All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  Gletsch could not properly be called a village. Abandoned in the winter because of deep snows, it consisted of a hotel, a stone chapel, and a few buildings set in a narrow corridor pressed hard against the mountains. He walked with his father to the glacier. To his young eyes the dirty ice had the wrinkled, living skin of an elephant. Peaks with broken teeth rimmed the ice, and clouds scuttled just beyond reach. They rolled their trousers and stuck their feet in the glacier melt and hollered with the cold. "The Rhône," his father said, "starts here, runs to Lyon—past where we were standing—then south to the sea." The young Poincaré could hardly believe it. They ate schnitzel that evening at the hotel, and his father offered him a sip of beer. Cresting the Grimsel Pass, the Rhône valley opening below him, Poincaré recalled these things and remembered what it was like to be happy.

  He found her beside the glacier, throwing stones into the chasm. Chambi rose at his approach and said: "I hardly know you, but I think my life depends on you." Over her shoulder, the river roared itself into existence. The sky, like the glacier, was dirty white and the air at that hour snapping cold. She wore a scarf.

  "Where is James Fenster?" he said.

  "Moving. Like I am."

  "You helped stage his death?"

  "Yes."

  "Quito's after him or Bell. Or both?"

  "Quito. It started back in Cambridge."

  "He planted you there to spy on Fenster?"

  "I'm not proud of that. But yes, Inspector. I sent Eduardo information for a few months. But I couldn't continue. I wrote to tell him, and he grew furious. He threatened me and James. Then Charles Bell started pushing for the same information."

  For a moment words failed her. She pulled at her scarf. "James proved that there is a definite, deep connection underlying everything we can see and name. Everything, Inspector. A deep structure to reality itself . . . a mathematical unity across every dynamic system that exists. Storms, the movement of nutrients through cell walls, the wobble of planets in their orbits, the ideas that come out of your head or mine—it's all one system. He proved it. And the only thing Quito could think to do with that knowledge was make money. James was modeling the markets—minute-by-minute stock averages for more than fifty years."

  That's what was on Fenster's hard drive," Poincaré realized. The raw data.

  "It was a small thing for him to find a pattern and predict the price of stocks. The behavior of the markets merely confirmed the larger truth. Quito couldn't see past the money or the advantage it would give the ILF. We really are going to hell."

  That may be the case, thought Poincaré; but before he did he needed certain questions answered. "Randal Young," he said. "Madeleine Rainier found him—her brother—and brought him to the Ambassade. He took Fenster's place in the explosion. You snuck him into the room somehow. You were there."

  Again, Chambi tugged at her scarf. "Dr. Meister's treatments kept Randal alive long enough for us to move him to Amsterdam. He and I rented a suite at the Ambassade for a week before the explosion, under assumed names. That's where he built the bomb. For safety's sake, I rented another room and stayed several blocks away. Two days before the explosion, I checked us out of the hotel and left; Randal moved to James's room. Before bringing him to Europe, Madeleine took Randal to James's apartment in Cambridge after it had been cleaned. She stayed outside while he left prints and DNA. James slept in hotels after that and hacked the dental clinic's computers to swap Randal's x-rays for his own. After the explosion, Madeleine had the remains cremated and sent to Randal's parents."

  "His adoptive parents."

  "That's right."

  "Then who posed as Randal Young at JFK? Who died there, Ms. Chambi?"

  She was stricken. "You've got to understand we didn't want any of this," she said. "We were put into a situation. . . . The man was another patient at the clinic, Ricardo Goren. He and Randal became friends and reached an understanding. They were both dying and wanted some good to come of it. In exchange for taking Randal's identity, Ricardo secured his family's future. He was twenty-eight, with three daughters. James used his equations and computers to anticipate movements in the market and within a few days generated a great deal of money. We had documents forged and Ricardo, posing as Randal, returned to the States with Julie. He was in such pain from pancreatic cancer that he said swallowing pills in the airport would be a relief. The man was too obviously sick for the authorities to have bothered with an autopsy. They took Julie's word for the cause of death, and she had his remains cremated and returned to Ricardo's family in Vienna."

  "Two bodies. Two false IDs," said Poincaré. He turned toward the glacier and recalled how, as a child, he had watched the sun play with the mist above the chasm, creating rainbows that shifted like curtains in the breeze. There was no sun this morning, only ice and stone. "Someone or something got buried in California," he said. "I saw a certificate."

  "Mostly sand," said Chambi. "To weigh down the casket. Also a skiing medal and a photo."

  "His wife paid off the funeral director?"

  Chambi closed her eyes.

  "Dr. Fenster retired Julie Young's mortgage, I suppose."

  "And then some, yes."

  Chambi squared herself to him, and Poincaré once more saw the person who held the attention of a packed lecture hall at Harvard. "Julie Young has needs," she said. "Her children will be able to attend college now. She'll have a home. She'll have food, a new life. This was never about wealth, Inspector—James's or anyone's. Listen carefully. The whole idea of the deception was Randal's. James was willing to face Quito alone, but Randal and Madeleine talked him out of it because he's no fighter. Anything but—if you only knew him!" Her voice broke. "What he discovered had to be protected. Madeleine had found Randal by then and explained what was happening to James, how something large and beautiful was being threatened. You have to understand about James and his gifts. It felt like we were rescuing Newton or Galileo, Inspector. He had to be saved. When Julie agreed, James agreed. Randal and Julie both wanted something positive to come of his death."

  "All of you . . . did this for him." He had never heard of such a sacrifice.

  "Too much was at stake. James never wanted to hurt anyone. Randal technically committed suicide, which would have voided his life insurance. James wouldn't defraud the insurance company and insisted Randal cancel the policy. In Amsterdam, he sent an anonymous gift to the insurers who paid for the renovation of the hotel. And because the city spent time and money cleaning up the site, some months later an anonymous donor underwrote the cost of canal maintenance for years. James believed in making people whole. He wouldn't let anyone lose—except himself. There would be no James Fenster after Amsterdam."

  From what Poincaré knew, the man was never much in the world to begin with. "People could have been hurt in that bombing," he said.

  "Randal knew exactly what he was doing," she said. "Madeleine knocked on every door in that section of the hotel to make sure everyone was out. We knew the blast would be going up, not down or sideways. After three days of checking, when she finally called to tell him all clear, he walked to the sink and detonated the bomb."

  Poincaré recalled Annette Günther poking at what was left of the torso with a telescoping wand: Notice the splinters of porcelain on the front, not the sides, of the victim. This man didn't know what was coming, Henri. Otherwise, he would have turned. He didn't suffer.

  "Quito's rage," said Chambi, "was like a storm. He was determined to use James's work to make billions for the ILF and finance indigenous reclamation projects around the world. Indigenous schools. Industry. Elder care. Then he was going to convert all the ILF money to gold and publish James's equations. What do you suppose would happen when brokers in New York and Hong Kong realized they could make 5,000 percent returns on their investments in a week? Money would be worthless, Inspector. It was Eduardo's dream to punish the West by collapsing its monetary system—and he was gifted enough to know exactly how to do it. When James real
ized why Eduardo had sought him out—the real reason for their collaboration—he broke it off. That's when Eduardo found me. Harvard had already accepted my application as a doctoral student in mathematics—but with another professor. Eduardo offered to pay my way if I would switch to James as my advisor. I was to report back on any work that might touch on the financial markets.

  "After a few months, after I got to know him, I couldn't betray James any longer. A week after I quit, my car was burned. James received threatening calls—people saying they'd kill him. He couldn't go to the authorities with his discovery. The equation was too dangerous because, in the wrong hands, it could be used to generate destabilizing wealth. Some agency would have buried his work on national security grounds, and what James discovered—his breakthrough, his gorgeous insight—would have been lost. For my protection, he wouldn't even show the equation to me.

  "A month after the bombing, Quito visited Cambridge and insisted that no one could havve wanted James Fenster dead. He claimed the assassination was faked and that James was alive. He demanded the equation. I told him he was crazy, but my reaction gave it away. He swore he'd find James himself—and crush anyone who tried to stop him. I got scared and ran. That's when he must have hired the woman who looked like me and sent her to the hospital. . . . I am so sorry, Inspector."

  "A name," said Poincaré. "Who was she?"

  "I don't know. They painted a stain on her neck to look like mine. Eduardo wanted us both out of the way so he could pursue James without any problems."

  He could have killed me in Québec, thought Poincaré. Quito must have considered it. An Interpol agent killed on assignment, in a riot started by the Indigenous Liberation Front? No, Poincaré reasoned. The man was smarter than that.

  "Inspector, he knew that if every police department in the world was hunting me I'd disappear, because if I were caught I'd have to tell someone that James was alive—and he would find out that way. So I disappeared. And you needed to go away, too. He said something about your never quitting, how you could make problems for him. So he had your granddaughter killed. He wanted to crush both of us. Two birds, one stone—it's how Eduardo thinks.

  "He was a good man once," she said. "He did good things for the Indigene. But something happened, Inspector. He got tired of fighting. He got tired of seeing the winners always win."

  CHAPTER 41

  A light rain had begun to fall, and they left the glacier to sit in a stone chapel by the river, in the valley. "Help me to understand," he said to Chambi. "I want to know what Dr. Fenster saw."

  She sat facing a rough altar, lost in contemplation. Her scarf had shifted, exposing the port-wine stain across her neck. "It would be a relief," she told him. "If you're going to help James, you deserve that much. What do you know about computational research?"

  Poincaré shook his head. He had never heard the term.

  "It's a method of doing science by beginning with data," said Chambi, "not with hypotheses and experiments that generate data. James worked with the raw numbers of Nature—with tens of millions of temperature readings, for example. Weather is a good case, because it's complex enough to produce unexpected behavior. It turns out that millions of similarly complex systems interact around us and in us at every moment. Each of these systems can become violently unstable. You've heard of the butterfly effect, how a puff of air in the Amazon can cause tornadoes in North America? No one can predict which puff, but in theory it can happen in any complex system."

  "Chaos," said Poincaré.

  "Exactly. Computational researchers write programs with certain rules like addition and subtraction and calculus. Then they set their computers loose on the data of Nature—say, the movements of glaciers or populations of salmons."

  "Fenster's hard drive," said Poincaré. "That was nothing but data. Millions of numbers."

  "Stock prices, Inspector. Quito and Bell were right. James was studying the markets, among other systems. Given the Dow Jones Averages over decades, or the data from other systems, he would calculate backwards to a simple equation that, if operated forward millions of times, could generate similar data. The computer generates candidate equations, which we test rigorously with new data. Most equations fail under stressing; but every so often we find one that begins to look like a fundamental law that took scientists centuries to discover through experimentation. None of this was possible before computers.

  "Other researchers studied data sets according to their interests— maybe cardiac rhythms or the spread of cholera. James was interested in everything he saw. He did not stick to one field or set of complex systems. That was the first difference between him and the others. I believe you saw his apartment—the photographs?"

  "I did," said Poincaré.

  "His photos were the visible evidence of the mathematics underlying each of the systems he studied. In programming his computers, he assumed that lightning bolts looked like the ridge line of mountains because they are alike—mathematically. This was the second difference between James and the others. He investigated similarities, whereas others looked for differences. Once his computer program was in place, he studied data of all sorts: wind flow, elk migrations, mating patterns of dung beetles, war dead. What he found was monumental—or would have been, had he published. Every data set of every system he ever studied, thousands of them, reduced to a variant of a single equation. He could not find a disconfirming example. He discovered a law, Inspector—and Quito and Bell wanted to keep that to themselves and exploit it."

  "How?" said Poincaré. "They would have needed to predict the markets. Is that remotely possible?"

  "It's an easy problem," said Chambi, "given James's approach. He fed his computers current market data and ran the equation repeatedly— faster than real time. The equation held."

  Poincaré was confused. "You told me he investigated systems in Nature. Stock values are not in Nature. The global financial markets are not in Nature—not like the meadow outside this chapel. Not like this." He plucked a weed growing from a crack in the window well.

  "I can explain," said Chambi. "Are you in Nature, Inspector, like the meadow? Like this weed?"

  "I am."

  "And would you agree there are thousands of complex systems operating in your body this very moment, systems that will continue to operate until you die? Insulin regulation, digestion, blood pressure? And would you agree that systems will be in place after you die to break down your flesh and bones?"

  "Yes," he said. "I know this is true."

  "Well, then. James took this understanding a step further and showed how humans, both individually and in groups, are complex systems. That's to say, you, Inspector, are as complex as a storm, and the outputs of your life, just as the outputs of a storm, can be recorded and analyzed. A storm generates measureable rainfall and wind. We humans generate language, wars, economies, art, social welfare systems. The products of our hands and minds are in Nature every bit as much as the rain, Inspector Poincaré. James studied the distribution of notes in Mahler's Ninth Symphony and the behavior of the Dow Jones Average and found they were indistinguishable, at a deep level, from temperature variations in a low pressure system over the eastern United States. The equation he discovered enabled him to make predictions about stocks with the same degree of certainty you'd expect from a forecaster predicting how hot it will be tomorrow. The markets behaved like every other system he studied."

  Is it possible, Poincaré wondered. He pointed to a floorboard. "That ant," he said. "If I made a grid and mapped the ant's movements—"

  "I know what you're thinking, and the answer is yes. Assuming you run the data through James's program, the map of the ant's movements would look a great deal like a map of the stock market or any other complex system. Which system doesn't matter because order and disorder are operating in all of them. It's the tension between order and disorder that matters, the dance, as James called it. On a good day, the system is orderly, and we can make reasonably accurate predictions. But
there's no predicting what will tip a system into chaos—or when. Quito tried to tip your life into chaos by ordering the death of your granddaughter. That was a hammerblow, not a puff.

  "When Eduardo and I first met, he told me that one day fifty years ago he decided to leave his alpaca herd—something his parents instructed him never to do—and walk to the village for candy. He turned a corner and saw his father begging so their family could eat. The puff, Inspector, was not the trauma of seeing his father beg but the harmless decision of an eight-year-old who thinks the herd is fine, the village is only a kilometer away, and he'd like something sweet. That started the chain that led to Quito's ordering your granddaughter killed a half-century later. Avalanches begin the same way, with a puff—the tiniest hint of a change, nothing consequential in its own right. But the system is tipped and madness reigns. Prediction becomes impossible. In time, the system resets and order is restored."