Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Read online

  “But you can explain it. Does Heywood like people explaining what he did after the fact?”

  “God, no. He tried to kill me for that,” she replies.

  “Interesting. So he likes to create supernatural-appearing phenomena and hates it when someone explains it?”

  “I’d say that’s the short form. Are you sure your paths never crossed?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  Blackwood thinks it over. “Putting suspicion on you doesn’t make sense. Maybe his real plan is to do something that still hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Interesting. If not disappearing New York, then what?”

  “What if it’s something else going on in the world? And New York was a distraction?”

  “Possibly. Is there something else weird going on in the world I should know about, Agent Blackwood?”

  She reaches into her bag and pulls out a second set of folders. “Quite a lot, actually. And call me Jessica.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE WEIRD FILE

  “I used to get all the weird stuff,” says Jessica.

  “Like The X-Files,” I reply.

  “Yeah, but not as cool. Sometimes it was agents who had problems they couldn’t solve. Mostly it was people who heard my name and wanted me to tell them why their house creaked or that the light they saw in the sky was a UFO.”

  “And?”

  “People are nuts. There was too much to deal with. And people hated being told they were mistaken. I had a grad student send me death threats because I told him the mysterious light in a photo he took in an Egyptian temple was the streak of an LED made by camera shake.

  “I thought I was doing him a favor. Turns out he thought I was denying that he was Anubis reincarnated. They put him in a mental hospital for a few days. I stopped responding after that,” she says with a sigh.

  “Very understandable. I got cases, too. Sometimes real ones. That was the problem. By ignoring them I knew that might mean a killer was getting away. I couldn’t handle it.”

  “When you’re a cop, they teach you that you have to put away the gun and the badge at the end of the day.”

  “I’ve heard that. How did that advice work for you?” I ask.

  “Ask my therapist.”

  “And how does that work?” I find it hard to imagine her opening up and being vulnerable to anyone like that, and I’m surprised when she answers my question.

  “It gives me outlook. I can stand back and analyze things a little more. I can see my own patterns. You ever tried it?”

  “My mom forced me to see one when I was a kid, after my dad died. He didn’t know how to handle my personality. It wasn’t very productive.”

  “I can’t imagine trying to diagnose a kid that knew my subject better than I did,” she replies with a smile.

  “It wasn’t quite like that. But yes. I told him that I had feelings, but I felt like they were something I visualized existing two feet to the side of me. I could tell what they were experiencing, but I could also decide to ignore them if I wanted.”

  “Jesus, Theo. It’s no wonder our behavioral-science guys have written books about you.” She picks up the stack of folders. “Anyway, one of the cadets at the FBI academy has been keeping track of weird stuff for me, filtering out the usual noise.” She flips through the pages and hands me a photo. “Cattle mutilation. The bite marks are big and don’t match coyotes or wolves.”

  I glance at the photo. It’s not the first time I’ve been asked to explain cattle mutilations.

  She’s right, though—the mouth is much wider than a coyote’s, yet not a wolf’s. I hand her the photo back. “Probably a mastiff/coyote hybrid. The larger jaw and broken bones are the indicator.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, I knew once you said ‘bite’ that it was an animal. The fact that it was weird means that it was an animal they hadn’t seen before. Because it was clearly canine, it means there’s either an entirely new species out there or some domesticated dog humans hooked up with a coyote and morphed into a pseudospecies.”

  “Okay. How about strange light formations over Orem, Utah? There’s been YouTube videos of them.”

  “There’s a secret testing ground for unmanned aerial vehicles twenty miles from there. Think there might be a connection?”

  “Wait, how did you know that?”

  “I was looking at internet routing patterns and started noticing regions with unusually high traffic. That area was one that came up. There’s also an FCC blackout zone nearby.” I don’t point out that she asked me how I knew that and not how I could prove it. She’s testing me with things she already knows.

  “This is a hobby of yours? Looking at internet traffic patterns?”

  “I like patterns. What can I say?”

  She digs deeper into the folder pile. “How about this? There have been cases of people who have experienced unusual disease remissions who also claim to have had weird visions of angels in their hospitals or their homes.”

  “Interesting. Does that sound like Heywood to you? Angels? Miracles?”

  “He’s not exactly the healing type. If they spontaneously combusted or were found to have died years before, that’d be more his style.”

  “You’d know better than I. But sometimes patterns aren’t what we think when we’re up close. Joe Vik was loved locally. Even after he went on his rampage, murdering his family and several police officers, he still had defenders. There were many aspects to Joe.”

  In truth, there are things about him I still don’t know . . . unproven suspicions. Part of me wants to go back. Another part of me is afraid.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” She sifts through the folders. “I’ve got a weird zombie thing, but it’s in Eastern Europe . . . so. And then there’s this one, which made my Spidey sense tingle.”

  “You have Spidey sense?”

  “I’m sorry, can only boys have it?”

  “Uh, no. Just Marvel characters.”

  Jessica’s got a funny edge to her. She’s the girl who liked nerdy stuff but someone told her she was too pretty for that kind of thing.

  “What is it?”

  “In the last two years, the heads of five different cults around the world have gone missing. There was a doomsday group in Belgium. A ‘retreat’ in Australia. Another in Mexico. And two in the US. One outside Anaheim, another in Michigan.”

  “When you say ‘missing,’ what do you mean?”

  “One day they’re running things, the next, someone else is calling the shots,” she replies.

  “Someone appointed from within?”

  “It appears so.”

  “What was that cult out in the desert . . . the one that . . .” I stop talking when I realize who I’m talking to. Jessica was the one who found the vault filled with bodies.

  “And now you see why I talk to a therapist.”

  “Who the hell does your therapist talk to after talking to you? That’s what I want to know,” I joke, perhaps a little too bluntly.

  Jessica laughs, the most open expression I’ve seen from her. “I’ll have to ask her that. That’s a good one.”

  “Thanks. So now you trust me?”

  “No more than you trust yourself. Part of me is worried that while you’re staring at me, you’re thinking about how to crack my skull open and have a look.”

  “An MRI’s much better for that. I could poke around and see what happens when I trigger different neurons . . . ,” I joke again, probably too graphically.

  “Okay, okay,” she says. “Let’s put a pin in the cult thing.”

  “I can tell you one thing,” I say. “The printout is on different paper than the others. I suspect your student brought it to you and you made notes. But you didn’t want me to see them, so you made a new printout. Unfortunately, she used a paper with different brightness. Probably some eco-friendly, recycled paper.”

  Jessica examines the pages. “Well, that’s a tell I need to pay more attention
to in the future. Yes. This cult thing does concern me. A lot. Heywood recruits vulnerable people who’ve already been through or been in cults. So we’ll want to circle back to this.”

  “You said recruits, not recruited. Heywood was in custody, last I heard. Did that change recently?”

  “Yeah. He managed to forge some transfer documents, and it got more suspicious and/or more stupid from there.”

  “How much could he arrange from inside prison? I would think a man like that would have limited access.”

  “In theory. But we found him working his way around that early on. Then he got transferred to a facility where even I had a difficult time finding out what he was up to. Like I said, it’s all highly suspicious.”

  “What else do you have?”

  “Thirty chimpanzees vanished from a zoo in Thailand six weeks ago,” she replies.

  “Vanished?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm,” I say. “That word again . . .”

  The captain’s voice comes up over the intercom. “Agent Blackwood, could you secure your passenger and come up here for a moment?”

  “Be right back. Uh, don’t jump out.” She gets up and walks to the cockpit.

  I pick up the article on the missing chimps. It’s written in a tabloid style and hints that they may have been stolen for some kind of underworld exotic meat trade, which horrifies me to no end . . . but the chimpanzees vanishing in the middle of a city zoo has me intrigued. Chimps are incredibly strong, dangerous, and difficult to force to do anything. I did some work with them in the past and love them as a species, but I also find them terrifying. I can’t imagine any sane person trying to devise a chimpanzee theft at that scale. It had to be an inside job with the handlers participating. But why?

  Jessica drops back down into her seat. “Seoul, South Korea, is experiencing an event,” she says.

  “An event?”

  “Another void. The entire city.”

  “Oh.” I’m not sure what to think.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better. Less dehydrated. The fever’s gone.”

  “You want to see a void up close and in person?” she asks.

  “As long as it’s not from a helicopter.”

  While I try to sleep and get enough nutrients in me that I won’t look like the walking dead, Jessica makes arrangements for when we land. I should call Jillian, the woman I left behind in Austin, and tell her I’m okay, but I can’t even begin to think of how that conversation should start.

  What do you say to the woman who stuck by your side through life-and-death situations, who literally risked her life to save yours, and whom you then walked out on, not once but twice?

  She’d already lost a husband to war. Then I came along, bringing who knows how much pain into her life. The guilt I feel can’t even be imagined.

  Not knowing what to tell Jillian isn’t what’s holding me back; it’s the shame I feel for what I’ve done to her. When I left for Asia, we’d ended things. At least through words.

  I knew Jillian would never be the one to say we should break up because of what I’d gone through, but I also knew it wasn’t right to keep torturing her.

  She’d been there for me through my downward spiral. She was there when I came back. When I told her it was probably best if we separated, I said it because she couldn’t. I wanted an easy, clean break, but that was a fantasy.

  I know I love her, because when I found out she was seeing someone else, a military veteran like her, it made me feel good to know that he was a decent man. I couldn’t be that man. I’m glad someone else is.

  It also made walking into the jungle easier.

  Even so, it’s never as easy as that. I hadn’t realized how much I missed having someone in my heart until I was close to death again.

  “Jessica?” I ask, lifting my head from my seat back.

  “Yes?” She glances up from her laptop.

  “I need to text someone. Or send an email. Do you think you could help me?”

  “Sure. Who?”

  “Her name is Jillian. I just want her to know I’m okay.”

  “She knows, Theo. That’s who I was talking to back at the snack stand. But I’ll give you a burner phone.”

  “Oh . . . I didn’t know.”

  “I should have told you. She’s the reason I was able to find you so quickly. In fact, I think she’s the reason you’re still alive.”

  This makes me sit up. “How’s that?”

  “She’d been keeping track of you when she could. When she heard you’d been arrested, she started sending bribes to the head of the police station. Basically, money to keep you fed. From the looks of things, that never reached you. But Jillian kept sending because she knew they’d rather keep you alive and the money flowing.”

  “I . . . I never knew.”

  “I know. She knows. Anyway, she did everything she could. Hired an attorney. Even talked to a kidnap-and-rescue team. It’s better that she didn’t use them. But, yes, she knows you’re okay and with me. She wanted a photo, but I figured we should let you recover a little first. Want to call her?”

  I don’t have a response, and now Jessica’s dialing her phone. She speaks to the voice at the other end, then hands it to me.

  “Theo?” says Jillian’s voice.

  My words seize up in my throat. All I can manage is a weak yes.

  “Oh, Theo.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.” Tears start streaming down my face. “I’m sorry for what I keep doing to you.”

  “It’s what you do to yourself that hurts. I was a soldier. I was a soldier’s wife. I got used to this. You need to—”

  The line goes dead. “Jillian? Jillian?”

  Jessica types into her computer, then glances up. “Oh, damn.”

  “What is it?”

  “Another void. This one in Singapore.”

  “The call stopped,” I say like a confused child.

  “Probably a routing center. Or an overload. She’s fine. She knows you’re fine. I’ll send her an email. That’s still working, for now. Get some rest.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DARKNESS

  “Are you sure they want us here?” I ask when I see the massive armored personnel carrier parked at the end of the runway and surrounded by Korean National Police vehicles with flashing lights.

  “I think we’re good,” says Jessica as she grabs her bag. “Hold on.” She takes a look at me and makes a concerned face.

  “Do I look like the subject of a hostage-rescue video?”

  “Not that bad . . . just . . . well, a little on the gaunt side. Let me see if I can borrow a jacket from the pilot.”

  I glance down at the belt cinched around my waist with the pants fabric bunched up like a cloth sack. It’s not the worst I’ve looked, but not exactly the image of confidence we want to project. I’d offer to stay behind, but I don’t want to miss this.

  Jessica returns from the front with a black bomber jacket. “Try this.”

  I put it on. The bottom at least covers my belt and potato-sack pants. “Better?”

  “A little. At least they’re less likely to charge me with reckless endangerment.” She heads toward the open door and stairs. “If anyone asks, you’re a consultant for the FBI.”

  “Technically, I’ve been just that. So no stretch there.” I glance out at the small group of Korean officials waiting for us. “How exactly did you arrange this?”

  Jessica points to a tall Korean woman in a suit with blonde streaks in her hair. She’s got sharp features, attractive but forceful. She kind of reminds me of Jessica.

  “That’s Lilith. I did some teaching for the FBI program that works with international agencies. We got along pretty well. She ran an entire unit that went after North Korean saboteurs. She started out by doing undercover operations when she was nineteen. Tough as nails. If she asks you a question, don’t lie to her. She’ll know.”

  “Okay. And what is our situation
here? Do we have to worry about IDR showing up?”

  “We shouldn’t. Fingers crossed. I did a little paperwork while you were sleeping,” she explains.

  “Okay . . .”

  “Being the first to file, make requisitions, and tell the chain of command what you’re doing is basically the Hogwarts magic of the FBI. If I say that I brought a person of interest in to interview and I ask a supervisor what questions they want answered, it basically commits them to approving the whole endeavor. Anyway, I can give you plenty more tips later. I learned from a master at sailing the seas of bureaucracy: bullshit reports are the wind in your sails.”

  “That sounds like a horrible way to live.”

  “You’re telling me. Are you good on the stairs?” she asks.

  “I’m good. I feel better than I look.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  Jessica steps onto the tarmac and greets her friend with a hug, then motions me forward. I reach the circle of officials and keep my appropriate distance. Lilith gives me a nod, and then two others are introduced, an older man named Dr. Gap-Kyum and a younger Korean official whose name is given as Ray.

  The Western nicknames some Asian people use have always fascinated me. I’ve wondered if adopting that name also helps in assuming, at least partially, a Western frame of mind.

  “Are you ready, Dr. Cray?” asks Lilith. Her English is perfect. I suspect she probably speaks a number of other dialects and languages with equal ease. Some minds are capable like that. Johnny could do it, and the poor kid never even had a proper tutor. He could even pronounce the complicated names on our medicine bottles after hearing them spoken aloud only once.

  In a better world, he wouldn’t be sleeping on a piece of cardboard in the back of his grandmother’s junk shed. He’d be in high school and on his way to whatever university he chose. I’ve seen so much untapped potential in the darkest places. Children who could be doctors. Adults fixing bent bicycle rims with a spoon who could be designing Teslas. If you were to ask me what’s broken in this world, I’d say it’s the amount of talent found in the places we ignore.

  “When the event happened, we’d already had personnel outside the major cities prepared,” Lilith explains as we walk toward the massive armored vehicle.