Black Fall Read online

  “I guess politics is time-consuming,” Gerald replies.

  I pick a bookmarked journal off the table and flip through it. I point to the coauthor of Devon’s article. “Does Dale Cyprian ring any bells? Where have I seen his name before?”

  Ailes nods. “I think he was the last person to collaborate with Devon in the journals. I’ve seen his name in some econ stuff.”

  “Okay. Maybe I should talk to him? I haven’t found any family or other leads for Devon. The video was made after he stopped teaching. To be honest, I got nothing else to go on right now. I can catch the shuttle to Boston and be back tomorrow morning.” I’m not eager to hop on an airplane, but it’s either that or obsess over the forensics on the Jane Doe.

  “Do it,” says Ailes. He holds up a finger for a moment as he thinks something over. “You didn’t find any evidence of satanic or occult practices at the farmhouse?”

  “No. They seem like Amish vegans.”

  “Odd. I’d figure the people out to get you would be more of the Dungeons and Dragons kind.”

  “That’s just prejudiced,” Gerald interjects.

  “No offense, Gerald. You know what I mean. It just seems odd.”

  Does Ailes doubt the connection between the girl and the men who rented the house? Now I’m questioning myself. Was I a bitch to Evans for no reason? No, I decide. He was still an asshole. “Did I just chance upon a weird scene that had nothing to do with the Jane Doe?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll put in a call to the Manassas sheriff’s department and get put in the loop. You focus on Devon connections. We need something more than we’ve got, and sooner rather than later.”

  “You still think there’s another prediction coming?”

  “I hope not. But I want to make sure we’ve done our homework.”

  I head for the airport with the unsettling feeling that somewhere in Ailes’s head there is an equation involving me and Jane Doe, and he doesn’t like the solution he’s seeing. I’d hoped he’d get more bureau attention focused on her and her conspirators, but now I’m worried.

  The stack of journals I saw on the table also makes me feel a bit guilty. While I was out chasing down a case that’s not really my own and causing problems with Evans, my coworkers were back in the office covering my ass on something that was my responsibility.

  I had one job, and nothing to show for it.

  I didn’t take Devon seriously. But Ailes did. Now I’m more than curious to hear what the dead mathematician says next.

  I’m afraid.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Control

  Professor Cyprian, now a member of an academic think tank called the Spritzman Group for Advanced Mathematics, located near the heart of Harvard College, sits behind a desk covered with colorful toys and puzzles. He’s got a Rubik’s Cube with at least twenty-five blocks on one side that gives me a headache to even think about. His office shelves are lined with books on fractals, nature photography, and novelties relating to mathematics and patterns. The room looks like a nerdy kids’ store.

  Cyprian, a small bald man with thick black glasses, seems too small for his chair and more suited for Santa’s workshop, where he’d be the elf in charge of fun educational toys. He recognized my name immediately when I called on my way to the airport, and readily agreed to meet with me.

  “I’ve talked to your father a few times,” he says, after guiding me into his office. “A clever man.”

  Sometimes people confuse my famous grandfather for my not-so-famous father. “He’s quite a showman.”

  “I’m sure it runs in the family, although I’ve never seen him perform. But his informal talks at the Gathering 4 Gardner conferences are always illuminating. His puzzle boxes are quite exceptional.”

  Interesting. Cyprian does mean my father. One of dad’s hobbies is creating intricate wooden puzzle boxes that are almost impossible to solve. Grandfather, who could never see much potential in them, regards them somewhat dismissively as bad magic and poor security devices, missing the point entirely.

  Dad makes these boxes by hand and shows them to other puzzle and curiosity enthusiasts at conferences such as Gathering 4 Gardner, which is a biannual meeting of magicians, mathematicians, and scientists. I shouldn’t be too surprised that he and Professor Cyprian would cross paths.

  I tap the monstrous puzzle cube with my fingernail. “Unfortunately, that kind of smarts skips a generation.”

  Cyprian ponders this for a moment. “Huh. I would imagine you take after your father quite a lot, given your line of work.”

  Perhaps he’s right. Sometimes I underestimate how much of my father is in me. We have such different personalities. He’s nonconfrontational, whereas I’m blunt to a fault. But Cyprian has a point. Dad loves to create little puzzles, like he did with the orchid, and I used to love figuring them out.

  I notice that Cyprian is watching me the way you might someone who is wearing a disguise, scrutinizing my face. It’s a little unnerving. I call him out on it so I can keep the upper hand. I’m not the one that needs to be thrown off balance here. “Professor, are you studying me?”

  He gives me a sincere grin. “I was, Agent Blackwood. I was looking at your microexpressions. The subtle, small reactions we make when people talk to us.”

  “Yes. They taught us about microexpressions at the academy,” I reply.

  “Probably so. But we’ve been using artificial intelligence and physiological data to discover new ones they probably didn’t teach you. For some of them, there aren’t even simple terms to describe the emotions. A lot of them are subconscious.”

  “So you’re treating human emotions as a puzzle box?” There’s a hint of disdain at the thought of being a lab rat that wandered into his office.

  “Right now we’re working with a children’s hospital on finding ways to help diagnose pain and inner emotional states in children who have communication problems.” He points to my face. “Just now you exhibited a slight shame response. A degree of reddening in your cheeks when I mentioned it was to help children. But even before I gave you that information, your forehead and chin muscles tightened. This is what we call the ‘anticipation of an inverse response’ reaction. Your mind was already reaching a conclusion that you might be embarrassed.”

  “Before you replied?” I ask, feeling extremely self-conscious. “Isn’t that a little, um, fringe?”

  “No. Not at all. You heard the tone of my voice. Our speech patterns are complex versions of warning calls, which by design need to be extremely efficient. Sometimes the first syllable is all we really need to hear.”

  “So your tone told me I was about to be mildly scolded?”

  “Basically. And you were already preparing a response. That was your subconscious prepping your conscious mind. These tones are an important part of language. The lack of them is what makes written communication difficult.”

  “Especially online,” I reply.

  Cyprian lets out a small laugh. “Too true. But an old problem. Almost five hundred years ago, John Wilkins, a philosopher and bishop, pushed heavily for the written language to adopt an upside-down exclamation point at the end of a sentence to indicate irony. Think of how many online feuds that could have prevented.”

  Other than when he’s embarrassing me a little, the professor is a likable man. I can tell he’s a naturally curious person who wants to see how everything works, including the person in front of him. I have my little techniques to get people to talk. In this case, by being unguarded myself and letting him expound on his work, I’m making him more comfortable and hopefully more open to talking about his relationship with Devon.

  “So you’ve been using mathematics to probe the mind?” I ask.

  “To some extent. Looking for clues in a complex system.”

  “Did you and Devon work together on this?” I change the conversation to the subject of why I’m here.

  “You’ve been holding that question in for at least two minutes,” Cyprian repl
ies. “It’s in your chin. If it’s not pointing at me, your eyes never let me leave your field of vision. Like you’re a hawk waiting for the right time to pounce on a mouse.”

  I hold up my hands in mock surrender. “You’re too smart for me.”

  “I seriously doubt that. Anyway, in answer to your question, Devon and I never worked on this particular area together. I was focused on individuals. He was thinking more globally.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He was really out to change the world.”

  “That seems noble.”

  Cyprian folds his hands. “So were Attila the Hun and Vladimir Lenin.”

  “Oh,” I reply. Those comparisons certainly seem sinister.

  He observes my reaction. “Oh, no. I don’t mean anything so tyrannical. Not overtly. I’m of the school that a scientist’s job is to make observations and suggestions where invited, and not to let one’s political or philosophical beliefs have undue influence. Peter felt like his job was to lead the way.”

  “Through mathematics?”

  “Sort of. You know we started collaborating right out of college? We had some early successes using math to make some real positive changes. Peter liked to keep a count of how many lives we saved.”

  “Saved? How?”

  “I’ll give you one example,” he replies. “We became fascinated by the rates of infections in hospitals. Peter and I did all sorts of measurements and surveys. We realized the single biggest thing we could change was to get doctors and nurses to wash their hands more. Simple. I know. But easier said than done. How do you do that? It’s not like they don’t know you’re supposed to do that. So we tried to figure it out. Long story short, and this will sound sexist, it was decades ago, but we realized that the hospitals with the highest rates of infection transmitted by the nursing staff correlated with scrub rooms that didn’t have mirrors over the washbasins. Add a mirror, and you give people a reason to stop at the basin. With doctors, we found that just adding a color dye to hand soap made them use more of it.”

  His face lights up as he recounts that discovery. “These are just some of the small examples. But for two aspiring mathematicians out to change the world, it was addicting. Hospitals adopted our suggestions and we saw statistically significant drops in infection rates. Peter added this to his scoreboard. Eventually he created an electronic spreadsheet that would tick every time a life was saved, statistically speaking.”

  “What about the earthquake revelation? Is this something you worked on?”

  “No.”

  “But the two of you stopped publishing together. Was there a rift?”

  “Our interests diverged. Peter chose a path that I think was greater than his intellectual capability.”

  “Was there a specific point where you drifted apart?”

  “Cassandra.”

  “A woman?”

  Cyprian grins slightly. “No. Not quite. Peter’s passion project, named for the Greek prophet. He wanted to build the ultimate prediction system. Understand, this was back in the late eighties. Computers were making fortunes on Wall Street. Imaging systems were spotting tumors, and you could finesse static-filled sonar data for oil wells.

  “Peter’s idea was to build a universal prediction system that would tell you anything if you gave it enough data. It was a big, ambitious project. The problem was it was deeply flawed. Peter believed that with enough computing power you could find something he called the unified signal. He thought that just like physics has elementary particles the real world has some basic algorithms and if you figured them out, the weather, well everything, could be determined.”

  “That seems a bit extreme for a mathematician of his background. More like kabbalah, or numerology.”

  “Yes and no. There’s certainly a supernatural stigma to it. The search for Ein Sof, god before form, what have you. But this was a little more complicated. Peter also believed there were driving signals. Things that influenced the randomness. After all, human history has been about determining them.” Cyprian points to his desk calendar. “That’s a prediction system. It tells you the lunar cycles, the shortest and longest days of the year. Almanacs tell you when to plant. All of this was noise at one point. Even after we figured out cycles of the moon and planets, the ‘why’ was a mystery until Newton came along and figured that out. Einstein clarified it even further, revealing truths that were right in front of us. What a really accurate calendar tells you is the theory of relativity. Right inside there is E = mc2. One simple formula controls gravitation and our fate. Even now, we’re looking for galactic events that may cause mass extinctions from cosmic radiation and solar cycles that bring deadly meteors toward Earth. A lot of the random things aren’t so random. Forty-year blights can be tied to locusts that wait that long to come out of the ground or bacteria that only bloom when certain environmental things come together. My point is there are an awful lot of real signals we don’t recognize. Peter initially wanted to find those.”

  “So what happened to Cassandra?” I ask.

  “It was a big, dumb, overly ambitious project that promised too much.”

  “It died?”

  “Worse. The government funded it. Some secret off-the-books agency that doesn’t report what it does to Congress came along and gave Peter a lot of money to make it happen. He asked me to come on board. I declined. I want to help people, not fight shadow wars. And intellectually speaking, I think you have to solve a lot of small problems to figure out the big one and not vice versa. So that was it.”

  “You lost touch?”

  “He disappeared into a black hole. I can’t tell you the number of promising graduate students who vanish from academia and into the bowels of the NSA, NRO, and other agencies. Who knows what genius the world was deprived of so we could find a quicker algorithm to read an Afghan shopkeeper’s encrypted e-mail?”

  “So you don’t give much credence to Cassandra?”

  “No.”

  “So it’s not connected to this prediction?”

  “I didn’t say that.” Cyprian thinks for a moment. “My fear is that it became something else.” His voice is grave.

  “What?”

  Up until now, I thought he was dismissing Devon’s research as a fool’s errand.

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. But I’ll give you an example. Down the hall from me is a brilliant biologist, Dr. Andrzycki, originally from Russia. He went to Moscow State University to become a doctor and to save lives. His specialty was viruses. Two years after graduation he found himself in Southeast Asia, hunting for strains of hantavirus. Ostensibly, it was for humanitarian research, but every sample he collected was taped up and shipped back to an army base outside of Kiev. There was no known medical facility there. Just a semisecret weapons research center. Once he realized what was going on, Andrzycki defected to the West. Not that we didn’t have our own programs for weaponizing those things, but at least most of the people we sent into the field were trying to save lives. Most military projects go nowhere. Sometimes though, they become worse than the problem they were trying to solve.”

  “And what do you think the worst-case scenario was for Devon’s project?”

  “It would never work. But when you can’t predict what’s going to happen, you do the next best thing: you find a way to force it.”

  “Artificial strange attractors.” I recall the name from one of the easier-to-read research papers I’d taken with me on the flight.

  Cyprian lights up. “Yes, that’s it! Dumb name, though. It has nothing to do with strange attractors. It was just marketing to impress the people with the money.”

  “The government?”

  “Yes. Government-backed contractors. Think tanks. Research firms, whatever. I’ve had two promising grad students erase their LinkedIn profiles after they went to work for an obscure agricultural aid agency I’m sure is backed by the CIA.”

  Cyprian’s theory makes sense. Devon vanishing into a government project would explain th
e lack of information we have on him. It also means it might be next to impossible to find out what he was up to. There are still files relating to 9/11 that involved agencies won’t even release to the FBI—probably to hide their own incompetence. Something tells me the moment Devon came back from the dead, somebody started a paper shredder and began bulk erasing data.

  When he was just a lone crackpot with a video camera, he was a joke to me. Now that I know he may have had access to unlimited funds and total secrecy, he’s suddenly become a greater cause for suspicion.

  “Thank you, Professor. If you could discreetly ask around about Devon, that would be appreciated.”

  “Of course. And please tell your father I said hello. And give him my congratulations on the Magic Castle nomination. That’s quite an honor. You must be proud.”

  “I am,” I reply, trying to hide the guilt on my face. I still haven’t talked to my dad since Grandfather mentioned it.

  As I leave I get a text message from Gerald: Hurry back! New Devon video is online. This time it’s an actual prediction.

  This is going to be interesting.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Unnatural Disasters

  In the next seventy hours, it is with eighty percent certainty that I can predict a natural disaster will strike within a thirty-mile area of the coordinates mentioned, causing the deaths of between four hundred and eight hundred people. I strongly encourage local authorities to do their best to prepare for this catastrophe. The involved people have my sincerest sympathies. I only wish I had more time to provide specific details. Black Fall is coming.

  Twenty years ago, the dire predictions of a dead man wouldn’t have garnered much attention unless his name was Nostradamus. In the Internet age, links to the video spread around the world like wildfire before there was enough time to watch it all the way through.

  For the people in Yanoa, Bolivia, the video is more than a curiosity. They are right in the epicenter of Devon’s prediction.

  Compounding all this is the fact that a massive tropical storm is already headed their way.