Blue Labyrinth

27

Lieutenant Peter Angler sat at a scuffed desk, heaped with paper, in the rambling offices of the Transportation Security Administration. Outside the room’s lone window, a steady stream of jets screamed by on JFK’s runway 4L-22R. It was almost as noisy inside: the TSA offices were awash in ringing phones, clacking keyboards, slamming doors, and — not infrequently — voices raised in anger or protest. Directly across the hall, a heavyset man from Cartagena was being subjected — visible past a door that was more than ajar — to a body cavity search.

What was that line of Sophocles from Oedipus Rex? “How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.” Angler looked quickly back at the paperwork strewn across the desk.

With little else to go on, several of his men were checking into the many ways Alban could have entered the country. He had one hard fact: before showing up dead on a doorstep in New York City, Alban’s last reported location had been Brazil. And so Angler had dispatched teams to the local airports, Penn Station, and the Port Authority bus terminal, searching for any evidence on his movements.

Angler reached for a stack of paper. Passenger manifests: lists of people who had entered the country from Brazil over the last several months, via flights into JFK. It was one of many such manifests, and it was an inch thick. Searching for any evidence? They were wallowing in “evidence”—all of it apparently useless, a distraction. His men were examining these same manifests, looking for known criminals that Alban might have associated with, checking for anything remotely out of place or suspicious.

He himself was simply checking — paging through the lists, hour after hour, waiting for something, anything, to catch his attention.

Angler knew he didn’t think like the average cop. He was right-brained: always searching for that intuitive leap, that strange connection, that a more orthodox, logical approach would overlook. It had served him well on more than one occasion. And so he kept turning the pages and reading the names, not even knowing what he was looking for. Because the one thing they did know was that Alban did not enter the country under his own name.

As he did so, he had the fleeting sense — not for the first time in this case — that somebody had made this journey before him. It was just little things: the slight disorder among papers that had no reason to be disordered, file drawers that looked like they’d recently been pawed through, and a few people who had vague recollections of someone else asking similar questions six months or a year ago.

But who could it have been? Pendergast?

At the thought of Pendergast, Angler felt a familiar irritation. He’d never before met such a character. If the man had been the slightest bit cooperative, maybe all this pawing through paper wouldn’t be necessary.

Angler shook this line of reflection away and returned to the manifests. He was experiencing a touch of indigestion, and he wasn’t going to let thoughts of Pendergast make it worse.

Suddenly he stopped. One of the names — Tapanes Landberg — stood out.

Why? Other odd names had jumped out at him before… and proven to be nothing. What was it about this one that stirred something in his right brain?

He paused to consider. What had Pendergast said about his son? He’d said so little that all of it had stayed in Angler’s mind. He was eminently capable of managing even the worst trouble. There was something else, too; something that had stood out: He took delight in malicious games; he was an expert at taunting and mortification.

Games. Taunting and mortification. Interesting. What meaning, exactly, was hiding behind the veil of those words? Had Alban been a trickster? Did he like his little jokes?

Taking a pencil, Angler — slowly, lips pursed — began doodling with the name Tapanes Landberg in the top margin of the manifest.

Abrades Plangent. On a whim, Angler removed the letters that made up Alban from this name. He found himself left with:

Shifting to the bottom margin, he rearranged these letters.

Angler glanced at the manifest details. The flight had been Air Brazil, Rio de Janeiro to New York.

The person who entered Kennedy Airport from Brazil came in with a name that was an anagram of Alban Pendergast.

For the first time in several days, Peter Angler smiled.