The Lost Island

14

Gideon exited the lab into the cavernous space, Garza following behind him.

“Nothing like that good old railroaded feeling, eh?” Gideon asked.

“I wouldn’t complain if I were you. A cruise in the Caribbean? I’ll take the assignment, thank you.”

“He gets on my nerves.”

“Welcome to the Glinn’s-a-pain-in-the-ass club.”

As they walked through the enormous lab, Gideon glanced over at Garza. He knew Garza didn’t much care for him, especially his brash, lone-wolf way of doing things. He in turn found Garza to be uptight and rule-bound. It was true that the two of them weren’t exactly buddies. But maybe it didn’t have to be that way.

“How about a drink?” he asked impulsively as they went through the double set of doors leading to the street.

Garza paused to look at him. The offer had taken him by surprise. “Well…sure.”

Spice Market was crowded, as usual, but they were able to grab a small table in the corner. Gideon ordered a Beefeater martini, Garza an IPA.

As the waitress left, Gideon looked at Garza more closely. He was a small, dark, heavily muscled man, with tightly curled black hair fringed white at the temples. His eyes had an intelligent gleam in them.

“How long have you been working at EES?” he said to break the ice.

“Twelve years. Ever since Eli and I got out of the military.”

“Military?”

Garza nodded. “I was an engineering specialist on Glinn’s team.”

“What kind of team?”

“Special Forces. Came up through Airborne, then the Rangers.”

“What kind of work did you do?”

“We blew things up, mostly.”

“What kind of things?”

“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Gideon chuckled. “If you’ve tagged along with Glinn all these years, you must enjoy working for him.”

“Enjoy isn’t the word. Let me put it this way: the man’s an honest-to-God genius, and he’s fair. That’s a rare combination.”

The martini and beer arrived and they broke off as each indulged in his respective drink. As Garza raised his bottle, Gideon — out of habit more than anything else — noticed the man’s wristwatch. “Nice watch.”

“Think so?”

“Oh, yeah. Blancpain L-Evolution Flyback Chronograph. With a red-gold caseband.”

Garza eyed him. “Most people don’t know anything about Blancpain watches.”

“With that carbon-fiber bracelet, it’s one of the finest watches made. Worth, what, fifty grand?”

“I wouldn’t know. A grateful client gave it to me.” Garza paused. “What makes you the expert?”

“I used to be a high-end thief and scumbag, remember?”

“Right.”

“Tell me something,” said Gideon. “What is this big project Glinn’s been working on ever since I came to EES? You know, that underwater model that everybody’s crawling over.”

Garza took a long draw on his beer, draining a third of it before setting down the bottle. “Glinn should be the one to tell you about it.”

“Come on. I’ve signed NDAs up the wazoo. It’s obviously no secret within the confines of EES — I thought that was the whole point of the open lab.”

“True.” Garza waved over another IPA. “That project…it’s Glinn’s Moby-Dick.”

“How so?”

The fresh beer arrived, and Garza took the opportunity to drain it down almost by half. “Well…” He hesitated for a moment, seemed to come to a decision. “You remember Palmer Lloyd, the billionaire who went nuts a few years ago?”

“Sure do.”

“You may also remember he had plans to open a museum, which got shelved after he went to the funny farm.”

“I remember the auction of all the stuff at Sotheby’s. Unbelievable collection.”

“Yeah. Well, five years ago — before all that went down — Lloyd hired EES to, ah, expropriate the world’s largest meteorite from Chile for his museum.”

Gideon put down his drink. “I never heard about that.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“Tell me about it.”

“The meteorite had been found by a prospector on an uninhabited island called Isla Desolación, at the tip of South America. Twenty-five thousand tons. Long story short: we went down there, secured the meteorite, loaded it on a chartered supertanker, got chased by a Chilean destroyer, and were wrecked in a storm. The meteorite went to the bottom in two miles of water and three-quarters of the crew died, including the captain. That’s when Palmer Lloyd lost his mind. And that’s when Glinn became…obsessed.”

“Were you on the ship?”

“Yes. What a nightmare.” Garza took another long pull of the IPA.

“And so Glinn’s still trying to recover it?”

“No. We’re not trying to recover it.”

Here Garza ordered a third beer and fell silent, waiting for it to arrive.

“If you’re not trying to recover it, what are you doing?”

“We’re trying to kill it.”

“Kill—?”

“It wasn’t a meteorite, after all.”

“What was it?”

“Sorry. I’ve already told you too much. If you want to know more, ask Glinn. I will say, though, that we’ve lost some great projects because of this damn obsession.”

“But not the Phorkys Map.”

“Phorkys. There’s something odd about this project.” For a minute, Garza’s thoughts seemed to go far away. “Eli used to share with me even the most sensitive details of every project. But this time, he’s playing his cards close. He won’t even tell me the name of our client. I’d like a guarantee that it’s someone who’s going to do right by this discovery — not some corporation that’ll just turn it into a billion-dollar profit center.”

“I feel the same way.”

“It makes me wonder if the client is unsavory.”

Gideon shook his head. “Glinn has talked about these computer programs of his that can predict human behavior. Is that for real?”

Garza’s third beer arrived. “Yes.”

“How does that work?”

“Eli founded Effective Engineering Solutions as a company specializing in ‘failure analysis.’ We’d get hired to come in after some cluster-fuck. Our job was to figure out what went wrong, and why. Not a nice business, because often you end up blaming your own client.”

“Making it hard to get paid.”

“Oh, Eli always gets the money up front. The bigger problem is that, once we’ve completed our work, sometimes the client wants to deep-six the report. And the people who prepared it.”

“Tough business.”

“You’re not kidding. But Eli’s the toughest man I know. Any normal person would have died from the injuries he sustained on that shipwreck.”

Gideon shifted in his chair. “So what about these computer programs?”

“Eli developed them. The human factor is always the most important in any engineering project. So these programs can predict, to a certain extent, human behavior. He calls it QBA — Quantitative Behavioral Analysis.”

“Sounds like science fiction.”

Garza laughed. “It started out as science fiction. Glinn got the idea from reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Remember Hari Seldon and the discipline of ‘psychohistory’?”

Gideon shook his head. He hated science fiction.

“Asimov invented a new science that combined history, sociology, and statistics. Psychohistorians could make predictions about the behavior of groups of people. With QBA, Glinn took psychohistory out of fiction and made it fact. His programs make predictions, not about groups, but about how a single person will react, in a given set of circumstances.” He took a sip of his beer. “You can bet that both you and I have had thorough QBAs done on us.”

“How comforting.”

“In an odd way, it is. Eli knows more about you than you do yourself.”

Gideon thought back to the time when he first encountered Glinn — and the extraordinary amount of information the man had already dug up on him, including his terminal condition. “So how did Glinn get from failure analysis to engineering?”

“Failure analysis is one side of the coin,” Garza said. “Engineering’s the other. Engineering is the science of not failing — of doing something right. It isn’t enough to figure out how to do something right. You also have to figure out how not to do something wrong. You have to analyze every possible path to failure. Only then can you be sure of success.”

“Like the meteorite disaster.”

“That was our only failure — although I concede it was a big one. Up to that point EES had never failed, ever. It was our trademark.”

“So you’re confident we’ll succeed with Project Phorkys?”

Garza stared moodily at the IPA bottle, and then chuckled to himself. “A simple Caribbean cruise? With Glinn’s fanatical attention to every detail, every possible avenue of eventuality? Oh, yeah, Gideon. We’ll succeed, all right.”