Page 41 of Mastermind

“It can wait,” I lie.

“No, it can’t. I apologize.” He turns away from the window and rests his elbows on the table. “What can I do for you?”

I feel awkward saying what I’m about to say after his observations on the nature of good and evil. “Well, this is a bit uncomfortable for me to ask. But I was wondering if you’d be up for a bit of role-playing?”

“Role-playing? What do you mean?”

“I’m convinced that Heywood’s at the center of this. The problem is, I can’t prove it, much less explain what ‘this’ really is. Some think the Voids are an end in and of themselves. You and I think otherwise. The data-center heist clearly shows he’s up to something.”

“But it could be ancillary,” says Theo. “That may not be the goal, either. More like stealing the jar of candy on the way out after a bank robbery.”

“Fair enough. But whatever it is, I’d rather figure out what he’s trying to do before it’s revealed. You follow?”

“I think so. So what role do I play?”

“This is the awkward part. I want you to think like a criminal genius who wants to do as much harm as possible.”

“Is that what you think he’s up to?” asks Theo.

“He’s evil. He has no problem with murder. I’m just trying to figure out how you would scale that up. I was hoping you could help. Everyone I’ve talked to pretty much starts with ‘steal a nuclear bomb’ or ‘get a hold of some kind of bioweapon.’ I was wondering if you had something more imaginative.”

“Nuclear is hard. A private individual could still pull it off, if they had enough resources.”

“Really? Everyone I’ve talked to says you’d have to be a nation-state, and then we’d still know something was up.”

“I think Bill Gates or Elon Musk could pull it off,” replies Theo. “Disguise it in plain sight as fusion research. The key would be keeping a lid on the people working for you. But you could have a hundred physicists and engineers working on compartmentalized projects while only a small team really knows what’s going on.”

“That’s scary to think about,” I reply.

“Is it? I could have changed the tide of World War II if I brought my laptop back in time. From uranium refinement to code breaking, it would give me godlike powers. Now we all have them. Anyway, I don’t think he’s going nuclear.”

“Why not?”

“Too small-scale. So, you take out a city. Earthquakes do that all the time. The last pandemic hit the major ones. It was painful; we’re still recovering, but we’re still here. The damage from September 11 wasn’t just the people lost, it was the psychological impact and how it changed all our lives. If you want to do real damage, you don’t just break a thing, you destroy a system.”

“Okay. How do you do that?”

“Lots of ways.” Theo looks up for a moment. “It’s not just what you do, but how you go about doing it. If you study the strategy of terrorists, you’ll notice that they went from focusing on initial damage to creating follow-up attacks that killed first responders. One bomb to hurt the civilians, a second to kill all the people who rushed in to help. This has affected the way we do crisis management and made the first attack even more deadly. We don’t rush in to help the wounded as quickly because we need to make sure it’s safe to do so. Now, accelerate that line of reasoning and you can figure out how to do maximum damage.”

“Such as?” I ask.

“It works with anything. Let’s say I wanted to do a simplified bioweapon attack. I’d start by getting the more dangerous strains of pathogens that are being worked on around the world,” he explains.

“And release them in shopping malls and other public places?” I reply.

“No. Not at first. That would be too conventional. I’d release them at the doughnut shop across the street, infecting coffee cups. I’d put them in those misters they use in outdoor bars wherever you have soldiers. I’d be infecting everyone at the major disease-control centers. I’d infect the people who are supposed to protect us first. That’s what Forrester was trying to do to our military forces.”

“They said he never would have gotten that far,” I reply.

“They desperately needed to convince themselves that’s true,” says Theo. “So many of their safeguards failed—why should we believe only the ones we didn’t test would have held up?”

I don’t know if this is Theo trying to make himself out to be some kind of great savior or if he’s just stating simple truths. I’m leaning toward the latter, and it’s frightening.

“And one more thing,” Theo continues. “Depending upon what I could get from each lab, I’d release different variants and entirely different diseases around the world. That would cause chaos. We may be better prepared now for handling outbreaks, but this would overcome those preparations. While we’re overwhelmed with one attack, we’d get hit by another. Then another.”

“So you think it could be biological in nature?” I ask.

“It could be, but I’m a biologist. So I’m biased. Ask a computer scientist and they might point out that one of our biggest vulnerabilities is embedded systems. You know that already. Red Chain found a series of exploits in the power grid that they were able to use to cause blackouts.”