Crooked River

16

The large screen showed a detailed map of the Indian Ocean between Australia and Réunion Island east of Madagascar, bounded on the north by Borneo and Sumatra and on the south by nothing. Stretching across the center of the map was a rat’s nest of pink, red, and burgundy threads, as dense and tangled as Day-Glo steel wool, surrounding a thicker black line that arced from the coast of Java to a spot in the southern Indian Ocean many thousands of miles from land.

Gladstone, standing behind Wallace Lam, stared at the image. “What makes you think this is going to help us?” she asked.

“Because this was the most expensive and sophisticated ocean drift analysis ever performed.”

“Yeah, and it failed.”

Lam sighed. “Lord spare me from fools and numbskulls.”

“Watch out, or I’ll cut your salary.”

“What salary?” He sniffed. “Look. It only failed because the searchers didn’t interpret it properly. But I was able to take their data and perform a different calculation.”

“You’re saying you know where Flight MH370 went down?”

“They spent a hundred and fifty million dollars searching this area here, and here, and over here — and were wrong every time.”

Gladstone stared at the map. “Okay, but we’re not looking for Flight 370. We’re looking for the place where a hundred feet were dumped into the ocean.”

“It’s the same problem, really.” Lam sighed again, this time with impatience. “Let me try to explain.”

“If it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition.”

“I’m a glutton for punishment. Anyway, you know the story of the missing plane. On March eighth, 2014, Flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur, headed for Beijing. Over the Gulf of Thailand it made a sudden turn and headed southwest, eventually flying far out over the Indian Ocean. About seven and a half hours after it took off, a satellite signal, the last contact with the plane, indicated it was somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean — and then whammo! It disappeared.”

Gladstone nodded. She knew the story well.

“Investigators calculated how far it could have flown, given the fuel it carried and the speed and altitude, and estimated it ran out of fuel and went down somewhere along this arc.” He gestured at the thick black line on the screen. “Which became the main search area.”

“Right.”

“But then!” Lam held up his finger. “On July twenty-ninth, a six-foot piece of the plane, a flaperon, washed up on Réunion Island. And that’s when this reverse-drift study was done, backtracking to March eighth to approximate where that flaperon might have originated.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“Patience, boss lady, is a virtue. Now, shut up and listen — please. You can’t just throw a virtual flaperon into the ocean off Réunion Island and then run the clock back to see where it was five months earlier. So what they did was throw five million virtual flaperons into the ocean and run them all back in time to see where they were on March eighth.”

“Using what data?”

“They made a model of the flaperon, put it into a tank, and ran tests on it. They took into account the sail effect — how much wind might affect the floating object. They calculated wave action. They allowed for surface currents, tidal currents, and deeper ocean currents. And finally, they took into account the flaperon’s permeability — how much it became waterlogged and degraded over the months it spent floating at sea. All that went into the model. As more debris washed up on various islands and the African mainland, they added that to the model, as well.”

“So each of those colorful little kinky threads on the screen is one possible backtrail?”

“Right the first time.”

Gladstone stared at countless squiggly lines. “Judging from this map, those virtual flaperons could have come from anywhere in a million square miles. This analysis didn’t work at all.”

“But at least it showed that some areas were more likely than others. They shifted their search after that.”

“But still didn’t find Flight 370.”

“No.”

“Like I said, their model was a failure. A total, balls-up failure.”

“But like I said—”

“And now you want us to replicate their failure?”

“Not the failure.” Lam rolled his eyes. “You see—”

“You want us to dump five million virtual feet into the sea off Turner Beach and backtrack them in time, to see where they started?”

This time, Lam waited until he was sure no more questions were forthcoming before he answered. “Yes, I do.”

“And why will that work for us when it didn’t for them?”

“We have more data on the gulf than they had about the Indian Ocean. And we only have to backtrack twenty-five or so days, not five months. But most important, I had a new idea about a way to analyze their data. I applied it to Flight 370 — and when I did, all the floating debris models from the flight converged in one approximate area on the date of the crash. Instead of a thousand.”

Gladstone stared at the map. “So what’s your new idea?”

“I figured if I applied Feynman sum-over-histories diagrams to the possibilities, I might be able to eliminate the least likely pathways. Not every one of these squiggly drift patterns is equally probable: some are more likely than others. So you eliminate the unlikely ones — using Feynman diagrams.”

“What’s a Feynman diagram?”

“I’m tired now. How much will you pay me to explain?”

Gladstone frowned. Money and mathematics were all that Lam seemed to appreciate, even though he rarely had any of the former. “I’ll order extra cheese on our next pizza night. And onion. Okay?”

“Okay. It’s a mathematical and geometric way of diagramming the probability of particle interactions. Like in a particle collider? I just adapted the process to the ocean, treating it mathematically like a sea of interacting particles and forces. The math is terrifying and you need a supercomputer. But when it was done, this is what happened.”

He gestured at the screen. One by one, the colorful little threads disappeared from the map until nothing was left but the black arc of the airplane’s possible locations when it went down. Then, new threads began appearing on the map, all originating from Réunion Island. Some drifted one way, others jagged off in another — but they all converged, more or less, on a single spot in the ocean — on that black arc.

Gladstone shook her head. Was this another of Lam’s mathematical flights of fancy? “So that’s where Flight 370 is? There?” She pointed to where all the lines converged on the map.

“At the bottom of the ocean, of course.”

Gladstone stared. “Are you sure?”

“Well, obviously I have no proof. But I did run several billion Feynman diagram permutations through the university’s Q machine.” He sniffed again. “And I ran up a rather impressive CPU bill in the process.”

“How much?”

“Four grand.”

Mary, mother of Jesus. “And you didn’t clear it with me?”

He looked at her with an exaggeratedly wounded expression. “I didn’t realize it was going to go so high.”

“And you think you can do the same thing with floating feet?”

“Well, you’ve got tons of data from your floater experiments you’ve gathered over the past five years — much better than what they had for the Indian Ocean. I just need to figure out the floating characteristics of the actual feet to plug into the calculation.”

“What exactly do you need?”

“I’ll need two actual feet, along with a test tank of water with a wave and wind machine — they’ve got one at the oceanography lab at Eckerd.”

“And how much will all this cost, even assuming I can get ahold of some feet?”

He shrugged. “Another grand?”

“Jesus. And where are we going to get the money for that?”

“Why don’t you ask that FBI dude? He looked rich enough to me.”