Page 17 of Mastermind

But in twenty minutes, this woman, who may be here to ask me questions and then kill me, has broken me.

For the first time since I watched those stars in the jungle and thought about drifting planets, I care about something.

I want to know what happens next.

CHAPTER TEN

TIME LAPSE

I gulp down a Pedialyte and devour a handful of crackers. After plucking the umpteenth louse from my thin beard, I decided to shave everything off, including my hair. Now the jeans and shirt Blackwood brought for me hang loose over my thin frame, accentuating my starving-prisoner look.

“I brought these,” she says, setting vials of different medications on the counter. “I was going to call in a doctor but thought you might want to make your own recommendations.”

“Thanks,” I reply as I start scanning labels and doing math in my head regarding my body weight. There’s also the question of what my liver can handle.

“Where have you been for the last five months?” asks Blackwood.

“Here. Well, Myanmar,” I reply.

“The whole time?”

“Yeah. Thereabouts. I think we may have been in parts of Thailand at times. The borders get kind of muddled.”

“What were you doing?” she asks.

That’s a complicated answer. I don’t know how much I care to tell her, let alone remember.

“I came here to vaccinate people.”

“I see. Without government approval?” she replies.

“Correct. There had been suspicion that their official vaccination program was using diluted or outdated vaccines on groups that they wanted to . . . minimize. In some cases, military personnel used WHO and UN uniforms to earn their trust.”

Blackwood thinks this over for a moment. “So, genocide?”

“I wouldn’t say that’s the wrong word. This is a more subtle way to do it. They have international organizations looking for trenches with bullet-ridden bodies. If a strain of cholera or COVID takes out twenty percent of the people, it’s hard to prove it was intentional.”

“Why only that many?” she asks.

“Trust me, if they could get away with more, they would. Part of what they’re trying to do is to displace people. If you kill off the elderly and wipe away the very young, people lose their roots and move on.”

“Move on to where?” she asks.

“Refugee camps on the border. Anywhere that there’s land or resources the government isn’t trying to sell to the Chinese or one of the proxies the US works with. But you didn’t come here to ask me about the human rights situation in this country.”

“The officials here say you’re the biggest human rights violator in Myanmar,” she replies.

“And yet they let you walk me out of there with just a sheet of paper. That seems pretty amazing . . . or unbelievable.”

“There’s more to it than that. Can anyone vouch for you being here for the last five months?”

“Nobody who’s alive.”

Her eyes drift to the crack in the window; she watches a car drive up the path and then make a turn. I now understand why she chose this location on the hill. She can see when anyone is approaching.

“What do you know about Michael Heywood?”

“The Warlock?” I reply. “I studied the case. What was public. Not much.”