Crooked River(75)

“And then?”

“He was pursued into Mexico. That scared the hell out of him. These men were in military fatigues—not ICE—and they were looking for him. Not to pay him, but to kill him. He just barely escaped several times. They’re determined, he says, and that’s why he was hiding in a remote farmhouse outside La Gloria—where I found him.”

“Still being hunted after five months?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe his story?”

“I do. I was totally convinced. The guy was terrified, and when he found out I wasn’t going to kill him, he just spilled his guts.”

“You left him there?”

“He wouldn’t come with me, and there’s no way I could get him out of Mexico without his cooperation.”

“It would be a setback if he were murdered. He’s a vital witness.”

“I realized that. I gave him almost all the rest of my money—ten thousand dollars—and told him to buy another car, get the hell away from La Gloria, and go to ground. He was very grateful.”

“Agent Coldmoon, you’ve done outstanding work, and I thank you. How quickly can you return? This case is starting to present some unexpected developments. I am uneasy.”

“I’m on my way to the airport in Tuxtla—I’ll be back in Fort Myers by evening.” In the silence that followed, he noticed the humming again, and now he recognized what it was: the sound of an automobile engine. “Hey. Are you in a car?”

“Yes.”

“You mean, you’re driving somewhere? Driving yourself?” Coldmoon had to laugh.

In lieu of an answer the line simply went dead.





43



PENDERGAST HAD ARRIVED suddenly and unexpectedly at the lab in the early afternoon. Gladstone was embarrassed that the A/C had once again failed and the lab was hot and stuffy, but it didn’t seem to bother the FBI agent, who remained cool and dry in his linen suit. He hadn’t even taken off his jacket. How did the man do it? Maybe he was part reptile. His eyes blinked infrequently enough, she thought, for it to be at least a possibility.

He wanted them to go once again through the drift models in exhaustive detail. Lam had launched into another incomprehensible explanation of chaos theory and imaginary space, but it amounted to the same thing: nada. The data from the buoy drop was beautiful, it had come in flawlessly, but plugging it into the models still resulted in nonsense. They were now over ten thousand dollars into CPU time on the supercomputer, with nothing to show for it.

“So there we are,” Lam finished up, spreading his hands as the last drift analysis finished its run, the squiggly lines of simulated floating shoes tracing themselves from nowhere to nowhere. “Unless you’d like to apply that Ramanujan eleven-dimensional Matrix Attractor you’re such an expert in.”

Silence fell. Pendergast said nothing, his pale face impossible to read. He seemed quite a bit more on edge than usual—almost wary. His eyes, always busy in the slackest of times, never stopped in their movement. The noises of passing trucks roused his interest. Once or twice, he checked his phone—something she’d never seen him do before. Finally, Gladstone cleared her throat. “Now you see why we asked you to come by.”

“I was planning on stopping by in any case. There is a matter, a possibly serious matter, that we need to prepare for.”

Gladstone barely heard. “Everything you need to know is right there on that screen. There’s really nothing to say. We’ve tried every imaginable variation. Lam has been a workhorse, using branches of analysis I didn’t even know existed to try to make the drift lines work out. But they simply don’t.” She paused. “I’m sorry we’ve wasted your money.”

Pendergast thought a moment. Finally, his silvery eyes turned to her. “Failure is always useful.”

“A nice thought. But personally? I think failure sucks.” Gladstone slumped down in her chair, trying to get comfortable. After so many hours, it was difficult.

“The question failure asks is: what don’t we know that we don’t know?”

“Whoa, man,” Lam said. “That’s deep.”

Gladstone had to parse this for a moment. “How are we supposed to find out what we don’t know? We’ve input every possible factor and still get nonsense.”

“Except that you have not. There’s a factor you haven’t input—the factor that will explain this phenomenon. Because there must be an explanation. And the key is to find that factor.”

She didn’t blame the guy for being annoyed at throwing away money, but now he was starting to sound like Don Quixote. “We’ve racked our brains, honestly we have. We’ve run simulations with all the meteorological data available. Every single thing that might influence a current is in that model, even weather events over highly localized areas of the sea—isolated winds and thundershowers, for example.”

“Could the meteorologists have missed something?”

Gladstone shook her head. “Not possible. They’ve got satellites, weather buoys, reports from ships—if a drop of rain falls into the ocean, they know it.”

“Every single thing that might influence a current, you said.” Pendergast frowned, and there was a long silence. “What about a land-based effect?”