Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Read online

  My best chance of survival is to defend myself long enough that I can get near a guard who’ll have to intervene in some way, with all the cameras watching. If they’re too slow to react, then suspicion will fall on them. That doesn’t mean that they’re required to perform a heroic intervention on my behalf, but they at least have to go through the motions of pretending to stop the assassination attempt.

  After what I guess is ten hours of my isolation, the light comes on, and two guards enter the room. One of them inspects my bandages and unlocks me from the gurney.

  “Prisoner will stand up,” says the other guard. I comply.

  “Prisoner will face the wall.”

  I face the wall and let them put the restraint belt around my waist and hands and the bindings around my ankles, making me incredibly vulnerable.

  “Prisoner will exit the cell and stay on the yellow line,” says the guard with his hand around my left arm.

  I’m moved out of the cell and down the corridor. When we pass the infirmary and the wing where my cell is located, a knot forms in my stomach. Somebody isn’t wasting any time.

  “I have to—”

  Before I can finish my sentence, my body convulses and I fall to the ground from the pain of the stun gun.

  As I lie twitching, the shorter guard stands over me. “Prisoner will remember that he must follow no-contact protocols. If the prisoner understands, he will respond in the affirmative.”

  “Yes,” I manage through numb lips.

  The men lift me to my feet and push me down the line. The short chain between my ankles forces me to make quick, tiny steps, like a rodent trying to keep up.

  We enter a wing of the prison that I’ve never seen before. There’s a long gray corridor with doors spaced twenty feet apart. I’m walked in front of one and told to turn and face the wall. The door is unlocked behind me.

  “Prisoner will turn around,” says a guard.

  The room is dark and small. There’s a metal door at the other side. “Prisoner will enter the room,” the guard tells me.

  I don’t know what’s on the other side of that door. I’m afraid to step any closer. I stand firm.

  “Prisoner will step forward,” says the guard.

  I feel the metal prongs of the stun gun press against the back of my neck. I’m being given a choice: walk into the room or be dragged inside.

  I take a step forward and enter the empty room.

  “Prisoner will stand in the center of the room,” a guard tells me.

  I move to the middle and get into a crouched position, bracing myself for whatever is on the other side of the door in front of me.

  The door behind me is shut and locked, sealing me inside.

  I crouch lower, putting myself into a sprinting position, ready to headbutt whoever walks through next. My adrenaline is pumping, and my quadriceps are starting to shake in my thighs.

  There’s a sound of clanking metal on the other side of the door, then the lights change to red.

  Sirens start to blare throughout the prison, and a recorded voice orders all inmates to lie on the ground. I don’t know if this is a riot or a fire, but I do know it’s a distraction for what’s going to happen next.

  The door handle starts to turn, then the door suddenly bursts open. Four masked men come flooding into the room.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  TACTICAL

  I let out a war cry and throw myself at the closest man. My head hits the armored plating on his chest, and I see stars. But I knock him on his ass.

  Two others grab me by the arms and yank me back, suspending me in midair like a child. I swing my feet wildly, trying to make contact. The man I knocked to the ground gets to his feet and yells at me.

  “Theo! Stop!”

  I recognize the voice. It’s Gerald Voigt’s.

  I don’t stop fighting. I have no idea what his intentions are.

  “Jessica got your message! We’re here to get you out.” He throws a backpack to my feet. “Put this on.”

  The men holding me release my arms and let my body drop. After I stop putting up a fight, one of them uses a key to unlock my restraints.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “No time. Put the armor on,” says Gerald.

  I strip off my prison uniform and climb into the black jumpsuit from the bag and start slipping on the armored vest. The other men put the boots on my feet and lace them up.

  A mask and helmet are placed on my head, and I’m ushered through the door they entered, escorted amid an armored phalanx. We reach a stairwell and race up three floors. Each time I stumble, a steady hand props me back to my feet.

  Another armed man is waiting at the top of the stairs. He pushes open a door, and the cool night wind blows through, touching the exposed parts of my face.

  I forgot what the world smells like. I stop for a second, only to be shoved along.

  Outside, there’s a Black Hawk helicopter with its rotors spinning. A hand pushes my head down, and I’m guided through the aircraft’s side door. The other men climb inside, and a moment later we’re aloft.

  Out the helicopter’s window, flashing lights illuminate the prison grounds as alarm bells continue to chime. I take off my helmet, and Gerald hands me an intercom headset so I can hear him over the noise of the helicopter.

  “Like I said, we got your message,” Gerald tells me over the comms. “We didn’t know where you had been transferred until then. We’d also got intel that said a hit had been put out on your life. When we contacted the warden of the facility and asked for protective custody, he said he had no record of you being there. We were able to get a judge to give us an emergency court order to remand you to FBI custody.”

  The adrenaline starts to fade, and I feel my heart rate go back to normal. “I figured I was about to be killed.”

  “You were right,” says Gerald. “We have an intercepted phone call from the warden to one of the leaders of the Aryan Nation. They were gonna put you in general population in the morning. You would have been dead by afternoon.”

  I nod.

  “Heywood wanted you dead.”

  I nod again. “I’ll explain why.”

  “We’ll debrief you at headquarters. I don’t know if these microphones are monitored.” Gerald glances at the cockpit, letting me know he doesn’t trust the men running the retrieval not to tell others what we discuss. “I’d also like to know how you were able to send us an email with your location from the most secure supermax prison on the planet.”

  When we’re in a secure place, I’ll show him the markings I clawed into my arm: x9x.us/escape

  One of my greatest fears is having all my weapons and secret tools taken away from me.

  But my greatest fear of all is losing contact with the outside world.

  Before I set out to catch N2, the serial killer nurse, I created several safeguards in case I found myself in difficult situations. One of them was a computer system that would allow me to make contact with anyone I wanted to reach, even when I couldn’t access a computer myself.

  The secret was to get someone else to send the message for me. While none of my captors would ever do this willingly, they might do it unwittingly. Especially if I used their curiosity against them. In this case it would be their desire to understand the message I’d written, a seemingly innocuous URL for a website.

  If I were your prisoner and you found out that I’d scratched a mysterious URL on my arm, wouldn’t you want to know where it led?

  x9x.us is a website I set up on a server that records every single network request sent to it and the location of who sent it. When you go there, all you see is a standard “Coming soon” placeholder, but behind the scenes it’ll perform different functions depending upon what instruction follows the slash mark.

  x9x.us/attack90 will launch a denial-of-service attack against whoever accessed the URL ninety minutes after they try to access it.

  x9x.us/911 will look up the address of the sender and h
ave a robotic voice make a call to the local 911 dispatch.

  x9x.us/files will load a script onto the host computer and quietly upload its entire hard drive to the server.

  x9x.us/escape sent an email to a short list of people that included the location from which the request was sent and a message from me saying that I might be in trouble.

  I don’t know if I have the nurse, the warden, or one of the guards to thank, but someone let their curiosity get the better of them and, despite the no-contact containment order, went to x9x.us/escape and unwittingly sent my rescue message to the outside world.

  It’s a foolproof method as long as nobody knows it exists. When I thought of it, I realized how clever it was because even I couldn’t resist the urge to look up a mysterious URL like x9x.us/secret.

  Our helicopter lands at Allegheny County Airport, and we hurry across the tarmac to a waiting FBI jet. When I board the plane, a familiar pair of green eyes looks up from a laptop, and I’m greeted by a sly smile. There are others on the plane, so our reactions are subdued, but I’m fairly certain the feeling is mutual between Jessica and me, because we can’t stop looking at each other.

  PART SEVEN

  MENTALIST

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  DOWNLOAD

  Theo is sitting across from Gerald and me, explaining what led to his revelation about Heywood. We keep catching each other’s glances, and I know Gerald has noticed. Does he think there’s something more there? Is there something more?

  Like the other men in my life, Theo is a broken soul. But unlike anyone I’ve ever known, Theo draws strength from it. It’s almost as if tragedy and misfortune serve as a kind of catalyst. Left on his own, he’d be studying his ponds while the world faded away.

  My fascination with him began the moment he went back to help the wounded IDR agent in Myanmar. No matter how dark a person Theo sees himself as, no matter the violent things he’s done, he never hesitates to perform a selfless act if it’ll make the world a better place. Maybe it’s rooted in self-loathing or a need to be loved, but it doesn’t matter. What’s important is what kind of person it makes him.

  The man in front of me is a far cry from the gaunt prisoner I found in Myanmar, even though he’s just spent additional weeks incarcerated here. There’s a glow, a vitality about him.

  He has purpose.

  While he was in custody, I missed his observations and his curiously relevant non sequiturs. And I selfishly wondered whether he thought about me as much as I thought about him—which I did every waking moment, as I looked into all aspects of Heywood’s story, trying to find the deceit so I could prove that they’d put the wrong man away and freed a monster.

  I thought I’d understood the depths of Heywood’s deception until I saw how he’d masterfully twisted and turned his own narrative to one that made people who should revile him hail him as a hero.

  Originally, I thought Heywood wanted a pardon for his crimes, but what he really sought was a complete rewriting of history.

  Employment records mysteriously surfaced, showing that Heywood, a.k.a. Michael Hopkins, was a CIA operative in the late 1990s who was assigned to deep-cover missions inside some of the millennium doomsday cults that were springing up overseas as the year 2000 approached. I’ve seen this done by intelligence and police agencies in the opposite direction to help plant an undercover agent within an organization or for witness relocation: fabricating prison records, employment documentation, and other details. Here it was being used to make a bad guy look good because he had something they wanted.

  His job, the redacted documents claimed, was to infiltrate cults that sought technological weapons and to stay undercover, reporting to the CIA if any of them posed a major threat.

  The Red Chain cult and the Void were precisely the kinds of things he was assigned to stop. Even his own incarceration was a deep-cover operation to get the most dangerous cults in the world to confide in him.

  But Heywood would have the last laugh, or so the bullshit narrative he wants us to believe claims, as what he was really doing was using these cults’ and anarchists’ collective energy for a project they didn’t understand: Lifeline, the public name for his neural network for curing disease.

  It’s a story filled with holes and unanswered questions, but it’s convenient fiction for those who want to avoid making moral judgments.

  As Heywood’s narrative evolves and the evil he’s done is forgotten, who knows what he could do next? The officials who were compromised into giving him what he wanted are already experiencing a form of Stockholm syndrome.

  I watched an NIH director practically attack Theo for questioning Heywood’s claims. She was an intelligent woman and a critical thinker, but Heywood understood how to turn her into an ally.

  Theo takes a sip from a water bottle and collects his thoughts. I notice that he keeps gripping the cushion of the chair, running his fingers across the material. This is probably the first time in forever that he’s sat on anything that wasn’t metal or hard plastic.

  He puts the bottle down. “I kept asking myself, why did he want me out of the way? For some reason, he was afraid I could see into his head and understand what he was really up to. Which I couldn’t. Not until he put me in the one place where I had the chance to think about that a lot.

  “Heywood assumes that everyone is like him, just not as smart. With all his talk about brain damage and the inability to feel compassion, he’s really providing a convenient excuse for anyone who knows what he’s done. What he didn’t understand is that my sense of compassion is why I couldn’t think like he did. The only way to see the world as he does was to pretend I had no compassion. What could I accomplish without that little impediment?

  “The reality is that a lot of the biggest advances we’ve made in medical science have come from acts that were immoral, even at the time. From Nazi endurance experiments to medical studies that take advantage of vulnerable parts of our society, big advances can happen when you put your morality to the side.”

  “This is not new information,” says Gerald. “We’re all familiar with the dark side of Heywood’s methods, regardless of how successful they may be. What are you trying to tell us?”

  “What I’m saying is that Lifeline, or Jessica, or whatever he’s calling it now, isn’t what he says it is.”

  “You mean it doesn’t work?” asks Gerald. “Wheeler and her team seem to be pretty convinced.”

  “I think it works to some degree. Give it ten thousand medical journals and it will show you novel ways to treat a disease or how to apply a technique better. We’ve already been doing this with supercomputers and sophisticated AI. Heywood just stole a bunch of computer access to crunch a hundred times more data than anybody else has on this subject. But give the NIH, OpenAI, Calico, or IBM that amount of computational resources, and they’d come up with similar results. See, right now, Wheeler and her team are probably thrilled with all the possible treatment avenues that Lifeline is showing them, but she’s also realizing the biggest roadblock: it’ll be years before they can test any of them. They won’t know if a potential treatment has a hundred percent chance of success or a one in a thousand chance. When they bring the first treatment to human trials, it’ll be the treatment they think has the best chance of passing, and they’ll be so heavily invested in their new version of Lifeline, nobody’ll be willing to question whether they’ve bet it all on bullshit.”

  “I looked into the miracle cases,” I tell Theo. “Everyone claims they were healed. Experts say Heywood’s treatments worked. As I said before, I even checked if he was calling his shots after the fact, looking for spontaneous remissions and then claiming them as successes.”

  “That’s because he knew that’s the first thing people would look for. Heywood is too smart for that. He found treatments that do help, but he’s been lying about how he actually found the ones that worked.”

  “Okay, how?” asks Gerald.

  “The miracle-cure patients weren�
��t the first ones he tested these treatments on. Nor was the Chernobyl group. Those were the cases in which he tested the most promising therapies. What Heywood’s hiding is that he tested all his results from Lifeline, including therapies that killed people and displaced more effective treatments. He presented us with only the ones that worked and hid all the deadly test cases.”

  “Who, Theo? Who are these test cases?” Gerald asks.

  “Everyone. Or near about. Hundreds of millions of people. What Heywood is hiding is how he learned which treatments worked. It wasn’t Lifeline. It was his willingness to sacrifice tens of thousands of people in the largest secret medical research project ever, by changing up prescriptions without anyone knowing.” Theo turns to me. “Remember the list of companies that he’d acquired? The ones that Warden Weir invested in? One of them went right under our radar because they got bought up by a Chinese conglomerate: Autopharmix. They made medical equipment that automated medication formulation. What we didn’t appreciate is that Autopharmix was acquired for its software—the code that tells the machines how much of a dose or what ingredient to put into a pill or a solution. Having bought the company, Heywood controlled the software and installed back doors, which means the machines could be overridden to change doses or substitute compounds. Many of those machines were used in factories where medications are manufactured. Because they’re produced in batches, with individual doses given batch numbers, Heywood could monitor which hospitals or pharmacies they went to. He was able to mess with the prescriptions of millions of people.”

  Gerald is shaking his head. “We would have noticed something like that.”

  “Would you? The same prescription software’s used throughout China, South America, and parts of Europe. All he had to do was test a tiny fraction of people and measure outcomes. He could do that by tracking patient IDs as they were used to generate prescriptions or through the software the physicians used.”