All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  "It isn't your concern, Alain."

  "But it is! You deserve peace as much as anyone."

  Poincaré did not agree. On arriving, he had noticed a man beside them, pushing two carts, each with a mountain of cans and bottles. The graybeard was restless, Poincaré's same age, leathery from living outdoors. The man fidgeted, and then in an eruption of broken but comprehensible French: "S'il vous fucking plait! You are seriously out of line, young man." He switched to English. "You come down here in your robes, preaching to the doomed. How do I know you're not going to take us all out with a suicide vest? What do you have under those robes? Show me or I swear I'll call the cops!" He held up a cell phone.

  Ackart backed away. "I'm not one of them, friend. They've perverted God's Word. They dress like us but have nothing to do with us. They are crazy. All I do is talk—if you'll talk. Help is coming."

  "Help? I've been waiting for help all my life, and not once has God or anyone else lifted a finger. So I've given up looking. The State of California couldn't give a damn. The city doesn't. The federal government is worthless. The churches are busy collecting money to pay off the debts of pedophile priests. No one cares even when they say they care. What, you think you can quote gospel and make all the shit go away?" He spread his arms and opened his palms. "You are seriously out of your mind, and I know what it means to be out of your mind!"

  "Wait," said Ackart. "Just a little longer. Take Christ into—"

  "Bushwa! Show me you're not wearing a vest under that or I swear I'll kick your skinny butt back to France!" Poincaré stepped forward, but Ackart motioned him off. And then he saw something remarkable: Alain turning his back to the line and to Poincaré and briefly raising his robes.

  "OK," said the man. "Now that that's settled, get the hell out of my neighborhood."

  Ackart tried again. "I know the world's failed you. But there's News that will change your life. In just twenty-seven days—"

  Graybeard heard this and pointed to a sign with the words All Redemption and an arrow over a door through which, one at a time, the men and women in line disappeared with their bags. "The only news I need is the kind that puts food on my plate now." He patted a plumped trash bag, and Poincaré heard a clink of glass. "I'll tell you what," said the man, "since you're not from around here. Let's take you to school. You're talking redemption? Let's give you some, American style."

  Despite the heat, the graybeard wore an overcoat, long pants, and steel-toed shoes. He dug into a trash bag and produced an empty can of Coca-Cola, which he thrust violently toward Alain. "Take it! Step right up. Come on, son! You and your white-robed brothers are trying my nerves!"

  Poincaré could see that Ackart had no idea what to do with another man's anger. He stepped between them. "I'll do it," he said.

  Graybeard sized him up and tossed the can of Coca-Cola back into his bag. "Hell, you're even more beat up than I am. But for you and that fine suit, only the best." He placed a different can in Poincaré's hand. This one read Budweiser. "King of beers, friend. Welcome to LA!"

  Poincaré stepped in line to keep the peace. Graybeard promptly ignored him and shuffled to tunes playing through earbuds. One woman in line danced to no music at all. Several rested their heads against their carts in the heat and stumbled forward as the line moved.

  "Next!" a man called from inside the opened doorway. Poincaré had been watching the people ahead of him set bulging bags separated into cans, plastics, and glass onto a scale and wait for a man wearing rubber gloves and a heavy apron to tear a receipt from a machine, bark off a number, then swing each bag onto a conveyor belt. Behind the building Poincaré had seen trash compactors and several tractor-trailer containers. When the man with the apron turned to Poincaré, he found a single beer can sitting on the scale.

  "What the hell?"

  Graybeard spoke before Poincaré had the chance: "Marvin, he's on a field trip. Weigh the can."

  "Get him out of here."

  "It's the law, Marv. He came with something to redeem. Weigh it and write him up. I don't care how much it weighs. He's got something."

  "It's a single fucking unit, Jimmy." The worker grabbed the can and tossed it over his shoulder without looking, then walked to a machine calibrated to weigh empties in the tens of pounds. He pulled a receipt and held it out to Poincaré. "See. It says here you've got nothing."

  "It's the scale's problem, Marv. Let's go. I want to get lunch."

  "I'll throw both your asses out!" Grumbling, the man signed a slip of paper and recorded a number. He said: "Don't come back unless you need it. These people depend on this place to survive. You come here with one can, you're wasting my time and flipping them the finger. Move on."

  Further down the shed, by the exit, a heavyset woman in a floral muumuu stood behind an old brass cash register. She examined Poincaré's receipt and laughed. "Five cents?"

  He nodded.

  "OK, then." She dug into the register and handed him a nickel. "Don't spend it all in one place, Hon."

  Graybeard emerged from the shack folding several bills into his pocket. "A typical haul," he said. "Thirty bucks. You know how long it takes to collect six hundred cans and bottles? Five hours on a good day. I started four o'clock this morning."

  Poincaré held out the nickel. "Here," he said. "It's yours."

  The man took the coin and looked up with an expression approaching wonder, his mouth a wreckage of neglect. "An Indian Head! I haven't seen one of these in forty years! Look—the profile of an Indian on one side, an American buffalo on the other. A genuine buffalo nickel! You've got some good luck coming, friend. Think hard before giving it away." Graybeard returned the coin, and Poincaré reached into a pocket, emerging with a twenty-dollar bill. "Not necessary," said the man. "Go spend it on that seriously misguided boy of yours. Better yet, hold onto the money and talk some sense into him."

  Poincaré unfolded a second twenty-dollar bill.

  "I won't say no this time."

  "Good," said Poincaré. "Sleep in, tomorrow."

  Alain Ackart was gone by the time Poincaré rounded the building. He walked to his driver, who had napped during the wait and could not offer a single useful hint to guide a search; so he returned to his hotel and placed a call to Samuel Ackart: Your son is fine, he reported. Poincaré told him that while Alain wore the robes of a cult, he hadn't surrendered his reason and didn't pose a danger to himself or anyone else. The fact remained, however, that the young man believed with all his heart Jesus would come to restore a kingdom that humans could not. If only, thought Poincaré. He feared for Alain Ackart and for his bitter awakening at sunrise on August 16th.

  After dinner, Poincaré made a second attempt at opening Fenster's hard drive. While still in Cambridge, he computed the possible combinations of a sixty-seven character password—95 x^y 67. That is, 95 times itself 67 times. The calculator reported the result in scientific notation:

  3.2172258856130695549449401501748e+132

  The number was impressive, and Poincaré wrote it out as a kind of cautionary tale. That way, if he found himself making random stabs at the password, he would look at the mountain of zeros and either stop or call himself a fool.

  32172258856130695549449401501748000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000

  Hurley was right: no language had a word for a number this large; and no computers, save the massive arrays used to simulate nuclear explosions, were powerful enough to crack Fenster's password in a time frame not measured in years. A man who could recite every play in every inning of every baseball game he ever watched or heard could have committed a random, sixty-seven character sequence to memory. But as a practical matter, would Fenster have typed sixtyseven unrelated characters each time he sat down to his computer? This would be nuisance enough for him to rely on a known number or a phrase. It was Poincaré's only hope.

  For this session, he decided on a single, limited line of attack: numbers that held specia
l meaning to mathematicians. Sixty-seven was a prime, perhaps a clue: so using a generator he found online, he computed every sixty-seven digit prime and ran these through Fenster's log-in sequence. Nothing. He entered the first sixty-seven numbers of the value for Pi. He entered them backwards. He started at the second and third-through- tenth values. Nothing. He found a paper online that calculated the Feigenbaum constant to sixty-seven numbers. Again, nothing. He tried the first sixty-seven numbers of the Fibonacci series. He was hours at it, with the same result. Any of hundreds of mathematical constants or series would have been available to Fenster.

  Poincaré's approach was barely a half-step better than brute force. A log-in sequence did not flash the message: You're close—just a few more tries. You were either right or wrong, and each new effort started from scratch. Poincaré had to be cleverer than this, and at the moment he was too tired to be clever.

  He returned the hard drive to its envelope and went to sleep.

  CHAPTER 32

  As it happened, of the six JPL employees Poincaré had investigated, Randal Young was the only one who had traveled outside the country—to Munich. The dates were still wrong, but he called Valerie Steinholz to inquire further. Young had been diagnosed at the age of twenty-six. "Altogether tragic," said Steinholz. "The cancer spread to his kidneys, lungs, and affected his eyesight near the end. He underwent several transplant operations to keep him functioning—four major surgeries before he resigned this past February. Everyone he worked with thought the world of him. He was buried just up the road, and easily two hundred JPL staffers attended the funeral. . . . His widow's name is Julie. She and her two children still live in La Cañada." Steinholz handed him an address.

  According to the report Poincaré read that morning, Young and his wife traveled to Germany on March 9th, they returned on the 19th, and Young died at JFK on the 20th. Poincaré had read the police report and seen a facsimile of both the death certificate and the notice of burial, so Randal Young could not have set a bomb in Amsterdam on April 12th. But before he died, he might have constructed a device and attached a digital timer, though its placement in a hotel room with multiple occupants before James Fenster would have required an accomplice. But then there was the delicacy of transporting and safely storing a volatile substance, according to Meyer. Poincaré had too many questions to leave Los Angeles without visiting the widow. He placed the call, and Julie Young agreed to meet provided he would forgive a chaos of moving boxes. She and her children were Colorado bound.

  A short drive up Highway 210 from Pasadena brought Poincaré to La Cañada, one more community that sprouted in Southern California like native Cliff-asters. He watched well-established subdivisions roll by, one after the next with tidy regularity, for the most part mission-style homes reminiscent of the county's Spanish past. The feel was Mediterranean and affluent, with green lawns, palms, screened porches, and European cars in circular drives—a triumph, this coaxing of a naturally scrubby habitat into perennial suburban bloom. The driver slowed, made a U-turn, and pulled over to a curbside.

  The door was open and Poincaré heard two children calling one another, their voices strangely muffled. Before he could ring the doorbell, one of the voices addressed him from inside a large, overturned moving box with a spy hole cut out. He knelt and could see a patch of freckles and red hair.

  "Identify yourself, Earthling. Mom, a man's here!"

  He rang the bell and Julie Young turned a corner, red hair held back in a bandana, shirt sleeves rolled. "I promised chaos, Inspector. We won't disappoint. Carl, Sam—say hello." A second overturned box, connected with a string to the first, shuffled towards him.

  "Good morning, Earthling."

  "I surrender!" Poincaré raised his hands. From the size of the boxes, he guessed they were the age of his grandsons. In a different home, on a different continent, he would have been on his knees beneath his own box.

  "I'd offer coffee, Inspector—but I wouldn't be able to find a mug to pour it in." Young's widow invited him into the kitchen, where she held out a plastic cup. "How about water? There's an open bag of chips somewhere."

  The cupboards were thrown wide, half the dishes wrapped in newspaper; canned goods and paper goods rose in precarious piles along the counter, and partially packed boxes reduced passage through the kitchen to a narrow lane. The dozens of already sealed and labeled boxes lined walls at the rear of the house, yet the job did not look nearly done. Beyond the kitchen, a large room with an attached porch and a hot tub opened onto a sweeping view of the San Gabriel Mountains.

  "Thank you for making time," said Poincaré.

  She retied her bandanna and began wrapping dishes. "We move Monday. We'll manage . . . as long as the boys hold up. We'll have to get on with this, Inspector. You had some questions concerning Randal?"

  He was taken at once with how ordinary and solidly suburban Young's life had been: the competent, appealing wife; healthy sons; fine neighborhood; steady employment at NASA. How did a man who lived here cross an ocean to plant a bomb beneath a hotel sink? He saw a photograph. "Ah . . . I saw a passport photo in the personnel file, but this does him real justice. A handsome man!"

  "You read his personnel file?"

  He moved closer for a better look, but Julie Young set her wrapping paper aside and beat him to the photograph. "Lake Tahoe, five years ago. I was very pregnant with our second son. Randal was healthy then." She held the photo for Poincaré to see; she did not let him touch it.

  "Better days," he said.

  Randal Young was tall and athletic with sandy hair and an appealing face: lean, thin lips, strong cheekbones, cleft chin. His widow was nearly as tall and powerful with red curls that had passed to the child he had seen. Poincaré heard a shout in the next room; and calmly, he thought, for a woman recently widowed amidst the chaos of a half-packed home, she called for them to talk on their orange juice cans. "Secret spy stuff so no one else can hear!" Julie Young turned to him. "Some days I'd come home from work, and they'd all be in boxes having three-way orange juice can conversations. Randy was planning an upgrade to walkie-talkies before he died."

  She cleared a stack of magazines from a chair. "The only hospitality I can offer, I'm afraid. . . . So—your questions, Inspector. I've got only so many hours before the movers arrive Monday morning."

  "Mrs. Young," Poincaré began. "I'm investigating a murder. A bombing. It was an unusual crime because not many people could have made and set that particular bomb. Your husband was one of them."

  Julie Young sat in the chair she had cleared for Poincaré.

  "Your husband had worked with these chemicals at JPL. For three summers, as a student, he worked with a mining company setting charges. And I've checked. The two of you traveled to Europe this past March. So, at present, I have no option but to consider your husband a suspect."

  "You're wrong," she said. "We were in Europe, but Randal was dying. What was the date of your bombing?"

  "April 12th."

  "You're certain?"

  "I was there."

  "Then you've wasted a trip. We traveled in mid-March to try one last treatment for his cancer. There's a clinic in Garmisch-Partenkirchen that had had some success with an extract of tree bark from South America. The treatment didn't work, and we returned to the States in time for him to collapse in the airport before we ever caught our connecting flight home. He didn't make it out of JFK. But you're Interpol. You knew this."

  Poincaré regretted what he was about to do.

  "The man could barely lift his head off a pillow," she said. She leaned heavily against a pile of boxes marked Pots and Counter Stuff. "We've met, Inspector. The dates don't work. I've got work to do."

  "Where did you go besides Garmisch?"

  "We landed in Munich, we took the train to Garmisch, we stayed the week for the infusions, and when the blood profile didn't change we returned home."

  "You were gone for ten days."

  "Three weeks before your bombing. After the in
fusions, we stayed nearby and waited to see if the medicine would help. Two days later, the clinic gave us bad news. We came home."

  As he looked through a window to the San Gabriel Mountains, Poincaré recalled Garmisch-Partenkirchen. "The Alps would have reminded you of home, I suppose. And the air would certainly have restored your spirits, if nothing else. Where did you spend those two days, Mrs. Young? Perhaps one of the nearby villages?" Two days would have been enough time to travel to Amsterdam and back.

  She studied the kitchen floor, lost in thought. "He loved the mountains," she said. "We would have taken a last-ditch chance on a clinic anywhere. But the fact that it was in the Alps? Randal wanted to see them before he died. We stayed in a village near the clinic."

  "In Garmisch?"