Dr. Anna Jones, a renowned cyber-psychologist, is grief-stricken, but not convinced when her husband, tech mogul Brad Jones, is found drowned off the Marin Coast and officials rule it a suicide. To find the truth, she starts digging into Brad’s past – and by extension, into the dark secrets of the Silicon Valley elite.
As Anna is pulled into this intricate web of secrets, she finds herself amidst some of the most influential people in the tech industry, and she learns that Brad’s death is tied to a deeply buried secret that some would kill to keep hidden. If Anna’s going to uncover the truth about what happened to her husband, she’ll have to risk
PROLOGUE
The rise and fall of her chest slowed. Titus Creed watched her body soften into his LC4 Le Corbusier chaise longue. Of all the possessions he owned, this was his most treasured. He’d been searching a long while for an original one by Jeanneret and Perriand. Their pioneering designs had shaped the 20th century, and in his opinion, this recliner was their crowning achievement. It was a beauty, made in 1928, one of the first ever made, and it had cost him two hundred thousand dollars at auction.
Titus could have bought an expensive knock-off that would have looked pretty much the same and cost him only a few thousand dollars, but he liked the truest form of something, its original self. Fakery and copies were a dilution of creativity.
True to its nickname, the LC4 was a “relaxing machine,” perfectly calibrated for hypnosis, with a design that mirrored the body’s natural curves.
The wave of white leather now held Dr. Anna Jones, whose body was suspended, seemingly #oating over the tubular steel cradle.
The breath work was done, and as he talked, using a slow, melodic tone, he watched the muscles in her tense, rigid body relax.
It had been a tough few therapy sessions, even by his standards. One moment she was complicit, ready to open up, the next the steel trap door came down. And Dr. Jones was smart—therapy smart like him—and kept challenging the how and why of what he was doing.
Finally, she was beginning to let her guard down, allowing him to scratch at the surface of her deeply buried emotions.
He transitioned into the suggestion phase, stimulating her subconscious mind with questions he’d been meticulously formulating, crafting and noting since their first session. He was probing for the unconscious blocks that held trapped trauma at bay.
He was well-versed in her textbook reactions as he guided her through them—tears, choked words of sorrow, love, and regret.
Then he took her deeper. Her breathing slowed, growing more rhythmic and measured. He set aside his notes and leaned forward in his chair, his focus entirely on her. Her head began to move side to side, her eyes darting beneath closed lids. She was traveling down some long-buried neural pathway.
Suddenly her back arched against the curve of the recliner in such a sharp convulsion that he leapt up, ready to intervene. Her mouth opened, releasing a blood-curdling scream that had the receptionist and two of his practitioners rushing into his treatment room.
“Loni, stay here,” he said, signaling the others to leave.
The poised, affluent figure in the photo that had made the front page of the SF Chronicle just weeks before, now lay awkwardly on the recliner, her body limp as a rag doll. He checked her vitals, keeping his voice a low, hypnotic hum. It was a tone carefully cultivated over years, a soothing balm that commanded a price as steep as its reputation.
Dr. Jones sank back against the leather upholstery. Titus glanced over as Loni sat down in the side chair, her face pale, notepad clutched tightly in her hand. The sound that had reverberated through the walls of their offices was unlike any they had encountered before. He glanced over at where Loni was now sitting in a side chair, her face pale, hand shaking as she began writing her observation notes.
Dr. Jones’ lips began to move, her words a slurred, disjointed whisper. He leaned in, his ear just inches from her mouth, straining to catch the fragments of her consciousness. “Sleep just a bit… Brad… So tired…” Then she was silent, her breaths becoming shallow and faint.
“Anna, where are you now?” he said.
The silence stretched out like a taut wire before she responded, her voice hoarse. “Dark. I can’t see. Lifting. Someone’s lifting me. Heavy.”
She lay still again, her body seemingly lifeless. But he continued mining, navigating through the labyrinth of her mind. Suddenly, her fingers twitched, a spasm rippled through her entire body. She began to writhe on the recliner, her face a grotesque mask of pain.
“Get the hell away from me!” she screamed.
CHAPTER ONE
2019
Fog shrouded Stinson Beach. It was that time of year, June gloom, when the coast was cloaked in a moist marine layer, while only a few miles inland the earth baked under a cloudless sky. Inside the glass and steel modernist abode of the Jones’ household, Anna began her morning coffee ritual.
Brad had already warmed the machine, making his custom espresso before heading out to run and surf.
As the milk frothed Anna checked her email, scrolling quickly through the endless stream of flotsam and jetsam from the digital world. New threads, old threads all spooling through.
She fought the urge to open one or two of them and dive in —knocking the balls back into someone’s court. Wait until later, after school drop-off.
Cup in hand she padded across the limed oak floor and out onto the cool ash decking. It was still early, her favorite time of day, when spaciousness and stillness lent promise to the day ahead. She took a sip of cappuccino. The first taste was always the best—a bittersweet jolt to a sleep-laden palate.
An ocean breeze whispered through the newly installed wild grass border that their landscape designer had recommended to soften the house’s brutalist lines. She pulled the collar up on her cashmere robe, and looked out to where the rhythmic rumble of Pacific waves pushed and pulled the golden grains of Californian sand. Today already had a good vibe to it.
She ran through her schedule, pausing on the noon exec team Zoom with Xomftov, a tech start-up. She still wasn’t certain how to pronounce their name. It was another fangled word, on which they’d no doubt spent a fortune creating with a big-name brand agency.
The CEO was in his early twenties, textbook cockiness from someone that age with a revolutionary idea (weren’t they all?) that had the promise of being a game changer in the financial markets. Venture capitalists had rushed in like bees to a honeypot, funding him and his arrogance to a tune of forty million dollars, before he’d even shown a dime of revenue.
Everything had been going swimmingly until he’d unleashed his repressed emotions, in a hot and heavy exchange with an online sex worker, late at night at his desk, making the rookie error of not bothering to check if anyone else was burning the midnight oil.
The project manager had walked in to share her updated Gantt chart. The fallout had legal and human resources scrambling. Hence the call to herself, cyberpsych troubleshooter Dr. Anna Jones.
She sipped her coffee, relieved she was the old guard, the ones who no longer had to deal with all the drama that went down with pioneering the digital storm that now governed the new age AI.
Way off in the distance she became aware of a dog barking, its tone insistent.
She headed up the centerpiece of their home, a spiral staircase made of bladder-molded glass and carbon fiber. Brad had become obsessed with its design, driving their architect to the point of madness, creating draft after draft of detailed drawings, until he was satisfied that the result was an exquisite, optical illusion of a double helix. She’d have called it done with one.
The door to Jack’s bedroom stood ajar. She pushed it fully open. Testament to teenage hormones and growth spurts, he was dead asleep under the duvet.
“Morning. Breakfast in ten,” she said.“Gui, come on.”She waited for the usual ripple of activity from their long- legged fox red Labrador squirreling out of her sleeping spot at the bottom of the bed. Nothing.
“Hey, Gui.” She lifted the edge of the duvet.
No dog. Must have decided to buck the trend of lying in, which she’d adopted as part of her being over a decade old. Probably had gone out with Brad, like the old days. Not the best idea since she had bad hips.
Anna headed back down the stairs into the kitchen, took a jar of granola o# the shelf. She opened the fridge to retrieve a bottle of organic milk. The noise of the dog barking came through the open door to the deck. No doubt someone had lost it on the beach…
Brad. She’d bet anything he’d put on his AirPods and forgotten Gui was with him. Head in the clouds. Hell. She marched onto the deck and unleashed her hi-lo whistle. The barking ceased.
She whistled again and stood, waiting for the familiar sight of a loping lab appearing out of the mist. Brad had to be more careful.
The barking started up again, accompanied this time by insistent whining. An image of Gui trapped, most likely in someone’s yard that she’d managed to access but not exit, flashed through Anna’s mind’s eye.
