It was a maneuver taught at Quantico, where they choreograph these things like ballets. The intent was to disarm a left-handed suspect who was unaware of the agent behind him. Charlie would doubtlessly say that the likelihood of meeting all those requirements was statistically insignificant. Nevertheless, the FBI, like Don's old Boy Scout troop, liked to be prepared for every eventuality. And this was about as perfect an opportunity as Don would ever get: rarely did you find anyone with a gun—anyone with a pulse—who was as distracted as Charlie was when he was working on a problem. Don shucked off his shoes and eased into the kitchen on silent stockingfeet. Ideally, he heard his old instructor explain, the agent would be able to clap on hand on the suspect's dominant wrist and another on the left shoulderblade. By pushing the shoulder forward before the suspect could react, the agent could simultaneously secure the weapon and break the suspect's hold on it, while keeping himself out of reach. Some of Don's fellow trainees had improved on the basic model by kicking the suspect's feet out from under him, but Don personally thought that was a great way to get yourself shot in the scuffle or slapped with a lawsuit later on. Moreover, Charlie was close enough to the kitchen counter that he might crack his head on the way down.
As if a distracted, gunwielding southpaw were not rare enough, the tactic was also prescribed for agents who had somehow lost their service revolvers—both because it was pretty desperate and because an agile target could conceivably grab the agent's holster with his non-dominant hand. No worries there, Don knew; handing a weapon was perhaps the only skill other than driving that Charlie had difficulty acquiring.
He took a wide stance, rocking up onto the balls of his feet to make the most the few inches he had on his brother. It worked like a charm, at first: left hand on left hand—right hand on left shoulder. Charlie, shaken from his math, let out such a squawk of surprise that Don started laughing. This would teach him to lock the door when he was at home alone! But he'd underestimated his little brother's tensile strength and forgotten that there was no weapon, just a long wooden spoon. Jumping back from the counter, Charlie knocked over the stack of papers. The spoon caught on the lip of the pitcher and that went over too. Don's socks slipped on the tile floor and he ended up on the ground, in a puddle, beneath a layer of paper.
"Don," Charlie sounded alarmed, "Are you OK? You just startled me…I was…now you're all wet!" He looked so ridiculously contrite, standing their waving that spoon that Don started laughing all over again.
"I was sneaking up on you genius!" he said. "You should be on the floor in a puddle of…is this lemonade?" Don picked himself up and shook off the damp papers that stuck to his wet shirt.
Charlie smiled uncertainly, still not quite sure what had happened, but glad that Don wasn't mad. "Maybe next time I should be the secret agent and you should be the absent-minded professor."
Don looked at the paper in his hand: at least a third of it appeared to be in Greek. "Uhmm, maybe not. What is this?"
"The latest chapter of Amita's thesis." Charlie said. Now it was Don's turn to feel guilty. "Don't worry," Charlie reassured him, "it's a draft. I bet she'll be more than happy to provide another copy once I explain that the original was lost in a hostile raid on my kitchen."
Don sent Charlie off to call Amita and started cleaning up the mess—he really did feel bad about damaging her thesis; this kind restlessness was exactly why he shouldn't be expected to sit in conferences all day. He managed to salvage a stack of notebooks that had been only slightly splashed, but Charlie said they were useless. Don looked at him, eyebrows raised; he'd never heard Charlie dismiss any math as useless.
"One of Carol Bressard's students keeps handing them in," Charlie paused on his way to the phone, "but they just…they're totally incoherant." He sounded frustrated by his inability to explain just how senseless the notations were. "She wanted me to look at them, as an outside opinion, 'cause this kid gets really upset when she disagrees with him. But I'm going to have to tell her not to OK the project unless he can come up with something better. I mean, compared with Amita, this—" Charlie flipped open a notebook to get the student's name "Anthony Padgett—he's is just in his own world, with his own mathematical rules."
Collecting pages off the floor, Don couldn't make heads or tails of Amita's work either, but he knew enough to see it was much more professional. Typed, for instance, instead of handwritten in various inks. Amita's work had headings and footnotes and page numbers, all the little details you add to research when you have other people in mind. Flipping through Padgett's notebook was like being inside Padgett's head: random thoughts in no particular order, written vertically, crossing margins, often breaking off in the middle of a page with no consideration toward the reader.
"Maybe you should tell that colleague to have Padgett talk to someone," Don suggested when Charlie wandered into the kitchen again.
"Carol can barely get him to talk to her," Charlie said as he pulled some limes from the fridge. "She thought bringing me in would help, but I didn't have much more luck. Anthony insists that we're just not seeing the obvious, but he doesn't want to go into details, lest we, I don't know, publish something earthshaking before he does." He seemed to sense Don watching him and turned around. "Oh," he said finally, "that kind of talk."
"I'm sure he's a very bright guy, but a doctoral student this out of touch with the basics of writing might need more than just an extension," Don said. Even Charlie, whose ideas were abstruse and whose rough drafts were frequently written on paper napkins, wouldn't dream of handing in something so disorganized. The academic niceties were second nature by the time grad school rolled around. "You know, a lot of undiagnosed schizophrenics have very high IQs, according to the profiler we had today. Something like seventy percent."
The numbers piqued Charlie's attention, as Don knew they would. "Seventy is high," the mathematician said, "but, then, you have to consider the definition of "high" intelligence. IQ is re-normed every year or so. If you didn't adjust the numbers, there would probably still be a 3 percent jump. Of that 3, only about—"
"I'm just saying," Don interrupted, "a lot of smart people can also be kind of unstable and sometimes it's hard to tell. Remember the economics guy from that movie? The one who won a Nobel prize? He said he believed the voices that told him about Communist plots because those same voices were right when they talked about economics."
"John Nash was a mathematician," Charlie corrected, "He won a Nobel for economics only because the Nobel Prize committee doesn't have a math award." He sounded personally offended that the Queen of the Sciences had been slighted by Stockholm: Larry teased him about it every year when the prizes were handed out. Don knew more about Nash was revealed in the movie—the profiler had gone into great detail—he just hadn't wanted to directly insult one of Charlie's applied math heroes; instead he'd brought up a point of constant contention. Smooth move. Charlie turned back to the cutting board, "Honestly, I think this Anthony is probably just stressed out, up against deadlines. He has to turn in something or forfeit his summer research stipend….Hey, you should go take a shower before that lemonade dries."
Don decided not to comment on the clumsy segue and wandered out to get the change of clothes he kept in his car. He was particularly careful to lock the front door firmly behind him. He'd heard it swing open and then slam while he was in the kitchen with Charlie; it really was time to fix that dead bolt. He was halfway to the bathroom when something caught his mind's eye.
"Charlie!" He yelled down the steps. He saw his brother's curly head stick through the kitchen doorway. "Did you…were you…Did I just see you counting those cherries?"
"The proportions are important," Charlie called back, sounding defensive. "Too many cherries and it's too sweet, too many limes and…oh, just go take your shower!"