Page 109 of Mastermind

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.”