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 Dir...