Black Fall Read online

  Before coming to the FBI in an advisory capacity, Ailes ran a black box hedge fund. It was the kind of firm that uses supercomputers and secret software to tell them how to invest and game the market. It made him a rich man—wealthy enough to play golf with CEOs and the president. The truest example of a public servant, he gave up a lucrative career to put his mathematical prowess to work for his country. He could be on the golf course right now with other rich and powerful men, or running for political office, but instead he’s in a nearly abandoned building on the outskirts of the FBI campus at Quantico, where they used to store carpet fibers and tire tread patterns, working with a team of just three people and trying to slowly modernize the bureau from the inside out while helping us tackle the impossible cases, the ones the rest of the FBI isn’t even sure exist.

  “I’m just rattled,” I say, instantly regretting the poor choice of words as images of the earthquake damage play out on a monitor at the back of our open office.

  I’d had to catch a ride in a squad car back to the stakeout location to grab my work car. The city is in pandemonium. It took flashing my blue light just to make it three blocks. Traffic signals are out all over. Commuter rails and the Metro are shut down because of safety concerns. Transit officials have to inspect hundreds of miles of track and tunnels before they can let people back on the trains. For a city that depends on them, this is the apocalypse.

  As I left DC for Quantico, people were walking around dazed, staring at their phones, some getting service and some not, all trying to figure out how they were going to get home. And we still have to find the people who could be trapped. The radio in my car said there was a report of a Metro car buried in the longest stretch of tunnel. The thought of being buried alive gives me shudders. I’ve been there. Not fun.

  It’s frustrating to be sitting here in an office miles away while rescue workers are out there doing something. But my orders were unambiguous. I was to return to my unit at Quantico and await assignment.

  My two other coworkers, Gerald and Jennifer, are hunched over a computer with their headphones on working on something. Other than a nod when I arrived, we haven’t communicated. Although they’re not much younger than me, the differences between us feel apparent as I watch them conferring like students planning the latest edition of the school newspaper.

  Solidly built, like a volleyball captain, Jennifer always wears an expression even more serious than mine; she apparently hadn’t been coached from a young age how to force a smile. The secret is to do it with your eyes. If they didn’t know she was armed, she’s the kind of woman men would condescendingly tell to smile. When faced with others’ stupidity, her withering glances barely contain how much more intelligent she knows she is. Neither of us has much capacity for small talk, and any conversation we share over box chicken salad lunches tends to be case related. But to say that we get along professionally makes our relationship sound colder than it is. A better way to say it is that we get along efficiently.

  Gerald—lanky and usually smiling—seems like Jennifer’s opposite, but intellectually he’s her soul mate. With his unkempt brown locks constantly falling into his eyes, he looks less like a G-man and more like some wunderkind working on a startup in his parents’ basement.

  Both of them could have gone to work in the private sector for greater pay, but they chose the FBI and answered Dr. Ailes’s call to service. I’ve since learned that Ailes’s reputation in academic circles is quite significant—and one of the reasons both Gerald and Jennifer decided to take this path.

  Watching the three of them geek out over some new code-breaking algorithm or a puzzle Gerald has brought back from a conference is like watching a family of geniuses. I’m welcome, to be sure, but I’m clearly the raven-haired stepchild.

  Everyone is focused on the earthquake. Everyone, except me. As I wait for Ailes to sort through e-mail and bureau bulletins, I find myself staring down at my finger, the one the child had grasped.

  “She said my name,” I say out loud.

  Ailes glances up at me from his laptop and thinks for a moment. “The woman who kidnapped the infant?” He reaches over and pulls a sheet of paper from a printer behind him. It looks like a transcript. “Did she recognize you?”

  “I had my hat and glasses on. It’s not the best disguise, but nobody has ever stopped me before. She knew it was me.”

  He gives this some consideration. “Do you think McGillis had anything to do with it?”

  My first impulse would have been yes, but I’d been thinking it over since I left the hospital. “She’s not that dumb. If she suspects we’re building a case, I’m sure she doesn’t want even more federal attention. She’s too calculated. The woman could have followed me to the stakeout.” I have an unlisted address, but that doesn’t mean much these days.

  My line of work puts me in contact with people who tend to take things very personally. DEA agents going after drug lords have to deal with the same situation. They’re often rotated out of the field to avoid personal reprisals. Unfortunately, for me a change of address or even a career move wouldn’t make a difference at this point. I tell myself I’m safer staying in the FBI doing what I do, because on the outside I’d be just another civilian victim. However, I don’t know if my enemies follow the same logic.

  “I’ll stay on the Metropolitan Police Department,” Ailes replies. “I’ll make sure they coordinate with us on the woman. Chances are she’s just some random crazy that saw you in a coffee shop one day and got fixated on you.”

  He’s trying to downplay it, but this is what bothers me—the idea that it could just be some crazy rando. My most high profile case—the one that placed me in the national spotlight—has attracted legions of nut-job followers. When you take down a man who calls himself the Warlock, a man some people think is a god because of his ability to disguise magic tricks as evil miracles, you tend to get attention from disturbed minds. The FBI receives threats addressed to me on a daily basis. Equally disturbing are the pleas from people asking for my supernatural intervention to rid them of demons and other imagined dark forces.

  It’d be one thing if the dangerous ones only came after me. Agents who take down mobsters and other vindictive crooks have to deal with this for the rest of their lives, sometimes even have to enter protective custody. But the potential harm to innocent people is what scares me the most. Ever since a bomb nearly took out my apartment complex, simply because I saw something I didn’t realize I wasn’t meant to see, I have to take everything into careful consideration. My current apartment is in a gated complex, where a number of people who work for CIA and NSA front companies live. It’s a good thing I don’t have expensive tastes, because rent is ridiculous. This is after Ailes secretly had another agent offer to sublet a place he owned at a ridiculously cheap rate. I’d called him out on it when I noticed the company that held the lease was named after Bernhard Riemann, a nineteenth-century German mathematician. He wasn’t trying to be clever. He’d just underestimated how diligent I would be.

  “I’m pulling you off the McGillis case temporarily,” Ailes says.

  I snap out of my daze. “What? You can’t!” I fought hard for this case. It’s the first major case I’ve initiated. Going after criminals like her is why I joined the FBI. It’s what I’m good at.

  “Knoll says he can take it over. He just finished a couple of his cases.”

  “But . . .” I try to find the words for my counterargument, but they all sound petulant. Knoll is a good man. We’ve worked together in the past and it’s never about ego for him. It’s about putting the bad guys away. I’d be mad at him for offering to take this one behind my back, but I’m sure Ailes called him once he heard what happened at the stakeout.

  “It’ll be in capable hands. We’ll lean on Martine, see if we can get him to turn. Knoll will be good on that.”

  Knoll is by the book, not at all imaginative, but he’s also very thorough. If I have to turn it over to someone, it might as well be him.
But I’m not ready to give it up. “Why? Because of this?” I point to the 911 transcript Ailes had taken from the printer. As a magician, I’m good at reading upside down.

  Ailes drops it to the desk. “No, no. Something urgent just came up.”

  “More urgent than McGillis?”

  He gestures to Gerald and Jennifer. “I got something I think we’re going to need you to clear up.”

  “What?”

  “Right now it’s a computer forensics issue. My gut tells me it’s going to turn into something else.” Ailes waves Gerald over to us.

  Gerald slides around the table in a swivel chair and places his open laptop in front of me. A video is queued up. He hits Play, and an older man with a thin goatee sitting at a desk in front of a bookcase begins speaking. He has an eloquent British accent and speaks like a professor explaining time travel or something in a movie.

  “Based upon my calculations, the mid-Atlantic region will experience a magnitude six or higher earthquake within a six-day window of August tenth, twenty seventeen.”

  That’s today. I glance at Ailes, looking for an explanation; he nods back to the screen.

  The man continues, “These calculations are approximate, based upon the formula, but the outcomes are unequivocal. I have other calculations I shall be releasing. My hope is that you will understand that these events are inescapable. All we can do is prepare ourselves for Black Fall.” The video ends.

  “Okay. Black Fall?” I ask.

  “We’re still figuring it out,” says Ailes. “What are your first impressions of the video?”

  Although his delivery is dry, my honest impression is that this video is creepy. But I know I can be tricked just as easily as anyone else when I’m out of my element. “When did it come out?”

  “A little over an hour ago,” replies Gerald.

  I check my watch. “The earthquake was almost three hours ago.” I point to the screen. “Anybody could put that together in no time. To predict something, you have to identify it before it happens.” I say the last part a little more smugly than I’d intended. But these people are geniuses. They should have figured this part out.

  Jennifer and Gerald exchange looks across the desks. Something has gone right over my head. Suddenly I’m feeling less confident about my assessment.

  “What?” I ask.

  “That’s Peter Devon,” Ailes explains.

  I shrug. “Okay. So Peter Devon has a YouTube account.”

  He realizes that I have no idea who Peter Devon is. “The mathematician and physicist? Won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics.”

  “So?” I reply. “Smart guys make up stuff all the time.”

  Jennifer speaks up. “This smart guy has been dead for eight years.”

  Chapter Five

  The Algorithm

  “Being dead does put an interesting wrinkle in things,” I reply, now understanding why everyone was surprised at my lack of surprise.

  Ailes points his pen at the man on the screen. “Peter Devon was a specialist in chaotic systems. Back in the real world, I based a lot of my work on his early research.”

  I scroll back the video and move through it frame by frame. “Not a simulation?” We’ve encountered uncanny computer simulations of people in the past. It’s crazy how something that was theoretical just a few months ago is now a smartphone app. Technology moves so quickly, making it even more difficult to tell the real from the unreal.

  Gerald shakes his head. His haircut seems a little better than usual. It looks like the new girlfriend is working out. “No evidence so far. After we nearly got spoofed in the Warlock case, we’ve gotten pretty good at spotting fakes. You’d have to build your own 3-D engine and create original algorithms to get past us now.”

  “But it’s possible?” I ask, trying to figure out the angle.

  “The video was uploaded seven minutes after the quake,” says Jennifer from across the table. “It’s four minutes long. I don’t even think Pixar could do all that in three minutes.”

  Okay. This is getting interesting. “How’d we find out about it?”

  “It was uploaded to a YouTube account and e-mails were sent out to every news station and to YouTubers.”

  “They spammed it into going viral?” I ask.

  “Basically,” replies Gerald.

  “Someone went through a lot of trouble to make sure the world knew about this fast.” People can call me a cynic, but the little girl who used to sneak down to her grandfather’s dusty basement library to swipe volumes of the Tarbell Course in Magic for reading under the covers is inclined to suspect trickery. “How hard is it to predict earthquakes?” I ask Ailes.

  “Hard. We miss the vast majority of them. And nobody has been able to call one anywhere near this far in advance. Basically, you know one might hit give or take within a few decades. Beyond that, your next indication is seconds before the tremors start.”

  “So it’s bogus,” I decide. If Ailes is telling me you can’t predict an earthquake, then I’m inclined to believe him. I just don’t know how he did it. But my instincts tell me it can’t be real.

  “Bogus?” Jennifer replies sharply. “A dead man just called this. Nobody alive saw this earthquake happening.” When something does not compute for her and she feels challenged, she sometimes reacts more forcefully than she intends to. But I’m sure the same can be said for me.

  I try to explain my reasoning. “The video came out after the earthquake. Not before. Assuming you guys are right, and it wasn’t made after the quake using some kind of computer software, then that leads to one conclusion: it was made before and someone was waiting to release it. Which raises the question, why?”

  Gerald and Jennifer exchange confused looks. Ailes just observes. He takes a certain amount of enjoyment in watching his work children banter over things. Gerald and Jennifer tend to focus on the physics. I’m the one who starts with the human problem. What are we assuming? What are we overlooking?

  “Are you saying the earthquake was some kind of trick?” asks Jennifer.

  I roll my eyes. Then a thought comes to mind.

  “Fracking didn’t cause this,” says Gerald, incorrectly anticipating my question.

  “No, that’s not where I was going. Anyway, you guys are supposed to be the super geniuses here.” But even brilliant minds learn best from experience. I look around the table. “Hold on. Is there a large pad of paper around?”

  “In the conference room,” says Gerald.

  “One second.” I go retrieve the pad. When I return, they’re all hunched over the computer as Gerald taps through the video, examining frames. “Who wants to write?” I ask from across the table.

  “I will,” offers Gerald.

  I hand him the pad and a fat black marker. “Point to something around us.”

  Gerald thinks for a moment and points to the computer sitting in front of him.

  “Okay, write it down on the pad.”

  He spells out “computer” in his precise script.

  “Great. You volunteered and that was a free choice?” I ask.

  Gerald nods.

  “Turn to the last page of the pad.”

  Gerald flips to it and grins. He shows Jennifer and Ailes what I’d written: Gerald will write “computer” on this pad.

  “Of course he was going to choose the computer.” Jennifer shrugs. She hates to be fooled by my tricks, and she’ll stew for days if I get her good. I’ll toy with her, like use a trick deck of cards and then leave a normal one in my desk across from her, knowing she’ll steal a peek in there when she doesn’t think anyone is looking. It’d be fun to catch her with her hand in the cookie jar, but it’s even more rewarding for me to watch out of the corner of my eye as the high school Intel science fair winner tries to figure out how the hell I fooled her. It’s the little things in life that give me joy.

  “Was he going to choose it?” I ask. “How did I know you weren’t going to volunteer?”

  Ailes
has a smile on his face. He loves watching me stump the geniuses. It keeps them humble. “Okay, Blackwood. Care to tell us muggles how you did it?”

  I’d bet anything he’s already figured it out and is just too classy to say anything.

  “Hold on,” Jennifer interjects. She’s not ready to give this up. “It’s a probability thing. Hmm, based on proximity of objects to Gerald?”

  “Not quite,” I reply.

  She turns to Gerald, looking for some backup. “Did you think about writing down anything else?”

  “I was thinking about the chair or the table.” He’s more amused by this than Jennifer is. “The only rational explanation is that Jessica is a wizard. The sooner you accept that, the easier it will be.”

  “Never,” Jennifer growls. She’s suspicious of us all. I once taught Gerald a trick that burned her for weeks.

  “Look inside the cap of the marker,” I tell Gerald.

  His eyes light up when he pulls it off and sees the Post-it note I’d shoved inside there. He reads it aloud. “Gerald will choose the chair.”

  “What if he said desk?” she asks.

  “If he’d chosen the desk I would have sent him back into the conference room. I wrote ‘Gerald will choose the desk’ on the whiteboard.”

  Gerald gives me an approving grin. “Okay, but how did you know I’d volunteer?”

  “I didn’t. I asked for someone to write. I didn’t say what they were going to do. If Jennifer had offered to write, I would have still asked you to choose an object. Because I wrote ‘Gerald’ in all the predictions, you assumed that I predicted he would be chosen. But I didn’t. I just said that he’d be the one to choose.”

  “So . . . Devon made a bunch of predictions, hoping one would hit?” replies Gerald.