7. Standard Deviation
"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you." -- Eric Hoffer
The elevator doors opened with a delicate ring onto the office, the first things out of them being a pair of crutches whose rubber tips did not agree at all with the polished floor. Nevertheless, their passenger seemed confident enough, confident… or desperate. Making his way through the buzzing office, he inspired many comments and even more looks. At last, he found a familiar face.
"Don?" Megan looked him up and down, taking in the crutches and his half-bent right leg with a suspicious expression. "I thought you weren't supposed to be out until tomorrow."
"I wasn't," he replied.
"Ah. Well, I'm glad you're here. We just got ballistics off the shells found on the lawn: AK-47, standard issue. All we know at this point is that the car was black, so we couldn't even begin to get license plates. Oh, and I got your message; Colby and David are out looking for your father. They should be back soon."
He nodded approvingly. "Good, I appreciate it." Looking around the office, he seemed to be scanning faces. "And Charlie?"
Her gaze dropped to the floor; Don didn't have to be an FBI agent to know what that meant.
"What?" he prompted.
"He's in the war room," she said hesitantly. "He's been there since we picked him up. I tried to stop him, but I think it's some kind of post-traumatic stress reaction…"
"Stop him from doing what, exactly?"
She finally met his eyes. "You should talk to him. The only thing I can get him to do is ask for you."
Slowly, he nodded, and she made for her cubicle. Continuing down the hall, he approached the conference room, coming to a halt in the doorway. The view it afforded him of the room stopped her dead in her tracks.
The whiteboard that stood at the far end of the room was, as usual, covered with a stream of symbols and variables that he could only pretend to understand. However, the formula didn't end there; the windows were covered with it, messy scrawl invading the panes. From here, the numbers flowed down the sills, dripping down the walls and congealing in pools at their junctures with the floor. The lines ran around the perimeter, a giant vortex of calculations in circles that slowly got smaller and smaller, converging on a single point in the center of the room. Perhaps four feet square, this bare patch was barely big enough for the person it enclosed.
In the middle of the maelstrom sat Charlie; cross-legged, he looked possessed, his eyes wide and yet unseeing. In one hand, he held a marker, nearly inkless with its recent usage. In the other, he clutched his cell phone.
Her quiet observations were interrupted by Charlie, who finally seemed to have realized his presence.
"Don?" he said softly.
"Hey, buddy," he replied as calmly as he could manage. "Looks like you've been busy." Understatement of the year.
Charlie just stared, blinking as if he'd never seen him before.
"Well, this changes things," he muttered. Rising, he paced around the room, examining a section of equation on the window with interest and amending some of the symbols written there. Charlie's attention otherwise occupied, Don worked his way slowly to the whiteboard, across which the letters U R NEXT CHARLES EPPES had been scribbled amongst a heap of numbers.
"You mind telling me what this is all about?" Don asked.
"It's just game theory," Charlie said, turning to behold Don at the whiteboard. "Oh, that. That," he said, "I received a little less than three hours ago. Megan was right when she said this has gotten a lot more personal." He turned back to the window and resumed his corrections.
Crossing the room, Don approached him, noting the somewhat crazed light in his eyes with worry.
"Hey, look, Charlie, what do you say you take a break? It looks like you've got plenty to explain to me already."
"No, I'm good," Charlie replied. "Since this is personal, I took the liberty of combing your previous cases for suspects. All I've actually managed to do is match our guy's movements to an existing MO. I haven't even begun to map out the possible resolutions at a quantum level; I haven't even developed a weighting system for the variables yet."
"Hold on, hold on," said Don, grabbing Charlie's wrist to keep him from working. "What MO did you match it with?"
Charlie closed his eyes and sighed. "Do you remember a few months ago when you did that case on the wiped out bank accounts that suddenly got very personal? We tried to use a backscatter program, but they sent an encoded message telling us it was a setup?"
Don let go of his wrist and stared. "If you're suggesting what I think you're suggesting—"
Charlie shrugged and turned back to the window. "Let's face it, Don; this whole case looks exactly like the standard operating procedure of the Russian mob."