Crooked River

12

Pamela Gladstone unlocked the door of her lab and held it open for the FBI agent. It was a tiny space, almost entirely filled with electronic equipment — computers, screens, and an NOAA Automated Surface Observing System terminal.

“You can shift those manuals off that chair,” she said, indicating a stool. “On the floor is fine.”

Pendergast slipped them off but did not sit down. Instead, he looked around with his glittering eyes. Lam, wearing his signature red Keds high-top sneakers, came in and wedged himself into the cramped nook that served as his workstation. Gladstone sat down in her own capacious chair, leaning back with her hands clasped in front. She turned to Pendergast. “All right. You wanted to talk? Go ahead.”

“I’ve consulted with a variety of sources, and it’s my understanding you have some unconventional theories about currents and the sea.”

Gladstone had to laugh. “Unconventional? Sounds like you’re describing my political opinions.”

“I loathe politics, presently more than ever. I’m solely interested in your oceanographic views.”

She brushed her long blond hair out of her face. The salt air always made it unruly. “My theories. Okay. Well, they involve chaos. I mean, in the mathematical sense. You’re familiar with the so-called butterfly effect? That the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Africa results in a hurricane in Florida?”

“I’m familiar with that fanciful idea, yes.”

“Fanciful,” Lam scoffed under his breath. She glared at him.

“It’s overstated, true, but what it really means is that the tiniest change in the initial conditions of a system can snowball into gigantic effects later on. Wallace and I are just applying that mathematical concept to ocean currents. Unfortunately, most of my colleagues think we’re wrong.”

“Are you wrong?”

She hadn’t expected this question. “That depends on how you define wrong. I know we’re on the right track, but we’re getting wrong results. It’s a nontrivial problem. I need time. And more data. Those who think we’re on the wrong track, that’s a different thing. They lack imagination. They’re... well... a little thick.”

Pendergast’s thin lips formed a dry little smile. “Most people, in my experience, are a little thick. If not abundantly so.”

Gladstone had to laugh, along with Wallace. This man, despite his severe look, had a droll sense of humor. She went on. “Ocean currents appear to flow in big, logical movements. The tide comes in and goes out. The Loop Current goes this way and that in a predictable fashion. It’s all there in the charts. The problem is that, when you actually drop small GPS floaters into the ocean, you find you can’t really predict where each individual floater will go. You can start them all together and they spread out enormously. Or you drop them far apart and they all end up on the same beach. So Wallace and I have been trying to develop a fractal mathematical model to explain that.”

“I developed it, actually,” Lam said. “On my own.”

The man nodded slowly. She wondered how much he actually understood. It was hard to read his marble-like face.

“How does the model work?” he asked.

“Wallace? You’re on — smartass.”

Lam cleared his throat extravagantly. “Ahem. We start by turning the surface of the sea into millions of vectors and perform a fractal matrix analysis showing how each vector evolves over time — given various initial conditions of air and water temperature, wind, tides, waves, currents, solar gain, and other factors. It essentially draws a multidimensional Poincaré map of the ocean’s surface. We do our calculations using the Q machine supercomputer at Florida Atlantic University.” Lam tilted his head. “Am I making sense?”

Agent Pendergast tilted his own head back. “A Poincaré map? Is that all? Why on earth did you not consider a Ramanujan eleven-dimensional Matrix Attractor?”

Lam sat there, dumbfounded. “Um... what?”

“I think our guest is making a joke,” said Gladstone.

“Oh,” Lam said slowly. He was used, she realized, to having a monopoly on irony in the lab.

“No, I don’t have any questions,” said Pendergast, “for the simple reason that I have no idea what you were talking about.”

“But I tried to make it simple,” Lam said with a smirk, regaining his equilibrium.

“No matter.” The agent turned to Gladstone. “How well do your models actually work?”

Gladstone smiled. “So far, I’m sorry to say — total shit.”

The man winced and she saw, to her amusement, that the vulgarity had offended him. “But they will work, I’m sure of it. Let me show you the size of the problem. Wallace, could you please run the floater video?”

“Why not?” Lam came over to a terminal and began tapping. Soon an image of the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the coast of Florida came up.

“What Wallace is going to show you is an animated video of the track of every floater for which we have data, going back twenty years. There have been thousands.”

Black lines appeared on the chart, crawling every which way until a vast spiderweb covered the screen.

“You can see how crazy it looks.” She pointed to a great hairy bundle of lines coming up from the Caribbean, running along the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, curling up into the gulf, looping back down the west coast of Florida, brushing the Keys, and streaming out into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving many eddies and swirls in the gulf itself.

“That’s the famous Loop Current,” she said. “But as you can see, even though many lines follow it, there are hundreds that don’t. It’s the ones that don’t — the exceptions — that I’m trying to fit into our mathematical model. Wallace is a genius and, as you’ve discovered, nobody understands his equations.”

“We’re making progress,” Lam said. “And I wouldn’t exactly term our recent results ‘shit.’ We’ve progressed to the ‘half-assed’ phase, at least.”

Gladstone laughed. “Another thing is that the results of our models go against a lot of traditional old-salt wisdom about the gulf, accumulated by generations of grizzled seafarers. A young woman like me and a Chinese American brainiac like Wallace — well, what could we possibly know? We’re not popular, to say the least. So... how can we help you, Agent Pendergast?”

“I wish to reverse engineer the journey these feet took to Captiva Island. Trace them to their origin. Can you do that?”

She had suspected this was where he was headed. “I can try.”

“And can you keep any data or information I share with you two completely confidential?”

“For extending the lease on my boat, I’ll sign an NDA in my own blood.”

“That won’t be necessary. Tell me what you need in order to do the analysis.”

“For starters, I’ll need all the data you have on where each foot washed up, and when — as precisely as possible. If there are any videos or photographs of the event, that would be great. Did anything else come ashore with them?”

“The usual flotsam and jetsam — seaweed, driftwood, and miscellaneous garbage.”

“Anyone collect it?”

“Yes.”

“Bring it to me.”

“There are two garbage bags full.”

“Wonderful. We love garbage that comes in from the sea. Every piece tells the tale of its travels.”

“Very good.”

She frowned. “Isn’t the Coast Guard also doing this sort of analysis? I sure as hell don’t want to get crosswise with them. They don’t like us as it is.”

Pendergast paused before answering. “I think it’s safe to assume that everyone involved should be doing this sort of analysis. It’s the most obvious investigative path. However, the Coast Guard — at least those assigned to this mission — are, as the expression goes, ‘old-school.’ They have the latest technology, but they prefer to rely on their own experience with the sea — including making use of fifty-year-old paper charts. It is my belief they are underestimating the complexity of the problem — perhaps by a vast margin. I know enough about meteorology to realize that Earth’s natural systems don’t always run in predictable patterns. As a result, I would prefer to work with somebody comfortable with cutting-edge tools and theories — and unlikely to discard possible results simply because they don’t follow received wisdom. In any case, your role will remain confidential.”

“Fair enough. So... what does the Coast Guard think?”

“That the feet came from a Cuban prison.”

“Sounds like a reasonable assumption to me.”

“The problem is that it is an assumption. Having made the assumption, they’re now trying to massage the data to prove it.”

“And you think that’s putting the cart before the horse?”

“It’s the cardinal error of any criminal investigation.”

She nodded. She was pretty sure this was going to end up a god-awful mess. She wasn’t at all sure she could pull off the analysis — Pendergast was right when he said it was a complex problem. But she couldn’t very well say no to the FBI, could she? And besides, there was something strangely magnetic — from an intellectual standpoint — about the pale man in the pale suit.