Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Read online

  PRAISE FOR ANDREW MAYNE

  THE GIRL BENEATH THE SEA

  “Distinctive characters and a genuinely thrilling finale . . . Readers will look forward to Sloan’s further adventures.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Mayne writes with a clipped narrative style that gives the story rapid-fire propulsion, and he populates the narrative with a rogue’s gallery of engaging characters . . . [A] winning new series with a complicated female protagonist that combines police procedural with adventure story and mixes the styles of Lee Child and Clive Cussler.”

  —Library Journal

  “Sloan McPherson is a great, gutsy, and resourceful character.”

  —Authorlink

  “Sloan McPherson is one heck of a woman . . . The Girl Beneath the Sea is an action-packed mystery that takes you all over Florida in search of answers.”

  —Long and Short Reviews

  “The female lead is a resourceful, powerful woman and we’re already looking forward to hearing more about her in the future Underwater Investigation Unit novels.”

  —Yahoo!

  “The Girl Beneath the Sea continuously dives deeper and deeper until you no longer know whom Sloan can trust. This is a terrific entry in a new and unique series.”

  —Criminal Element

  THE NATURALIST

  “[A] smoothly written suspense novel from Thriller Award finalist Mayne . . . The action builds to [an] . . . exciting confrontation between Cray and his foe, and scientific detail lends verisimilitude.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “With a strong sense of place and palpable suspense that builds to a violent confrontation and resolution, Mayne’s (Angel Killer) series debut will satisfy devotees of outdoors mysteries and intriguing characters.”

  —Library Journal

  “The Naturalist is a suspenseful, tense, and wholly entertaining story . . . Compliments to Andrew Mayne for the brilliant first entry in a fascinating new series.”

  —New York Journal of Books

  “An engrossing mix of science, speculation, and suspense, The Naturalist will suck you in.”

  —Omnivoracious

  “A tour de force of a thriller.”

  —Gumshoe Review

  “Mayne is a natural storyteller, and once you start this one, you may find yourself staying up late to finish it . . . It employs everything that makes good thrillers really good . . . The creep factor is high, and the killer, once revealed, will make your skin crawl.”

  —Criminal Element

  “If you enjoy the TV channel Investigation Discovery or shows like Forensic Files, then Andrew Mayne’s The Naturalist is the perfect read for you!”

  —The Suspense Is Thrilling Me

  OTHER TITLES BY ANDREW MAYNE

  UNDERWATER INVESTIGATION UNIT SERIES

  The Girl Beneath the Sea

  Black Coral

  THE NATURALIST SERIES

  The Naturalist

  Looking Glass

  Murder Theory

  Dark Pattern

  JESSICA BLACKWOOD SERIES

  Angel Killer

  Name of the Devil

  Black Fall

  THE CHRONOLOGICAL MAN SERIES

  The Monster in the Mist

  The Martian Emperor

  OTHER FICTION TITLES

  Station Breaker

  Orbital

  Public Enemy Zero

  Hollywood Pharaohs

  Knight School

  The Grendel’s Shadow

  NONFICTION

  The Cure for Writer’s Block

  How to Write a Novella in 24 Hours

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Andrew Mayne

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542020398

  ISBN-10: 1542020395

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE THE VOID

  PART ONE MAGICIAN

  CHAPTER TWO ALPHA

  CHAPTER THREE EXPERT OPINION

  CHAPTER FOUR FLYOVER

  CHAPTER FIVE CRASH

  CHAPTER SIX TASK FORCE

  CHAPTER SEVEN SUSPECT ZERO

  PART TWO SCIENTIST

  CHAPTER EIGHT ROGUE PLANET

  CHAPTER NINE FLOPHOUSE

  CHAPTER TEN TIME LAPSE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN MAN DOWN

  CHAPTER TWELVE FLIGHT PLAN

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN MASTER OF LIES

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE WEIRD FILE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN DARKNESS

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN BALANCE POINT

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN DATA

  PART THREE ESCAPE ARTIST

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN LANE CHANGE

  CHAPTER NINETEEN CHESSBOARD

  CHAPTER TWENTY MASTERMIND

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THREADS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO MONKEY VILLAGE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE TRAPDOOR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR NEW LOGISTICS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE SYSTEM MALFUNCTION

  PART FOUR DARWINIST

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX PAN TROGLODYTES

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN SURVIVAL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT WETWORK

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE PARALLEL PROCESSING

  CHAPTER THIRTY THE CLOCK

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE ZOMBIES

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO THE PATIENT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE WANDERERS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR SKELETON CREW

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE ANATOMY

  PART FIVE ILLUSIONIST

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX JACKIE OSWALD COBS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN AVATAR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT ACCESS

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE TREASURE HUNT

  CHAPTER FORTY THEOSAURUS REX

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE PAPER TRAIL

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO DIVERSIFICATION

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE ICO

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR OPERATIONS

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE FRONT ROW

  PART SIX THEORETICIAN

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX ASCENSION

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN BACKPROPAGATION

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT PAPERCLIP

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE THE GIFT

  CHAPTER FIFTY COLD STORAGE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE PALACE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO MEMETICS

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE ISO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR TACTICAL

  PART SEVEN MENTALIST

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE DOWNLOAD

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX RAW DATA

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN LIFELINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT AFTERMATH

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE VOID

  Kelsi the silver robot girl pushed her bicycle up the Brooklyn Bridge with her back to Manhattan. It had been a rough night. The tourists in Times Square were rowdier than usual as she’d stood on her box and performed her robot-ballerina routine, balancing on her toes and moving from one precise position to the next.

  Lots
of people stopped to ask for a photo; none of them tipped. They treated her like a public service, posing in front of her for their Instagram stories about their amazing trip to New York. Even the pigeons made out better than she did.

  At one point a man asked for a selfie and put his hand on her ass. Enough was enough and she decided to head home, the silver makeup streaking across her face as the tears began to fall.

  At the middle of the bridge, a trio of teenage girls stopped her and asked if she’d take their photo.

  She wanted to bark at them, but she remembered her first trip to New York and decided to do as they asked and then go home.

  The girls stood arm in arm with the city in back of them and giggled as they tried to get the right pose. Kelsi aimed the phone she’d been handed and tapped the screen to maximize the contrast so the girls and the skyline would be visible.

  In the distance she heard a popping sound like a firework, followed by another and another.

  Suddenly the city vanished from behind the girls on the screen, and then the phone itself went dark. As she lowered the dead phone and stared into the distance, the lights of Wall Street and all the rest of Manhattan blinked out of existence.

  There was another rumble, and all the lights on the bridge went out. Then the cars stopped moving and their headlights went dead.

  The teenagers were amused, then nervous. They turned around to look at the city, but it was gone.

  In its place was a billowing darkness that Kelsi and millions of others were staring into, unable to comprehend what had just happened.

  PART ONE

  MAGICIAN

  CHAPTER TWO

  ALPHA

  Cortland Alva is a six-foot-five former Wyoming state trooper and current FBI academy student who is standing in front of me, extremely pissed. I saw this coming two days ago when I singled him out for a demonstration during my portion of the course that I co-instruct on survival tactics. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s about to help me with the second part of the lesson while the rest of the students watch.

  My goal as an instructor is to help the one agent out of a thousand who may actually find themself in a life-and-death situation. Most of my students will never even draw their guns in the line of duty. They’ll never have to make a split-second decision on whether to take a life to save their own. They won’t have the nightmares. They won’t have the guilt of wondering, What if I handled things differently? They won’t have the panic attacks that come from thinking that if they hadn’t acted at the right moment, they wouldn’t be around to contemplate their stress. Those are the lucky ones. My job is to make sure they never need to rely on luck, because eventually luck runs out. So, I have to illustrate a point for my students. Sometimes that means bruising the ego of a man twice my size who almost became a pro wrestler. Feelings heal with time. Not all scars do.

  I picked on Cortland precisely because he was the largest target. He has the bearing of a person who’s never lost a fight. He probably hasn’t been in many because people give him a wide berth.

  There are stories about Cortland disarming suspects without having to draw his gun. He once punched an armed suspect so hard they smashed a plate-glass window with the back of their skull. The FBI hired him because he had been justified in every case. He could have shot the guy he punched through a window. The man isn’t a bully, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. But he is overconfident. And other students looking at a man like Cortland might take the wrong lesson from him: that size matters. This can lead to self-doubt, which can lead to fatal mistakes.

  I asked Cortland to come to the front of the small auditorium and had him stand in front of me. What I did to him was a magic trick disguised as an awareness exercise. I told him it was the slap game, where we try to anticipate when one player is about to slap the back of the other player’s hands.

  Moments before, I’d finished explaining that you should never let your suspect determine the rules of engagement. They’ll never write them in your favor.

  As Cortland stood before me, I reached out and pulled him closer by grabbing his wrists. He didn’t see the handcuffs. Nobody did. They were up my sleeve until the moment I put them on his wrists. Like I said, it was a magic trick. But to Cortland and the students watching, it was a miracle.

  The powerful man stood there, looking down at his wrists as a woman almost a foot shorter than him and half his weight rendered him incapacitated, or at least restricted enough that I could do more harm to him than he to me. It was a humiliating experience. And like every other time I’ve done that demonstration, I knew the real lesson would happen when he challenged me to do it again.

  “Instructor Blackwood,” Cortland, now uncuffed, says in a polite yet irritated voice. “I don’t suppose you can try that handcuff trick on me again?” He’s standing opposite the table from me and from his vantage can see over the top of my open briefcase.

  I’m packing up my notes, seemingly caught off guard. In truth, I’m never off guard anymore. I sleep with a loaded gun under my pillow and a shotgun under my bed. The handcuffs from the demonstration lie in my briefcase, gleaming in the overhead lights. Cortland sees this. Everyone sees this.

  If I ask for a moment to get ready, it’ll look like a sign of weakness. My previous demonstration will seem like a trick, not a real-world lesson. I need to look as if I’ve thought of everything.

  “I’m sorry?” I say as I move to shut my case.

  He nods at the closed briefcase. “Can you try that again on me?”

  Cortland has been running through the incident over and over in his mind, trying to figure out how I got the better of him. He finally decided he simply wasn’t prepared. He was right.

  I lean forward on my closed case. I caught him off guard before and was able to bring his wrists together before he realized it. Now he won’t let me do that. He’s too strong. I have to get him to do it for me.

  “Which thing?” I ask with a lighthearted smile, making myself seem unthreatening.

  “The handcuff trick,” he says, bringing his hands together to show me.

  Perfect.

  “Oh.” I look to the clock on the wall. “I’m not sure if we . . .”

  He relaxes, and his eyes flick to the clock.

  His hands drop slightly. Click.

  “WHAT THE FUCK?” Cortland yells as he looks down at his bound wrists.

  Everyone explodes with laughter. Tom Simmons and Ned Antonio, my co-instructors, are standing at the back of the classroom near the door, grinning.

  This is the crucial moment, the one I want Cortland to learn from, because in some ways he’s the most vulnerable. He lifts his hands and stares at the handcuffs. It isn’t shock that he feels this time. It’s the reality of life setting in.

  All the other students are watching him, waiting to see how he’ll react. Is he going to get angry? Will he protest that it wasn’t fair?

  Cortland appraises his situation. He looks at the steel restraints like they’re some ancient scripture. A light goes on. His face relaxes. His anger fades. He smiles.

  “You understand the secret?” I ask.

  Cortland nods. “Never let your guard down.”

  “Never,” I reply. “And you write the rules. Your greatest threats aren’t always going to be in front of you. Sometimes they’re thousands of miles away, plotting your demise.”

  He drops his hands to his waist, unconcerned with the handcuffs; he’s accepted them now. “The stuff they told us about you—the cartel gun battles, the assassination attempts. I thought they hyped it up to make you into some kind of woke female superhero.”

  I shake my head. “No. I was dumb and put myself into situations you all should be smart enough to avoid. I’m alive because I won a lottery, not because of tricks like this. They only work when I see what’s coming. When I don’t, I won’t survive.”

  “Is this why you’re not in the field anymore?” asks Rhonda Parry, a petite young woman from Phoenix.

  “The
bureau decided I was better as a cautionary example than a tragic one.”

  Tom Simmons jokes that I’m like the shop teacher who’s missing a few fingers.

  Rhonda is sharp. She studied biology in college, then decided on forensics, but her criminal justice classes made her want to become an FBI agent. She sticks around after class and asks me about cases she’s researching and about my own history.

  With every class, I get a few cadets like her. They see me as a role model and not the cautionary tale I should be viewed as. I do my best while secretly wanting to tell them to find some boring job and spend their evenings watching Netflix with someone they love and not a stack of folders and a pile of photographs of dead people.

  “There have been some more miracle-cure ‘angel’ cases,” she says hesitantly. “I’d like to talk to you about them.”

  “How about tomorrow?” I reply. “My office?”

  “Okay.” She gives me a nervous smile.

  “Ahem,” says Cortland, holding up his manacled wrists.

  “Here.” I hand him a ballpoint pen.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?”

  “When I was eight, my grandfather put a pair of handcuffs on me, actually child-size ones, and locked me in a closet with just a pen and a notebook,” I explain.

  “That’s horrible,” says one of the other cadets, Denise Elliott.

  “No, it was fun. I mean, in my house, this is what we did.”

  My grandfather was a famous stage magician. I followed in his footsteps until I realized that you have to follow your own dreams—especially when the dream that someone else wants you to follow almost leads to you drowning while performing an escape attempt on live television. It took me a long time to realize that my grandfather didn’t have a death wish for me, he just saw me as invulnerable because I was usually several steps ahead.

  “Lock children in closets?” she replies.

  “Think of it as a tiny escape room? Okay. I was a weird kid.”

  She shakes her head. “That sounds like child abuse.”

  “It’s why I’m alive today. Anyway, this pen’s your key,” I tell Cortland. “You and your friend Riley can figure it out. Looking on YouTube isn’t cheating.”

  At the rear of the room, Tom Simmons is trying to get my attention, holding up his phone and pointing to it urgently.