What the AI did was see how all those movements corresponded with specific locations on a map and then make some reasonable deductions. So three jinks fifteen degrees to the right, a dip in the road, another jink here, a sloping slide there, and finally a big, wide one-eighty turn and a halt, all within fifteen seconds, might look like someone in Mumbai, India, took New Panvel traffic circle to the Birmole Hospital parking area, after turning off Matheran Road to the southwest.

But it wasn’t cut-and-dry. Sometimes the same set of jinks, dips, slips and slides corresponded to multiple city or town layouts. Sometimes the geomapping wasn’t too accurate or up-to-date. There were construction detours, road closings, exit openings. A road that dipped down low last week might have been filled in and leveled since. Or maybe someone had randomly made those very movements while scooting around the Arctic tundra on a snowmobile. It happened. So what Needlefish did was kick out the leading candidates and rate them in order of likelihood. It’s probably that traffic circle in Mumbai. But it very well could be we’re looking at an approach to the Arc de Triomphe roundabout. And we can’t rule out Mohanlal roundabout in Doha, Qatar, though it’s a third-place long shot.

It helped if you were able to exclude certain locations. Say you were confident the parties you were tracking weren’t in Qatar. Or France. Then you could tell Needlefish to leave those places off its candidate list. And even better if you could narrow the search to a specific country, district or city.

Which was what Castro and Raymore had been able to do looking for Musil’s daughters.

They knew from the jump that the kids were in New York. They also knew the girls had started out at the Woodmere Middle School in the borough of Queens. And they knew that all five city boroughs had highly exact and current street maps and satellite imagery. These factors bumped up Needlefish’s location accuracy to a tick under one hundred percent.

Assuming there was a phone to locate.

That had been the big question mark hanging over the techs. If there was no phone, any Needlefish search was moot. Musil had told them the girls’ abductor had claimed it was discarded or destroyed...but it was within that very claim that he found a small kernel of optimism.

Your daughter’s phone is gone, the man had said.

Phone, singular.

Not phones.

According to Musil, his daughters always went to school with two phones between them. One each.

They had kept their hopes in check. The kidnapper very well could have misspoken. Musil had also acknowledged that he might not have heard him correctly. He might have taken both phones. Therefore nobody got too excited.