Page 1 of Mastermind

CHAPTER ONE

THE VOID

Kelsi the silver robot girl pushed her bicycle up the Brooklyn Bridge with her back to Manhattan. It had been a rough night. The tourists in Times Square were rowdier than usual as she’d stood on her box and performed her robot-ballerina routine, balancing on her toes and moving from one precise position to the next.

Lots of people stopped to ask for a photo; none of them tipped. They treated her like a public service, posing in front of her for their Instagram stories about their amazing trip to New York. Even the pigeons made out better than she did.

At one point a man asked for a selfie and put his hand on her ass. Enough was enough and she decided to head home, the silver makeup streaking across her face as the tears began to fall.

At the middle of the bridge, a trio of teenage girls stopped her and asked if she’d take their photo.

She wanted to bark at them, but she remembered her first trip to New York and decided to do as they asked and then go home.

The girls stood arm in arm with the city in back of them and giggled as they tried to get the right pose. Kelsi aimed the phone she’d been handed and tapped the screen to maximize the contrast so the girls and the skyline would be visible.

In the distance she heard a popping sound like a firework, followed by another and another.

Suddenly the city vanished from behind the girls on the screen, and then the phone itself went dark. As she lowered the dead phone and stared into the distance, the lights of Wall Street and all the rest of Manhattan blinked out of existence.

There was another rumble, and all the lights on the bridge went out. Then the cars stopped moving and their headlights went dead.

The teenagers were amused, then nervous. They turned around to look at the city, but it was gone.

In its place was a billowing darkness that Kelsi and millions of others were staring into, unable to comprehend what had just happened.

PART ONE

MAGICIAN

CHAPTER TWO

ALPHA

Cortland Alva is a six-foot-five former Wyoming state trooper and current FBI academy student who is standing in front of me, extremely pissed. I saw this coming two days ago when I singled him out for a demonstration during my portion of the course that I co-instruct on survival tactics. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s about to help me with the second part of the lesson while the rest of the students watch.

My goal as an instructor is to help the one agent out of a thousand who may actually find themself in a life-and-death situation. Most of my students will never even draw their guns in the line of duty. They’ll never have to make a split-second decision on whether to take a life to save their own. They won’t have the nightmares. They won’t have the guilt of wondering, What if I handled things differently? They won’t have the panic attacks that come from thinking that if they hadn’t acted at the right moment, they wouldn’t be around to contemplate their stress. Those are the lucky ones. My job is to make sure they never need to rely on luck, because eventually luck runs out. So, I have to illustrate a point for my students. Sometimes that means bruising the ego of a man twice my size who almost became a pro wrestler. Feelings heal with time. Not all scars do.

I picked on Cortland precisely because he was the largest target. He has the bearing of a person who’s never lost a fight. He probably hasn’t been in many because people give him a wide berth.

There are stories about Cortland disarming suspects without having to draw his gun. He once punched an armed suspect so hard they smashed a plate-glass window with the back of their skull. The FBI hired him because he had been justified in every case. He could have shot the guy he punched through a window. The man isn’t a bully, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. But he is overconfident. And other students looking at a man like Cortland might take the wrong lesson from him: that size matters. This can lead to self-doubt, which can lead to fatal mistakes.

I asked Cortland to come to the front of the small auditorium and had him stand in front of me. What I did to him was a magic trick disguised as an awareness exercise. I told him it was the slap game, where we try to anticipate when one player is about to slap the back of the other player’s hands.

Moments before, I’d finished explaining that you should never let your suspect determine the rules of engagement. They’ll never write them in your favor.

As Cortland stood before me, I reached out and pulled him closer by grabbing his wrists. He didn’t see the handcuffs. Nobody did. They were up my sleeve until the moment I put them on his wrists. Like I said, it was a magic trick. But to Cortland and the students watching, it was a miracle.

The powerful man stood there, looking down at his wrists as a woman almost a foot shorter than him and half his weight rendered him incapacitated, or at least restricted enough that I could do more harm to him than he to me. It was a humiliating experience. And like every other time I’ve done that demonstration, I knew the real lesson would happen when he challenged me to do it again.

“Instructor Blackwood,” Cortland, now uncuffed, says in a polite yet irritated voice. “I don’t suppose you can try that handcuff trick on me again?” He’s standing opposite the table from me and from his vantage can see over the top of my open briefcase.

I’m packing up my notes, seemingly caught off guard. In truth, I’m never off guard anymore. I sleep with a loaded gun under my pillow and a shotgun under my bed. The handcuffs from the demonstration lie in my briefcase, gleaming in the overhead lights. Cortland sees this. Everyone sees this.

If I ask for a moment to get ready, it’ll look like a sign of weakness. My previous demonstration will seem like a trick, not a real-world lesson. I need to look as if I’ve thought of everything.

“I’m sorry?” I say as I move to shut my case.

He nods at the closed briefcase. “Can you try that again on me?”