The coincidence engine
A hurricane sweeps off the Gulf of Mexico and in the back-country of Alabama, assembles a passenger jet out of old bean-cans and junkyard waste. An eccentric mathematician vanishes in the French Pyrenees. And the thuggish operatives of a multinational arms conglomerate close in on Alex Smart - a harmless Cambridge postgraduate who has set off to ask his American girlfriend to marry him. At the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable - an organisation so secret, many of its operatives aren't a hundred per cent sure it exists - Red Queen takes an interest. What ensues is a chaotic chase across an imaginary America, haunted by madness, murder, mistaken identity, and vast amounts of unhealthy but delicious snacks. The Coincidence Engine exists. And it has started to work.
Intelligence service, Mathematicians, Probabilities, Coincidence, Mathematical instruments
Sam Leith