An Annoyance of Grackles (Applied Topology Book 3)

by Margaret Ball

  “They wouldn’t.” Lensky looked as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “Balan, however, is highly intelligent and particularly talented with languages. We believe that he assumed the persona of a radicalized American and even taught himself Arabic in order to infiltrate the group he was dealing with last fall. That would have been an extremely lucrative contract, involving major bombings across the country. San Antonio, Albuquerque, Denver and Los Angeles were definitely targeted. We believe there were also plans for Dallas, Tucson, and San Francisco.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment. “You did say were?”

  “Based on information in Balan’s papers, the FBI was able to pick up several key members of the group. They moved on different cells simultaneously and believe that they’ve permanently broken up that particular terrorist group.”

  “FBI?” Ingrid said. “But I thought you were – “

  “The Agency,” Lensky interrupted her. “has limited law-enforcement authority. If we identify someone who should be arrested, we notify local LEOs or the FBI.” He had that sour-lemon expression again. Given his opinion of the FBI, it really galled him to have to cede to their authority. I had known better than to raise the subject; Ingrid, of course, had never had the learning experience of sitting beside Lensky while he watched a TV show about espionage and law enforcement and shouted insults at the scriptwriters. Many of the insults were also slurs on the competence of the FBI, NSA, and any other members of the intelligence community apart from his own agency.

  “Why do you think he’s not ideological?” I asked, just to change the subject.

  “Pattern of behavior,” Lensky said. “He’s now been linked to bombings carried out by ETA – Basque separatists – as well as some purely commercial ventures. We know he consulted with Lashkar-e-Taiba before the Mumbai attacks in ’08, but that’s the only incident before last fall that can be definitely linked with both Balan and Islamist ideology. And at that time he wasn’t posing as a jihadi. We presume he learned Arabic in order to insert himself into Islamist terror groups, because let’s face it, nowadays that’s where the money is for, um, independent contractors like Balan. But with any luck, last fall’s arrests will have destroyed his credibility with his terrorist buddies. If we got really lucky, they’d kill him themselves, but sadly, that hasn’t happened. Yet.”

  “I can’t believe anybody would contract to maim and kill innocent people just for money,” Ingrid said.

  “What, you think it’s less evil if they maim and kill innocents because they don’t like the color of their skin, or their religion, or their laws?” Lensky was getting testy. “I can tell you this about Balan: he’ll take a contract for anywhere, any time, if there’s enough money in it to balance the risk for him. He literally does not care whom he kills. Oh, did I mention he’s also carried out targeted political and commercial assassinations? Apparently he has sniper skills as well as demolition expertise.”

  “But… how does a person get that way?”

  “He was born in Romania,” Lensky said. “In 1982. Probably. The exact birth date isn’t known, but he was definitely in one of the state orphanages by 1985, and they estimated that he was three years old then.”

  Ingrid frowned. “But just because somebody was in an orphanage doesn’t make them a bad person.”

  “No, thank God,” Lensky said, “but the worst ones can be soul-destroying. Romanian orphanages were notoriously terrible – they just warehoused the children. Rooms full of children tied to their cribs so they wouldn’t make trouble for the caretakers, adolescents in straitjackets… they were nightmare places. The truth about them came out after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, but many of them kept operating after that because, well, Romania was broke, and there was no other place for the children.

  “Many of the children in orphanages were physically or mentally undeveloped, some permanently. Our analysts surmise that Balan escaped those fates by pouring all his energy, first, into developing his intellect, and second, into dominating his caretakers and the other children so that he, at least, was adequately fed. He ran away from the orphanage in his early teens and probably spent some time living on the streets.

  “He did not, however, escape all the effects of the orphanage. Many of the children displayed some signs of reactive attachment disorder – an inability to connect emotionally or to maintain relationships. Balan appears to be an extreme case: no personal relationships, no sense of guilt, no values, unable to trust…”

  Lensky threw up his hands. “Short version: he has no moral center and, probably, no authentic feelings except one.”

  “And what is that one?” Ben asked.

  “Anger.” Lensky looked around the room, focusing his gaze on each of us in turn. “This is a very intelligent, very competent man with absolutely no qualms about hurting others and with a great deal of anger against the world. He is extremely dangerous and I don’t want any of you trying to “help” by prying into his affairs. In fact, should any of you come into contact with him, do not engage. Just notify me and I’ll take it from there.” He looked at me. “Thalia, if I’d known all this last fall, I would never have enlisted your help with him. I hope you can see now why I don’t want you trying to identify him or having any contact whatsoever with him.”

  Ben and I carefully refrained from looking at each other until Lensky had gone back to his office on the public side.

  “That’s it,” I said. “He must never know what you and Annelise were doing the last two nights. And you certainly can’t do it again.”

  Ben sighed. “It does seem a pity.” But he didn’t argue.

  Annelise, however, had a different opinion when we talked to her.

  “I’ve already spent two evenings in that bar, drinking bad cocktails and swatting bored businessmen away. Now you want to quit before we get any results?”

  We had gone out for lunch to compare notes in privacy and well away from Lensky. And a good thing, too, because her voice was rising with every word.

  “It’s too dangerous,” Ben said.

  “It isn’t any more dangerous than it was yesterday!”

  “We didn’t know all this about Blon – Balan – yesterday.”

  “So? We already knew he cosied up to terrorists to help them bomb places. We already knew he was dangerous enough that Lensky was spooked about letting Lia get close enough to identify him. And,” Annelise finished with what she evidently thought was a clinching argument, “we’re not even spying on Bl – Balan. We’re checking out some guy who might or might not have met him.”

  “Not any more, we aren’t,” Ben said. “I won’t let you take the risk.”

  “Then I’ll just have to do it on my own.”

  “Without me to point out Chayyaputra, you can’t do it. And I’m not cooperating.”

  That sounded to me like the effective end of the argument. Annelise was flushed and her hair was curling crisply around her face and she hadn’t given up quite yet, but obviously she wasn’t going to get anywhere. I excused myself to go back to my nice quiet office – and to spare myself listening to the two of them bickering.

  Therefore, I don’t know exactly how Annelise turned a flat refusal to continue spying on Chayyaputra into an agreement that they’d give it one more night. And into an agreement not to talk to me about it until afterwards.

  “You should know how it’s done,” Lensky said, later, when we were confessing all to him. “You do it to me all the time.”

  Do I?

  Oh, well, maybe just once or twice I’ve taken the obvious and logical steps to resolve a situation without going into details with him beforehand. But that’s different. I think.

  Anyway, I didn’t know about Ben and Annelise until the next day, and by that time they’d been through so much that they may have forgotten some details of how it all started.

  ***

  In any case, all I was worried about that afternoon was not killing Prakash Bhatia. Continuing to not kill him. After hiding out in
the math department library all morning, he’d come back to Allandale House to continue his mission of being the most irritating person in the known world. He didn’t need to continue that campaign; he already had my vote.

  He was still (a) refusing to admit that any use of topology could generate paranormal effects, and (b) telling us how much more topology he knew than any of us and how many distinguished mathematicians had been associated with the Tata Institute. I wasn't the only person who quietly wished that he'd take himself back to the wonderful Tata Institute. But I was the one who was stuck with him on this bright, crisp January afternoon; we'd been handing him off according to an informal rota so that nobody would go mad from dealing with him for too long, and it was my turn.

  I just hadn't realized that he would discover yet a third way to be annoying.

  That afternoon I was trying to talk him through a very minor visualization, kind of hoping that the exercise would settle the Matter of Prakash one way or the other. Either he'd succeed in a minor selection, understand his abilities, and have an instant breakthrough; or he'd fail so comprehensively and thoroughly that we'd feel justified in handing him back to Dr. Verrick with a report that his buried talent was buried so deep that it would take a crew of mining engineers to unearth it.

  Okay, just call me a cockeyed optimist. To date the topologists of the Center had a zero success rate at either (a) getting through Prakash's blocks or (b) changing Dr. Verrick's mind about anything whatsoever. But I, being so very clever, was going to achieve one of those things this very afternoon?

  Well, no. But I did give it my best shot.

  “Let’s work on the Axiom of Choice today,” I told Prakash.

  He looked down his perfectly sculpted nose at me. “Kid stuff.”

  “Yes, so even you -” Stop. Swallow rejoinder. Back up. Restart. “I thought it might help to work on something both of us are perfectly clear on.”

  “For every collection S of mutually disjoint non-empty sets there exists a set S' containing one and only one element of each set in S,” he rattled off in one breath. “What is there to work on?”

  “Well… what do you see when you think about the Axiom of Choice?”

  Another sneer. “At this moment I am seeing a girl who pretends to be a serious mathematician, sitting in an exceedingly untidy office.”

  Maybe the man had a death wish.

  I took a couple of deep breaths and wished we had discovered a visualization which would endow you with preternatural calm and patience. Maybe I could get Ben to think about that; he was very creative at finding new applications of topology.

  “Not what you see with your eyes,” I said carefully, “what you see in your mind. When you go into your math space and think about that axiom, what do you see?”

  “Math space?”

  “Where you go inside your head to think about mathematics.” I felt on reasonably firm ground there; Prakash wouldn’t have had these troubling little incidents happening around him unless he visualized mathematical concepts the same way that all the rest of us did.

  “I am not describing the inside of my head. This is meaningless babble.”

  “All right, then I'll do it for you. You see a dark, empty space. You populate it with glowing objects corresponding to the concepts you are thinking about. In this case, you see a collection of separate and distinct shapes, each of which turns out, when you look closely at it, to be composed of many bright points. You picture one point leaving each shape…”

  “Stop!” For the first time since he'd been inflicted upon us, Prakash looked shaken. “How you are knowing this about me?”

  “Because that's the way the math space in my head works,” I told him, “and the way it works for all four of the research fellows. We have never found anybody with the power to connect mathematical constructs and real-world objects who doesn't visualize that way. Hence, if you really have the latent talent Dr. Verrick believes you have, you see things that way too.”

  He stood up and went to the floor-to-ceiling window that opens onto one of Allandale House's cute little balconies and that was one of my reasons for grabbing this office. At this time of year there wasn't much to look at except a tangle of tree limbs and the occasional grackle, but he seemed to be studying the view intently. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his tailored pants, balled them up into fists, yanked them out again.

  “The way in which one is seeing these ideas,” he said eventually, “is not important. All that matters is whether one is translating them into mathematically correct statements and rigorous proofs.”

  “If you're doing traditional mathematics, that's true,” I agreed. “For the… ah… kind of sideways math we do here, it turns out that the way you visualize the concepts is key. Why don't you have a seat? I'd prefer not to talk to the back of your head.”

  “I have never desired to do anything but what you call 'traditional' maths,” he said. He pulled his chair back and sat down very carefully, as if he thought something might break.

  For the first time, I felt some sympathy for him. “Neither did I - once upon a time. None of us did. I mean, I’m pretty sure nobody grows up wanting to have paranormal abilities that have to be concealed from the entire rest of the world.”

  “I am not so sure,” Prakash said. “Even in India, comic book heroes such as the Superman are much admired. But I do not wish to live in a comic book. I prefer a university.”

  “Well, nobody's drafting you into the Center.”

  “This is true.”

  “Do you want to get out of here and go back to working on your dissertation?”

  “That is… not an option,” Prakash said, surprising me. “I am here to work under supervision of your Professor Verrick, isn't it? He is of opinion that I was taking too much course work too fast at Tata Institute and must take a short pause to, he says, solidify key concepts. Mentally. He will not accept me again as dissertation candidate until end of this semester.”

  Much of this, of course, I'd already gathered from Dr. Verrick himself, but I hadn't expected to hear Prakash admit it. Perhaps his attitude towards us was softening.

  I hoped.

  Because it was going to be hell spending the entire semester with somebody who not only didn't believe in what we were doing but considered all of us except possibly Ingrid to be his intellectual inferiors.

  That gave me a brilliant idea. “If you're going to be at loose ends until June… Why don’t you take this chance to go home? Visit your family? There's certainly enough time.” And Prakash in Bangalore or Mumbai or wherever would be a lot easier on us than Prakash on the third floor of Allandale House.

  He winced slightly at this suggestion. “That… might be unwise… at this time.”

  I waited.

  “My family is…” He came to a halt and started over. “My mother especially…. They were desiring me to marry before I left country. There is this girl… A cousin really, daughter of my father's brother, so she is quite suitable. Indeed, we grew up together. You know what is cousin-sister?”

  I shook my head.

  “Is what we call someone who is cousin only, but so close that she might be sister. Arushi, she is cousin-sister to me, very nice girl, but we… I… I do not wish to marry her. If I go home for visit, it will… they will expect I have come home for wedding.”

  I started to dislike him less, now that he was revealing a human side.

  “I can relate,” I said. “My own family is constantly on my case about getting married, and what's worse, they're right here in town, conveniently located for nagging and pressure.”

  “But is different, no? A woman should do as family tells her.”

  “Oh? And is Arushi happy to do as she's told, to marry a man who doesn't love her?'

  “Of course. She is good girl.”

  8. A whirling cloud of grackles

  “And that was where I lost it with him,” I told Lensky that night. “Really. I mean, I managed to keep it together for a f
ew more minutes, but at that point I was totally ready to kill him. And it didn't help any when he tried to justify his attitude by “explaining” that I didn't have a real profession and was just playing around with this fantasy of having paranormal powers to put off my proper task of marrying some man and giving him sons.”

  “Ouch,” Lensky said appreciatively. “I wish you'd told me all this before we got comfortable.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I assume you're telling me because you want help moving the body.”

  I snickered. “Oh, no. I've decided that killing's too good for him. I told him to meet me at the office tomorrow night after everyone else has gone home and I'll demonstrate exactly how real the Center’s work is.”

  “Why tomorrow night?”

  “Well, you already told me you were making veal piccata tonight. I didn't want to miss that.” I ran a hand over his shoulder. “I kind of wanted to see you, too.”

  “No, I mean why the secret meeting at night?”

  I hadn't really been thinking clearly at the time; it took me a moment to figure out why that had seemed like the right thing.

  “Once he has to accept that this is real, there's a chance he will choose to stay and work with us. That’s what Dr. Verrick wants. And it will be easier for Prakash to make that choice if he hasn't been made to look a fool in front of the whole research division.”

  “Good Lord. What are you planning to do to the man? Fly him over the South Mall?”

  “I haven’t been able to fly yet,” I said with some regret. It would be extremely satisfactory… “Anyway, I'd better stay with my strengths. I'm going to teleport him from one side of the third floor to the other until he concedes. If that doesn't work, maybe Ingrid and Colton can demonstrate flying on Friday. If they’ve solved their technical problems – I haven’t heard how that’s going, she said they’re not going to announce anything until they can do it right. Stop hogging the covers, I'm cold.”

  Lensky liberated a bit of the duvet and flipped it over me. “Has it occurred to you that Bhatia may have misinterpreted your challenge?”