Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Read online

  She uses the word been, letting me know that she understands the potential consequences of the kiss. Perhaps intentionally letting me off the hook for the guilt I feel.

  A small smile forms at the corner of her mouth. “We could just flip a coin. Heads we enter. Tails we don’t.” She shrugs. “We’ll have to find out sometime.”

  She unlocks the doors with the key card, and her hand reaches for the knob. She twists it and opens the door. A twenty-foot floor-to-ceiling window stands at the far end of the room. Three white couches sit in the middle, and a stainless steel telescope is aimed out at the city.

  Jessica turns to me and rolls her eyes. “Of course. It’s one big scavenger hunt.”

  She strides across the room and leans over the telescope to look through the eyepiece. I consider stopping her in case it’s a trap, but it’s too late.

  Instead, I join her and watch as she adjusts the focus on the scope. Her free hand tucks a loose strand of her hair behind her ear as she squints.

  “The first time he saw me was in Fort Lauderdale, when the FBI brought me onto the case. He watched me from a telescope.”

  A familiar voice speaks from within the room. “No, Jessica. The first time I saw you was long before that . . .”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  BACKPROPAGATION

  Jessica’s eyes go wide, and there’s a flash of motion as she pulls her gun from her waist too fast for me to see her arm move. The barrel of the pistol is already pointed at the far end of the room by the time I realize what she’s done.

  “FBI! Hands behind your head. On the floor! Now!” she shouts as she advances toward him.

  He raises his hands and drops to his knees on the tile floor.

  He’s an ordinary-looking man. He could play a dad in a car commercial. Midforties. Slight but athletic build. Graying hair at the temples. But there’s something about the way his eyes watch her and me. They dart back and forth like he’s looking for something between us.

  Jessica puts the barrel of her gun at his temple and pushes him flat.

  Heywood complies and allows himself to be cuffed with his wrists behind him.

  Jessica pushes him down and tosses a set of keys and a phone to the side. “Theo, call the dispatcher. Tell them we need a team here now.”

  I pull my phone from my pocket and look at the screen. There’s no signal. “I don’t have reception.”

  Jessica pulls her phone from her pocket with her free hand and slides it across the floor to me. “Use mine.”

  “Yours won’t work, either,” says Heywood. “This apartment’s a kind of Faraday cage.”

  “Unbelievable. Fine. Get to your feet. We’ll go to the lobby. Theo, get the door.”

  I reach for the door handle, but it won’t move. “I believe he has us locked in,” I tell her.

  “Actually, it’s me who’s locked in,” says Heywood. “There are cameras controlled by a computer designed to keep me from leaving but not you. If Jessica releases me, you’ll find that the door will open. If you try to prop it open, the elevator won’t operate.”

  “Why?” asks Jessica, holstering her gun.

  “I wanted you to hear me out. Both of you.”

  “Tell DHS,” says Jessica. “We’re done playing games.”

  “This isn’t a game. This is a promise. Just let me say what I have to say and I’ll deactivate the system and surrender,” Heywood tells her.

  “Theo, take a look around. If you see anything that looks like a computer, hack it or break it.”

  I start to search the room before moving to the rest of the apartment. The decor is sparse and modern without a lot of ornamentation. I knock on the walls, looking for hidden panels.

  “The controls are inside a walk-in safe in the bedroom closet. It would take some time to get to them. Considerably more than it would take to hear me out,” says Heywood.

  Jessica glances in my direction. She really doesn’t want to give Heywood his chance to monologue for us. I understand, but I don’t think it’s going to change the outcome one way or another.

  “Give him ten minutes,” I reply. “Then leave the room and I’ll beat the access code out of him.”

  “Dr. Cray, your capacity for violence amazes me,” says Heywood.

  “It’ll more than amaze you when you discover my capacity for throwing you out an eighty-fifth-story window.”

  “Do you know what the amazing part is, Jessica? Dr. Cray thinks he’s bluffing, but he’s actually secretly afraid that he’s capable of doing it,” says Heywood.

  “It’s no secret.”

  Heywood is still lying facedown. “May we move ourselves to the couch? I have something to show you. No tricks. I promise.”

  Jessica grabs the chain between the handcuffs to control him. “Get up. Move the wrong way and I shoot you.”

  She walks him over to the couch and pushes him into a seated position, then sits opposite him. I slide a chair between him and the door and take a seat, concerned that a trapdoor or spikes will be sprung at any moment.

  “This is better,” says Heywood. “I’d prefer it if my hands were in front of me. But I understand. Fortunately, I anticipated this and acquired exceptionally well-padded furniture.”

  “Nine minutes,” says Jessica.

  Actually, he has eight minutes left, but I don’t correct her.

  “Fine. First, I don’t expect you to believe anything I have to say. In time you’ll find that it’s true. Right now, I just want you to hear it in my own words. My virtual avatar didn’t come off as sincere as I would have liked, and I’ll be honest, I was stalling for time.”

  His voice and body language seem sincere. But so do those of a sociopath. Jessica is watching him carefully, not reacting. She’s waiting for the trick. I have the sneaking suspicion that this is the trick—some kind of mind game.

  “I am very sorry for everything I’ve done. To you and to all . . . my victims. I can’t even describe what I feel. But if you think that I have no remorse, please know that that’s all I feel.”

  “Right. Is that it? Can we go now?” asks Jessica.

  “There’s so much more.” He glances in my direction. “We could talk about the unusual nature of my ventromedial area, couldn’t we?”

  “What’s he talking about?” Jessica asks me.

  “It’s the part of the brain that controls moral judgment,” Heywood answers for me. “It’s what Dr. Cray was afraid was deteriorating in his own brain after he was exposed to the Hyde virus.”

  Jessica scoffs. “Okay. A brain injury made you do bad things. Got it. Did it prevent you from seeking help, too?”

  Heywood nods. “I understand. I don’t expect you to believe me. But I have a question: Do you think a perfectly functioning brain would do the horrible things I did?”

  “Maybe not the brain, but the mind. This is tedious. You’re not going to spin me some bullshit story where you had a tumor or an accident that made you do the horrible things you did. And if this is the dramatic revelation you wanted to share, it was a waste. You failed.”

  “Everyone in this room is a killer, Jessica. All of us believe it was for the greater good,” replies Heywood.

  “This conversation is done. Open your doors before I shoot them open.”

  “They’re bulletproof. But the good news is that they will automatically open ten minutes from now. We can use this time for me to answer any question you want. I’ll either tell you the complete truth or pass. I promise I won’t lie to you.”

  “Fine. Did you cause the Void?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he replies without hesitation.

  This takes her aback for a moment. “Why?”

  “It was a condition forced upon me by an anarchist collective when I sought their cooperation. I didn’t have an alternative,” he replies.

  “All right. What was your purpose?” she asks.

  “I needed to steal something.”

  “What?”

  “Data,” he answers.
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  “What kind of data?”

  “Pass.”

  “This is pointless,” she says. “Whose data?”

  “Mine,” Heywood replies.

  “Was it Bitcoin or some kind of cryptocurrency?”

  Heywood laughs and shakes his head. “Nothing so . . . trivial.”

  “Is it a neural network model?” I ask.

  Heywood nods. “Very good, Dr. Cray. You are correct.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Jessica asks me.

  “A neural network is a program that emulates the neurons in the brain. It’s how your phone recognizes your face or his little avatar demo carries on a conversation. He probably created it by stealing time on computers around the world and inputting billions of parameters.”

  “Trillions,” says Heywood. “I used a scalable cloud cluster bigger than anyone could ever imagine.” He smiles. “I had NSA computers working alongside Chinese People’s Liberation Army clusters. It was massive.”

  “To create what?” I ask, trying to hide my curiosity.

  “The most sophisticated neural network ever made.”

  “To do what?”

  “Jessica gets to ask the questions,” says Heywood.

  “To do what?” she asks with a sigh.

  “Pass.”

  “Well, that was completely useless,” says Jessica. “So you made a nerd thing. Yay for you. I’m sure all the other nerds in nerd prison will be proud. Oh, wait. When we extradite you to South Korea, they’ll probably give you the death penalty. Too bad. Or maybe Thailand.”

  Heywood shakes his head. “Nobody will be extraditing me. And if I go to those countries, it’ll be because they’ll be hailing me as a hero.”

  Jessica stands. “All right. Let’s go. This is just sad now.”

  “Not yet,” says Heywood. “We have to wait for your friends to arrive.”

  “My friends?”

  “Yes. I’m not surrendering to you—no offense. I had something more strategic in mind. You’ll understand.” He looks to me. “And Dr. Cray, this will be the part where you kick yourself and wonder why you didn’t think of what I did. You certainly have the capability.”

  “What the hell is he talking about?” asks Jessica.

  The computer clusters. The secret labs. Heywood’s grand proclamations. I finally see it now. The picture is coming into focus.

  I was too close before, but now I see the entirety of what he’s done.

  “Oh my god,” I say out loud.

  “What?” asks Jessica. “What is it, Theo?”

  “Holy shit.”

  Heywood is grinning from ear to ear. “You see it now.”

  “Theo . . .” Jessica’s scared.

  “He . . . he . . .” Words fail me. I’ve wasted my damn life.

  If he’s done what I think he’s done, then I should be the one taking the dive out the window.

  “Theo!” Jessica says sharply.

  Heywood’s practically bouncing up and down on the couch, waiting for me to say the words.

  “Heywood won.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  PAPERCLIP

  Jessica is staring at me furiously as I try to find the words while Heywood savors every nanosecond. This is the moment he wanted. Not what comes later. Not the accolades. Not the praise. Not whatever reward he may receive. This is the moment when someone else finally realizes why Heywood’s name will become immortal.

  “How many?” I ask.

  “Hundreds right now. Thousands with more data. All of them, eventually,” says Heywood.

  “What. Did. He. Do?” asks Jessica.

  “Heywood built the largest neural network ever,” I reply.

  “We know this,” says Jessica.

  “A neural network solves problems. Heywood built one to solve a very specific problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “Death,” I reply. “He built a neural network to develop cures for disease.”

  “Bullshit,” she says.

  “The angels, Jessica. Those miracle cures around the world? You heard of those?” asks Heywood.

  Jessica turns away from me and toward Heywood. “What are you talking about?”

  “I cured them. My model found treatments that had never been tried before. It looked at the human genome and the millions of medical records and research articles I trained it on, and it learned how to cure diseases. It saw patterns medical science never considered. It noticed why certain drug types would only work on certain genes. It figured out how to boost a treatment with a slightly above average success rate to near one hundred percent.” Heywood is beaming.

  “This is bullshit, right?” Jessica asks me. “Somebody would have thought of it.”

  “Lots of people thought of it,” I tell her. “The problem was twofold: one, you’d need more medical records than anyone legally has access to; two, you’d need more computational power than anyone has ever had access to. Not to mention an intelligent-enough algorithm to begin with. Basically, you’d have to be willing to invade the privacy of hundreds of millions of people and then steal billions of dollars’ worth of computer processing without anyone noticing.”

  “You’re mostly right,” Heywood chimes in. “Although I did pay for a considerable amount of that computation myself. But essentially correct.”

  Jessica searches my face, trying to make sense of this. “Is he saying he cured cancer?”

  “Some forms,” Heywood answers for me. “The model is still learning. But yes, eventually all disease will be cured in time. Immortality is within our grasp.”

  Heywood’s eyes dart to the left for a moment, like he’s listening to something. “It appears the other guests have arrived, and they’ve sent a tactical team up the elevator first. Dr. Cray, you might want to go ahead and open the door so they don’t knock it down. I would myself, but I’m afraid Jessica might accidentally shoot me.”

  “It wouldn’t be an accident,” Jessica replies.

  I open the door at the same time an FBI SWAT team bursts through. My hands are on my head and I’m on my knees before they even have to yell at me.

  An agent fastens a zip tie around my wrists and pushes me to the floor without too much force.

  I turn my head to see that Jessica has her badge out. The SWAT team fans out and searches the rest of the penthouse while the commander speaks to Jessica.

  “Are you okay?” the commander asks her from under his mask.

  “Fine. Can Dr. Cray get off the floor?”

  “We have orders to hold him for now.”

  “Whose orders?” she demands.

  “The director’s orders.”

  “I want to speak to him.”

  “You can once we clear the premises.” The commander walks over to the window to confer with another agent.

  “Theo, I’m sorry,” says Jessica.

  “This is the politest arrest I’ve had in a while,” I tell her.

  To be honest, my mind is still racing with what Heywood says he accomplished. Intellectually I can grasp what he did, even the finer details, but the scope of it is beyond comprehension. I’ve done some illegal and shady things in the name of helping people, but hacking the largest medical databases in the world, intruding upon that many computing clusters? It’s a work of evil genius. But is it evil?

  If he’s telling the truth about the so-called miraculous recoveries and he can prove that his system cured them, the millions of lives he’ll save will outweigh the many he’s taken. Some might even forgive him. A generation from now, many will think of him as a mad-scientist hero. If his neural network continues to evolve, he could go down in history like Pasteur, Darwin, or Newton.

  If his goal was to be thought of as a kind of living god, he may have accomplished that.

  As hard as it is for Jessica to see it, we live in a world where leaders of nations can send missiles into other countries to clumsily murder enemies, kill innocents with drones, and still be given the Nobel Peace Prize. How
would humanity look at the man who cured cancer—and had a viable explanation for his reckless behavior? Would people even remember him for the evil things he’s done? Would they care?

  Jessica walks over to me and kneels as two FBI agents frisk Heywood on the ground. The Warlock’s looking in my direction and grinning.

  “What’s going on, Theo?” whispers Jessica.

  “I think he won.”

  “He won? That’s all you have to say? What exactly did he win? He killed some people and used a computer to say he cured some other people. We don’t know if any of that is true.”

  “You’re right. But we’ll find out pretty quickly. And in theory, it makes sense.”

  “Does it?” she asks.

  “In theory. Up to now, nobody’s ever been able to put this kind of effort into solving disease.”

  “Why not? If it was so easy?”

  “It wasn’t easy. And the answer is more complicated, but even when we were trying to decode the human genome, the National Institutes of Health vetoed using supercomputers to decode it faster. They only relented when a start-up company was about to beat them and showed that their methods were hopelessly antiquated. Medicine is conservative. Sometimes for the right reasons. Sometimes for the wrong reasons. We’ll let people die from a pandemic because we don’t want to give them a cure that might also kill them. It’s easier to deal with the repercussions of a death by natural causes than a death from an experimental procedure. We worry about fallout more than data. That’s why it takes a sociopath to do what Heywood has done.”

  “They’re not going to give him what he wants,” says Jessica. “They can’t.”

  “Sure they can. The entire US space program was led by a former Nazi officer who ran a slave camp. When we landed on the moon, he became an American hero. Did we make the wrong decision? I don’t know that we did. If they want what Heywood’s offering enough, then anything is possible.”

  “I’m going to be sick,” says Jessica.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  THE GIFT

  “Please have a seat,” the unfamiliar Department of Justice attorney tells me, directing me to a chair opposite him and a dozen other people. Gerald and Jessica are already sitting to my right. They’ve been speaking to the committee today and for half of yesterday. As I sit, I scan the names and badges. There are scientists from the National Institutes of Health and the FDA, some advisers from different universities, and some Senate staffers. A few others don’t have name tags and could be people from the CIA, NSA, or some obscure computational agency dedicated to artificial-intelligence security that’s rumored to exist. IDR director Vivian Kieren is here as well.