by Matt Richtel
On one level, it’s compelling. Very much so. Not that Silicon Valley companies would buy tantalum. Everyone’s in the mobile space. But the fact they’d do so in concert. Why cooperate on something so competitive?
But what could that possibly have to do with war?
He shakes his head, willing away cobwebs and dust and exhaustion, turns off the phone, pulls himself closer to the side of a restaurant behind him. Wants to blend in, a red-slickered object of what he assumes must now be a manhunt.
Jeremy, feeling intensely self-conscious, looks up. His eye again catches the tint-windowed sport utility vehicle, the kind you see all the time in Washington, D.C., a heavy, dark power machine.
The passenger door opens. A man gets out and jogs into the hotel lobby.
No way. Jeremy shakes his head. No way.
CHAPTER 23
THE DOCK CREAKS and groans. Light waves rock the gigantic anchored ships, nothing compared with the powerful sounds produced crossing the Pacific, but then the churn and purr of the engine had covered the clash of ocean and steel.
The man with the beard and the backpack crouches. So much of his life is spent crouching. Hiding, scurrying, the posture of the Lord’s work is not a proud one, not in the era of heretics. In this case, he crouches behind containers at the Port of Oakland. Not far to his left, he can see the ship he stowed away on, which landed hours ago, and now he’s watching the police hustle about.
They’ve found the young man whose neck he broke, whom he ushered into the next life. He had no choice.
And his righteous certitude has been reinforced by the ease with which he escaped the ship onto the dock—safely and with his deadly backpack by his side. God must be here or he’d be in handcuffs right now.
He pulls the backpack close, waiting for the Guardians to find him.
He hears a policeman “comb the place,” and the words take him back to the beginning. He pulls close to the shipping container and thinks about the story, how long his people have been hiding while heretics comb the world for them.
“Your grandfather, Fishl, he knelt and he waited,” his father’s story would begin.
Always the kneeling, always the waiting. He could imagine his grandfather’s beard, and see his father’s own commanding beard, a towering upside-down cone, wisdom in the form of facial hair. The story was always the same. His grandfather knelt, and waited, and listened to the onrush of furious Russian villagers, literally wielding pitchforks, literally on horseback, like a cliché of the horsemen of the apocalypse. If only the world could’ve been so lucky. It wasn’t the end of days, just the end of another poor Jewish village, its inhabitants persecuted because they did exactly as they were told: helped the nobility tax and manage the peasants. Jews, wanting only to be left alone to pursue their beliefs, by happenstance gained middle-class status, upward mobility.
But the Russian peasants didn’t understand that. And finally fed up with the inequities that governed their society, they turned on the Jews, the partners of a noble class that were themselves untouchable with pitchforks. Just another deadly ebb in the ebb and flow of the Jews in European culture. A boatload of pious refugees subject to the waves of change, awaiting final redemption.
His grandfather could hear the wails of the murders on the edges of the village, the shouts and cries of the mothers begging for their babies’ lives. And then, his father tells him, his grandfather heard another voice telling him what he must do.
“Was it . . . ?” the boy would ask. He’d know he couldn’t say “God,” but how could he ask if his grandfather had heard a divine voice?
“No, Moshe,” his father said, understanding the unspoken. “It was the rebbe,” in his devout sect, a divine intermediary, a prophet. “He said, ‘Go that we might live.’ Your grandfather begged to stay. But he was commanded.”
And so, the story went, his grandfather leaped from the window, escaped and eventually became a seedling planted in the verdant valleys in the north of Palestine. And from him sprouted the bloodline, his father, like his great-grandfather a pious man, committed to the word and the ancient code, the Talmud, and not wayward convenience. And certainly not to Israel.
Israel, a heretical concept. At least a secular Israel. In fact, little could be more heretical. Its establishment would, in effect, institutionalize, formalize godlessness. The Messiah might well never come.
“So it is bad that Grandfather came here?” the boy would ask.
“Quite the opposite.” Of course, his father always had the answer. “We are here for a reason, an important reason.”
His father tells him, again, about the Guardians. In ancient times, Rabbi Judah the Prince sent emissaries to inspect pastoral towns. In one, these rabbi emissaries asked to see the city guardian and they were shown a municipal guard. The emissaries said this was not a guard, but a city destroyer. The townspeople asked who should be considered a guard, and the rabbis said: “The scribes and the scholars.”
The Guardians of the City. Neturei-Karta. From Aramaic. The Jews who would keep this land pure, who would not allow a secular weed to take root. His father, among their leaders, was hunted for seeking to disrupt the Zionists in 1947 and 1948. So hunted that he was forced to disappear, or maybe the hunters got him.
“Our own people,” his father told him before he packed up a small sack of belongings. It was the last time he saw his father, and that majestic beard. “Tracked down by our own people so that they might do the work of Satan and create a goyish land. Take care of your mother, Moshe. Guard the city.”
The boy thinks of the old words; the Zionists combed the northern valleys for his father, as these heretics surely will comb the belly of the ship for him, the boy, the grandson, now bearded himself, carrying the mission. Neturei Karta. And the stakes so magnified. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be called to such purpose.
And, as always, such risk, and uncertainty. Seeming happenstance that left him with his half of this deadly suitcase, a treasure bestowed by unlikely authorities, inert though it is in its current state.
And then a contact from the Old City, and another contact, calling his tiny cell to action. Giving him clear but incomplete directions, codes, instructions to find an unlikely—even impossible ally—a woman, a Syrian, a Christian. The Guardians, he’s told, are no longer merely Jews, as the world’s mythology heralds. They are Christians, Rastafarians, a secret network, zealots, in the best sense of the word. A simple, abiding, core belief: for the Messiah to come, they must cleanse Jerusalem of the infidels. The nonbelievers.
And the nonbelievers have become so powerful. They hold the key to forever undoing the eternal peace.
Can it be that he and a Christian from Syria, and white men from America, are not enemies but share a common enemy?
These are, anyhow, the rumors. He will believe it when he sees it.
And then he does—he sees it. Rather, he sees her.
A woman like a shadow moves through the open platform, unnoticed, and then scurries between two containers. She is dark-haired and dark-skinned. And soon, she is nearly beside him. How did she find him?
He pulls the backpack tight as she inches near.
She whispers: “Have no fear of atomic energy.”
“Shalom,” he says.
“Salam,” she says, then repeats: “Have no fear of atomic energy.”
The bearded man keeps his back to the voice. “None of them can-a stop-a the time.”
“Redemption Song,” by Bob Marley, the code.
The man looks directly into her face and sees her bright eyes, breaking into a smile.
He recoils. Her smile, it is not joy, but tightly controlled fury, the look of a bloodthirsty animal before a fight, anxious to kill, and eat what it has killed.
“You are Janine,” he stammers.
“That works.”
“The Guardian.”
“No, I am not the Guardian. Merely a guardian, as it were, a foot soldier, like you. You will meet him soon. Come. We a
re in a hurry.”
“There’s a problem?”
By way of an answer, she ushers him with a gentle hand on his elbow. Moments later, undetected, they’ve made their way into the port parking lot. She opens the door to a dark blue van, loosing from the inside stale air. She gestures him inside.
She eyes his backpack.
“You have done a wonderful thing. Now we have our divine tool.”
“How long before . . .”
“Mere hours.” She guns the engine, accelerating the van out of the lot. “But, first, we have urgent work.”
CHAPTER 24
JEREMY PRESSES HIMSELF against the building, wants to withdraw his head into his slicker, turtlelike.
Alternatively, he wants to sink his teeth into an attack, a drooling, take-no-prisoners, savage attack.
He knows he wasn’t imagining things. Knows that cocky gait, the too-cool for an umbrella or a jacket, the iPad case tucked under his arm.
What the hell was Evan doing climbing out of a sport utility vehicle across the street?
But that’s only the setup. Jeremy’s staring now around the corner of the building at the punch line.
The SUV dropped off Evan, then sped off, and seconds later appeared around the corner and parked at the valet stand at Perry’s.
The door opened.
One sheer leg, the hem of a knee-length skirt, the other leg. Deliberate, practiced, careful, seductive. Andrea.
He’s watching her now, as she hands the keys to the valet, curtsies a flirtatious little thank-you. All while looking around, swiveling her head, craning her neck to look inside.
I’m right here, Andrea, Jeremy thinks. Watching you lie.
She was the one driving the big sport utility vehicle that dropped off Evan. He’s almost positive, but not positive positive. The big car dropped off Evan and sped around the block, out of sight. Then it, or one virtually identical, appeared at the front of Perry’s. Hard to imagine, almost impossible to imagine, it was two different cars.
Andrea opens the rear door, pulls out a handbag off the backseat. Which for some reason makes Jeremy think: handgun. She’s licensed to carry. She once flirted with him by suggesting she’d purchased a pink holster bra.
“Packing a concealed gun is like wearing lingerie,” she told Jeremy. “Even if you’re the only one who knows you’re wearing it, it still makes you feel different.”
“What if you’re wearing both—a gun and lingerie?”
She laughed that syrupy laugh. “Exactly my point.”
She walks into the restaurant. Jeremy looks at the revolving doors of the hotel, then back. Evan barely knew Andrea, right? And what little they knew of each other, they professed to hate.
“We call someone like him an instigator,” Andrea once told Jeremy of Evan. Meaning: he tries to disrupt things so that he can find market opportunities in the rubble. “A business terrorist.”
Jeremy’s not sure of the time, but can safely assume it’s a little past five, the hour of his planned meeting with Andrea.
The rain is intensifying, not yet a downpour but now a challenge to the limits of his cheap slicker. A bus passes, flush with passengers, including one woman Jeremy can see with a cheek matted against the window in a post-work nap. Behind it, a taxi. Its driver reaches the intersection just in front of Jeremy and makes a sharp U-turn. On any other day, Jeremy lets the driver have it, threatens to call 911, maybe does so.
The driver pulls into the circular entrance of the hotel. Seconds later, Evan slips through the revolving doors. He’s not alone. Next to him, two people: an elegant man in a gray suit, wisps of gray hair to match, tall but slightly bent at the shoulders, weathered, dark-hued skin; and a woman with a pink suit and short, fast steps. Jeremy recognizes them, sort of. People in the high-tech world, big dogs. He pulls himself into the building, close as he might. Wishes for invisibility. Evan and the pair climb into the taxi, and it speeds away.
Jeremy takes a deep breath, looks down, inhales deeply again.
He reaches behind him, feels his backpack. It’s damp but not soaked. He sees the coffee stand across the street, an awning shaking in the wind and three tables beneath umbrellas. Mild shelter but the vantage point he’s looking for.
He decides he must stop thinking. There’s too much to think about, and not enough: not enough data to conclude anything. He must act. He needs more data.
He sneaks a look at the iPad, the clock.
26:40:40.
He shoves the device back into the bag.
Two minutes later, he stands against the side of the coffee hut across the street, a vantage point from which he can look right into the front of Perry’s. He can see someone standing right inside the door, beside the maître d’ stand. Might well be Andrea, a woman almost certainly, given the person’s height, but hard to be sure it’s her because of the drizzle on the windows. He can see the woman glance at something in her hand, probably a phone. She noodles with it—dialing; reading a text?—then puts it to her ear.
Jeremy scrambles to pull his phone from his pocket. She’s got to be calling him, naturally; that’s what you do when your friend is late. Even if the woman at the front of the restaurant isn’t her, even if Andrea’s sitting at the bar, or at a table, she’s got to be calling him, or she will soon. He turns on his iPhone. He’ll keep it brief, he promises himself, hoping to forestall anyone tracking him as the device comes to life.
The screen flickers and so does a hard truth. Jeremy can’t go to the police, not to Harry, or Evan or Andrea. The media? Who can he turn to for help?
“You want a coffee?”
Jeremy looks up to see a short man with a mustache and an East Indian accent, gleaming teeth in a crescent smile, holding out a coffee in a tall white to-go cup.
“On the house,” the man says in a high voice. “I’m done for the day. Take a pastry, too. Even the pigeons aren’t buying in this shit.”
Jeremy looks at the counter, with a spread of pastries, crumbly muffins, a gooey lemon bar wrapped in plastic, croissants, a half sandwich. “Take a couple,” the man says, cleaning the nozzle of the milk steamer on his industrial espresso maker.
Jeremy pockets the tuna sandwich, bites into a muffin, tasting cranberry, turns to look back at Perry’s.
“A simple thanks would be nice,” the man mutters.
Jeremy almost says: I thought you said they were free. Instead he looks back and says: “I really appreciate it.” But stops short of a completely human truth: I’m having a really bad day. That would be tantamount to an apology for not saying thanks.
His phone rings. With a mouthful of half-chewed muffin, he fumbles the phone and looks at the screen. A 202 area code. He answers.
“You’re late, Atlas.”
He swallows, a strategy forming. “You know how it is.”
“How what is?”
“Having the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
She laughs. “It never fails to amaze me, even surprise me, how you communicate. It’s like Ping-Pong,” she says. “Volleys, deep shots and chip shots, spin, things that keep the other person off balance, even in the most innocuous exchange. Then the occasional overhead smash. Maybe it’s more like Ping-Pong meets chess meets javelin throw.”
“New plan, Andrea.”
“Case in point.” She hesitates. “I like spontaneity.”
“It’s a little weird.”
“Even better.”
“I want you to come outside but stay on the phone with me.”
Finally, silence. Then: “It’s raining.”
“When you get out here give the guy your valet ticket.”
More silence. He can hear her brain clicking and he can guess what she’s thinking: how does he know I parked my car with the valet? It’s a logical assumption that I did so, but still. For his part, Jeremy wants to make sure she stays on the phone, that she can’t alert someone she might be in cahoots with, whoever that might be, or for whatever reason.
; “I’m watching you,” Jeremy says.
“What?”
He lets loose a small laugh, to keep her off balance. “I know, Andrea.”
She clears her throat. “Okay, you’re right.”
“About what?”
“This is weird. It’s downright kinky.”
He has to smile. She’s good. She’s not giving an inch, just like his mother.
“What happens after I give my ticket to the valet guy?” She pushes open the door at Perry’s. She had indeed been the woman at the front, near the maître d’ stand. He takes a big slug of coffee, looks around. Is there a place to hide? If not, he’ll soon be in plain sight when she starts looking around.
She walks outside, takes a step, then steps back against the building, remaining mildly protected by the blue awning.
“Is that you, a vision in red?”
“I’m down the block, to your right, around the corner.”
“Bullshit, Jeremy. I’m looking right at you.”
“Are you packing?”
She holds her hands up in the air, the phone away from her head, looking in his direction, as if to say: what the fuck? She brings the phone back to her head.
Jeremy says: “You’re not wearing cargo pants so I’m guessing it’s in your purse.”
“I can’t carry a gun on an airplane.”
“All the same, I want you to give the valet guy your ticket, put your purse in the trunk and then climb into the passenger seat. Tell the man that he’s going to give the keys to your husband.”
“Okay, enough. What the hell is going on, Jeremy?”
“Andrea, I know you’re lying to me. And I know you want something from me. And if you want it, you’re going to have to do it my way.”
