Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Page 14

  Results speak.

  “Twenty chimpanzees?” asks Jessica. She turns to me. “We’re missing ten.”

  I kneel down to inspect the body of one of the chimps I wounded. There’s a small metal band around his ankle. I put on my gloves and lift it for a closer look. I read a serial number and see a string of Chinese characters. Three other chimps have similar bands.

  When I inspect the skin, I can see old scarring. They’ve had these bands for a long time.

  Well before the chimps went missing from the zoo.

  “What’s up?” asks Jessica.

  “You want the bad news or the bad news?” I reply.

  “Oh jeez. You choose.”

  “Some of these chimps are from somewhere else. These aren’t the Monkey Village ones. I think those over there are.”

  “Two groups of chimps?” she asks.

  “At least. And, like you said, we’re still missing more than ten chimpanzees.”

  Chuntakaro calls into his radio, ordering his men to spread out and look for escaped animals. I’m not sure if they’re anywhere near here or not, but it’s a smart precaution.

  Jessica is taking photos with her camera to use for her report. She gets close-up shots of each chimp’s face and extra images of the wounded ones. From what I can tell, she’s treating them the same as she would victims in a human massacre.

  Chuntakaro walks over to the section of the floor where I shot near the two chimps as they started to crawl inside. I can see the blood drops from where my bullet grazed one of them. Things got close.

  “You were down there?” asks Chuntakaro.

  I nod. “Did the army check underneath?” I ask, suddenly aware that since we don’t have an accurate chimp head count, more could be hiding beneath us.

  “The general crawled under himself,” replies Chuntakaro.

  Jessica finishes taking photos and walks back over to us. “So, what was going on here? I’m pretty sure these guys weren’t doing tech support.”

  I point to the far wall. “We need to find a way through that. The interesting parts are probably hidden there.”

  “I know the way,” says Chuntakaro. “Some of General Phathanothai’s men found an entrance.”

  He walks us to the back of the room, where a large section of server cabinets has been slid aside, revealing an opening into another cavernous room. Only instead of being filled with row after row of cabinets for servers, this one is filled with large metal cages and operating tables. The back wall is lined with benches, refrigerators, and large medical equipment, like centrifuges. Broken vials and syringes litter the floor.

  “What the hell happened here?” asks Jessica.

  I kneel and pick up a tranquilizer dart. “It looks like they had a riot.”

  Chuntakaro points to a large enclosure. It’s about ten feet tall, thirty feet long, and made from chain link. At the bottom of the far end, the fence has been ripped from the metal post with just enough space for an adult chimp to climb through.

  “That is not very good construction,” Chuntakaro remarks.

  “No kidding. Something tells me this lab wasn’t built to standard. Check out the benches. They look like they’ve been cleaned out.”

  “Before or after they started eating people?” asks Jessica.

  “I’d say before. My guess is the people running the facility took off and left a skeleton crew behind that wasn’t prepared for handling this many chimpanzees. They may have been in the process of euthanizing them when the chimps broke loose. You can’t do that in front of them. They’re not dumb. The chimps probably panicked, tore open the cage, and then . . . whatever came next.”

  At the back of the room is a large roll-up door. I walk over to the control panel. There’s a lock on the button to raise the door. Jessica leans in to take a closer look.

  There’s blood on the lock.

  “I’m guessing they didn’t let the staff have the key to the only exit inside here,” she replies. “Captain Chuntakaro, with your permission?” Jessica holds up a lockpick.

  “Be my guest.”

  She has the lock open a second later and presses the button to open the door.

  The metal groans and begins to retract upward. Too eager to wait to see what’s underneath when it reaches eye level, Jessica and I both kneel to look. I was afraid there’d be another room of horrors, but instead, sunlight shines in from underneath, revealing a red clay loading area and an untilled field beyond.

  Jessica and I step outside the building. There are large tire tracks on the ground, along with a pile of metal cabinets, buckets, and shovels.

  Chuntakaro joins us. “Looks like they cleared out of here.”

  I step farther out into the loading area and look around. “Not quite.”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asks Jessica.

  “Probably,” I reply as we start walking toward the overgrown field.

  “What’s out there?” asks Chuntakaro.

  “I don’t know. But where there’s this many apes, there’s got to be a lot of ape shit and whatever else you’re trying to hide.”

  We climb to the top of a small berm and are greeted by a cloud of flies. To the left is a long pit filled with excrement. In front of us is another pit with a large pile of burned boxes and documents. To the right is a mound of fresh dirt at least a foot high and ten feet long.

  “Our missing chimps?” asks Jessica.

  “I’m afraid so,” I reply.

  “Why afraid?”

  “If the chimps were part of a medical experiment, which ones are the control group, and which ones are the experimental ones?” I wonder aloud.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are the chimps we encountered the lucky ones? Or are these?”

  I step down from the berm and take a look at the burn pile. There are some file folders, IV bags, and lots of vials. I notice some unusual writing on one of them and reach down for a closer look.

  “Step away from there!” shouts a man in accented English.

  I turn and see a different general from Phathanothai standing on the berm with a row of armed men. That’s the problem with the Thai military: they give out general stars like midtier colleges hand out honorary degrees.

  Chuntakaro confers with the general, then steps down from the hill to explain the situation to Jessica and me.

  “He’s with a different division. You are being asked to leave. He says this is an internal matter.”

  “Great,” sighs Jessica.

  We back away and head to the front to wait for Chuntakaro to try to smooth things over.

  Twenty minutes later, he comes walking around the building, shaking his head.

  “They want you to leave here now,” he says. “He yelled at me for letting you into the location. I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

  “It’s okay.” I notice a fire truck parked at the outer edge of the parking lot. “Can I go talk to them about how to deal with the bodies in case they have to burn them here? I don’t want anyone getting sick.”

  “I can give you my notes,” Jessica says to Chuntakaro.

  “That would be helpful,” he replies.

  Twenty minutes later, we’re back in our car, and I have questions burning through my mind—plus one literally burning through my pocket that’s too crazy to mention even to Jessica right now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  PARALLEL PROCESSING

  I’m a difficult guy to like. I have very few friends. If people were pets, some would have to be dogs: everyone likes them. Others, like cats, are a bit of an acquired taste and come with the understanding that it’s going to be a one-way relationship. I think I fall into tarantula territory—interesting to most people at first, but only worth the effort to a select few.

  Hailey is one of my friends. She’s put up with almost as much of my insanity as Jillian.

  She even tracked me down when I went into my last downward spiral. I was too far gone to explain the me
thod to my madness. Hell, I barely understood it.

  She may have forgiven me, but she hasn’t forgotten. I can tell by the way she’s watching me from the other side of the coffee table in the Marriott hotel lobby.

  Hailey is in her late twenties and runs one of the most successful mobile video game companies on the planet. I met her while trying to hunt down Forrester, and she’s proved to be instrumental to my work on more than one occasion.

  “So . . . I got an interesting voice message a couple of days ago,” she says after we exchange hellos. “Care to elaborate?”

  Jessica’s in meetings at FBI headquarters, and I’ve been told to hang out here while I wait to be called in, arrested, or committed. I figured it would be smart to reach out to my one friend in Virginia in case I need help.

  “Ah, that. I was in Thailand. We were looking for a group of missing chimpanzees. I needed to fake a phone call so I could copy a suspect’s phone directory.”

  “Cool,” she says in that way people younger than me say cool without it actually being cool. “No word from you for six months. Jillian worried that you were dying in some jungle, and this is after you had your psychotic break in Portland?”

  “Was it a psychotic break?” I ask. “I mean, I did catch the most prolific serial killer in America.”

  “Alleged,” says Hailey. “The trial hasn’t finished yet.”

  “You taking demotivational lessons from Mylo? Speaking of which, where is your sidekick?”

  Mylo is Hailey’s best friend and probably the most sarcastic person I’ve ever met. Nothing I could say or do would impress her.

  “We’re running an online tournament right now. She’s providing commentary.”

  “Does that include reminding your fans they’re going to die virgins?” I joke.

  Hailey shakes her head. “You of all people can’t be the ultimate nerd hero and then point at other nerds and yell, ‘Nerd!’ It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Fair point.”

  “So, the Void thing? Are you involved in that?” she asks.

  “Kind of. Did it affect you?”

  “Not too much. We run some servers from Manhattan, but everything was backed up. It was more of a problem for some friends there. A lot of people had their entire businesses wiped. I’m hosting a used-laptop drive to help people get back on their feet,” she explains.

  “That’s good of you.”

  “Good? If people don’t have computers, they can’t play my games,” she jokes. “So, seriously, are there going to be more of those after Singapore and Seoul?”

  “I don’t know. Are you worried about your data?”

  “Yeah. Like everyone else now. Companies are scrambling to add triple redundant backups. Some services are even offering servers in Faraday cages.”

  “Smart,” I reply.

  “Maybe. What can I do to help?”

  “With what?”

  “Your case, idiot. What can I do?”

  “I don’t have a case. They actually wanted to put me into some detention center in case I had some connection to what was going on. Some people were afraid that I was a secret criminal mastermind.”

  “Well . . . ,” Hailey replies.

  “Well, what?”

  “You do have that ‘decides who lives and who dies’ vibe. Not gonna lie. I think it’s kind of attractive, but I always rooted for Ming the Merciless and the Bond villains with the good plan.”

  “Maybe we should be looking into you.”

  She shakes her head, “Oh, Theo, you could never catch me if you tried. But seriously, if there’s anything I can do to help, let me know.”

  “I will. Assuming they let me stay involved.” I’m surprised to hear myself say that. A few days ago, all I wanted was to die or go home and sleep forever. What changed?

  Idiot. You know what changed. You don’t only need challenges, you need challenging people.

  People like Hailey, who can run circles around you mentally; or Jillian, who can literally run circles around you hiking up a trail looking for a crime scene; or Johnny, who could grasp a concept so quickly you felt stupid for not seeing it his way; and of course Jessica, who underneath it all is as scarred as I am, but somehow manages to hold it all together.

  “Earth to Theo.” Hailey snaps her fingers. “You zone out on me again and I’ll have you committed to a facility I control where Mylo can be your therapist.”

  “Sorry. I appreciate the offer of help. There might be a point where I need something in a hurry.”

  “Like what? A helicopter? Billie Eilish singing at your birthday party?”

  “I don’t know who he is,” I reply. “Either way, I’ll let you know.”

  My phone starts buzzing. I glance down and realize I’ve received five text messages from Jessica while talking to Hailey. Each one is marked Urgent.

  “Whoops. Looks like I need to take this.”

  “I’m not surprised they need you,” says Hailey. “But can they handle you?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  THE CLOCK

  An FBI staffer greets me at the entrance to the J. Edgar Hoover building and escorts me all the way up to the sixth-floor meeting room where Jessica is seated at a conference table with five other people I’m given quick introductions to.

  The only one I’ve heard of is Gerald Voigt, her acting supervisor for the Manhattan incident. He sports a boyish look but also has a certain gravitas that tells you he’s intelligent and chooses his words carefully. The other obvious player in the room is an older man to his right, Assistant Director Thomas Pullman. While he shares Gerald’s gravitas, he falls on the other end of the boyish spectrum. Pullman looks like a man who would rather be tying flies and planning his fishing trip to Montana than be here right now.

  “Jessica, do you want to give Theo the update?” asks Gerald.

  Other than a polite nod, we haven’t interacted since I entered the room. We never agreed on an “official” version of the events, but we did dissect what happened enough to know we wouldn’t contradict each other. The only tricky part is how I got the gun in Thailand. Since I still have a federal firearm permit from my work as a defense contractor, I’m not too worried about the legality of my having a gun, at least from the US perspective.

  “Sure,” says Jessica as she picks up a controller for the oversize video monitor at the end of the room. An image appears showing a countdown clock and the name MANHATTAN. She opens two more screens with SEOUL and SINGAPORE. “These website countdowns appeared five days before each city experienced its Void. The links to them were found in several Reddit forums from aliases that appear to be connected to Heywood.” She clicks to another countdown timer that has four days left. “If this is to be believed, another city’s going to be hit soon. We’re obviously concerned about wherever gets hit, but we’re especially concerned if it’s in the United States.”

  “Agent Blackwood is convinced that Michael Heywood is either the originator or a conspirator in this attack,” says Gerald. “What’s your opinion?”

  I’m not sure if this is a trick question. Are they asking me to contradict her? Do they want me to implicate myself?

  “I would defer to her opinion on Heywood’s involvement,” I reply. “I’m not as familiar with his methodology or his motives as she is.”

  “Do you think it’s possible?” asks Pullman.

  Interesting. They don’t know if they should believe her, or at least Pullman doesn’t. Do they want an outside opinion? That seems odd. Do they want a scapegoat in case their judgment is questioned after the fact? That seems more likely.

  “I’d say the chance is nonzero. And as to my understanding, we have no idea of his whereabouts after his custody was shifted to another agency. All of which is suspicious,” I reply.

  “That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the theory,” says Pullman.

  Odd that he calls Heywood being behind this a theory, dismissively.

  Wait a second. Why are they looking for
every opportunity to look anywhere except at Heywood? Jessica suggested that Heywood had been feeding another agency false information and may be at the center of a spy ring embedded in the intel agencies. If that’s the case, then they’re afraid to find out if that’s true. Heywood escaping, causing the Void, and also being involved in espionage and disinformation from within federal custody would be a huge blow to the government. It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t the FBI’s fault. Everyone would look bad, and whoever would look the worst is probably trying hard to convince themselves and anyone who will listen that Heywood is a preposterous suspect.

  They’ve done such a good job of it that the only reason Jessica was even brought into the case was because her former colleague realized she was essential.

  Okay, I think I understand the game. This is a matter of risk management. So I need to try to point it out to them in emotional terms, not rational ones.

  “If Heywood is involved in this and you don’t follow Agent Blackwood’s leads, I can’t see how this would be anything other than a disaster for the FBI.”

  “I’m glad to see you have our best interests in mind,” says Pullman sarcastically, possibly thinking of Butcher Creek and the other times I’ve frustrated federal investigators.

  “I’m always for good law enforcement. Furthermore, what concerns me is that nobody seems terribly bothered by the fact that Heywood is still at large.”

  “We have a special unit dedicated to his capture,” says Pullman.

  “How’s that working out?”

  Pullman sighs. “We don’t have nearly the resources you imagine.”

  I nod at Jessica. “And yet, the most valuable resource you have is kept at the academy teaching cadets card tricks.”

  She glares at me for a moment. I know she’s not teaching them card tricks. At least I don’t think so. What I do know is that if I’m going to be the most aggravating version of myself, I need to say things like that. At least that’s the strategy I’ve decided to follow here.

  Usually my “I’m the smartest guy in this room and if you don’t do what I say, you’re all going to look like idiots” approach has a fifty-fifty chance of working. Which is to say, shutting up might have the same outcome.