Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller Read online

  “Over here,” I call out to the others.

  They join me in the row but keep a few meters away. I pull a pair of gloves from a pocket and open the door to the server rack. Inside, there are forty servers, all stacked on top of each other, each one containing anything from medical records to entire porn empires. There are no empty slots.

  “Did they use a hard drive to steal the data?” asks Jessica.

  “That would take too long. I think they replaced a server with another. That’s what I’d do.”

  “They all look alike.”

  “They do . . .” I take out the scope and look at the thermal image. All of them glow a bright white-blue . . . except one toward the top. This would be the server they brought with them. The one that hasn’t been running for several years straight. The cold one.

  “Now what?” asks Jessica.

  “We write down this location, and when the power comes back on, we find out what was supposed to be here. Also, we need to get a warrant to see what’s on this replacement they left.” I think for a moment. “We also need to contact every data center in Manhattan and find out if any of them had fire department personnel ask for access right after the blackout; then they need to dust for fingerprints and find the one server that doesn’t have any.”

  “Singapore, too,” says Jessica.

  “Yeah. Singapore, too. We may have found what they were really after.”

  Lilith puts her hand to her earpiece and listens to someone for a moment. “Jessica?”

  “Yes?”

  “May I speak with you?”

  “Sure. Excuse me, Theo.”

  She walks over to another row. I can barely hear the words, but one stands out: IDR.

  PART THREE

  ESCAPE ARTIST

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  LANE CHANGE

  IDR was waiting for us outside. My paperwork stunt didn’t impress Vivian Kieren. Before I could explain, Theo was slammed into the ground, his hands bound behind his back, and he was dragged into a truck while the rest of her team kept their guns trained on me.

  I was treated with slightly more professional courtesy, although I was disarmed and shoved into the back of another vehicle with her men on either side of me to make sure I didn’t try to make a run for it.

  Lilith protested and threatened to take this up with her bosses until Kieren pulled her ace card from her sleeve. Two of them, actually: a dusky, mustachioed CIA station chief named O’Donnell and his right-hand man, Shafner, who had the pale skin of an office drone. They worked with Korean intelligence and had major pull here.

  I wasn’t sure at the time what kind of bullshit story Kieren told them to get their cooperation, but as I sit here in an interrogation room somewhere in Camp Humphreys, a US Army base forty miles south of Seoul, I have a feeling that no matter what I say, it won’t make a difference.

  I’ve been locked in this room for two hours. Twice I’ve been offered coffee and an armed escort to the bathroom, which is more of a way to cover their asses if I complain about mistreatment than any act of kindness on their part.

  The waiting irritates me. But what’s killing me is that I know that while I’m in here, they’re in some other part of the building interrogating Theo without the pseudopoliteness of coffee or bathroom breaks. I pulled him from a wretched prison cell less than twelve hours ago. He’s had half a full meal and still looks like walking death.

  I could get out of this room. But then what? Rescue Theo and steal a C-141 StarLifter like in a Tom Cruise movie? The real world doesn’t work like that. How would I explain it to my bosses? And I’ll bet anything that Kieren has already told them where I am. Not Gerald, but whomever she knows at the FBI who’s senior and thinks of me more as an embarrassment than an asset.

  The only way out of this is time. Which isn’t something I have right now. Every minute they’re in there with Theo increases the likelihood he’ll say something to incriminate himself or agree to something he doesn’t realize he’s admitting to. Kieren and the CIA would love to say they have somebody materially involved in the Void. Even if, later on, it doesn’t hold water.

  The door opens, and Kieren enters with O’Donnell and Shafner. They take the seats on the other side of the table from me. O’Donnell watches me, waiting to see my reaction. Shafner is texting on his phone. Kieren sits with her arms folded. She’s beyond pissed. My airplane stunt probably didn’t help.

  O’Donnell speaks first. “Blackwood, I’m sure you already know your career is over.”

  “Do I?”

  “You’re not a stupid woman. Of course you know you’re done. You’ve misappropriated a government jet. You helped a suspect escape custody. You interfered with a counterterrorism operation. Should I go on?”

  “None of that is true, and shouldn’t I have someone from the FBI here? Last I checked, it wasn’t policy to interrogate personnel from other agencies without someone being present from that agency.”

  “Would you like me to get the FBI liaison from Seoul here?” asks O’Donnell. “Norm’s married to my daughter. I’m sure he’d love to be in this room right now. Actually, I’m doing you a favor by not calling him in. In fact, I’m trying to do you a huge favor. There’s two ways this ends. One is you cooperate fully, and while your career is effectively over, you get to leave with your pension and no black mark that makes you unhirable. The other option is you put up your little fight, irritate us, but we eventually get what we want and not only is your career over, but we destroy you. No pension. Messy stories in the news about you fucking things up. That kind of thing. So, what do you think?”

  I glance over at Kieren and the smug look on her face. She’s been quiet the whole time. “I take it he was your office husband when you two worked together in the CIA?”

  Neither react, but I catch a tiny grin at the edge of Shafner’s mouth as he pretends not to be listening intently. It appears I hit the nail on the head.

  “Let’s just say it’s good to have friends,” she replies.

  “I want to talk to Theo.”

  “He’s not a well man,” says O’Donnell. “We have a doctor looking at him right now.”

  “Was the doctor with him when you started interrogating him?”

  “That’s not how we operate. Now, let’s focus on you and what you know. Did he say anything that could possibly be incriminating or make someone suspect that he was involved in the events in Manhattan or Seoul?”

  “No. Absolutely not,” I reply, deciding that incriminating is a subjective term that I won’t interpret to their benefit. “In fact, the suggestion is completely absurd. He’s spent the last five months providing medical treatment to refugees in Myanmar.”

  “Our sources there say he was working with a terrorist faction,” says Shafner.

  “And as a reasonable person, you know that’s complete bullshit. Your sources have been shoving people into mass graves for years.” I turn to Kieren. “Do you have any reason to believe Cray’s involved in this other than his name showing up on a list?”

  She doesn’t respond.

  I push. “We know who’s behind this. It’s Michael Heywood. I keep saying that, but everybody pretends it can’t be him. Why? Instead, you’re chasing down a man who was half-dead when this happened, beaten within an inch of his life because he was trying to vaccinate babies so the next epidemic didn’t wipe an entire group of people off the face of the planet.”

  “Is that what you think of Dr. Cray?” asks O’Donnell. “There’s a side to him you don’t know. I’ve seen images of the bodies of some of the people he’s ‘helped.’”

  “Were these images taken from the same drone that was used to supply information to the Myanmar military so they could kill him? Which, if I’m not mistaken, might be a breach of our current sanctions on them? Never mind that using such intelligence to target a US citizen without oversight is probably something the FBI could investigate. At the very least, it’s a story the New York Times would like to hear. How lon
g after I put that out on Twitter before it blows up?”

  “Let’s just cuff her and put her somewhere until she’s ready to talk,” says Kieren to the men. She turns to me: “You tipped off Cray. Helped him escape and then stole our plane. That’s pretty cut-and-dried. Isn’t it?”

  “Is it? Last I checked I was assigned to find the whereabouts of Dr. Cray. You were there, remember? My supervisor understood that. You knew that. I then took him into protective custody. I don’t recall anyone identifying themselves as IDR. And as far as I can tell, you didn’t let the locals know what you were doing. How is Willets’s leg?”

  O’Donnell glances at Kieren. “Who?”

  I interject. “She didn’t tell you? One of her men got shot by a Burmese cop in that little screwup. I guess she didn’t tell you who bandaged the wound and saved that man’s life . . . That would be Dr. Cray.”

  “For all I know, Cray pulled the trigger,” she replies.

  “No. I was there. I’ll happily go on the record and explain what happened. As far as the plane? When I looked, the three letters of the agency it belongs to are FBI and not IDR.”

  She smirks. “I don’t think you understand the way the game is played out here. Your little paperwork tricks and bureaucratic jujitsu only work to a point. If I say I found text messages on your phone that have you talking to Dr. Cray and giving him information about the case, those text messages appear. If I say there’s a hundred thousand dollars in your bank account you can’t explain or a Bitcoin wallet on your phone, who are they going to believe?”

  I look to O’Donnell. “Is this how it works here? You openly threaten to manufacture evidence? To what end?”

  “We want Cray. We have strong intel about him. That’s all we can say.”

  And now you’ve got him. God, I’m going in circles here. Why can’t they see it? Or . . . what can’t I see?

  Okay . . . Theo’s name shows up on a list, and I’m convinced that Heywood had something to do with that. The problem is, I never took that to its logical conclusion.

  Heywood gets mysteriously transferred to a different facility.

  Then Gerald tells me there’s a mole inside the FBI.

  Oh jeez.

  The whole mole thing that Gerald’s concerned about? That was Heywood. I have no idea how, but I think I get the big picture.

  “Theo Cray’s name shows up on a list,” I tell my hosts. “You all buy into it because that same source has provided you with other information, right? Names of spies? Counterintel operations? You’re so used to working with scumbags, it doesn’t bother you that source is Michael Heywood, a.k.a. the Warlock. Right now, he’s pulling your strings, and you don’t even see it.”

  Shafner’s eyes lift from his phone. He glances at O’Donnell. I might have gotten to him, at least. I don’t know what good it will do, though.

  “This is how Heywood works,” I go on. “He fed you what he did so that when the time came, he could misdirect you.”

  Kieren slaps a hand on the table. “I’ve had enough. Can we just stuff her somewhere for now?”

  There’s a knock at the door, and a soldier comes in and whispers something to O’Donnell.

  “The ambassador’s here,” he says.

  Before Kieren can respond, another knock comes at the door, and an elderly man with a dark complexion and silver-tinged temples enters.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing anything,” he says in his booming voice. “I’d just flown in from Japan to offer to help, and I heard one of my oldest and dearest friends was here.”

  Robert Ailes, US ambassador to Japan, my former mentor at the FBI, and the man who saved me from a life of boredom and helped me do whatever good acts I’ve done in this world, looks in my direction. “Ah, Jessica. It’s so good to see you.”

  He walks around the table, and I give him a warm hug. “Dr. Ailes,” I say deferentially.

  “Listen to her with that. She’s like my own daughter. I hope they’re treating you well here.”

  “We were just wrapping up. I was heading over to the infirmary to see Dr. Theo Cray.”

  “Cray? He’s here?” says Ailes, pretending to be surprised. “I’d been meaning to talk to him. His paper on simulating neural network backpropagation using bacterial films was a work of genius.” Ailes glances over at O’Donnell. “Are we good here?”

  O’Donnell rolls his eyes. Everyone in the room is aware of who just played whom. I should keep my mouth shut, but I look to Kieren and remark, “It’s good to have friends.”

  Ailes and I walk down the hall with his escorts, and he whispers under his breath, “This better be good, Jessica, or I’m putting you in an even worse place than they were planning to.”

  “Define ‘good,’” I reply.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHESSBOARD

  After checking on Theo, who was moved to the base hospital to get some much-needed rest and medical care, Robert Ailes and I found a nearly empty base coffee shop to talk out of earshot of anyone connected to Kieren.

  I spent the first hour explaining everything that had happened up until the moment he walked in, leaving nothing out. That’s my relationship with Ailes. He can tell when I’m lying from a mile away. He can even tell when I’m lying to myself. I didn’t tell him I was coming to this part of the world, and I didn’t ask him how he knew, but Ailes is the kind of man to keep an eye on people, and he must’ve heard about my whereabouts through diplomatic channels.

  Ailes started off as a brilliant mathematician, made a fortune in the private sector, and then let the last president talk him into helping restructure the FBI to better utilize people who have skills that are often overlooked. As part of that project, he created his own little team of misfit toys—Gerald being one and me another. My years working with Robert were the most dangerous, damaging, and rewarding of my life.

  When I was moved to a teaching role, Robert left and later accepted the position as US ambassador to Japan. While it was historically a role that dealt with ceremony and trade negotiations, I’d heard whispers that his real mission was to help build a new US/Japanese/Korean intelligence partnership to counteract the threat of China. If any person could pull that off while avoiding knee-jerk xenophobia, it was Ailes.

  He listens to the last details of my account, then shakes his head. “So you decided to travel to Myanmar to retrieve Dr. Cray. Did Gerald sign off on that?”

  “Technically, yes. I had prior approval to travel overseas to escort material witnesses, provided they were in custody of local authorities,” I explain.

  “What you did was a jailbreak.”

  “Assumptions may have been made. But, Robert, they were going to kill him.”

  “Who? The Burmese or Kieren?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “I don’t see it. Kieren is a blunt instrument. But I don’t get why she’d want him dead,” he replies.

  “All I know is this: Cray’s name showed up on a list from an intel source that I suspect is Heywood—or is at least controlled by him. If you’re Kieren and you’ve been running around acting on this intel, you’re better off putting Cray into a deep hole. Plus, it’s a big win for the IDR.”

  “So you don’t think Cray is involved?”

  “No!” I almost spit out my coffee. “That’s absurd.”

  “Maybe not as absurd as you think. There’s some suspicious things about him.”

  “What? The whole he-framed-the-serial-killers theory? You?”

  “No. The way he got some of them. Remember the Butcher Creek fiasco, where the FBI thought they had a serial killer and it was some prankster with a bunch of medical body parts?”

  “Theo? Why?”

  “Forrester, the man who tried to vaccinate half our armed forces with a bad vaccine, was a crime-scene junkie. Speculation is that Cray manufactured that entire scene just to lure him out.”

  “Clever.”

  “I won’t even get into how many federal laws he may have broken doing that,” says
Ailes.

  “But he caught Forrester. Sometimes the ends justify the means.”

  “Sometimes the people who are deciding that cross one too many lines. Take Kieren and the others back there. They started off as upstanding enforcers of the Constitution. At some point they decided they needed to push things a little. Then a little more.”

  “I think Theo knows his boundaries,” I reply.

  “Maybe he did once. But he’s also dived off the deep end more than a few times. That can change you in ways you don’t realize. His PTSD has PTSD. Look,” Ailes tells me in a confiding manner, “I’m not revealing anything you’re not going to find out, but there’s an open investigation into Dr. Cray. I don’t know what they’ve found out since I left the FBI, but I know there are people who have it in for him.”

  “Is this professional or because he’s made more than a few of them look like complete idiots?”

  “The effect’s the same.”

  “I can’t speak to his methods or what’s going on upstairs. But I know this world would be a much worse place if he hadn’t made the choices he made. I think he lives with that every moment of every day. I know I do. But I was lucky to have you watching my back, covering for the stupid stuff I did.”

  “You’re a fan of the guy,” Ailes says.

  “He’s a piece of work, but in the last day, I’ve seen him at extremes, and I trust him.” I shrug. “When he’s not thinking, he’s trying to fix things.”

  “But he’s also exceptional at breaking them. And that’s why everyone’s so interested in him,” says Ailes.

  “They’re interested in him because some anonymous source fed them his name. None of this is remotely like anything he’s been involved with. It’s painfully obvious to me.”

  “Hmm.” Ailes thinks for a moment. “You think Heywood wants Cray out of the equation because he’s afraid of him?”

  “It’s part of his playbook. Remember when you put me on the Warlock case and my face made it into the news? Heywood freaked when he realized the FBI had sicced someone on him who understands magic and illusion methods. So, what did he do? He made highly public threats on my life. He made me part of the story because he knew that the FBI, assuming one agent is the same as another, would pull me from the case. Which they almost did, until you intervened. And after that, with each of his cartoon-villain plots, he got somebody to try to kill me. Red Chain, whatever. But this time we’re dealing with something bigger. His biggest deception of all. And he’s not worried about me, because it’s more than a magic trick. It’s Cray he wants off the chessboard.”