Mastermind (Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood #1)

by Andrew Mayne

“I kissed my balls goodbye and pretended I was drunk, because alcoholics seem to survive everything.”

I like people well enough, but not all of them at once. And I totally didn’t have the bullshit factor it takes to be a boss and convince a room full of people that you’re less clueless than they are.

She probably doesn’t think she can multitask well, but under pressure her bandwidth is enormous. Her greatest skill is not trying to focus on any one thing, but reading the entire world around her.

“Being the first to file, make requisitions, and tell the chain of command what you’re doing is basically the Hogwarts magic of the FBI. If I say that I brought a person of interest in to interview and I ask a supervisor what questions they want answered, it basically commits them to approving the whole endeavor. Anyway, I can give you plenty more tips later. I learned from a master at sailing the seas of bureaucracy: bullshit reports are the wind in your sails.”

If you were to ask me what’s broken in this world, I’d say it’s the amount of talent found in the places we ignore.

“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.”

“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.

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.”

If you want to do real damage, you don’t just break a thing, you destroy a system.”

The only thing intelligent people hate almost as much as making mistakes is being wrong.

“The lesson was: if you can’t discern one species’ pattern, look for the patterns of the other species it shares an ecosystem with.”

Encyclopedia Theotannica.