Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Page 15

  Pullman shakes his head. “I don’t know how much of you is show versus real. I’ve got people at NSA and the CIA strongly hinting that I should take a closer look at you. They say you’re far more dangerous than Heywood could ever be.”

  “And yet here I am, offering you my help. And he’s on the run,” I reply.

  “But you have an angle. A book deal, a TV series, or a something.”

  I reach into my pocket and set my burner phone, hotel key, and twelve dollars on the table. “This is the entirety of my net worth. And both the phone and the money are borrowed. I transferred everything I own to my girlfriend over a year ago, with no obligation for her to give it back. I’ve been washing my underwear and socks in the sink every night because they’re the only ones I own. I’ve never accepted a book deal because I find the idea of profiting off the horrific acts committed by the people I caught to be disturbing. I’ve never sold movie rights, tried to sell them, or had any wish to be a public person other than to what degree it helps me help other people. If you think I’m trying to profiteer from a situation, then I think I have a better understanding why you’ve failed to see the warning signs within your own agency of agents found guilty of corruption and espionage.”

  Pullman doesn’t immediately respond. He sits back and sizes me up for a moment. “You’re nuts. You’re absolutely nuts. I just can’t tell if you’re the good kind or the bad kind.”

  “I can simplify that proposition for you. All you have to ask is if I’m the useful kind.”

  Pullman turns to Gerald. “Do you vouch for him?”

  “That he’s nuts? One hundred percent. That he’s useful? Blackwood thinks so. And that’s better than my own opinion.”

  “Fine. If Dr. Cray flips out and turns evil, I’m having you both put on trial as conspirators,” says Pullman.

  “If I went evil, there would be no one left on this planet to hold trials,” I reply. Jessica groans audibly.

  Too much?

  “He doesn’t know when to shut up, does he?” Pullman asks her.

  “You get used to it,” she sighs.

  “No,” Pullman replies. “You get used to it. Not me. Let’s move on. Blackwood told us that you found evidence that Heywood or someone he’s connected to is working on a biological weapon.”

  “We did not,” I correct.

  I can feel Jessica’s stare burning into my face. “Pardon me?” says Pullman.

  “We found a testing facility where they were using stolen chimpanzees and a mass grave where we believe more chimpanzees will be found. This could indicate a bioweapon. It could just be a clandestine pharmaceutical-testing facility doing under-the-table work for a major pharma company,” I explain.

  “Run that by me again?”

  “Human trials are prohibitively expensive. Sometimes pharmaceutical companies will conduct secret trials using third parties to determine if it’s worth the effort to spend billions of dollars taking a drug to the next stage of development.”

  “I’m not familiar with this.”

  “It’s a kind of regulatory compromise. Either way, though, that facility could be a weapons-testing lab. It’s illegal and probably has ties to the United States.”

  “So you want us to send you back to Thailand to investigate further?” asks Pullman.

  “No. I want you to send Blackwood and me to Estonia.”

  Jessica’s head snaps toward me. I didn’t tell her this part because I knew she’d have to disclose everything to her superiors. Whereas I’m under no such obligation. I can also present only one set of facts to them while withholding other details.

  “We’ve had one EMP attack in the United States, two in Asia. My guess is that if the target is data-storage facilities, then the next one will be in Europe. Estonia is a possible target. I’d like to start there.”

  “Estonia? What about the chimp research?” asks Pullman.

  “We found that lab inside an abandoned data center. Estonia has quite a number of data centers. There might be a correlation.” But there’s not . . .

  “Fine. Voigt, they’re your problem. Got it?”

  “They’re definitely my problem,” Gerald replies.

  Pullman gets up and leaves the room, taking everyone else with him except Gerald and Jessica.

  She makes a polite nod and waves as they depart, then turns to me. “What. The. Fuck. Was. That?”

  “Yeah,” Gerald chimes in. “What she said.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ZOMBIES

  Jessica is looking at me like she’s seriously considering turning me back over to Kieren and being done with me forever. Gerald seems ready to help her.

  “Okay, let me explain things. Or not . . .” I think out loud. “Jessica, do you trust Gerald?”

  “With my life,” she replies flatly.

  “Okay. Do you trust me?” I ask.

  “Not at the moment. No.”

  “Okay, fair enough without context. On a meta level, do you trust that I have everyone’s best interests in mind, not accounting for whatever brain damage you assume I may have?”

  “Fine. Sure,” she says impatiently.

  “Okay, Gerald. May I call you that?”

  “If it helps you get to your point faster, yes.”

  “You trust Pullman, right?”

  “He’s ethical. Yes,” he replies.

  “All right. But I can infer that somewhere between Pullman and the other agencies, there’s someone we shouldn’t trust.”

  Gerald glances at Jessica. She doesn’t flinch. I’m assuming there’s something deeper here.

  “My name showed up on a list that it had no business being on. Someone’s leaking misinformation. Which means somewhere in this huge circle of trust between the Justice Department and the intelligence community, there’s someone being trusted who shouldn’t be trusted. And if I were to have said certain things in this room that raised red flags, the party we do not trust could learn what was said . . . eventually.” I turn to Jessica. “And that meant me withholding certain things from you until after your briefing so you wouldn’t have to disclose them and have the enemy know what we know.”

  If they think I sound like a raving lunatic now, wait until I get to the good part.

  “Go on,” says Jessica.

  “Well, first we have to solve the Gerald problem.”

  “And what problem is that?” he asks.

  “If what I tell you is too sensational or whatever, you’ll have to tell your superiors.”

  “As will Jessica.”

  “No. Not if you tell her to use her discretion,” I reply.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” she fires back.

  “Of course it does. If I told you that I believe in aliens, does that have to go into a report? No. If I mentioned that one of the reasons I want to go to Estonia is to see if the mother ship is there, does that need to go in?”

  “Aliens?” asks Gerald.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just making a point. I have a lead, and it would be better if only Jessica knew. You have the comfort of knowing that if she thinks I’m completely insane, she’ll let you know.”

  Gerald shakes his head.

  “See what I’ve been dealing with?” says Jessica.

  “I’m shaking my head because I see his point,” Gerald replies. He stands. “I’m out. Jessica, best of luck. Have fun ending the world in Estonia with Dr. Strangelove here.”

  “It may not be Estonia. That’s the other thing,” I reply.

  “Don’t care,” he says as he exits, leaving Jessica and me in the conference room.

  She rocks back in her chair and swivels in my direction, I assume assessing what just happened. She finally nods. “Clever, Theo. Very clever. I think I get you. You managed to clear the room yet still got us what we want. You’ve got the mad-scientist part down pat.”

  Er . . . do I tell her it wasn’t an act?

  “You have to use what tools you have,” I reply.

  �
�Okay, enough with the Estonia-and-aliens nonsense. What are you really up to?”

  “Estonia was just a cover. And the aliens thing was just a joke.”

  “That’s a relief,” she replies.

  “Yeah. We need to go to Chernobyl . . . to look for radioactive zombies.”

  Her hands go to her forehead, and she lets out an exasperated sigh. This may be the closest I’ve seen her to tears. “And why?” she asks in a strained voice.

  I take the one item I didn’t set on the table and place it in front of her. She picks up the burned piece of green plastic and examines it.

  “Is that Cyrillic?” she asks, pointing at the Russian wording.

  “Yes. I pulled it from the fire pit back in Thailand when you were distracting the general. It’s a prepackaged syringe wrapper.”

  “Made in Russia?” she replies.

  “Or Ukraine. Either way, they were trying to destroy this. Leaving behind the chimps didn’t matter as much as this and whatever else was in that fire pit.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because there’s a second facility. One that may still be active. But with human subjects.”

  “And why Chernobyl?” she asks, inspecting the paper more closely.

  “Because that wrapper’s radioactive.”

  Jessica drops it on the table and looks at her hands.

  “Not that radioactive. But enough to measure. Remember when I talked to the Thai firefighters?”

  “About disposing of the chimp bodies?”

  I slap my forehead. “I forgot to tell them that part. Actually, I asked to use their Geiger counter. Fire departments carry them in case they have to go into hospitals or other facilities that have radioactive materials.”

  “And that made you think Chernobyl?”

  “Indirectly. We know there are a number of research facilities in that part of Ukraine that are used for secret research because of its isolation yet relative proximity to major cities. Also, your Weird File,” I add.

  “Oh.” Jessica thinks for a moment. “The zombie sightings outside Kiev?”

  “Yes. Read one way, it sounds like science fiction, but in the context of a poorly run secret facility that may have had drugged-up, unwell people escaping, it kind of makes sense. And there’s the fact that I was able to trace the number Jack gave us to another number in Kiev.”

  Jessica glances up at the ceiling and runs her fingers through her hair. It’s quite nice hair, I realize for the first time. It reminds me of a raven’s feathers.

  “Theo. How does Jillian put up with you?” she asks.

  “Well, I’m gone a lot. That helps. We do our best when I’m not around.”

  “Sorry,” she replies. “I didn’t mean that. Your thinking is of course sound. And I understand why you went about it in the way you did. I’d tell you not to do it again, but that would be pointless. So now what? Where are we headed, Kiev?”

  “Yep,” I reply. “We start with those zombie sightings.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE PATIENT

  Dr. Mayya Kosakivsky agreed to meet us at the Pesto Café in a small shopping plaza in Kiev. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Olena, is sitting next to her, translating for her mother. Mayya watches the exchange and appears to understand our English but is too self-conscious to speak it herself. Fortunately, her daughter’s English is excellent, and she even occasionally throws in an Americanism that I assume comes from television.

  “She was the doctor on the afternoon shift at the clinic. It was just herself and two nurses when they brought the man in,” Olena explains.

  “Who brought him in?” asks Jessica.

  We’d started off by asking Mayya about the news story involving a “zombielike” man found wandering outside the Chernobyl zone. He had no idea who he was and could barely answer questions. His dialect was unfamiliar to anyone who talked to him. Because of his hollow cheeks and the condition of his clothing, he was nicknamed the Kyyiv Zombi, which, phonetically, is almost the same as the Kiev Zombie.

  The mystery deepened when, after the man’s story hit social media that night and a ghoulish photo was posted to Facebook, a group of men identifying themselves as government health workers pulled up to the clinic and took him away.

  The Ukrainian government denied any knowledge. When attention turned to the Russians, they insisted they had no knowledge of the man. Eventually it was dismissed as a hoax, but other regional news outlets ran stories about other zombis being spotted on roads or in forests.

  We decided to talk to Mayya first, because her account was the most credible. She’d actually avoided talking to the news out of concern for patient privacy and seemed more worried about the man’s well-being than the sensational aspects of the story.

  “He was brought in by a policeman who patrols the roads,” Olena translates for us. “He was a friend of a doctor there and brought the man into the clinic because it was closer than the hospital.” Olena confers with her mother. “Dymytro is his name.”

  Jessica lays a map on the table. “Do you think he or your mother would know where the man was found?”

  Without waiting for the translation, Mayya puts her finger on the map, then speaks to her daughter.

  “Dymytro said the man was found wandering near the road close to the equipment cemetery,” Olena explains.

  “Equipment cemetery?” asks Jessica.

  “It’s where they buried all the trucks and machines used to handle the Chernobyl accident,” I reply.

  Mayya nods in agreement. Jessica puts an X where the doctor indicated the man was found and adds the time and date it happened.

  “What was the health of the man?” I ask.

  Olena relays her mother’s comments. “She says he looked malnourished, but from some kind of digestive disorder.” She points to her left arm. “There were needle marks there. The police thought they were heroin injections, but my mother said the needle was too big and looked like a . . . what’s the word . . . intravenous drip.”

  Jessica nods, glancing at me for my reaction.

  “My mother says he also had marks on his wrist,” adds Olena.

  “Like handcuff marks?” I ask.

  Mayya nods again and seems agitated as she speaks rapidly.

  “It looked like he’d been a prisoner somewhere. That’s what she thought. Perhaps he escaped a prison infirmary. The problem is that Dymytro never would have brought him in if that was the case. He called the state police and the organization that would handle such a thing. They said check the mental hospitals.”

  “And they didn’t know anything, either?” asks Jessica.

  Mayya shakes her head, looks around the café, then whispers something in a low voice for her daughter to translate.

  “She says that she spoke to a friend at another facility, and they had a similar patient two days before. But he’d only been there for an hour before the men in the trucks pulled up and took him away. Same condition. Same injuries.”

  “Where was that facility?” asks Jessica.

  Mayya puts her finger on a spot twenty miles to the northwest of the other sighting.

  “Do you know what time he was brought in?”

  “A-bout ten o’clock,” Mayya says in halting English. “Night.”

  “What do you think was medically wrong with these men?”

  Mayya thinks it over, then speaks to her daughter for a full minute, pointing to her feet and her chest occasionally.

  “She says it’s quite odd. They had blisters on their feet and what looked like bedsores. These men appeared to be on the verge of death, but they were healthy enough to walk great distances. She didn’t get to thoroughly examine the man, but she did see some surgical scars. There was another thing . . .” Olena asks her mother for clarification. “She says the man wasn’t quite there. Not drugged. Not crazy, but not fully present. Like he had some kind of brain damage. Mother said when she was an intern, she met older patients that were similar. They’d been given .
. . what’s the word?”

  Mayya points to her temple. “Lobotomy.”

  “That’s curious,” I reply.

  “That’s disturbing,” says Jessica.

  “There’s also an odd connection here,” I say. “António Moniz, the man who pioneered lobotomization, got the idea after watching a talk by a neurologist who severed the frontal lobes of a chimpanzee, making her docile and easy to work with.”

  “Too bad the people at the Thai research facility didn’t do their homework,” Jessica replies.

  “Or maybe they did—the ones that abandoned it, at least. The Thai facility may have tried chlorpromazine on the chimpanzees to keep them calm, but I’m sure human-level dosages wouldn’t nearly be enough.”

  “Lobotomies . . . patients escaping? What are they up to?” asks Jessica.

  “I don’t know, but if we can find the facility, that would be a start.”

  After thanking Mayya and her daughter for their help, Jessica and I plan our search. We don’t have a lot to go on, other than two sightings twenty miles apart. The radiation from the syringe package was strong enough for me to draw a perimeter around where its origin point could have been, but that still leaves several hundred square miles.

  Jessica is using her phone calculator to track on the map the range the men could have walked from. Both of their paths lead back into the Chernobyl protective zone, which is fenced off and patrolled—loosely. The security doesn’t mean there aren’t people coming and going from there on a regular basis. Within the zone there are a number of research facilities studying the effects of radiation on the wildlife around Chernobyl, as well as testing treatments and technologies for mitigating the threat of radiation.

  Working within large parts of the zone doesn’t pose much more of a radiological threat than being an airline flight attendant or working in a coal mine. That doesn’t mean there’s zero effect, but it’s not enough to keep researchers away.

  When I saw the syringe wrapper with Cyrillic, my instincts were to check for radiation, because the Chernobyl zone had been on my list of locations for possible clandestine operations. I didn’t expect the Geiger counter to go off, but I wasn’t terribly surprised when it did.