Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Read online

  “Glad to be here, and thanks.” Sheppard sounds like he just got a compliment from the pope.

  I can’t tell if Gerald is becoming a more commanding presence or if Sheppard feels he’s been benched too soon. This kind of task force would be under Sheppard’s control if he were really running my old division like Robert Ailes did. God knows what politics are going on behind the scenes.

  “See you soon,” I say to Sheppard as I stand to follow Gerald wherever he’s going next.

  “Need me to hold the plane?” asks Sheppard.

  “She’s got other transportation,” says Gerald as he walks ahead of me out of the auditorium and into a small side room. Inside, he takes a chair on the other side of the table and motions for me to sit.

  I hold up the papers I’ve been given.

  “What’s going on here?”

  “I’m sorry about pulling you back into the field. The situation is complicated.”

  “Not that. I don’t know how good I’ll be for you, but I don’t need to see another lesson plan anytime soon.” I raise the list again. “I’m talking about this.”

  “What about it?”

  “Specifically, who’s not on it.”

  “Michael Heywood,” says Gerald.

  “Yeah, Michael Heywood. Last I checked, he’s at large and the reason I almost draw my gun every time there’s a new Uber Eats delivery person in my building.”

  Gerald nods. “I know. I know. We’re following that lead, too.”

  “Really? I didn’t hear that back in there.”

  “Things are complicated right now.”

  “You already said that. So, maybe make them uncomplicated for me while we’re alone?”

  “Okay. The FBI has a mole. So does the CIA and just about every other intelligence agency. We’ve seen evidence that a number of investigations have been compromised by the release of internal information.”

  “A mole or computer espionage?” I ask.

  “Maybe hacking but probably human, too,” he replies.

  “What does that have to do with this?”

  “Everything. We don’t think it’s a state actor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Three months ago, we were about to launch an investigation into New Sun Energy, and the day before we served papers, someone took a massive short on their stock. Twenty minutes before the CIA got approval to launch a strike in the Middle East, we saw a huge move on the markets. All of it going to offshore accounts and leading to dead-letter offices.”

  “Someone’s using top secret intel to play the market?”

  “That’s all we know happened. Then the DEA was about to raid Gulzam Coceto’s hideout. But he got tipped, and someone walked away a hundred million dollars richer. The point is that in some of these cases, the suspects only had minutes to use the illicit information. You’d need a thousand people listening to hidden microphones or reading emails.” Gerald pauses. “Or . . .”

  Now I understand why the FBI’s leading technical mind has been put in command. “Some kind of artificial intelligence?”

  “Exactly. We don’t just use code to spy on people—we use it to figure out what we need to know. Someone’s doing that to us.”

  “Okay. But why are you here? Why this case?”

  “Because I pushed for it when I read the briefings late last night. They smelled funny. Not only are we being watched, we’re being misdirected.”

  “Ah,” I say. “Meaning . . . ?”

  “This has Heywood written all over it. It’s one of his Batman villain comic-book plots that he probably paid some minor-league anarchist group to pull off.”

  “So why me?”

  “Like I said, he’s misdirecting us. Who understands that better than you? While we’re chasing down former Antifa members and whatever lowlifes we can dredge from the depths of the internet, Heywood’s doing something else. And if he just made New York City appear to vanish into thin air, then what the hell’s his real plan? That’s what has me scared.”

  “Okay. And the list of people? Just busywork?”

  “Not at all. You know how he operates. He recruits broken minds. He manipulates people. He’s undoubtedly got conspirators. Some of them may be on the list. A number of people on it are on internal watch lists, in any case. It’s not random. In fact, a couple of them scare me almost as much as the Warlock.”

  I point to a name on the list. “What about this guy? I thought he and the FBI got along great. Most people think of him as a hero.”

  “Yes. And some people think he’s a little too good at what he does, which makes him seem suspicious. Let me ask you this: Does anyone really know what goes on in the mind of a man like Dr. Theo Cray?”

  PART TWO

  SCIENTIST

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ROGUE PLANET

  When I lay in the jungle, bleeding out my side, watching the stars through a tiny break in the canopy, Johnny long gone and my attacker slumped over me, dead, his blood warm on my skin, I thought about the planets drifting between solar systems—rogues that escaped their own stars to wander the cosmos. Mostly they pass by, causing only the mildest of disruptions to debris at the edge of each system’s heliosphere, but sometimes a rogue is captured by a star’s gravity and it spirals inward, building up velocity until it gets pulled into an orbit and either escapes or collides with some other world, causing havoc and destruction. That would be an astronomically rare event, but in a galaxy with billions of rogues, astronomically rare events happen every day. There could be some rogue planet drifting in our direction right now. The earth and the moon exist because two heavenly bodies in our own solar system collided. Who’s to say the next civilization doesn’t get its start at the end of our own?

  As a centipede crawled across my face, I wondered whether that next civilization would resemble anything like humanity.

  Could something like me happen again? Would another village like Bo Luc have to deal with the wrath brought upon them when someone such as myself interfered?

  Was I an agent for order or a magnet for chaos? The latter seemed more likely, given what damage I’d done both in my personal life and here, ten thousand miles away from home, where a simple and pure gesture on my part ended up causing more bloodshed than I could have imagined.

  “Dr. Cray? Are you with me?” asks the woman with the probing eyes sitting in front of me.

  “Yes. Always.”

  “I think you’re suffering from a fever,” she says.

  “I left that in Portland.”

  Lights spin.

  I fall into the dark.

  “Shit,” she says, keeping me from falling over in my chair. “I need you to hold it together a little while. Okay? We don’t have much time before they realize I got you out with fake papers. Drink this.”

  I gulp down the water from the bottle she hands me. Something tastes off about it. My mouth starts to slacken, and water drips down my chin as I process what’s different. My lips close and I swallow as I realize that the water tastes different because it’s clean.

  Anything I’ve drunk in the last month that wasn’t alcohol-based was filled with bacteria and parasites. Even before they came for our camp, I’d been suffering from a low-grade fever.

  I take another sip of the water and try to pull myself together. I’m no longer in the prison cell. I’m outside. Motorcycles and buses run back and forth on the dirty street in front of me as old women on bicycles weave through them. We’re sitting under an umbrella near a stand where a man is selling fruit drinks and snack food.

  This is the civilized part of Myanmar, not the Rohingya townships where the army has ground everyone under their boot . . . not the remote villages being quietly eliminated while the world looks elsewhere.

  I came here to follow up on a promise to a friend. I was with a group that was trying to help vaccinate the Rohingya and other groups the government was trying to kill off. When the soldiers started threatening us, we moved on. When they started
killing villagers . . . I started killing the soldiers.

  They didn’t know who it was at first—even the team I was with had no idea what I was doing when I sneaked out at night and went on my walks.

  Only Johnny knew—the thirteen-year-old kid who’d had two older brothers kidnapped by the army. He told me how to find the commanders and the other men behind the atrocities.

  Contact poisons, electrocution . . . I even killed a man with his own tire iron as he tried to fix a flat that I caused. I wish I could say I felt remorse, but that emotion could never materialize after I’d heard the cries from the metal shed at the camp where he’d been torturing and indoctrinating the children he’d taken from their families.

  I came here to kill parasites. It didn’t matter if I didn’t need a microscope to kill some of them.

  The moral line is clear for me: If you kill the innocent, prepare to be killed.

  This woman . . . Who is she? And can she be trusted?

  She’s watching me carefully, but she’s also watching the street and studying every face. When someone’s head turns, she casually glances to see whether they’re looking at us.

  She’s smart. She knows how to use all the parts of her environment to sense a threat. She doesn’t turn around when a motorcycle with a bad muffler drives by, but anything with a large engine that sounds a little more tuned than everything else on the street . . . she pays keen attention to that.

  That’s how you spot the government vehicles. Bureaucrats and generals are the ones with repair shops and money to keep their fleets running.

  “Give me a second,” she says, standing up. “I need to check in and then ask for directions.”

  She walks a few meters from our table to make a call. Her left side is to me, her right to the street. Straight ahead is where we came from, the small prison where they were holding me.

  Through the street din, I can make out her words.

  “Yes. Everything’s good. We’re going to wait here a little while until he feels better. Then we’re headed to the embassy.”

  She ends her call and pockets her phone. I watch as she approaches a woman getting onto a rusty bus and asks directions. The woman has her arms full, and my hostess helps her put a suitcase into the compartment below. The local woman thanks her, and the bus heads off in a cloud of dust and exhaust.

  She walks back to me. “Are you doing okay?”

  “Yes, the water helped.”

  “Okay. We need to move. Can you walk?”

  “I’m good. Just a little dehydrated.” I follow her as she walks into a small alley between a stall selling T-shirts and bootleg DVDs and another with barrels filled with brooms.

  We walk across plywood covering a trench where sewage filters into a clogged drain. My brain starts calling out all the parasites sloshing around my feet: cholera, listeria, whipworm, Giardia lamblia, Entamoeba coli, and Endolimax nana, to name a few.

  “Here,” she says, directing me to the passenger seat of a car parked by a pile of rotting boards and broken tiles.

  It’s an older Toyota with carpet on the dashboard and a small idol dangling from the rearview mirror. In the back seat, there’s a crate of Nestlé infant formula.

  “That’s for you, if you want. Best I could do,” she says. “I have some Pedialyte and other stuff back at the hotel.”

  She planned ahead. She knew what condition I’d be in when she found me.

  But why did she find me?

  “I’m sorry, who are you?” I ask.

  “Blackwood. Jessica Blackwood,” she replies, her eyes only leaving the road to check the rearview mirror.

  Blackwood? I roll the name around in my head until it registers. I’ve read about her. I think I even watched a TV movie about her. The actress didn’t have a fraction of the real woman’s presence. The real Jessica Blackwood has a gracile air, not unlike a dancer’s, but also the potential for explosive power, like when you watch a ballerina spring into the air impossibly high or balance on her toes in a way that would make a muscular man cry.

  Blackwood was the woman who helped bring down Michael Heywood, a.k.a. the Warlock.

  She was also involved in stopping a plot against the pope. She was a law enforcement legend, a supercop who hated the limelight and avoided the press. One day she was everywhere, and then her name vanished from headlines.

  What I remember most was her snide nickname: the FBI’s Witch. Actually, I recall, she came from a family of stage magicians. And from what I’ve observed, that lineage is not as far behind her as she would let on.

  I’ve watched her lie about three things in front of me. What else is she lying about?

  I could grab the door handle and roll out at the next stop, but I have a feeling even in my best condition, she could catch me before I made it a block. She probably has a plan for that.

  If I don’t cooperate, what’s next? Handcuffs? Stuffing me into the trunk?

  Does she know how exhausted I am? Does she know there’s no point to this charade? There’s no need to threaten me; those things don’t work on a man who doesn’t want to live anymore.

  I tried to get my captors to kill me three times back in the prison, but they refused. I even tried to keep my head down in the bucket they wanted to water-torture me with. I breathed in when they expected me to hold my breath. The attending doctor had to pump my lungs while I tried to fight my body’s own sense of self-preservation.

  “We’re almost there,” says Blackwood.

  Meaning the embassy.

  “Great,” I reply. “Or you could just ask me what you want to know now, or take me into custody, or shoot me . . . it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Shoot you? That’s a little dramatic. I’m not here to kill you, arrest you, or take you into custody,” she replies.

  I nod. “That’s the fourth lie you’ve told me.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  FLOPHOUSE

  She doesn’t respond to my statement about the four lies. I can’t tell if it’s because I’ve trapped her or she doesn’t feel the need to answer me. I suspect it’s the latter. Watching her check the mirrors with each turn, I consider that she may be on the run, too. Could there be something even more clandestine than a simple rendition going on?

  We turn past a soccer field and start up a narrow road lined with shacks and buildings built at odd angles that would be at home in a Dr. Seuss book if they didn’t look like they were one heavy rainfall from tragically sliding down the hill.

  Blackwood’s left hand touches the scarf around her face. It looks like she’s trying to adjust it, but I catch her fingertips pushing into her covered ear, as if she’s trying to reposition something.

  Earpiece . . .

  Who or what is she listening to?

  She pulls the car onto a small side road and parks at the back of a car-repair shack. “We get out here.”

  Blackwood is several strides ahead of me, not bothering to check if I’m following. She’s got her eyes on the streets and the buildings around us . . . and the skies.

  The Myanmar government can be brutal and efficient in a third world kind of way, but they don’t have the resources of advanced economies. They use neighborhood spies instead of drones. When they want to get you, they surround you with trucks in every direction and basically fire into the middle, not terribly concerned if stray bullets hit bystanders or even foot soldiers.

  I watched a soldier leaning over the body of his dead companion in what I thought was prayer, only to find out he was taking the other man’s cash and cigarettes from his pockets. He was back to marching a moment later, laughing with another soldier about how the man took a shot to the head. I felt more sadness for their dead compatriot than they did. I try not to hate them for that—most are children, and life’s as cheap as a video game to kids here.

  Blackwood weaves through a back alley and takes me through a gap in a fence, clearly knowing the spot in advance.

  “Been here before?” I ask.

  “On
ly on Google Maps,” she replies. “Just up this road here.”

  We go through another fence and get buzzed into a courtyard. A grandmotherly woman with a small child clinging to her neck greets us. Blackwood nods to the woman, then leads me up a staircase to the next level.

  The building is surrounded by large padauk trees. The windows are open, with clothes and towels hanging over the edges. Floor mats just outside the doors hold hiking boots and sneakers.

  If I had to guess by the footwear, this is a hotel that caters to Westerners. It’s a dive by any standards but not crawling with sex workers and drug dealers, like you find in other tourist locations—which, generally speaking, are two of the few reasons someone comes to a hellhole like this place.

  Blackwood opens the door to a room and motions for me to step inside. The windows are cracked open slightly, but it’s barely any cooler in here than outside. But that doesn’t bother me. I stopped worrying about the heat a long time ago.

  “I’ve got clothes for you there,” she says, pointing to a bag on the floor mat that serves as a bed. “You can clean up there.”

  In the corner there’s a small privacy screen shielding the toilet and a tiled section where one takes a bath by squatting on a stool and washing with a bucket and hose.

  I’ve got weeks of sweat and grime covering my body. The only clean spots are where they tried to drown me. I kick off my broken sandals, step behind the screen, and take off my shirt and pants, hanging them up.

  Something about the sight of the rags lying over the clean, white screen takes me aback.

  Rags. I’ve been wearing rags. The white shirt is stained into some color between tea brown and vomit green. My chinos are so torn that Robinson Crusoe would have been embarrassed to wear them. My underwear is a shred of elastic holding up a loincloth.

  Blackwood sits at a table, texting on her phone and not paying attention to my sartorial display.

  In truth, it’s not the condition of the clothing that has me startled—it’s the state of the man underneath. I’ve watched the effects of my deterioration before, but this is something new, even for me. I reach over to the sink and find a small hand mirror.