Black Fall Read online

  The FBI tends to hire people from three kinds of backgrounds: legal, accounting, and actual law enforcement. All have their value in an agency that prosecutes plenty of white-collar crime, but Evans—who is clearly the accounting type—is evaluating my report like it’s my tax form and I’ve suddenly asked him for an irrational deduction.

  Evans shoots a glance over at Agent Carr, a recent hire who is almost twenty years younger than he is. His expression, not exactly subtle, is one of disbelief. Not so much of what I just said, but of my written statements. I try not to take it personally.

  This meeting had started out cordially enough. Evans and Carr are the agents assigned to investigate what happened at the stakeout loft. We exchanged pleasant courtesies; they praised my past work. But I knew things were heading south because of Evans’s almost gleeful reaction when I told him the Jane Doe in the Manassas morgue was the woman who’d showed up on our stakeout doorstep. As I relayed to him the details of what happened at the loft, and my relative certainty that this was the same woman, he gestured increasingly enthusiastically with his coffee cup, like a conductor with his baton. He wasn’t thrilled because someone who threatened a fellow agent’s life is dead; he was happy because this could be an open-and-shut case for him. As far as he’s concerned, solving her murder is a job for local police.

  When I got to the part about it being a possible conspiracy, his animation came to a screeching stop, as if his orchestra had suddenly started playing a different tune than the one he was leading.

  Carr has been quiet. He seems more focused on the details than how quickly he can punch out on the case. “Do you think there’s more than the three of them involved?” he finally asks.

  Evans turns to him with a death stare, willing the younger man to shut up lest I keep talking and make their lives much, much more complicated.

  “Yes,” I reply. “I don’t think she was acting alone.”

  “Wait a second.” Evans holds up his coffee cup, this time like it’s a stop sign. “We don’t even have a connection between this woman and the farmhouse. I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.”

  “Prince William County forensics is out there now, pulling fingerprints, shoe impressions, fibers, everything.”

  Evans waves his coffee cup in the air again, trying to dissipate the dark cloud I’ve just conjured. “Let’s just wait and see what they have to say in their official report.”

  I have to control my response. I can’t afford to antagonize him. He’s too senior. Too connected. “I see your point. In the meantime, what do you recommend we do before the trail gets too cold?”

  “Trail? She’s dead.”

  “I think she means the trail for the two men who may have killed her, and also been part of the attempt on Agent Blackwood’s life,” offers Carr.

  Evans shrugs off the comment. “We don’t even know there was an attempt on your life. You said so yourself. She may just have been trying to kill the infant.”

  “Possibly.” I want to call him out for trying to take the easy way out, but all I need is one more person telling people I’m “difficult.” It doesn’t matter if my file is great. Ailes has already warned me, more than once, that it’s the off-the-record, behind-your-back comments that make all the difference.

  Evans realizes how lazy that sounds—or he sees my reddening face—and catches himself. “Of course, we take any potential attempt on an agent’s life very seriously. I’m going to give this my complete attention.”

  Translation: He’s still going to do nothing. At best, he’ll put out an FBI bulletin once the county sheriff finds something conclusive.

  He reaches a hand over to a stack of folders. “We’ve got a lot on our plate, as I’m sure you do. Right now there are about a thousand people at the White House gates protesting the earthquake response. Secret Service is swamped and we’re out there looking for potential terror suspects.”

  Wow. He dropped the terrorism card on me? While he’s telling me my case is a top priority, he’s reminding me that of course the real top top priority is the terrorists. For me to complain would be just unpatriotic. I suppress an eye roll. “How do you know these guys aren’t terrorists?” I reply flippantly.

  Evans ignores my comment and retrieves a sheet from a folder. “We just got this back. It’s a breakdown of the image of the burned books you found. One is on gardening. Another is a volume of poetry, and the third is about French literature. Not exactly ISIS reading material, is it? Or devil worship manuals?”

  He pushes the paper toward me, but I’m too pissed to read it. Is he this much of an asshole to everyone? The vast majority of the agents I work with are supportive colleagues, but every now and then I run into one of the two types who can only acknowledge my achievements through gritted teeth: female agents who feel this is some kind of competition, and male agents who think my success is a threat to their masculinity. They’d never call themselves chauvinists—some will even actively claim to promote gender equality—but when they come across a woman who may actually be better at their job than they are, they can’t handle it. They look for a catch, any excuse to explain why someone they feel is inferior has outshone them. Maybe it’s preferential treatment; perhaps it’s luck. If this were just a performance review, I could care less. Well, at least at this point in my life. But because this involves the lives of others, I feel myself stretching too thin as I try to contain my anger.

  I’d love for Evans to tell me how preferential treatment helped me survive when a renegade Mexican militia was trying to gun me down in a Mexican grocery store, or when I was drugged and nearly shoved out of an airplane. Last I checked, bullets and gravity are gender neutral.

  “We appreciate you taking the time to go out there and ID the body,” Evans says, confusing condescension for grace. “If any more leads show up, like the farmhouse, just send them to us.”

  The farmhouse isn’t a lead that just appeared out of thin air. I figured it out, with Lewis’s help. We only found it because we persistently asked questions. Evans doesn’t seem like the question-asking type. He doesn’t even like answers.

  Right now, I don’t have many options. I can make a stink over this, but I’ll look like a prima donna—like I’m begging for attention. The best outcome I could hope for is a supervisor saying he’ll look into it. And all that means is he’ll give Evans a few days, then call him up and ask for an update. Evans will repeat whatever the Manassas sheriff tells him and pass it off as overall progress in the case. Maybe the supervisor will see through it, maybe not, but he’ll give him at least another week to have something new to say. If it stalls there, Evans will only get leaned on if there’s an indication it might be a coordinated effort. Maybe. And that could take weeks.

  Evans flips through a pile of notes, pretending to be diligent. “Are you certain the woman said your name?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m looking through your case notes. It seems like it was a very frantic moment. Are you sure she said your name?”

  “Yes.” I’m about to ask why. But I know where this is going.

  “Are you sure?” There’s suspicion in his voice.

  I’m at my limit and trying to control my mouth. He’s saying he’ll put his best foot forward on this, but right now he just wants an exit. He’s telling me: Fuck you and your attitude.

  My words come out faster than I can think, fueled by anger that’s been welling inside me. “If I say no, would that make you feel better? Because then you can suggest this had nothing to do with me or the FBI. Wouldn’t that make your life easier, if you could just toss this all over to metro police? Isn’t that what you want me to say? Maybe I should. At least I know a real cop would be handling this.” I turn to Carr. “No offense.”

  Now Evans turns red. He’s a lazy ass and I’ve just called him on it. I can tell he wants to use a word that’ll put him in hot water. This is going to haunt me.

  Damn it. I still haven’t figured out how to only speak part of m
y mind. I made this personal when I shouldn’t have.

  “Whoa,” Carr calmly interjects. “Let’s take a step back, folks. This earthquake and all the pressure has us on edge. We’re all cops here.”

  Maybe two of us are.

  Evans does some calculation in his head, maybe assessing how much shit I could stir up for him. I’m not that type. But he is, and so he assumes everyone else is that petty. He holds up his hands, still gripping the coffee cup in one of them. “I surrender. Last thing I want is your curse to get to me.”

  My curse?

  Carr shoots him a frustrated look.

  Evans flinches, then produces an insincere smile. “You’re hardcore, Blackwood. No doubt. You made your point.” He glances at Carr. “We’ll take this seriously.”

  Translation: I’m Carr’s problem now. Fair enough. One cop is better than none. But, while I mean no disrespect to him, Carr seems really green. I don’t have a lot of hope he’ll take this very far. I still might as well be at the bottom of the stack of folders Evans brought with him.

  I realize now why they were there on the table in the first place. He wants to show me how busy he is. What a tool.

  The briefing ends with all the friendliness of a handshake lineup after a high school basketball game between rivals. Evans pretends to take me seriously. Carr pretends this wasn’t as tense as it was.

  I leave the room wondering why people think I’m cursed.

  Then again, maybe it’s not so hard to see why.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mimicry

  Ailes patiently listens to me unload on Evans like I’m talking about a bad day at school. Gerald and Jennifer, my surrogate siblings, sit on the other side of the large table where we work and shake their heads sympathetically. We may have some minor disagreements, and sometimes I do feel like the foster kid, but in this unit we have each other’s backs. Part of the reason we do most of our work in this common area is so we can solve problems as a group, lending each other help on cases and setting aside egos. There’s not much Ailes or the others can do at this point. But I know he’ll use his soft but effective touch if things don’t progress, and it’s satisfying to know my coworkers share my frustration.

  When I finish my rant, I notice a stack of papers and journals on the table. They have titles like Elliptical Mathematics Quarterly and Quanta Journal.

  “I’m sorry I missed out on your book club,” I reply, finally relaxing in my chair.

  “No you’re not,” says Gerald.

  “You’re right.” I pick up a printout of a research paper and see Devon’s name listed as the author. About the only thing I understand is the word “abstract.” I hold it out to Ailes. “What? You guys don’t trust me on this?” It’s a half joke. I wasn’t aware they were also pursuing the case as well. The more the merrier. I guess.

  “Let’s just say if we see any more Devon predictions—” says Ailes.

  “Post-dictions,” I interject. It may be a nitpick, but I think it’s important we don’t start giving this guy too much credit.

  “Yes. It seemed wise to do a little more background into his work. Since I left the academic world, there have been advances in a number of areas I’m not familiar with.”

  “Care to give me the BuzzFeed version?” I ask.

  Gerald drops a journal he’s been reading back onto the pile. “Devon went nuts.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite fair,” says Jennifer. Other than when I melt her genius-level brain with a magic trick, she’s usually quiet and nonconfrontational. Blunt, but not the type to interject if she doesn’t have to. She’s bothered by the idea that Devon, someone she respected, got posthumously pulled into this.

  Gerald shakes his head. “This whole simulated strange attractor mimicry thing is like A New Kind of Science without the pretty Game of Life graphs.”

  “You’re being too reductionist,” replies Jennifer. “He’s speaking metaphorically.”

  “Metaphorically, or abstractly? Is it a transitive observation or a reflective one?”

  I interrupt them to bring the conversation back to earth. “Did I mention I saw the dead body of the woman who wanted to murder me?”

  Gerald and Jennifer look at me, trying to grasp the relevance, then realize I’m making a morbid joke.

  “Sorry, Jessica. Nerd argument,” Gerald replies.

  “If you want to talk Boba Fett versus Captain America, I’m your girl. But this is a bit beyond me. A lot beyond me.” I turn to Ailes for the cable-documentary-level explanation.

  “Devon was trying to develop a way to look at complex systems and make predictions. We do this all the time in investigations. We try to find hidden patterns in random evidence collected at the scene of a crime. Or in medicine, doctors look for warning signs in a heartbeat. Finding that signal in all the noise is how stock market computers work, not to mention weather and even earthquake predictions.” He points to the stack of journals. “It seems that after Devon stopped publishing in the big journals, he was releasing papers in some of the niche ones. His focus was on signal mimicry in chaotic systems.”

  “Obviously,” I sigh.

  “When you try to predict something, you want to separate the signal from the noise. The problem is that not all signals are noise, and not all noise started out as noise. And when you want to influence something, you can mimic the signal and change the system. Devon was studying signal mimicry.”

  “Um, I think I understand the words, but I’m not sure I get the context.”

  I usually grasp more than I let on, but find it safe to play it slightly dumber, lest they get too enthusiastic and go too geeky on a topic.

  “Imagine the stock market. It’s thousands of fluctuating prices. If you’re trying to play the market, you look for something predictable, like a proven pattern. When there’s war in the Middle East, oil gets more expensive. In a recession, fewer people are buying cars. But these days, the market is much more complicated because most of the pricing is driven by computers looking for microfluctuations in the market. They’re not looking at reality as much as the decisions other computers are making. The mimicry comes in when you decide to trick the other computers. If you realize they’re basing their trades on a few different factors, like the price of industrial machinery dropping or an energy boom in Iceland, you do a number of trades to manipulate those factors and trick the computers.”

  “It’s like bluffing at poker, only the other players don’t realize you’re even sitting at the table,” adds Jennifer.

  “Got it. Like the margay?”

  “The jungle cat?” asks Gerald.

  “Yeah,” I reply. “It’ll imitate the cry of a baby tamarin monkey to lure adult monkeys out into the open, and then pounce on them to get some delicious monkey meat.”

  Jennifer and Gerald stare at me blankly for a moment.

  Ailes grins and replies, “That’s exactly what signal mimicry is.”

  “I watch a lot of the National Geographic Channel,” I explain, leaving out that I usually watch it for company as I drink a glass of wine and then pass out on the couch. “So what’s this have to do with earthquakes?”

  “We’re still trying to figure that out. Devon became interested in mimicry when he realized that some systems were just too chaotic to predict. That’s when he got the idea of influencing systems to cause major shifts.”

  “What kinds of shifts?” I ask.

  “Think about a crowd of people in a stadium watching a football game. Assuming the scoring is random, there’s no way to predict when the crowd will start to cheer. Despite that, crowd waves will spontaneously emerge, group clapping and stomping. All of these can be initiated by one persistent person. If they keep clapping, soon people around them will pick up. Or if they start the wave, you get the idea. One person can affect eighty thousand.”

  “And that many stomping people could cause a stadium collapse,” I add. “So Devon was looking for ways to goose the system?”

  “Sor
t of. Going back to the football game analogy, there’s a small correlation between crowd behavior and scoring. That one persistent person might be able to have a slight effect on the outcome of the game. Devon was interested by how, in otherwise chaotic systems, you could create some predictability.” Ailes suppresses a knowing smile. “Small advantages mean a lot in chaotic systems.”

  What he means is that this is how he made his own fortune. He found the signals within the noise of the stock market.

  I survey the journals on the table and the realization that my one contribution to the conversation involved the phrase “delicious monkey meat.” I think I’m out of my league. “I get the idea I’m the wrong person for this case.”

  Ailes shakes his head. “No. Quite the opposite. If someone walked in here with an antigravity machine it’d be up to Gerald, Jennifer, and me to do our due diligence on the science, but in the end, it’d be up to you to figure it out.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You. Because antigravity machines aren’t real. You’re the only one here who knows how to make it look like things are flying. Same with Devon. He can’t predict things the way he claimed. There’s a trick to it. Figuring that out is your job. We’ve been spending the last few hours thinking about how signal mimicry could create an earthquake.”

  “Can it?” I ask.

  “Maybe. But what does your gut tell you?”

  “It’s a trick.”

  “And that’s why we need you and it’s still your case.”

  I gesture to the journals. “So why all this?”

  There’s an uneasy silence in the room.

  I answer for them. “Ah . . . external pressure.”

  Ailes nods. “I have to give a briefing to the president’s science advisor.”

  “You?”

  “Let’s just say mathematics isn’t his strong point.”

  “He hasn’t published anything meaningful in two decades,” adds Jennifer, dismissively.