t stop until the Bureau fired him and barred the doors. And when that happens, David knew, his father would open his own P.I. business, or buy a scanner and try to nose his way into Philadelphia police investigations. No matter what, he knew Martin would do anything he could to keep some skin in the game—the vital game of “chasing people who hurt people,” as he always put it.

  “You’re giving up?” Lauren said to David’s back as he walked away from the firing range.

  He turned and waved for her to follow him. “Pop’s going to be here in an hour,” he said when she had caught up. “I need to stop at the store for his whisky, and I want to get the steaks out so they can warm up before we grill them.”

  She looped her arm through his and held up her left hand in front of their faces. The gold band that circled her ring finger was simple and gem-less, but it still held its brilliant polish. David had purchased it with her just the previous week.

  “What do you think Martin’s going to say?” she asked him.

  “I know exactly what he’s going to say,” David said. Affecting his father’s loud, coarse bark of a voice, he said, “Where’s the stone, you cheapskate?”

  “No diamonds for this girl,” Lauren said, shaking her head and repeating the same thing she had told him when they went ring shopping. “My mother never had one, and neither will I. You’re marrying the wrong chick if you want to throw money away on pointless crap.”

  David reached forward and took her hand. He kissed her finger and the engagement ring encircling it. “I’m marrying the right chick,” he said. “But pop is still going to ask about the stone.”

  .

  Chapter 3

  “Where the hell’s the stone?”

  David’s father looked as though he thought someone was playing a prank on him. He didn’t loosen his grip on Lauren’s hand even as he turned from her and shot his son a look of disgust.

  When David and Lauren had told him their good news, Martin had clapped his hands and shouted, “Goddamit, all right!” He’d jumped up from the small outdoor table behind his son’s townhouse and embraced his future daughter-in-law. He’d stood next to Lauren, his big arm around her shoulders as he beamed at David and listened to him recount the details of his proposal.

  It wasn’t much of a story. The two of them had been together at Lauren’s house, preparing for bed. David had been lying in her four-poster, listening as she spoke to him from her bathroom. She was talking about something banal—a gripe she had about their division’s travel expense paperwork. As she’d talked, his eyes had drifted around her perpetually unkempt bedroom before finally settling on a new photograph on her desk. It was a picture of the two of them, sitting outdoors in front of a seafood restaurant in Philly.

  It was a recent photo. They’d driven up to visit with David’s father the previous month, and had spent part of a Saturday wandering together through the dense streets of Martin’s neighborhood.

  In the photograph, which their waiter had taken, David was smiling—something he always struggled to do when posing for photographs. Lauren’s expression was one of feigned frustration, and both her hands were wrapped around David’s upper arm as though she were shaking him. She had been shaking him, he remembered. The waiter had already taken one photo, and Lauren had peeked at it to make sure it was to her liking. Seeing it, she had let out a groan, seized David’s arm, and, shaking him, had implored him to really smile in a picture just for once.

  Seeing the photo and recalling the look on her face—the look of understanding and devotion even when she was annoyed with him—had settled something in David’s mind. He knew she loved him, and he realized then that he loved her and wanted to spend his life with her.

  And that’s what he had said when she walked out of her bathroom in her pajamas, her arms above her head as she pulled her dark hair into a loose ponytail.

  “I love you, and I want to spend my life with you.”

  Lauren had stopped to stare at him, though her hands had kept working for a moment on her ponytail. When she had finished, her arms crossed themselves over her chest. She had looked at him questioningly. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I want to marry you.”

  At this point in the engagement story, Martin had said, “You mean you didn’t get down on one knee, you jerk?”

  “He didn’t even have a ring,” Lauren said. “There was zero forethought involved.”

  David had only held up his hands in an acknowledgment of guilt.

  Now that his father was asking about the engagement ring’s stone, David directed his pop’s attention to his fiancée. “She picked out exactly what she wanted,” he said, nodding toward the hand Martin still held clutched in his own.

  “You dummy,” his father bellowed at him. “The good ones all say they don’t need a rock. You buy them one anyway. So listen, tomorrow you two are going back to that jeweler—”

  “No way,” Lauren said, cutting him off. Putting her free hand on top of Martin’s, she shook it as she spoke. “Believe me, your son couldn’t have been more embarrassed by the whole thing. But I insisted. No gems for this girl.”

  David sat quietly as Lauren laid out her reasoning to his father.

  As Martin listened, he rubbed absently at the red scar on his forehead—the fading remnant of a gunshot wound he had suffered a year earlier while he and his son had apprehended a sick man who was kidnapping and murdering teenage boys.

  When Lauren had finished, Martin let out a sigh and said to his son, “How did you get so luck
y with this one? You don’t deserve her.” Turning to her, he added, “He doesn’t deserve you.” Then he grinned and led her around the table to David’s side, where he sat her down in the chair next to his son.

  “There,” he said, “let me look at you two.” He took a few steps back and stood beaming at them with his big hands clasped together.

  Martin’s faded American Flag tattoo was almost indiscernible on the tan, hair-matted flesh of his bare forearm. “Your mother would be happy,” he said. And for a moment, David saw sorrow mix with the joy in his father’s eyes.

  The three of them sat out back for a time, smiling and reminiscing about Martin’s courtship and marriage to David’s mother, as well as the story of Lauren’s parents’ wedding. But as they were clearing away their dishes and glasses from dinner, David’s cell phone began to ring.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you,” a deep voice said on the other end of the line.

  It was David’s section chief, Carl Wainbridge. David could tell what sort of call this was by the timbre of his boss’s voice.

  Carl went on, “There’s a situation I need to discuss with you. Tonight, I’m afraid.”

  .

  MONDAY, MAY 3

  Chapter 4

  Though it was after midnight, Martin Yerxa was still awake when David returned home from Quantico and his meeting with his section chief, Carl Wainbridge.

  The elder Yerxa was seated at his son’s round kitchen table with his wide hand wrapped around a tumbler of whisky. Martin lifted the glass an inch off the table in greeting when David walked into the room. “Pour you one of these?” he asked him.