Crooked River(23)

“I’ve consulted with a variety of sources, and it’s my understanding you have some unconventional theories about currents and the sea.”

Gladstone had to laugh. “Unconventional? Sounds like you’re describing my political opinions.”

“I loathe politics, presently more than ever. I’m solely interested in your oceanographic views.”

She brushed her long blond hair out of her face. The salt air always made it unruly. “My theories. Okay. Well, they involve chaos. I mean, in the mathematical sense. You’re familiar with the so-called butterfly effect? That the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Africa results in a hurricane in Florida?”

“I’m familiar with that fanciful idea, yes.”

“Fanciful,” Lam scoffed under his breath. She glared at him.

“It’s overstated, true, but what it really means is that the tiniest change in the initial conditions of a system can snowball into gigantic effects later on. Wallace and I are just applying that mathematical concept to ocean currents. Unfortunately, most of my colleagues think we’re wrong.”

“Are you wrong?”

She hadn’t expected this question. “That depends on how you define wrong. I know we’re on the right track, but we’re getting wrong results. It’s a nontrivial problem. I need time. And more data. Those who think we’re on the wrong track, that’s a different thing. They lack imagination. They’re…well…a little thick.”

Pendergast’s thin lips formed a dry little smile. “Most people, in my experience, are a little thick. If not abundantly so.”

Gladstone had to laugh, along with Wallace. This man, despite his severe look, had a droll sense of humor. She went on. “Ocean currents appear to flow in big, logical movements. The tide comes in and goes out. The Loop Current goes this way and that in a predictable fashion. It’s all there in the charts. The problem is that, when you actually drop small GPS floaters into the ocean, you find you can’t really predict where each individual floater will go. You can start them all together and they spread out enormously. Or you drop them far apart and they all end up on the same beach. So Wallace and I have been trying to develop a fractal mathematical model to explain that.”

“I developed it, actually,” Lam said. “On my own.”

The man nodded slowly. She wondered how much he actually understood. It was hard to read his marble-like face.

“How does the model work?” he asked.

“Wallace? You’re on—smartass.”

Lam cleared his throat extravagantly. “Ahem. We start by turning the surface of the sea into millions of vectors and perform a fractal matrix analysis showing how each vector evolves over time—given various initial conditions of air and water temperature, wind, tides, waves, currents, solar gain, and other factors. It essentially draws a multidimensional Poincaré map of the ocean’s surface. We do our calculations using the Q machine supercomputer at Florida Atlantic University.” Lam tilted his head. “Am I making sense?”

Agent Pendergast tilted his own head back. “A Poincaré map? Is that all? Why on earth did you not consider a Ramanujan eleven-dimensional Matrix Attractor?”

Lam sat there, dumbfounded. “Um…what?”

“I think our guest is making a joke,” said Gladstone.

“Oh,” Lam said slowly. He was used, she realized, to having a monopoly on irony in the lab.

“No, I don’t have any questions,” said Pendergast, “for the simple reason that I have no idea what you were talking about.”

“But I tried to make it simple,” Lam said with a smirk, regaining his equilibrium.

“No matter.” The agent turned to Gladstone. “How well do your models actually work?”

Gladstone smiled. “So far, I’m sorry to say—total shit.”

The man winced and she saw, to her amusement, that the vulgarity had offended him. “But they will work, I’m sure of it. Let me show you the size of the problem. Wallace, could you please run the floater video?”

“Why not?” Lam came over to a terminal and began tapping. Soon an image of the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the coast of Florida came up.

“What Wallace is going to show you is an animated video of the track of every floater for which we have data, going back twenty years. There have been thousands.”

Black lines appeared on the chart, crawling every which way until a vast spiderweb covered the screen.

“You can see how crazy it looks.” She pointed to a great hairy bundle of lines coming up from the Caribbean, running along the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula, curling up into the gulf, looping back down the west coast of Florida, brushing the Keys, and streaming out into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving many eddies and swirls in the gulf itself.

“That’s the famous Loop Current,” she said. “But as you can see, even though many lines follow it, there are hundreds that don’t. It’s the ones that don’t—the exceptions—that I’m trying to fit into our mathematical model. Wallace is a genius and, as you’ve discovered, nobody understands his equations.”

“We’re making progress,” Lam said. “And I wouldn’t exactly term our recent results ‘shit.’ We’ve progressed to the ‘half-assed’ phase, at least.”