Blue Labyrinth

At his request, his team had prepared lists of everyone who’d rented a car in the Albany area during the May window when Alban was in town. Examining the lists himself, Angler got a hit: a certain Abrades Plangent — another anagram for Alban Pendergast — had rented a car from Republic on May 19, the day after he flew to Albany. Angler had made a call to the rental office and got a Mark Mohlman on the line. Yes, they had a record of the rental. Yes, the car was still in active use, and was available, although it was currently at another agency about forty miles away. Yes, Mohlman could arrange to get the vehicle back to Albany. And so Angler and Sergeant Slade got into a pool car and made the three-hour drive from New York City up to the state capital.

Mohlman had proven to be just the man they needed. An ex-marine and a card-carrying member of the NRA, he helped them with all the enthusiasm of a wa

It was at this point that Angler began to feel a nagging suspicion. Alban Pendergast had the a

And that was when the investigation started to fall apart. All of a sudden, there were too many variables. Alban could have monkeyed with the odometer settings — that was allegedly impossible, but Angler wouldn’t put it past Alban to figure out a way. Or he could have removed the car’s fleet tracker and put it on another vehicle, swapping it back later, thus furnishing false data. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered swapping it back — he’d just left a different tracker on the vehicle to add to the confusion. They needed some way to distinguish among the possibilities, and he didn’t have a clue how to do that.

At that point, Mohlman had been forced to leave the office to deal with an irate customer. And so Angler sat morosely, twirling the pencil. Sergeant Slade sat across from him, characteristically silent. As he twirled, Angler wondered exactly what he’d hoped to achieve by coming here. Even if he knew exactly how many miles Alban had traveled and what kind of car he’d rented, so what? Alban could have gone anywhere in those three days. Blue Avalons were legion. And in the tiny towns that dotted upstate New York, traffic cameras were exceedingly rare.

But when Mohlman came into the office, there was a smile on his face. “The black box,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“The black box. The event data recorder. Every rental car has one.”

“They do?” Angler knew about fleet trackers from his own experience with police cruisers, but this was something new to him.

“Sure. For a few years now. Initially, they were used just to provide info on how and why air bags deployed. The boxes were turned off by default; it took a hard jolt to get them to start recording. But recently the rental companies have paid to get cars with special boxes that are a lot more sophisticated. Nobody who rents a car can get away with anything nowadays.”

“What information do they collect, exactly?”

“Well, the newest ones record rudimentary location data. Distance driven per day. Average speed. Steering. Braking. Even the use of seat belts. And it’s tied into the GPS system. When the engine is turned off, the black box records the vehicle’s direction, relative to when the engine was turned on. And, just like with an airplane, a car’s black box can’t be removed or tampered with. People just haven’t realized how much we in the rental business can keep track of what they’re doing with our cars.”

Can’t be removed or tampered with. Hope began to creep back into Angler’s soul. “But we’re talking about events that happened a year ago. Could this thing still have that data stored inside?”

“That depends. Once its memory is filled up, the device starts overwriting the oldest data. But you may have caught a break there. This Avalon has been assigned to our Tupper Lake office for the last six months — and they don’t get many rentals out of there. So, yeah, the data still might be there.”

“How do you access it?”

Mohlman shrugged. “You just plug it in. The latest models can even transmit their data wirelessly.”

“You can do this?” Angler asked. He couldn’t believe his luck. Alban might be smart, but in this he had made a serious mistake. He hoped to hell Mohlman wouldn’t need to ask for the approval of a judge.

But Mohlman merely nodded. “The car’s still in the garage. I’ll have my guys download and print it out for you.”

An hour later, Angler was seated at a workstation in Albany’s central police headquarters, a map of New York State open on his lap. Sergeant Slade sat at another workstation beside him.

Mohlman had come through. In addition to all sorts of relatively useless information, the Avalon’s event data recorder provided them with a key item: on the day Alban rented the car, it was driven eighty-six miles almost due north from the Albany airport.

That put the car square in the tiny town of Adirondack, on the shores of Schroon Lake. Angler had thanked Mohlman effusively, asked him to keep quiet about this, and promised him a ridealong in an NYPD cruiser if he ever found himself in Manhattan.

“Adirondack, New York,” Angler said aloud. “Zip code 12808. Population three hundred. What the hell would take Alban all the way from Rio to Adirondack?”

“The view?” Slade asked.

“The view from Sugarloaf’s a hell of a lot more dramatic.” He accessed the workstation’s criminal database and searched the region for the dates in question. “No murders,” he said after a minute. “No thefts. No crime at all! Christ, it looks as if all of Warren County was asleep on May nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first.”

Exiting the system, he began a Google search. “Adirondack,” he muttered. “There’s nothing there. Except a lot of tall trees. And a single firm: Red Mountain Industries.”

“Never heard of it,” said Slade.

Red Mountain Industries. It rang a faint bell. Angler searched for it, read over the results quickly. “It’s a large, private defense contractor.” More reading. “With something of a dubious history, if you can believe these web conspiracy theorists. Secretive, if nothing else. Owned by someone named John Barbeaux.”

“I’ll check him out.” Sergeant Slade turned to his own workstation.

Angler didn’t reply for a moment. The right-brained part of him was thinking again — and thinking fast. Pendergast had last seen his son in Brazil, eighteen months ago.

“Sergeant,” he said. “Do you remember that newspaper article I told you about? When Pendergast was in Brazil a year and a half ago, there were reports of a massacre, deep in the jungle, spearheaded by a pale gringo.”

Slade stopped typing. “Yes, sir.”

“A few months later, Alban secretly travels to Adirondack, New York, home of Red Mountain, a private defense contractor.”

There was a silence while Slade pondered Angler’s words.

“You’re thinking that Pendergast was behind that massacre?” Slade said at last. “And that somebody at Red Mountain perhaps assisted him? Financed the project, provided the weapons? Kind of a mercenary action?”