Page 85 of Mastermind

“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?”