Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Read online

  Ailes thinks this over. “Do you really trust him?”

  “I do. Do I know what his real motives are? No. Do I think he’s a soldier who’s been at war too long? Definitely. But we need him right now. We think we know how the Voids happened, but we have no idea why. Heywood’s up to something even I can’t comprehend.”

  “Something he doesn’t want one of the world’s leading computational biologists looking at too closely.”

  “At least not the one who also happens to have caught more serial killers than half the FBI.”

  “Fair enough. It’s obviously not my call, but I’ll vouch for you and talk to some friends. I’ll have to explain why turning him over to IDR would be a bad idea. Hopefully they’ll listen. What’s next?” asks Ailes.

  “That’s easy. When Theo wakes up, I’m going to ask him to think of the most horrifying plots against the world that he can imagine.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MASTERMIND

  Theo is sitting in a chair, staring out the window of his room of the base hotel. My room has a view of the base and the runway; his looks out over the morning fog–covered tracts of farmland south of Camp Humphreys. I can’t tell if he’s looking inward or outward. He hasn’t touched the cup of coffee I brought him. The watch on the table with the timer running and the bottles of water near medicine packages tell me he’s been focusing on getting his body back into shape instead of tending to his cravings.

  “Want me to order you some breakfast?” I ask.

  “No, I’ll stick to liquids for a little while longer.” He picks up a protein shake. “The key, I think, is to dilute them. My stomach hasn’t processed this much nutrient-rich food in a while. That’s one of the problems in trying to treat people who are malnourished. Our urge is to force-feed them, but that can make things worse.”

  “Like with Auschwitz survivors,” I muse, thinking back to a documentary I watched on how the Allies had to nurse them back to health.

  “Exactly. We know a lot more now. Thankfully. And my situation was nowhere near as bad, but I saw men back in that prison who weren’t much better off,” he says, still staring out the window.

  “Hard to imagine how someone could do that to another person,” I reply.

  “No, it’s not. You just make a person not a person. You start with a label. Maybe it’s a different political party or religion from your own. Then you make them that label and everything you hate about it. I watched military commanders do that with young children, getting them to hate people in a different village.” He points to the television in the room. “We have our version. We even tell ourselves convincing little fictions that it’s okay to hate those other people because they’re the ones who are really filled with hate. We make ourselves judges.” His eyes go down to his hands in his lap. “I made myself a judge. I’m sorry. You have some folders. You want to talk about something?”

  “It can wait,” I lie.

  “No, it can’t. I apologize.” He turns away from the window and rests his elbows on the table. “What can I do for you?”

  I feel awkward saying what I’m about to say after his observations on the nature of good and evil. “Well, this is a bit uncomfortable for me to ask. But I was wondering if you’d be up for a bit of role-playing?”

  “Role-playing? What do you mean?”

  “I’m convinced that Heywood’s at the center of this. The problem is, I can’t prove it, much less explain what ‘this’ really is. Some think the Voids are an end in and of themselves. You and I think otherwise. The data-center heist clearly shows he’s up to something.”

  “But it could be ancillary,” says Theo. “That may not be the goal, either. More like stealing the jar of candy on the way out after a bank robbery.”

  “Fair enough. But whatever it is, I’d rather figure out what he’s trying to do before it’s revealed. You follow?”

  “I think so. So what role do I play?”

  “This is the awkward part. I want you to think like a criminal genius who wants to do as much harm as possible.”

  “Is that what you think he’s up to?” asks Theo.

  “He’s evil. He has no problem with murder. I’m just trying to figure out how you would scale that up. I was hoping you could help. Everyone I’ve talked to pretty much starts with ‘steal a nuclear bomb’ or ‘get a hold of some kind of bioweapon.’ I was wondering if you had something more imaginative.”

  “Nuclear is hard. A private individual could still pull it off, if they had enough resources.”

  “Really? Everyone I’ve talked to says you’d have to be a nation-state, and then we’d still know something was up.”

  “I think Bill Gates or Elon Musk could pull it off,” replies Theo. “Disguise it in plain sight as fusion research. The key would be keeping a lid on the people working for you. But you could have a hundred physicists and engineers working on compartmentalized projects while only a small team really knows what’s going on.”

  “That’s scary to think about,” I reply.

  “Is it? I could have changed the tide of World War II if I brought my laptop back in time. From uranium refinement to code breaking, it would give me godlike powers. Now we all have them. Anyway, I don’t think he’s going nuclear.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too small-scale. So, you take out a city. Earthquakes do that all the time. The last pandemic hit the major ones. It was painful; we’re still recovering, but we’re still here. The damage from September 11 wasn’t just the people lost, it was the psychological impact and how it changed all our lives. If you want to do real damage, you don’t just break a thing, you destroy a system.”

  “Okay. How do you do that?”

  “Lots of ways.” Theo looks up for a moment. “It’s not just what you do, but how you go about doing it. If you study the strategy of terrorists, you’ll notice that they went from focusing on initial damage to creating follow-up attacks that killed first responders. One bomb to hurt the civilians, a second to kill all the people who rushed in to help. This has affected the way we do crisis management and made the first attack even more deadly. We don’t rush in to help the wounded as quickly because we need to make sure it’s safe to do so. Now, accelerate that line of reasoning and you can figure out how to do maximum damage.”

  “Such as?” I ask.

  “It works with anything. Let’s say I wanted to do a simplified bioweapon attack. I’d start by getting the more dangerous strains of pathogens that are being worked on around the world,” he explains.

  “And release them in shopping malls and other public places?” I reply.

  “No. Not at first. That would be too conventional. I’d release them at the doughnut shop across the street, infecting coffee cups. I’d put them in those misters they use in outdoor bars wherever you have soldiers. I’d be infecting everyone at the major disease-control centers. I’d infect the people who are supposed to protect us first. That’s what Forrester was trying to do to our military forces.”

  “They said he never would have gotten that far,” I reply.

  “They desperately needed to convince themselves that’s true,” says Theo. “So many of their safeguards failed—why should we believe only the ones we didn’t test would have held up?”

  I don’t know if this is Theo trying to make himself out to be some kind of great savior or if he’s just stating simple truths. I’m leaning toward the latter, and it’s frightening.

  “And one more thing,” Theo continues. “Depending upon what I could get from each lab, I’d release different variants and entirely different diseases around the world. That would cause chaos. We may be better prepared now for handling outbreaks, but this would overcome those preparations. While we’re overwhelmed with one attack, we’d get hit by another. Then another.”

  “So you think it could be biological in nature?” I ask.

  “It could be, but I’m a biologist. So I’m biased. Ask a computer scientist and they might point out that one of our
biggest vulnerabilities is embedded systems. You know that already. Red Chain found a series of exploits in the power grid that they were able to use to cause blackouts.”

  And nearly tore countries apart through riots and misinformation. “They’re supposed to be better now, and we have improved systems for controlling misinformation,” I reply.

  “Do we? Or did we centralize everything and make it even easier to spread fear? Now all it takes is one extra vote in a contested district for a VP of software at a tech company to have the authority to tell people what’s true and not true. Is that a better system? Sometimes quick fixes are exactly what our enemy wants. Viruses learned to use our immune systems against us, and that’s worked extremely well.”

  “We’re still here,” I reply.

  “Cow pastures exist because we need meat, not because of any clever social thinking on the cow’s behalf.”

  “Any other cheery thoughts?”

  “No, just what I said. That if Heywood did want to use some kind of pathogen attack, then he’d do well to infect the people who are supposed to solve the problem. Taking them out of the equation like he tried with you and me.”

  I make some notes. “So, we should be monitoring infectious-disease researchers for disease?”

  “It’s probably worth the effort. Although I suspect that he’d use something rather mild in the beginning so as not to raise too many of their own alarm bells. He might even infect researchers with variants of their own research so they’d take longer to report symptoms.”

  “Because they’d assume it was self-contamination?”

  “Yes. The only thing intelligent people hate almost as much as making mistakes is being wrong. When I was teaching, sometimes I’d deliberately mess up my students’ experiments and see how many of them reported the errors in their results.”

  “And?”

  “I’d call out the name of a student and read their lab report in class and eviscerate them for concealing the faulty results, giving the others a chance to make amends.”

  “That had to suck to be that student,” I reply.

  Theo shakes his head. “I made the name up. The other students were too focused on their own mistakes to realize that I was tearing into someone who didn’t exist.”

  “Did you like to teach?” I ask.

  “I miss it more than anything else,” says Theo without hesitation. “I liked to teach and do original research. I didn’t appreciate what I had back then, though. I didn’t know what a gift it was to be around smart, young minds . . .” His voice trails off. “I should have paid more attention.”

  There’s something profoundly sad about the way he just said that. I’d ask for more, but I might be probing too deep.

  “You’ve circled the word biological,” says Theo, pointing at my notepad.

  “Well, you make a strong case. The thing is, we haven’t had any reports of break-ins at labs . . .”

  “First of all, you don’t need to physically steal the specimen. You can get the genetic sequence from an online database. Then it’s a matter of using a sequencer. If the strands are too short, you can use a growth medium like yeast to join them. After that, you take the DNA and convert it to RNA—if it’s an RNA virus—and then infect a cell with it. Same with bacteria, although you can skip a step. For fun, you could mix and match genes to see what you get.”

  “It’s that easy?” I ask.

  “It’s all relative. I’ve done it . . . unofficially. But some of my methods haven’t been published because I’m afraid they make the process a little too simple. Any medium-size university or biotech company could pull it off. It just takes one or two steady hands and money. Do you think Heywood has access to those kinds of resources?”

  “I wouldn’t put anything past him. And I suspect he has access to a large source of funding, either his own or from a state sponsor. But I can’t prove it.”

  Theo goes silent for a moment. “Hmm. I’ll have to think about that.”

  “I hate to ask you this, but we need your help. Ongoing, I mean. This has already been helpful.”

  “Hmm,” he says again. “Last I checked, the government was trying to put me into a cell.”

  “Some people still want to see that happen. And if you stay on board, it’ll only create more suspicion for them about you.”

  “That’s good. At least it shows they’re learning. After the Forrester incident, I pointed out that because he’d been considered a leading authority on the kind of vaccine tampering they were trying to prevent, they never considered him a suspect. And yet he should have been the first one we looked at.”

  “So, you’ll help us?”

  “No, Jessica. I’ll help you. The moment they take you off this or try to get me to talk to someone else, I’m done.”

  “That could mean sitting this out in some IDR secret detention center,” I say.

  “Then so be it.” Theo shrugs. “Where do we start?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THREADS

  “I’d like to know more about the data centers,” says Theo. “What was taken. That seems like our biggest clue yet. If we could get back in there, we might find something else.”

  “We can’t. IDR has taken over that part of the investigation, along with the Koreans,” I explain.

  “Well, they seemed to be on the same track we were, so I guess it makes sense.”

  “Except they weren’t. They got our position from Korean intelligence. They didn’t show up at the data center to chase down a clue. They went because it’s where you were.”

  “Ah. I see. And now they have access and get the credit, I assume?”

  “Basically. The credit doesn’t bother me. I’d just like to know what they know as soon as they find out. While I don’t trust Kieren, the people working with her aren’t stupid. They’re bound to discover something, but I doubt they’ll be sharing it with us,” I say with a sigh.

  “Why didn’t the FBI put their foot down? You or Ambassador Ailes could have made a deal.”

  “We did. Sort of . . .”

  Theo leans back and stares at me. “Oh. I see. I was that deal. I’m not in some IDR facility because you made a trade?”

  “In a roundabout way,” I say.

  “Jessica, objectively speaking, was that wise? I think you and your colleagues might make faster work of whatever is in that data center than IDR can. This could be a setback.”

  I shake my head. “No. I’m making a bet, something my gut tells me.”

  “And that is?”

  “That having you on the outside is better than whatever I can learn from the data heist. I bet on your freedom and your mind.”

  “Let me apologize in advance for disappointing you. I don’t think there’s anyone better at understanding Heywood than you. I’m afraid I’m not much more than deadweight.”

  “Let’s hold off on that determination until later. Right now, we need another lead.”

  “What about the EMPs?”

  “The FBI lab is looking for clues. All the materials except the carbon nanotubes are off-the-shelf. The suspects they’ve arrested have prior associations with anarchist groups. They claim they were recruited online and paid to carry out the New York attack.”

  “Paid how?”

  “Bitcoin or some other digital currency. A hundred thousand each. Apparently, there were dry runs with small teams. Those might’ve been to see who could be trusted.”

  Theo nods. “They were run like terrorist cells. Nobody had enough information to compromise the others.”

  “Correct. And it seems they had no idea what the EMPs would do. They thought they were just bombs meant to disrupt traffic.”

  “Interesting. So that means that somewhere there’s a bomb maker. Did we have any more sightings of demons or dementors anywhere else?” asks Theo.

  “No. But I’ve asked if we could get hold of military radar recordings and satellite images. There might be something to be found there.”

  “
It sounds like everything to do with the Void is being covered,” says Theo. “I don’t know what help I can really provide.”

  “Then let’s look outside the Void. Let’s look where nobody else is paying attention.”

  Theo considers this for a moment. “Patterns are hard because we can only know what we see. Great white sharks were a complete mystery to us because they’d show up in one region, then vanish for a year before returning. Where did they go? In retrospect it was obvious, but at the time it was a big nature mystery. The simple answer is that when an animal goes someplace else, it’s either to eat, breed, or give birth.

  “When they finally were able to tag great whites with satellite trackers, they found the places where the big sharks were doing all those things. The feeding grounds should have been obvious, because that pattern was enmeshed in another creature’s pattern. In this case, great whites went to eat where seals went to give birth. A booming seal colony meant a great white buffet. When scientists found out where great whites gave birth, it turned out to be where they didn’t have to worry about being fished or killed by orcas when they were at their most vulnerable.

  “The lesson was: if you can’t discern one species’ pattern, look for the patterns of the other species it shares an ecosystem with.”

  “All right. How do we apply that here? Or do you just make up nature documentaries in your head as you go along?”

  “Good question. I’ve been asked that before. As far as Heywood’s pattern goes, he needs people. Maybe not informed people who know the whole picture, but people to do the physical work for the insanity he dreams up. Talking to some of the people he’s recruited in the past would be helpful, but I suspect that he’s smart enough to leave so many false trails that we’d be running in circles.