Crooked River

by Douglas Preston

  Coldmoon braced himself, then rammed his shoulder into the door. It burst open with a splintering noise and he rushed the man, who was crouching below the window. The man whipped the gun around, but he was in such a panic that he started firing even before he had aimed and Coldmoon body-slammed him, sending the gun flying. He kicked it aside and swung his Browning on the man, who was now sprawled on the floor.

  “Don’t!” the man cried, covering his head with his hands and drawing up his knees. “Please! Just tell me what you want me to do!”

  Instead of the brutal coyote he expected to find, Coldmoon saw a small, skinny man with a wispy goatee, blubbering in fear.

  “Are you El Monito?”

  “Don’t do it!”

  “Pull yourself together. Is there anyone else in the house?”

  The man shook his head.

  “You’re El Monito?”

  A tentative nod.

  “Okay, now do as I say. Stand up slowly, hands in view.”

  The man stood up, his thin arms held out. Coldmoon quickly searched him and removed a knife. “Okay, let’s go into the kitchen. You first.”

  The man turned and they walked into the kitchen.

  “Have a seat,” said Coldmoon. He could smell burnt coffee. There was a pot on a woodstove. Damn, he could sure use a cup.

  The man sat down, shaking in terror.

  “Look. First of all, I’m not going to kill you.”

  The man said nothing.

  “Second, we’re going to need coffee. Two cups, please, and pour them nice and slow, keeping your hands in view. Okay?”

  The man rose, took down two mugs from a wooden shelf, and poured out the coffee.

  “Slide mine over here.”

  Coldmoon hoisted the mug, enjoyed the burnt aroma, and took a sip. He took another, bigger gulp, almost burning his mouth in his enthusiasm.

  “All right,” he said, putting the mug down. “You’re going to answer my questions completely and truthfully. You understand?”

  Another nod.

  “Let’s start by you telling me who you think I am and why you think I’m trying to kill you.”

  42

  TWO HOURS LATER, on his way to the airport, Coldmoon called Pendergast.

  “Delighted to hear from you,” came the smooth voice. Coldmoon, to his surprise, found it unexpectedly reassuring. “Have you made any progress?”

  “A lot.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Martina Ixquiac was part of a large group of travelers headed for the United States. They left San Miguel Acatán in December. A local man guided them over the border into Mexico, where they met with a coyote, a fellow called El Monito—real name Alonzo Romero Iglesias. El Monito has been moving groups of people from southern Mexico into the U.S. for half a dozen years now. We just had quite a long talk, El Monito and me.”

  “What is his methodology?”

  “I’ll start by telling you how it usually works; Martina’s group was handled differently.”

  “Very well.” There was some kind of humming sound in the background, behind Pendergast’s voice.

  “Usually, he picks them up outside of La Gloria, in Chiapas State. It’s where I am now, a little town about twenty miles from the Guatemalan border. He has vans and drivers, and he brings them north in a sort of caravan. There are certain Rurales and police he pays off to let him through the checkpoints. They go up through Oaxaca, bypass Mexico City, on through Durango, Hermosillo, and into Sonora—heading for the San Pedro River, which flows from Mexico into Arizona, just south of Palominas. That’s where they bring them across. The Sonoran drug cartel controls that portion of the Mexican border, and charges a toll to the coyotes to bring people through—a thousand dollars a head. So our man has to pay off the cartel.”

  “How do they actually get across?”

  “There’s a fence along that stretch of border, but where the river flows there are only some steel tank traps that are easily climbed over. The area is heavily patrolled by ICE, but they have spotters on some hills on the Mexican side with powerful night-vision telescopes. They’re able to track the coming and going of the ICE patrols. The group waits for hours, sometimes days, on the Mexican side before they find an opportunity to slip through.”

  “And once over?”

  “El Monito takes them to a ‘safe ranch’ north of Palominas. There they wait before being allowed to continue on to wherever they want to go—Houston, Chicago, New York, LA. Most of them have a destination where there’s family or friends. El Monito makes sure that only a few leave the safe ranch at a time, in ordinary-looking delivery vehicles or cars, so as not to arouse suspicion.”

  “But this isn’t what happened with the group that included Martina Ixquiac.”

  “No, it isn’t. That was special. Just after his previous trip, El Monito was contacted by an ICE official—at least someone claiming to be ICE. It scared the hell out of him that they knew who he was and how to contact him, but they told him they had a proposition. They needed to engineer a spectacular bust, something dramatic. It would not only help their careers, but also ease the difficult political climate. Or so they said. So they asked him to bring in an extra-large group so they could bust it. They would pay El Monito big money: fifty grand. The migrants would be nabbed on the U.S. side, before they reached the safety of the ranch. For fifty grand, El Monito couldn’t resist.

  “So: in order to get enough people to satisfy the official, El Monito had to assemble three groups of twenty individuals each and consolidate them in Sonora. One of those groups he recruited in San Miguel, and the others in Huehuetenango. He brought them up, paid off the Sonora cartel, combined them at the border, and then brought them over—all sixty—at once. They were able to cross quickly, without any problem. At the time, El Monito figured this was part of an official plan. But it’s possible that certain bad actors had instead arranged for a diversion that would draw off ICE.

  “The bust was to happen where they had to cross Route 92 in Arizona. It was a moonless night, dark as a tomb, when El Monito and his two associates got the group over the border and up through the mesquite scrub. They waited along Route 92. As they were waiting, a bunch of truck headlights turned on and moments later the place was swarming with armed men in military fatigues. But something wasn’t right. El Monito had a bad feeling, or so he says. These weren’t ICE vehicles, but U.S. military trucks—with the logos and markings painted over. And it wasn’t a normal kind of arrest either, making everyone lie down and that sort of thing. Instead, the soldiers surrounded them and just started loading them into the trucks as fast as possible. El Monito, who was in the rear driving the stragglers forward, saw them take his two associates away at gunpoint as well. So he took off back south. Some soldiers chased him, but he knows that country like the back of his hand and was able to escape and get back over the border.”

  “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?”

  “Like what?” Gladstone asked.

  “Forgive the naiveté of the question, but could a storm on land affect ocean currents?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “If it caused a flood, for example?”

  Okay, now the guy was really reaching. “A flood from a river would inject a very small amount of extra water into the gulf, yes, but the effect would be minuscule. These Florida rivers are slow-moving and shallow. The effects would remain close to shore. Nothing that would push debris far enough out into the gulf to reach the Loop Current.”

  Pendergast nodded slowly. “And the garbage analysis? Are you sure there’s nothing there?”

  She sighed. “As I mentioned over the phone, what we could identify came from all over the gulf. There was no pattern to the samples we analyzed.”

  “Hold on,” said Lam. “I just thought of something.”

  “What?” Gladstone said.

  “You remember a few years back, when that developer up north was fined for illegally dredging the mouth of some river?”

  Gladstone nodded.

  “He dredged a long, straight channel that unexpectedly acted like a funnel when a big storm caused a surge of upstream water, shooting all the agricultural pollution out into the gulf, killing a bunch of fish and creating a dead zone. They fined him and made him redo the dredging into a wiggly pattern.”

  “Your point?”

  “Well, maybe somebody else did the same thing more recently.”

  “Did what same thing?”

  “Christ on a donkey.” Lam sighed with impatience. “Dredged a channel that, in a flood of water from a storm upstream, would create dangerous currents in what should be a protected harbor. And push debris out into the Loop Current in the process.”

  Gladstone paused. It was such a far-fetched idea—especially that the force of such a flood could reach the Loop Current. But it wasn’t like they had anything else to go on. And it might satisfy Pendergast. “The Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of coastal dredging. Wallace, pull up their enforcement website. Let’s see if anyone’s been fined recently.”

  Lam tapped away on the computer and they waited while the website loaded.

  “Here’s something.”

  Gladstone leaned over his shoulder. It seemed that not too long ago, a developer in Carrabelle had been fined for illegally dredging the Crooked River to his new marina. Ripped out a lot of mangroves in the process, too—a big no-no.

  She felt Pendergast’s presence behind her. “This looks like the straight-dredging situation you spoke of,” he said.

  “Yes, but that’s way the hell up in the Panhandle. I mean, this is really unlikely.”

  Pendergast stepped back. “If you please, bring up the analysis you prepared on the garbage.”

  Gladstone pulled it up on the computer, and sent a copy to the printer as well.

  “There,” said Pendergast, pulling sheets from the printer and pointing at the second one. “Two crab pot license tags from Carrabelle washed up with the feet.”

  Gladstone stared. She had dismissed those earlier, Carrabelle being so far away from any conceivable drift pattern. Besides, there were a dozen other license tags from all over the gulf, including from as far away as Texas and Louisiana. “Um, I’m not sure that’s relevant.”

  “Perhaps, but recall the missing factor. Let us look at extreme weather events—on land. Specifically, did the Crooked River flood at the time period when the feet would have entered the water and that illegal dredging was still in effect?”

  Lam grunted. “That’s easily looked up.” More gunfire rapping of keys. Meteorological data and weather maps scrolled across the screen. “Whoa,” he said. “Check that out. Massive thunderstorm over the Apalachicola National Forest on March 19—that’s in the Crooked River watershed.”

  More tapping.

  “And—yup—the river flooded. Took out a few piers, dr
agged some boats from their moorings. After that, they made the developer restore the river to its previous condition.”

  Gladstone felt her heart accelerate. This was amazing. Unlikely, unexpected, but amazing. “Wallace, plug into the model a bunch of simulated shoes being injected out of the mouth of Crooked River in a flood of that magnitude. Then let the simulation run freely and let’s see where they go.”

  “Will do.”

  Lam began typing at a furious rate, and soon he had set it up. “Shall I run it? Gonna cost us more dough.”

  “I will cover it, naturally,” said Pendergast.

  Lam hit the execute button and they waited. These drift simulations ate up CPU time like it was peanut butter, but this one seemed particularly slow. Gladstone heard Lam curse under his breath.

  The screen finally came to life, showing the Florida Gulf Coast. A nest of black lines—hundreds of simulated feet—arrowed out of the mouth of Crooked River into Saint George Sound, curled around Dog Island, got caught up in what looked like an eddy, circled way out into the gulf, got snagged by the Loop Current, swept down the coast…and converged on Captiva Island.

  “Holy jeez,” breathed Lam.

  Gladstone could hardly believe it. All of a sudden, her model had worked beautifully: all the squiggly lines coming out of Crooked River and twenty-five days later converging on Captiva Island.

  “It appears,” said Pendergast, “the feet weren’t dumped at sea. They were flushed out of Crooked River in that flood. I believe we may have our factor.” His eyes, still unusually restless, had been focusing on Lam. “Dr. Lam, you seemed frustrated with your computer just now. Is it operating unusually slowly?”

  “Yeah, they must be running some big simulations over at the university. It’s been like this for a day or two.”

  Pendergast went still. “A day or two?”

  “Yes. I think. I didn’t pay much attention at first.”

  “And you’ve noticed this on which systems, exactly?”

  “All of them. At least, the ones tied into the university—which is almost everything.”