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Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(89)

Author:Douglas Preston

“The way I like it prepared?”

“For God’s sake, no.” She turned with a rustle of expensive silk and left his room.

It was ten minutes later that Coldmoon—now dressed and fully awake—stepped into the library of the Chandler House: a narrow room overlooking Taylor Street. The room held wall-to-wall bookcases, with a few tables and several comfortable reading chairs. In one corner sat Pendergast and Constance. They had pulled a sofa and two armchairs away from the other furniture in a kind of defensive posture. Coldmoon walked over and sat down. As promised, there was a large pitcher of coffee and some cups with saucers. Without speaking, Coldmoon poured himself a cup and sipped suspiciously. He put the cup down on the table between them and sat back.

Pendergast, so drawn and pale he might have been a candidate for Moller’s monster-diagnosing equipment, sat across from him. “I’m going to tell you both a story,” he said.

“Oh, goody,” Coldmoon replied sarcastically. He had looked up D. B. Cooper on Wikipedia and been as entertained as Pendergast promised, yet he’d been unable to figure out how that celebrated cold case could be linked to the current killings—although he could see a number of possible links to their trip west.

“Both of you know different pieces of the story,” Pendergast went on. “Neither of you knows it all. Our trip west answered half of it. The other half belongs to Constance. I tasked her with a most difficult undertaking…and she has followed through.”

“What was that?” Coldmoon asked.

“Asking the proprietress of the Chandler House four questions.”

Four questions? Coldmoon glanced at Constance. She was sitting on the sofa between Pendergast and Coldmoon, utterly still and—apparently—emotionless. Coldmoon knew from personal experience this might be a bad sign, and he discreetly edged his chair away from the couch.

“I’ll tell the story, as reconstructed with the help of Constance, as efficiently as possible. Time is of the essence.” Pendergast drew in a breath. “A little over fifty years ago, a young woman named Alicia Rime was employed as an airframe designer at the Boeing aerospace complex in Portland, Oregon. She was a brilliant young engineer, and she had been moved from the company’s headquarters in Chicago to the advanced operations facility. This was a secret location, not unlike Lockheed’s ‘Skunk Works,’ where employees worked to develop new technologies. Beginning in 1970, important steps were being taken toward fly-by-wire systems, as well as novel approaches for improving safety. At that time, Rime was the only female engineer at Boeing.

“Soon, Rime began to learn that the more senior engineers in her department were poaching her work and taking credit for it themselves. Given her lack of seniority, and—alas—the fact that she was a woman, management circled the wagons and turned a blind eye to what was happening. And it wasn’t long before Rime’s excitement turned to disenchantment, then bitterness.

“At this point, she gravitated toward an older engineer working in advanced operations. He had been a rising star in earlier years, but—as his ideas became perceived as more and more impracticable, even bizarre—his work was disparaged or, worse, dismissed. By the time Rime met him, such treatment had driven him to work alone, not sharing with the others. He was a widower, with no family to speak of. He’d been laughed at one too many times, and now he kept his projects secret, locked in a safe when he went home for the night.

“Not surprisingly, the old man and Alicia Rime, the two outcasts of the department, forged a friendship. Eventually the older man began to share the secret of his work with her.

“His idea had been to develop hardware and software that could model human behavior. He took a dazzlingly unconventional approach, using a computer language of his own invention, far more advanced than LISP. His goal was to predict pilot behavior using AI. If a computer could predict, even a minute in advance, what a pilot might do given a set of circumstances, it would be an extremely powerful tool in avoiding pilot error.

“Alas, his efforts to create predictive AI ended in failure. The world is ruled by chaos, and human behavior is too complex.”

Pendergast allowed this observation to settle over the small group before he continued.

“But this scientist was a true genius, and he was not yet ready to admit defeat. After abandoning AI as a tool, he hit upon another idea—an insight based on the Schr?dinger’s cat effect and the many-worlds theory of the physicist Hugh Everett, proposed in 1957.”

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