Page 40 of Mastermind
“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.”
Ailes thinks this over. “Do you really trust him?”
“I do. Do I know what his real motives are? No. Do I think he’s a soldier who’s been at war too long? Definitely. But we need him right now. We think we know how the Voids happened, but we have no idea why. Heywood’s up to something even I can’t comprehend.”
“Something he doesn’t want one of the world’s leading computational biologists looking at too closely.”
“At least not the one who also happens to have caught more serial killers than half the FBI.”
“Fair enough. It’s obviously not my call, but I’ll vouch for you and talk to some friends. I’ll have to explain why turning him over to IDR would be a bad idea. Hopefully they’ll listen. What’s next?” asks Ailes.
“That’s easy. When Theo wakes up, I’m going to ask him to think of the most horrifying plots against the world that he can imagine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
MASTERMIND
Theo is sitting in a chair, staring out the window of his room of the base hotel. My room has a view of the base and the runway; his looks out over the morning fog–covered tracts of farmland south of Camp Humphreys. I can’t tell if he’s looking inward or outward. He hasn’t touched the cup of coffee I brought him. The watch on the table with the timer running and the bottles of water near medicine packages tell me he’s been focusing on getting his body back into shape instead of tending to his cravings.
“Want me to order you some breakfast?” I ask.
“No, I’ll stick to liquids for a little while longer.” He picks up a protein shake. “The key, I think, is to dilute them. My stomach hasn’t processed this much nutrient-rich food in a while. That’s one of the problems in trying to treat people who are malnourished. Our urge is to force-feed them, but that can make things worse.”
“Like with Auschwitz survivors,” I muse, thinking back to a documentary I watched on how the Allies had to nurse them back to health.
“Exactly. We know a lot more now. Thankfully. And my situation was nowhere near as bad, but I saw men back in that prison who weren’t much better off,” he says, still staring out the window.
“Hard to imagine how someone could do that to another person,” I reply.
“No, it’s not. You just make a person not a person. You start with a label. Maybe it’s a different political party or religion from your own. Then you make them that label and everything you hate about it. I watched military commanders do that with young children, getting them to hate people in a different village.” He points to the television in the room. “We have our version. We even tell ourselves convincing little fictions that it’s okay to hate those other people because they’re the ones who are really filled with hate. We make ourselves judges.” His eyes go down to his hands in his lap. “I made myself a judge. I’m sorry. You have some folders. You want to talk about something?”
