Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

“You are needed for an estimate, sir.”


It took Soter a few seconds to grasp that the man was not asking for him to perform a mathematical task. “You’re from ONE?”

The man’s cheek twitched a little, as if Soter had spoken out of turn, but he nodded. “Please, come with me.”

“I’m giving a lecture in ten minutes. You’ll have to—”

“Cancel it.” The man’s tone indicated that further debate would be futile.

Ten minutes later, when he should have been introducing himself to a hall full of graduate students, Soter found himself in the passenger seat of a Ford Granada, the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shrinking in the rear view mirror. He made no inquiries about where they were going or what was expected of him. The driver seemed a very tight-lipped sort of fellow, and someone would answer Sotor’s questions soon enough. After all, he couldn’t very well give them an estimate if they didn’t provide data.

An estimate. He found the euphemism rather amusing. He routinely used estimation in the course of his mathematical and statistical research, so it was almost ironic that the men from ONE—the Office of National Estimates—would utilize his expertise in formulating their predictions about world affairs. Indeed, the process of correlating intelligence and drawing probable conclusions was highly mathematical in nature, so all other things being equal, it was probably an appropriate term. Unfortunately, there were factors that always remained elusive in any equation—human variables—and that made all the difference between a well-founded estimate and a best guess.

ONE, a division of the Central Intelligence Agency, had been founded in the aftermath of the biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor—the Communist invasion of the Republic of Korea in 1950. It had resulted in a two-year long open conflict, and an ongoing state of war that persisted nearly thirty years later. The problem had not been a failure of intelligence, but rather a failure to draw accurate conclusions—estimates—based on available information. In the three decades that had followed, ONE had broadened their scope of influence somewhat to include operations, which Soter supposed, was a way of making sure that inaccurate estimations could be steered back on track. But that didn’t concern the mathematician. His job was simply to deal with the numbers.

The Granada pulled up at the Hotel Eliot, and the driver let Soter out. “They’re waiting for you,” the man said. “Room 237.”

Soter nodded and headed inside. Clandestine meetings in hotel rooms were standard for ONE, even when the subject of the estimate did not seem to warrant extraordinary secrecy. The meetings weren’t that much of an inconvenience, and they paid him well.

He took the stairs to the second floor. A short walk down the hall brought him to the door, which opened before he could knock. A man he did not recognize—older than the driver, and wearing an even better suit—stood aside and motioned for him to enter.

The room was heavy with cigarette smoke, but Soter saw three more men seated at a small table. One of them stood up and gestured for Soter to take his chair. He did not recognize any of the men, and while that wasn’t unusual—he had never dealt with the same person twice—it was strange to see so many representatives of ONE in the same place.

A single sheet of paper lay on the tabletop in front of him. A cursory glance revealed numbers, or more precisely typed digits. There were a lot of 1s, but a few 3s and 4s. The arrangement looked like a scatter plot of statistical data, but without a context, Soter couldn’t begin to guess at their significance. Someone had drawn a circle around a vertical column of six digits…no, not just digits. There were letters as well, but only in the circle.



6 E Q U J 5



The same pen had also drawn circles around a 6 and a 7, and then to the left of the numbers scrawled a single word: Wow!





Soter studied the characters in the circle a moment longer, then took another look at the paper itself. There were no indentations on the page from the ballpoint pen that had drawn the circles and written the exclamation. It was, he realized, a copy made on a Xerox machine.

“What is it?” he asked, looking up.

The man across the table took a long drag on his cigarette, then said, “You tell us.”

So that’s how it’s going to be, Soter thought. He looked at the paper again, ignoring the handwritten modifications and focused on the printed values instead. “Okay. This is a computer printout. The digits probably represent numbers—”