Crooked River

43

Pendergast had arrived suddenly and unexpectedly at the lab in the early afternoon. Gladstone was embarrassed that the A/C had once again failed and the lab was hot and stuffy, but it didn’t seem to bother the FBI agent, who remained cool and dry in his linen suit. He hadn’t even taken off his jacket. How did the man do it? Maybe he was part reptile. His eyes blinked infrequently enough, she thought, for it to be at least a possibility.

He wanted them to go once again through the drift models in exhaustive detail. Lam had launched into another incomprehensible explanation of chaos theory and imaginary space, but it amounted to the same thing: nada. The data from the buoy drop was beautiful, it had come in flawlessly, but plugging it into the models still resulted in nonsense. They were now over ten thousand dollars into CPU time on the supercomputer, with nothing to show for it.

“So there we are,” Lam finished up, spreading his hands as the last drift analysis finished its run, the squiggly lines of simulated floating shoes tracing themselves from nowhere to nowhere. “Unless you’d like to apply that Ramanujan eleven-dimensional Matrix Attractor you’re such an expert in.”

Silence fell. Pendergast said nothing, his pale face impossible to read. He seemed quite a bit more on edge than usual — almost wary. His eyes, always busy in the slackest of times, never stopped in their movement. The noises of passing trucks roused his interest. Once or twice, he checked his phone — something she’d never seen him do before. Finally, Gladstone cleared her throat. “Now you see why we asked you to come by.”

“I was planning on stopping by in any case. There is a matter, a possibly serious matter, that we need to prepare for.”

Gladstone barely heard. “Everything you need to know is right there on that screen. There’s really nothing to say. We’ve tried every imaginable variation. Lam has been a workhorse, using branches of analysis I didn’t even know existed to try to make the drift lines work out. But they simply don’t.” She paused. “I’m sorry we’ve wasted your money.”

Pendergast thought a moment. Finally, his silvery eyes turned to her. “Failure is always useful.”

“A nice thought. But personally? I think failure sucks.” Gladstone slumped down in her chair, trying to get comfortable. After so many hours, it was difficult.

“The question failure asks is: what don’t we know that we don’t know?”

“Whoa, man,” Lam said. “That’s deep.”

Gladstone had to parse this for a moment. “How are we supposed to find out what we don’t know? We’ve input every possible factor and still get nonsense.”

“Except that you have not. There’s a factor you haven’t input — the factor that will explain this phenomenon. Because there must be an explanation. And the key is to find that factor.”

She didn’t blame the guy for being annoyed at throwing away money, but now he was starting to sound like Don Quixote. “We’ve racked our brains, honestly we have. We’ve run simulations with all the meteorological data available. Every single thing that might influence a current is in that model, even weather events over highly localized areas of the sea — isolated winds and thundershowers, for example.”

“Could the meteorologists have missed something?”

Gladstone shook her head. “Not possible. They’ve got satellites, weather buoys, reports from ships — if a drop of rain falls into the ocean, they know it.”

“Every single thing that might influence a current, you said.” Pendergast frowned, and there was a long silence. “What about a land-based effect?”

“Like what?” Gladstone asked.

“Forgive the naiveté of the question, but could a storm on land affect ocean currents?”

“I don’t see how.”

“If it caused a flood, for example?”

Okay, now the guy was really reaching. “A flood from a river would inject a very small amount of extra water into the gulf, yes, but the effect would be minuscule. These Florida rivers are slow-moving and shallow. The effects would remain close to shore. Nothing that would push debris far enough out into the gulf to reach the Loop Current.”

Pendergast nodded slowly. “And the garbage analysis? Are you sure there’s nothing there?”

She sighed. “As I mentioned over the phone, what we could identify came from all over the gulf. There was no pattern to the samples we analyzed.”

“Hold on,” said Lam. “I just thought of something.”

“What?” Gladstone said.

“You remember a few years back, when that developer up north was fined for illegally dredging the mouth of some river?”

Gladstone nodded.

“He dredged a long, straight channel that unexpectedly acted like a funnel when a big storm caused a surge of upstream water, shooting all the agricultural pollution out into the gulf, killing a bunch of fish and creating a dead zone. They fined him and made him redo the dredging into a wiggly pattern.”

“Your point?”

“Well, maybe somebody else did the same thing more recently.”

“Did what same thing?”

“Christ on a donkey.” Lam sighed with impatience. “Dredged a channel that, in a flood of water from a storm upstream, would create dangerous currents in what should be a protected harbor. And push debris out into the Loop Current in the process.”

Gladstone paused. It was such a far-fetched idea — especially that the force of such a flood could reach the Loop Current. But it wasn’t like they had anything else to go on. And it might satisfy Pendergast. “The Army Corps of Engineers is in charge of coastal dredging. Wallace, pull up their enforcement website. Let’s see if anyone’s been fined recently.”

Lam tapped away on the computer and they waited while the website loaded.

“Here’s something.”

Gladstone leaned over his shoulder. It seemed that not too long ago, a developer in Carrabelle had been fined for illegally dredging the Crooked River to his new marina. Ripped out a lot of mangroves in the process, too — a big no-no.

She felt Pendergast’s presence behind her. “This looks like the straight-dredging situation you spoke of,” he said.

“Yes, but that’s way the hell up in the Panhandle. I mean, this is really unlikely.”

Pendergast stepped back. “If you please, bring up the analysis you prepared on the garbage.”

Gladstone pulled it up on the computer, and sent a copy to the printer as well.

“There,” said Pendergast, pulling sheets from the printer and pointing at the second one. “Two crab pot license tags from Carrabelle washed up with the feet.”

Gladstone stared. She had dismissed those earlier, Carrabelle being so far away from any conceivable drift pattern. Besides, there were a dozen other license tags from all over the gulf, including from as far away as Texas and Louisiana. “Um, I’m not sure that’s relevant.”

“Perhaps, but recall the missing factor. Let us look at extreme weather events — on land. Specifically, did the Crooked River flood at the time period when the feet would have entered the water and that illegal dredging was still in effect?”

Lam grunted. “That’s easily looked up.” More gunfire rapping of keys. Meteorological data and weather maps scrolled across the screen. “Whoa,” he said. “Check that out. Massive thunderstorm over the Apalachicola National Forest on March 19 — that’s in the Crooked River watershed.”

More tapping.

“And — yup — the river flooded. Took out a few piers, dragged some boats from their moorings. After that, they made the developer restore the river to its previous condition.”

Gladstone felt her heart accelerate. This was amazing. Unlikely, unexpected, but amazing. “Wallace, plug into the model a bunch of simulated shoes being injected out of the mouth of Crooked River in a flood of that magnitude. Then let the simulation run freely and let’s see where they go.”

“Will do.”

Lam began typing at a furious rate, and soon he had set it up. “Shall I run it? Gonna cost us more dough.”

“I will cover it, naturally,” said Pendergast.

Lam hit the execute button and they waited. These drift simulations ate up CPU time like it was peanut butter, but this one seemed particularly slow. Gladstone heard Lam curse under his breath.

The screen finally came to life, showing the Florida Gulf Coast. A nest of black lines — hundreds of simulated feet — arrowed out of the mouth of Crooked River into Saint George Sound, curled around Dog Island, got caught up in what looked like an eddy, circled way out into the gulf, got snagged by the Loop Current, swept down the coast... and converged on Captiva Island.

“Holy jeez,” breathed Lam.

Gladstone could hardly believe it. All of a sudden, her model had worked beautifully: all the squiggly lines coming out of Crooked River and twenty-five days later converging on Captiva Island.

“It appears,” said Pendergast, “the feet weren’t dumped at sea. They were flushed out of Crooked River in that flood. I believe we may have our factor.” His eyes, still unusually restless, had been focusing on Lam. “Dr. Lam, you seemed frustrated with your computer just now. Is it operating unusually slowly?”

“Yeah, they must be running some big simulations over at the university. It’s been like this for a day or two.”

Pendergast went still. “A day or two?”

“Yes. I think. I didn’t pay much attention at first.”

“And you’ve noticed this on which systems, exactly?”

“All of them. At least, the ones tied into the university — which is almost everything.”

“I see. Excuse me while I make a call.” Pendergast slipped his cell phone out of his pocket, dialed a number, and turned away. He murmured quietly into the phone for a while. Then he turned back and handed it to Lam.

“What’s up?” Lam asked.

“A computer expert in my employ, specializing in cybersecurity and cyberwarfare. His name is Mime. He wishes to examine your system. I can assure you he is entirely trustworthy.”

“Maybe. But I’m the computer expert around here.” Even so, Lam took the phone with a puzzled expression. Gladstone watched as the person on the other end gave Lam detailed instructions, which he tapped onto the keyboard. It appeared that the anonymous person began controlling the computer remotely after a few moments, because suddenly Lam was no longer typing, just watching as his screen filled with windows dense with scrolling computer code. After ten long minutes, Lam handed the phone back to Pendergast, who spoke into it and then hung up.

“It seems your system has been hacked,” Pendergast informed them as he replaced the phone in his pocket, along with the printout. “By an expert — most likely, someone with government or military expertise.”

“What kind of a hack?”

“Mime called it a ‘cocktail of zero-day exploits,’ but the most pernicious actors were keyloggers attached to every input device.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Lam. “So some bastard has been keeping track of everything I type? Who the hell would want to steal a bunch of drift data?”

“Who, indeed?”

This was said in such an uncharacteristic tone of voice that Gladstone looked over at Pendergast. The wariness she’d noticed earlier had turned into alarm. The FBI agent stared at both of them in turn. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that the time has come for our departure.”

“Departure?” Gladstone asked. “Where?”

“Away from here. And right now.” Then, before she could react, he had taken her arm and hustled her out the door.