Caution was like money: More was more.
The third of the four burners rang at 10:55 in the morning. Mangouste got to it on the second ring.
The caller said, “We’re getting some headway on the trailer in the desert. Not sure if any of it’s going to pan out, but we’re trying.”
In the background, over the line, Mangouste could hear a keyboard clicking—his people hard at work, using the system. His jaw tightened at the notion of it: all that numinous power, sidetracked for three days now to play cat-and-mouse. The hunt for Claire Dunham and Dale Whitcomb and Curtis Wynn. Like using an aircraft carrier to dredge for clams.
Until today there had been no leads at all, and then in a span of hours, in the middle of the night, there had been two: A stakeout team had pegged Curtis at a coffee shop, and the system had found Claire in the Mojave—had picked up a police report describing a run-in between her and a patrol unit out there, several hours before the event took place.
That police report, describing the original version of the incident—with no intervention by Mangouste’s people—made it obvious that Claire knew about the system. She knew the danger of having her name and location officially logged by the police.
She had very nearly avoided that outcome.
According to the report, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy, doing a routine patrol, had spotted two vehicles parked in the darkness, far off of a remote highway in the Mojave. The deputy had stopped to investigate, at which point one of the two vehicles left the scene before the cruiser’s dash cam could resolve its plate number. The other vehicle, a Land Rover, U-turned and rammed head-on into the deputy’s patrol car to disable it.
This crash also crippled the Land Rover, whose female occupant then fired several shots from a handgun toward the deputy’s car, forcing him to take cover behind it. The woman fled the scene on foot and was picked up by the unidentified second vehicle several hundred yards away.
The crashed Land Rover turned out to have stolen license plates on it, and its VIN had been physically removed. Only a fluke had allowed authorities to identify its owner at all: The oil filter had a unit-specific identifier stamped into it, traceable to a point-of-sale record at a service garage in San Jose, where the Land Rover’s owner, Claire Dunham, had gotten an oil change six months before.
All of which had been enough for Mangouste’s purposes. The police report included a time stamp and GPS data for the incident, from the patrol car’s dash computer. It gave Mangouste enough information to send a team to that spot, in advance. Which he had done, immediately.
The report also tantalized him, though. It offered no further information about the person who had been with Claire in the desert—the driver of that second vehicle. The police had not yet identified that suspect at the time the report was filed.
Might it be Dale Whitcomb? Was that too much to hope for?
It couldn’t have been Curtis. He was already accounted for at that moment, being tailed by the stakeout team that had spotted him, hundreds of miles away.
It made good sense, of course, that Claire would be with Whitcomb, and for a while there, when that possibility seemed solid, Mangouste had let himself believe he had all the loose ends in reach. All three strands, right there in front of him, ready to be tied off forever. Curtis, Claire, Whitcomb. Easy as that.
It would have been nice to know for sure, in the moments after first seeing that police report. It would have been helpful to run further searches with the system, and find later reports detailing the police manhunt for Claire Dunham and her unknown friend, in that original version of the future. Maybe some document would eventually name Whitcomb as the second suspect.
Except there was no chance of finding any later reports like that.
No chance at all.
Here was one bona fide weakness the system had, and would always have: Once it showed you a useful piece of the future—some bit of knowledge you were sure to act on—then the future itself changed accordingly. How could it not? From the moment you saw that information—in this case, the time and place at which to attack Claire—then the old future no longer existed. You could run all the searches you wanted, but all you’d find would be information from the new future.