Mastermind: A Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood Thriller

by Andrew Mayne

  “Condition?” asks Theo.

  I hand him the printouts that show the pharmacy receipts for her medication. “Cytarabine and dexamethasone. Leukemia?” asks Theo.

  I nod. I didn’t have to look them up to know what they were used to treat. “From the dosage, it looks like she’s on the recovering side. If I’m reading that right.”

  “I don’t know enough to know,” Theo says in one of his rare admission-of-ignorance moments.

  At least he has them.

  “Let me make a couple calls and see if Umbra can meet with us so we can make more sense out of this before telling Gerald what we’ve been up to.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  DIVERSIFICATION

  Mandy Umbra is already waiting for us at a diner that’s a thirty-minute drive from FBI headquarters, where she works. She gets out of the booth and wraps her arms around me. I don’t know if this is the Peruvian or the Italian side of her, but whenever we meet outside the office, she treats me like a long-lost sister—emphasis on the lost part.

  She looks Theo up and down. “Wow. It’s really him. I don’t know if I should congratulate him or have him arrested.”

  “I’d prefer the former,” says Theo. “But even then, I don’t do well with praise.”

  “Well, it’s nice to meet you,” she says politely. “Have a seat. I can show you what I found.”

  Theo and I take the side of the booth opposite her, Theo on the inside and me on the outside. Mandy glances at us, then smirks. “I see you two have been working together closely.”

  “Come again?” I say, a little surprised. I look to my right and realize that Theo and I are sitting almost hip to hip in the large booth. “We’ve been through a bit together.”

  “I’ll say,” she replies.

  “Killer chimps,” says Theo, not helping and only sounding crazy.

  “No worries. Not judging. We know Jessica’s type. And normal isn’t it,” Mandy says as she makes an exaggerated eye roll.

  “Pardon Mandy’s judgy-bitch routine,” I say to Theo. “She doesn’t get to do that in the office.”

  “You can’t do a lot of things in the office,” she replies. “Apparently the field is where the real fun is, hanging out with brooding bad-boy scientists and their killer chimps.”

  “Wait? I’m brooding?” asks Theo.

  “A little,” I reply.

  “Huh.”

  “You’re thinner than the guy that played you in the TV movie,” says Mandy.

  “I didn’t see it,” says Theo.

  “He was better-looking, too.”

  “I’m sure that actor didn’t spend the last five months in a Southeast Asian jungle, fighting off death squads while trying to prevent genocide,” I shoot back a little too sharply.

  Mandy gives me an all-knowing smirk. I want to slap it off her face. I glance over at Theo, but he’s staring at the saltshaker, probably counting the grains—accurately. Then I realize it’s not that he was suddenly distracted; it’s that when he feels uncomfortable, he uses things like that to distract himself.

  Did this happen when his father died? Was that when he decided to retreat? It would explain why he can be extremely social one moment, downright funny even, but on another planet a moment later. I wouldn’t put him down as someone on the spectrum, because I think for him it’s a clear choice. It’s not so much a retreat as a force field he chooses to raise.

  I realize that my hand is on his knee, reassuring him. I feel his rough palm cover the top of mine and give me a gentle squeeze. His hand is warm and completely engulfs my own.

  “Let’s talk about what you found,” Theo says to Mandy, putting his hands on the table after letting go of mine.

  I realize that in that little moment it was me who needed the reassurance. Theo provided it, then found a way to redirect the conversation without being awkward.

  “Those companies are interesting,” says Mandy. “I only had time to dig into two of them heavily. The first is Autopharmix. It’s a company that makes software for pharmaceutical robots that manufacture customized medication. They got bought for a sizable amount by a Chinese conglomerate. The other is Z-Prime Biotech. They are a large holding company that acquired a number of medical patents and then bought a smaller company, which they tried to bring a product to market with. It failed FDA trials, but Z-Prime was able to raise some more capital and keep researching. You might be able to make better sense of what they were doing.” Mandy passes Theo some documents.

  He scans them for a moment. “Artificial intelligence for drug discovery. It’s kind of a big area right now. It has promise, but it’s still early. Hmm, this is interesting. Their primary area of research was using modified viruses to insert DNA into cells. They were doing a whole-genome approach. Basically, the virus was the cure.”

  “Or was it?” I ask. “Didn’t you say you could use viruses to deliver a bioweapon?”

  “It’s plausible,” says Theo.

  “Well, somebody thought they could do something and invested four hundred million dollars in the company back in September 2018,” says Mandy. “That’s when it gets—”

  Theo cuts her off. “September 2018?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Nothing. Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  “Anyway, the mystery deepens, because the investor was an overseas investment fund that nobody knows who was putting money into. The suspicion was that it was a sovereign wealth fund of the Saudis or possibly a Russian oligarch.”

  I start a timeline on the back of my place mat, putting down when this happened along with Heywood’s incarceration history. “Do you think Heywood was like a Jeffrey Epstein character? Posing as a financial adviser? Maybe he convinced the Saudis or Russians to put money into the company as a kind of pump and dump?”

  Theo is typing away on his phone and using the calculator app. “Maybe. What else, Agent Umbra?”

  “Well, for one, that company acquired a few small labs around the world. It’s odd . . . the acquisitions didn’t make financial sense until I realized what they were really buying was labs that had approval from their respective countries to do advanced trials—and, in two cases, work with infectious diseases.”

  I feel my stomach churn. “Heywood talked someone into buying him an illicit bioweapons program? Who’d be that stupid or evil?”

  “He probably lied,” says Mandy. “He may have told them they were working on one thing while doing something else.”

  “I don’t think Heywood had to talk anyone into anything,” says Theo.

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “In August 2018, Mount Gimli, a Bitcoin exchange, lost eight hundred thousand coins to a hack. The total value was almost half a billion dollars. What was odd was that when it happened, the coins were liquidated very quickly and none of the other exchanges showed an increase. Usually you can see stolen coins move from one market to another in the form of valuation.”

  “What are you saying, that Heywood stole it?” I ask.

  “I’ve looked at his timeline.” Theo gestures at the paper in front of me. “All his major acquisitions are preceded by a theft in the Bitcoin market. In some cases, they’re big ones. In other situations, it’s something like a bad wallet app that Android users installed that took twenty percent of their money.”

  Something that should have been painfully obvious to me comes into focus. “Heywood’s a legendary hacker, so I guess it makes sense he’d go after Bitcoin exchanges and wallets.”

  “It gets better or worse, depending on how objectively you look at it,” says Theo. “There have been rumors that some of the initial coins mined were actually done on government computer systems, either with the knowledge of the agencies or behind their backs by people who had access to the systems. Some even suspect that Bitcoin could have been a CIA or NSA invention. I don’t know if I buy that, but it wouldn’t surprise me if people who worked for either agency had been involved. In any event, Heywood may have se
en an opportunity. It would also explain the resources he’s been marshaling for his attacks.”

  “Heywood is a Bitcoin millionaire?” I say out loud, trying to wrap my head around the concept.

  “No,” Theo interjects. “If this theory is true, Michael Heywood is a Bitcoin billionaire.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ICO

  In a secure conference room inside FBI headquarters, Gerald stares at his laptop screen, tabbing through the different parts of the spreadsheet we prepared and shaking his head. He looks up from his computer and across the table at Theo and me. “Is this legit?”

  “It’s credible,” I reply.

  “A good portion of the wealth he amassed happened while he was in federal custody,” says Gerald.

  “And increased when we think he had especially lax oversight. Also, another thing. We wondered how he was able to retain such a high-priced law firm—Keller and Olson? They have a subsidiary that does cryptocurrency investing. Heywood’s made them very rich,” I say.

  “That would explain an odd request we had a while ago,” says Gerald. “Nauru, a tiny island country near Australia with huge corruption issues, wanted to have Heywood extradited there to go on trial, prior to completing his sentencing here. Now it makes sense. Heywood probably tried to bribe them so they could bring him under their jurisdiction and give him a new identity.”

  “It gets worse,” says Theo.

  “How worse?” asks Gerald.

  “Heywood may have been behind a number of other cryptocurrencies. We might have no real idea of his true net worth.”

  This makes Gerald more agitated than I’ve seen him in a long time. “We’ve sent more than a few billionaires to prison. Almost none of them stayed billionaires. I can’t think of a single one that got richer while he was in custody.”

  “We need to figure out a way to go after him,” I say. “He has to be at the center of the Void. He’s got the money and the opportunity to pull it off. I think it’s clear that when he wasn’t leading the CIA around by the collar, Weir was granting him complete, unmonitored internet access.”

  “But why?” asks Gerald.

  “Why? Because he paid Weir off.”

  “Yes, but what did Weir think Heywood was up to? Why was he okay with letting a suspected serial killer and convicted hacker have access to a computer? Weir may be compromised, but he’s not stupid or evil. And that brings us back to the Void. If that’s Heywood’s doing, what’s the point of it?”

  “If it’s not data theft? Chaos? Fear? Death? We have all three. Plus, it’s a distraction for whatever he’s been cooking up in those secret labs,” I reply.

  “And what do you think he’s doing?”

  “A new plague? Perhaps those health companies Weir was investing in were going to be the first ones with a cure? Heywood would stand to get even richer.”

  “Heywood doesn’t need that to get rich,” says Theo. “Using them in some kind of stock scheme doesn’t make sense to me. However, I do think he used them for their labs.”

  “We need to put together a team and go take those labs down right now,” I tell Gerald. “Before word makes it back to Heywood through the grapevine.”

  “That’s on the table,” says Gerald.

  “I hope so . . . Wait, what? Since when did you know about those labs?”

  “We’ve been looking at a lot of facilities since you and Dr. Cray found the chimpanzee research lab. The ones you mentioned were among the list of suspect labs.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” I ask.

  Gerald lets out a sigh. “I was going to tell you. There’s another team out there looking into the Warlock. It’s an interagency task force.”

  “Sounds like a leaky ship,” I say, frustrated at being outside the loop.

  “These are good people. All information is contained within the group. We’ve had to compartmentalize because of the leaks.”

  “Why wasn’t I part of this? It would have helped when I was dealing with IDR.”

  “IDR has members on the task force. And your job was him,” Gerald says, pointing to Theo.

  “Well, I found him. Why wasn’t I put on this team?” The thought of being left out is making me angrier by the moment.

  “To be honest, Jessica? Not everyone trusts you. Some worry that your connection to Heywood makes you irrational.”

  I’m about to show him how irrational I can be when I feel Theo’s hand on my arm. He’s more present than I realized and possibly as agitated as I feel. I take a breath to calm myself.

  “What has this task force determined?” I ask as neutrally as possible.

  “Nothing yet. But the best guess is Heywood is after something atypical,” says Gerald.

  “Like what? Disneyland shut down for his own amusement? A trip to the space station?”

  “Some think he may be trying to build a bioweapon and ransom it back to the United States,” says Gerald.

  “Excuse me? How exactly does that work? Since when does the United States pay off bad guys not to do bad stuff?” I ask.

  “I’d say the billions of dollars we’ve sent to the Middle East with no accounting says otherwise,” replies Gerald.

  “But you’re talking about sovereign states. Countries and regimes. Not a person,” I protest.

  “It all comes down to power. A bioweapon that can kill more people than a nuclear bomb is a lot of power.”

  “This is madness! The government can’t be thinking about taking an offer like that seriously?”

  “It hasn’t reached that level yet. And as far as it being an offer, we think if and when Heywood approaches us, it won’t appear to be extortion. He’ll probably present this as part of the intelligence that he stole from Chinese and Russian bioweapons research. He won’t say, ‘Give me what I want or I release this death virus.’ He’ll be offering to become a government informant.”

  “Wasn’t he doing that already?”

  “Probably. But even the CIA didn’t have the power to free him.”

  “No. But they had the stupidity to make it easy for him to escape,” I reply.

  “That’s being looked into as well. And I’ll tell you one more thing.” Gerald glances at Theo. “This doesn’t leave here. Understand? We may have an informant who knows more about what Heywood is up to. We’re going to find out what that is.”

  I make a loud sigh. “Right. Like that doesn’t smell of a Heywood setup.”

  “Perhaps. But what you don’t know is that informant tipped us off to five shipping containers in Chicago that had enough chemical EMPs to take out the city. There was a countdown timer that stopped shortly after we found them. We think we preempted an attack.”

  “Or Heywood set us up to think so,” I suggest.

  “Possibly. But why?” asks Gerald.

  “So you’ll buy whatever bullshit this informant feeds you. Come on, you have to see that.”

  “We have to explore all leads, whether or not my gut tells me otherwise,” says Gerald.

  “And does your gut tell you that this may all be a waste of time so Heywood can distract you?”

  “It does. But the question you and I haven’t answered is, to distract us from what? Heywood likes creating chaos, but his goals have never been apocalyptic.”

  “People change,” I reply. “Besides, what better way to reset the social order than with a minor apocalypse?”

  “Dr. Cray? What do you think Heywood’s up to?” Gerald turns the floor over to Theo.

  He thinks it over. “I told Agent Blackwood earlier that I don’t have enough information to discern his pattern. The problem is like when we try to imagine what aliens or a superintelligent artificial intelligence would do in a given situation. You can’t emulate a mind you don’t understand. What we end up doing is either projecting our own ideas or playing a naive game of opposites, where we try to determine what’s evil by our understanding of what’s good. Some of the worst people I’ve gone after thought they were doing good, albeit in hor
rific ways. For example, if you were the conjoined twin a surgeon had to kill to save the other, you’d think he’s evil. In the case of Heywood, my question is for Jessica: Does he see himself as a force for good or a force for evil?”

  “Red Chain thought they were doing good by attempting to kill off half the planet. Does it matter?” I ask.

  “Very much so. A man who sees himself as good and has multiple options will likely try the ones that cause least harm first. Michael Heywood has an incredible pool of resources. If he sees himself as good, then I can’t comprehend what he’ll attempt.”

  “He wants people to see him as a god,” I reply. “Good gods, bad gods—they all have one thing in common: they define themselves by their ability to kill.”

  “And create life,” adds Theo.

  “So what does that mean? He’s going to have a kid?” I ask, frustrated by Theo’s semantics.

  “No. Perhaps not. But he does like to create. The Void, as destructive as it is, is a sight unto itself. His little AI trick with that video call was another act of creation. He could have done something destructive.”

  “Like murdering a young girl so he can use her corpse in a macabre display in a cemetery, making it appear she crawled out of her own grave? By luring another girl hundreds of miles across the country to then throw her out of an airplane so he could pick up the broken pieces?” My hand goes to my side. “Is my scar an act of creation? Were the bodies I found hanging in the vault an act of artistic expression?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Theo says.

  “He’s evil. Evil does as evil is. Can’t you see it?”

  “Yes,” says Theo. “Yet even Satan, a fallen angel, saw himself trying to restore the world to a more perfect order before man came along. From your account, Heywood doesn’t derive any kind of sexual pleasure from what he does. He sees himself as a surgeon. Sometimes temperamental and vindictive, but his larger purpose is one I can’t fathom. And it would be best if we stopped him before he accomplishes whatever it is.”

  I take a long breath and let my blood cool. Everything Theo said was maddeningly correct. But it was also cold and logical. Michael Heywood wounded me on a number of levels. The faces of his victims will never leave my mind. It’s hard to see him as anything other than the embodiment of evil.