Линкольн Чайлд - Crooked River

“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.”

Roger Smithback DROVE his Subaru along Cypress Lagoon Drive. For the last half hour, he’d been cruising around some neighborhoods south of Fort Myers — supposedly this was the more dangerous part of town, but he had seen mostly well-kept apartment buildings, schools, bodegas, small houses, even a decent-looking country club straddling Whiskey Creek.

This wasn’t what he’d expected at all.

Smithback had done his research. He knew that the tattoo he’d surreptitiously photographed was most likely a gang symbol of some kind. After he’d blown up and sharpened the image, it had become much clearer. It was definitely a cross, with lightning bolts coming out diagonally from the lower intersections of the crossbeam, and what looked like animal claws protruding from the top — although their tips were not visible, thanks to the tearing and nibbling of the torn skin. It was surrounded by two letters: a P on the left and an N on the right, done in the usual blackletter font of gang tattoos. Its color was the blue of prison tats, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything: it could just as well have been done at some Central or South American tattoo parlor. Because his research had indicated crosses done in this particular way — with a distinctive fleur-de-lis styling at the tips and an unusual method of decorative shading — were a trademark of gangs from south of the border.

But conventional research could tell him nothing further. And there were a shitload of gangs out there. He’d done his share of guessing about what the P and N could mean — Panama? Padre Nuestro? — but if he really wanted to learn more, he’d have to hit the pavement.

As a reporter, he’d heard back in the day about the troubles in Fort Myers — the Latin Kings, Surf 69, and the others: lots of drugs, lots of bad hombres killing other bad hombres. But there had been a concerted effort to clean this up, and the neighborhoods he’d previously heard mentioned, like Dunbar and Pine Manor, felt safe. Now, however, he found himself southwest of those, closer to the Caloosahatchee River. And as the blocks passed by, and he noticed more and more shuttered storefronts and graffiti tags sprayed on the sun-bleached walls, he grew confident he’d found a good place to start sniffing around.

He drove a little farther west, letting things get worse, then pulled over to the curb. He was on a block where old bungalows — the worse for wear — stood cheek by jowl with family businesses. About half the businesses were closed, windows painted white and front doors shuttered. Smashed or dented trash cans lay strewn about. Pickup trucks and a few old boat skeletons sat on cinder blocks in driveways or on front lawns, slowly moldering in the heat. A stray dog wandered by, tongue lolling. The air smelled of burnt rubber and garbage.

Smithback got out of his car and walked up to the first bungalow, which, not uncommonly in older and poorer communities, was half-hidden in overgrown tropical vegetation. The once-bright coat of paint had been reduced to faded and peeling strips. He pushed the doorbell — busted — then knocked. After a few minutes, he heard shuffling inside. Then the door opened halfway.

Hot as it was outside, he could feel even more heat radiating from the house. An old Hispanic woman in a housedress stood, peering at him in curiosity.

“ Buenos días ,” Smithback said. He explained, in halting Spanish, that he was a student, working on a research project. Then he pulled out the enlarged and sharpened photo of the tattoo.

“ ¿Ha visto esto antes? ” he asked.

The woman squinted in the semidarkness of the front hall, putting her face close to the image.

“ ¿Qué es esto? ” Smithback asked.

Suddenly, the old woman’s eyes widened. The curiosity was replaced with suspicion. “ ¡Vaya! ” she spat at him, abruptly slamming the door in his face.

Smithback rapped again, then again, but there was no response. Finally, he shoved his card under the door, went back to the curb, and looked around. A few houses down, he saw a short, wiry man of about sixty mowing his lawn. Smithback walked toward him.

At his approach, the man cut the motor. He was smoking a small, foul-smelling cheroot and wore a filthy T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a landscaping company.

Smithback nodded at him, and the man nodded back. Encouraged by the logo, the reporter launched into his explanation, in English this time. After a minute, the man interrupted him. “ No hablo inglés. ”

Smithback showed him the picture. “ ¿Qué significa eso? ”

The man looked at the image — barely a glance, really — then shook his head. His face was a studied blank.

“ ¿Lo ha visto antes? ” Smithback pressed.

The man shrugged. “ No hablo inglés. ”

Christ, it wasn’t even English. But the man just stood there, shaking his head and shrugging, and eventually Smithback gave him his card anyway, thanked him, and turned away. Immediately, the man fired up his old mower and went back to work.