All Cry Chaos (7 page)

    "So your new posting came through, Serge?"

    "By e-mail. Lyon gave me the Soldiers of Rapture, a miserable goddamned business." Laurent cleared his throat and spit into a handkerchief. "Also known as Rapturians—a fundamentalist, evangelical cult preaching an End-Time theology. They form themselves into autonomous cells, like al-Qaeda, with no central authority other than the New Testament, no church per se, each cell led by a selfanointed prophet who derives instruction through his own interpretation of the Word. They're Bible-thumping terrorists. They've committed at least two dozen murders, each time leaving a passage of Scripture as justification. They're also setting off bombs for Jesus—the Milan event was one of theirs. Henri, they want to make the world
more
miserable in order to hasten the Second Coming. Apparently, Christ will only reappear at a time of absolute chaos, so a devoted Christian should not only
not r
epair the world but should work actively to tear it down. Hence bullets, bombs, and murder for Christ. Just when you thought people had exhausted the possibilities for stupidity . . ."

    Poincaré would not have believed it but for the Barcelona killing. He located Matthew 24:24 on his computer:

For false Christs and false prophets will appear and will perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect.

"It's got to be the same people," he said. He logged onto an Interpol database and read enough to confirm a connection. "The police report says the shooter clipped the note to the victim's hair, above the entry wound, so blood wouldn't obscure any words."

    Laurent dropped his cigarette into an open can of soda. "Detail oriented," he said. "Don't you just love that in a killer? It makes them so . . .
human.
" He lit another Gauloise and expelled a lungful of smoke. "Only the religiously inspired could be so twisted. As for the Milan bombing, I don't even have the words. The guy exploded himself next to an ice cream parlor. Five of the six victims were children." Laurent coughed, his chest rattling ominously. "We've worked together a long time, Henri. You know I've never run from a case. But I actively detest these people, and it's no good beginning a job this way. Let me take the Fenster bombing. I'll make it right with Lyon."

    Poincaré considered the offer. True, investigating the Soldiers of Rapture would be an unpleasant business, but then so was every assignment. Neither of them had signed on to repair hiking trails or deliver warm meals to shut-ins. Tomorrow, Poincaré knew, Laurent would have in place the beginnings of a plan. "I can't," said Poincaré. "But I'll help if I can. How do I know a Rapturian when I see one?"

    Laurent spit into a handkerchief. "Look for people straight out of a Hollywood Bible epic, wearing robes and quoting Scripture. All ages, some as old as seventy. Twenty countries have reported active cells, and they want Interpol to coordinate a response. And, no, it won't do to arrest everyone wearing a robe. Not all of them are maniacs, and you can't tell for the looking. I'll likely go to the States for this one—I'm thinking Las Vegas." He coughed again and opened a file. "Thank God for the merely puzzling," he said, pointing to four photographs.

    
  

 SERIES 2:C

 

    "I'm supposed to guess?" said Poincaré.

     Laurent nodded.

    "Alright, then. The first one is a snowflake—though it's a strange color for a snowflake. But image A also looks like image B, which is clearly an island or a peninsula. Image A could be an x-ray of B—the boney structure of mountains. Put some flesh on the skeleton and you've got a land mass. C is possibly another snowflake or could be a slice of pine tree viewed from above. D, obviously, is a branch with leaves. You play with the scale a bit and you could place it in any of the other photos. I couldn't tell you what any of it has to do with globalization."

    Laurent flipped each photograph in turn and read the captions: "Two out of four, Henri. You fail. Image A—I can barely pronounce this, is an example of something called 'epitaxial islanding.' It says here that 'these are individual atoms of gold attaching themselves to a layer of silicon with characteristic dendritic branches.' " Laurent looked up. "It's gold, not snow." He flipped image B and read: " 'Christchurch, New Zealand, as seen from space. Note the dendritic extension of mountain ridges—central ridgelines fanning out to finger-like sub-ridges and sub-sub-ridges down to the water's edge.' Image C: 'Bacterial growth, Petri dish . . . dendritic branching.' And image D," Laurent concluded, realigning the images, "is a fern leaf."

    "Let me guess, Serge. Showing dendrites."

    Poincaré studied the images, registering two examples of the biological world, two of the geological. One was so small as to be invisible to the naked eye; another, so massive that its structure could be appreciated only from earth orbit. One was a plant on a forest floor; the other, a colony of living organisms gorging on laboratory agar—a pinwheel galaxy in a Petri dish. Poincaré sat quietly.

    "Look at the leading edge of each image," said Laurent. "They're cousins. Each is at some level a version of the other." He twirled a massive ring as he spoke, a present from his third wife prior to his final, failed effort to quit smoking. It was less a ring than a nugget of raw silver with a hole bored through the middle. During his six months of fighting insomnia and night sweats, the hope was he would reach for the ring instead of a cigarette. "Better than prayer beads," he said at the time. "Ella wanted those, but I decided to leave God out of the equation."

    The silver worked no magic, unfortunately, and all Laurent could show for the effort was a new habit to accompany the old: he now smoked three packs of filterless cigarettes each day
and
twirled the ring. "I made copies for you," he said of the photos. "I'd give my left testicle to know how Fenster was going to work these into a talk on globalization."

    The ballroom door squealed open, and in walked Ludovici and De Vries on either side of the last protester to be interviewed in connection with the bombing. Poincaré resisted settling on single suspects early in a case. He had set a worldwide net for Rainier through electronic postings, but he was also looking to others—in this case the anti-globalists. One of them, he reasoned—possibly in league with Rainier—may have targeted Fenster, whose promised talk on a one-world economy might have made him a target. Yet no one Poincaré interviewed thus far had any plausible link to the mathematician. None even admitted to having heard of him, let alone knowing his work well enough to plan and execute a murder. Last on the list, Eduardo Quito, was a former academic and their likeliest prospect. Poincaré looked forward to this meeting both because Quito was famous in his own right and because the interview was all that stood between another night in Amsterdam and a flight home to Lyon. Claire had left to prepare the farmhouse and welcome the children, but still it would be good to drink familiar wine and sleep in his own bed. The photos, he figured, could wait.

Peru's Ministry of Tourism would have done well to paste Eduardo Quito's likeness on brochures meant to separate rich North Americans from their hard-earned vacation dollars. He walked into the temporary Interpol headquarters every bit a son of the Andes, wearing the clothes of an alpaca herder—his job and the job of his father and grandfather before him. With a calico shirt, bandanna knotted at his throat, waxed-cotton jacket, and fedora over silver-flecked hair, Quito looked more the herdsman than the scholar or political gadfly. Improbably, he was all three. With equal ease he could argue before the International Monetary Fund, lead street protests, and navigate remote mountain trails. One week might find him in Paris speaking, in fluent French, at a forum on indigenous rights; the next, in Berlin shouting down G-8 ministers in flawless German. And then a flight home to the Andes like a condor returning to its nest. He was compact and powerfully built, with piercing black eyes.

    Poincaré had turned the matter over in his mind but was still not sure how to engage Quito, who would have remained a herder save for an alert priest who recognized a talent for numbers in the child. This led to a series of schools and, eventually, an endowed chair at the University of Lima where he specialized in the economics of colonialism. At least one European country had put Quito on a terrorist watch list; several others, calling him a provocateur, routinely denied him entry. And then there were the whispered conversations among academics that he was Nobel material. The problem, detractors claimed, was that he allowed a stunningly original mind to be corrupted by politics. Quito's supporters celebrated that same influence. At the height of his powers, he abruptly quit his academic post, returned to Pisac, the village of his birth, and launched what he called the Indigenous Liberation Front, or ILF. Using the Internet, a tool appropriated from the Enemy, Quito reached 300 million indigenous peoples worldwide and became the voice of a surging political and human rights movement. Poincaré had read the profiles in
Le Monde
, the G
uardian
and the N
ew York Times
; he had studied Quito's now classic papers on the systematic economic destruction of native peoples; and he fully doubted anyone could be so prolific or instantly charismatic—until, that is, the man stepped into the room. Without removing his pack, Quito walked directly to his host as if arriving for a long-sought audience.

    "Your reputation precedes you, Inspector."

    Bright, probing eyes met Poincaré's, followed by a firm handshake and a kind of preemptive friendliness that put one simultaneously on alert and at ease. The man had an undeniable force.

    "M
y r
eputation?" Poincaré responded.

    "No one who knows Interpol can afford not to know you."

    The spell broke the instant Quito closed two hands over Poincaré's outstretched hand, a touch that recalled bricks thrown in Seattle and cars burned in Rotterdam. At the WTO riots in Paris, a policeman lost sight in one eye—all protests directed by the man who greeted Poincaré so warmly now. Yet Quito had never once been named in a complaint. He was that clever.