Chisholm thanks me for the demonstration I gave Jensen. I’m clearly part of a little power game between D.C. and the local bureau that I can only guess at. I get the feeling I was just shown off as a pet freak. If that’s what it takes to stay on the case, then I guess I’m okay with that.

On the far wall, a video feed from the beach shows a crane getting ready to move the Avenger to a flatbed truck. A forensic team is doing a last-minute pass on the plane before they wrap it in plastic for transportation.

I count all the different law enforcement personnel in the hotel conference hall. There are more than fifty people working on this case while it’s hot, not counting the ones back at D.C., Quantico and the field office in Michigan. Most of these people will be back to their normal workload in a day or so, but that’s still a lot of human resource hours being spent on this.

Chisholm goes over to a side of the conference hall where his people are reviewing the profile they’re creating of the Warlock. He’s one of the most important people in the FBI, and yet he’s in the field trying to scrape together something to give us a lead. I respect his dedication.

I think it’s the black swan factor that has drawn him in. The Warlock is just so atypical. Since leaving the behavioral analysis unit for sciences, Chisholm spends more of his time teaching and on research. Back out here he’s in the presence of something real. Something immediate.

My phone rings. It’s Ailes. I walk over to a quiet corner of the hall.

“Anything exciting to report, Agent Blackwood?”

“You’re the mathematician. What are the odds that someone would find a missing Avenger bomber in the middle of the Atlantic?”

“Higher than you might think. Jennifer looked into this and noticed all the previous documented searches fell into the classical search pattern mistakes.”

“What are those?” I ask.

“Giving too much weight to one data point and ignoring the fact that at least some of your data points are going to be manufactured.”

“You mean somebody lying?”

“No. Not exactly. Go to a high school science fair where kids are measuring the height of daisies or size of diatoms in ocean water and you’ll notice a strange effect. Scientists do it too. If someone measures something that’s exactly one centimeter, or some other number that sounds too perfect, they change it to .9 or 1.1. The same thing happens with coordinates. We ran a test on some naval log books and found that you almost never get an exact coordinate like ten degrees mark ten degrees. Nobody wants to look lazy. I’ve got a bet with Gerald that I can predict something about the signatures on the logbooks when those kinds of numbers do come up, the round ones.”

“What’s that?”

Ailes lowers his voice. He must be calling from the bullpen and not want Gerald to hear. “There will be two signatures with the nice round numbers. If two people witnesses it, then they’re not as worried about appearing dishonest by using what they imagine is an overly convenient number. The positions for Flight 19 smell of very scared people trying to cover their own asses and not be asked why their numbers are too round. I bet a search that takes this into account might be more fruitful.”