Page 29 of Mastermind

“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.