the debate team, wannabe poet with a few scribblings in the
“No, no,” Seth Ludonowski repeated. “I don’t know anything about Zapata. I don’t even know what an anarchist is. But I sure as hell have heard of Jorge Rafael Marquez. Every computer geek this side of 1995 knows him.”
Tony scanned through his Zapata notes. “He made a fortune in computers.”
“He raked in huge dollars!” Seth said admiringly. “And he deserved it. He wrote algorithms that were pure genius. Half the systems we run in here use software built on his ideas. I had no idea that Jorge Rafael Marquez had become a terrorist.”
“Of course,” Talia continued, “knowing his original name means nothing. Sometime in the late 1990s he managed to disappear, and I mean completely. The fortune in his bank accounts vanished. They found his car and identification on the side of the road in Central California. No one has ever heard from Marquez again.”
“How do we know it’s the same person?” Jack asked.
“Truth is, we don’t,” she admitted. “But again, it doesn’t matter. The Marquez identity is a dead end anyway.”
Tony continued, “No one’s come close to catching him. He never follows any patterns, and he isn’t attached to any cause. Totally unpredictable. Conventional wisdom says that the usual policing techniques won’t work.”
“. so they recruited you to apply chaos theory to tracking him,” Jack finished for her. “It’s an interesting idea. And it almost worked. I was one room away, but he escaped.”
“He’s smart,” Talia said. “Maybe one of the most brilliant minds on the planet, at least in his field. If his computer work is any indication — and pretty much it’s all we have — he has an incredible aptitude for deduction; he takes small bits of data and extrapolates them, reaching fairly huge conclusions that are usually right. At least, we assume they’re right because he keeps succeeding in his plots, and no one catches him. That’s what his computer programs did, you know. He wrote them for Internet search engines. You type in one or two words and, based on those hints, the search engines find what you need. The same technique feeds right into voice recognition systems, deep space exploration satellites, and pretty much, if we ever develop real artificial intelligence, some of his work is going to be at the foundation of it.”
“You sound like you like him,” Jack said. “He blows people up.”
Talia had clearly heard this criticism before. “My job has been to get to know him. There’s no sense letting my ethics get in the way of that, because he doesn’t. I don’t approve of him at all. But if you ignore his intelligence, you’ll never catch him.”
“So where does chaos theory come in?” Jack asked.
Talia smiled, and her skin actually seemed to glow. “Ah, now that’s the interesting part. The working theory on Zapata is that he uses his ability to recognize patterns in order to avoid them himself. If there are no patterns, any leads you get don’t matter, because there’s no path to follow. It’s all random.”
“Anarchy,” Jack said. “Chaos.”
Talia held up her finger. “That’s just it. There’s no such thing as chaos.”
It occurred to Jack that Talia Gerwehr had never stood in the middle of a rioting mob, but he let it slide. She continued. “Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy literally means ‘without leaders.’ That’s definitely what Zapata is after. He seems intent on breaking down structures, all structures of any kind. But chaos, well, chaos doesn’t exist.”
“So what’s chaos theory?”
“A cool-sounding name for exactly its opposite,” Talia said. “To make a long story short, chaos theory says that events that seem chaotic are really the result of a huge series of small events that, happening one after another, make the outcome seem like chaos. The popular example is this: a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and you get a storm in Los Angeles. The butterfly makes a tiny puff of air, which contributes to another tiny event, et cetera, et cetera, and then you have a big event.”
Jack may not have been a Mensa member, but he could follow this. “You’re suggesting that there’s a pattern somewhere in Zapata.”
“Somewhere,” she agreed. “It’s just too complex for us to find it yet. Nature does not abide chaos, Agent Bauer. All things fall into some sense of order. Frankly, he does have one obvious pattern: he follows no patterns.”
Jack said, “Well, I’ve got one lead to follow, whether it fits into your theory or not. I need you to help me get information on a gang tattoo. Zapata’s guy had one, and it’s the second one that I’ve seen since last night. Can you access confidential records?”
Talia said, “Yeah, but not here. My office computer can.” “Let’s go.”
Henderson, for some reason, was the lone holdout in the room, and since he was Director of Field Operations, his opinion held sway. “I get all this interest in Zapata,” he was saying. “But there’s still no direct evidence that this Ramirez was involved with him. None of the victims at the Biltmore have any connections to him. For all we know, it was an arms deal gone bad, and that’s that.”
“Then why would Jack go to the hospital to get information from Chappelle?” Nina replied, her neck turning red.
Tony agreed. “We need to put the word out that Jack isn’t a suspect. He didn’t kill anyone, so there’s no crime. We need to reel him in so we can help him.”
“Absolutely not!” rasped a thin, wraithlike voice.
They all turned to see Ryan Chappelle standing in the doorway looking like a harbinger of death. He slumped against the wall weakly, but his eyes stared defiantly out of his bloodless face. “No one contacts Bauer. No one!”
14. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 9 A.M. AND 10 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
Chappelle limped forward, and someone vacated a seat so he could sit. It was a measure of his popularity that, although they would move out of his way, no one offered to help him sit down. He slumped back in the chair, gasping for breath. He did not speak.
Finally Tony couldn’t wait any longer. “Chappelle, we have to get him in. The police are hunting him. He’s got no resources. He’s—”
Chappelle nodded. “Right. That’s it. That’s what we need.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Surprised questions popped up from several agents.
Chappelle gathered his breath again and they waited like so many impatient children attending an old man. “He needs to be. outside the system. It’s the only way we’ll catch Zapata. If we work with the usual methods, we’ll get made. It’s happened every time.”
“It happened this time, too,” Henderson pointed out.
Chappelle managed a weak smile. “Close. Arm’s reach, what I heard.”
Henderson was caving at last, but he looked unhappy about it. “I still don’t get it. You hate Bauer. Why were the two of you running this and not any of us?”
Chappelle’s chest jumped up and down slightly. He was laughing, but didn’t have enough breath to make noise. Finally the tremors subsided. “Hate Bauer. Yes. Goddamned loose cannon. Doesn’t follow orders. Rules.
