The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  He bellows: “What the fuck do you want?!”

  The words barely register. They get swallowed by the wind and a bus pulling up across the street, its broad side momentarily blocking Jeremy’s sight of his stalker. On the bus’s side, a lengthwise ad shows a woman sitting in an expansive plain, surrounded by exotic animals, a zebra, wildebeest, elephant, monkey. She holds an iPad. The ad copy reads: “With an iPad, you’re King of the Jungle.”

  “Jesus.” It’s the homeless guy, turning over in his refuse. “Find your own spot.”

  Jeremy stuffs his phone into his pocket and steps out of the mouth of the alley. He waits for a car to pass on his side of the street, then begins sprinting as the bus departs. When it disappears, Jeremy sees the woman has too.

  He’s standing in the middle of the street, looking around, as near as he can be to being frantic. He looks in the parking lot of the McDonald’s. A roadster pulls out, an old Fiat. It’s not the woman. Nor does it appear she’s in the window of the restaurant. Nor up and down the block. She could’ve gotten onto the bus. She could’ve slipped into a car. She could, Jeremy thinks, be a figment of my imagination.

  He puts his head back, looks up into the drizzle. He hears tires skid on the pavement. From the far corner of the McDonald’s lot, a midsize car appears, a dark tinted sedan.

  Gaining speed.

  Heading right for Jeremy.

  The car swerves out of the McDonald’s lot. Twenty feet away, ten. Jeremy dives left. A full sprawl. The car misses him by inches. His body smacks into the wet pavement, skids. Brakes screech. Jeremy rolls. Springs up, swivels. Ready to dive again. Sees the sedan drive off.

  He tries to shout, or wants to shout: “Stop! Police!” But he can’t get anything out. The car takes a left. Jeremy wants to run. His hands ache. Is something broken?

  “I got the license plate.”

  Jeremy turns and sees that the voice belongs to the homeless guy who’d been sleeping in the alley. He looks half bent at the waist, a lifetime of tragedy bearing down on him. He’s got wet newspaper stuck to his body.

  “F-L . . . something. It started with an F and an L. And then . . . . there was a seven in there.” He shakes his head. “Sorry, man. It’s bullshit out here.” He turns to the alley.

  “I’ve seen it before.”

  The same car he saw outside the subway earlier in the day, driven by the same stalker, the thin woman.

  “Are you okay?” he hears a voice say.

  A handful of people have trickled from McDonald’s, peering at the guy in the middle of the street having narrowly avoided a hit-and-run. Jeremy somehow recalls that San Francisco has the state’s highest rate of accidents involving cars hitting pedestrians and bicyclists; it has something to do with San Francisco being both a driving and a walking city.

  This was no accident.

  He brushes himself off. His hand burns, skid marks, embedded gravel. He can feel eyes on him, bystanders. But he’s lost in thought. A thousand inputs pouring into his brain. That woman at the bus stop, the car, and, oddly, the image on the side of the bus—a woman with an iPad turning into the king of the jungle, a lion.

  Something about lions. The computer said something about lions. That’s important. He reaches for the idea, can’t grasp it.

  “Sir, you want me to call an ambulance?”

  Jeremy shakes his head at the distant voice, no. I’m okay. Ideas, images are circling his brain, his brush with the pavement jostling things together in a new way. AskIt. The computer? He’s struck with an idea, something he can ask the algorithm. He needs a wi-fi network. Someplace to pull out his iPad and keyboard.

  He wipes away drizzle from his forehead, ambles to the sidewalk, sits on a bench at the bus stop.

  A stout black car takes a left from the street, kitty-corner. The car pulls in front of Jeremy and stops.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE WINDOW OF the black car slides down. Andrea leans over from the driver’s seat.

  “Get in, Jeremy.”

  He stands.

  “Jesus, Are you okay? What happened?” Now she’s looking him up and down.

  Jeremy’s palms burn with embedded gravel from his dive and skid.

  “Country codes,” he says.

  “What?”

  “They’re country codes!”

  “Did you hit your head?”

  Jeremy says: “Get out.”

  “I’m sorry, Atlas. I should’ve told you earlier . . . I didn’t know. I didn’t realize that you’d—”

  “Get out!”

  He reaches for the door handle. He sees Andrea recoil inside. He pulls on the door. It’s locked. He reaches inside. He can feel the interest of a small crowd. He hears someone call for the police.

  “I’m driving,” he says.

  “What just happened? Your shirt . . . your face . . .”

  He reaches inside for the door lock, groping.

  “Please move over and let me drive. You owe me.”

  “You’re right.”

  “You told me already,” Jeremy says. “Move over. You owe me.”

  “You’re right. Harry’s dead.” She says it in a loud whisper, suggesting her awareness of the crowd. “It’s on the news now. No details. Heart attack?”

  He glowers at her, doesn’t answer. He turns his back, beelines for the sidewalk, starts walking. Ten steps later, she’s pulled up next to him.

  “Get in,” she says through the rolled-down passenger window.

  He’s still walking. She inches along with him. “You’re in no condition to drive.”

  He hears sirens, maybe someone called in the near hit-and-run. He laughs. “Fine.” He stops and turns to her. “But I am in a condition to use the phone.”

  “What?”

  “You drive. I get your phone.”

  “You don’t have a phone?”

  “Battery’s dead.”

  She grits her teeth. She reaches into a compartment between the seats and pulls out her smartphone. She tosses it onto the passenger seat. She presses a button to unlock the door as Jeremy climbs inside.

  “What just happened?” she repeats.

  “You tell me.” He looks in the rearview mirror, sees the small crowd, losing interest. “First and Howard.”

  She hits the accelerator. “Which is where? And what?”

  He squints his eyes, thinking, trying to remember something. Evan’s office; there’s one on the peninsula, obviously, and one nearby.

  “Straight ahead and then left. The offices of SEER, but you know all about that.”

  “Jeremy—” After a pause, she says: “Who are you calling?”

  He doesn’t answer. On her iPhone, he does a Google search: “Country codes.” As it loads, he pulls from his back pocket the piece of paper onto which he’s copied Harry’s symbol and the numbers: 972, 970, 7, 41, 212, 986, 86, 218-650.

  He looks at the list of country codes delivered him via Google. The numbers correspond:

  Israel

  Ramallah, the West Bank

  Russia

  Switzerland

  Morocco

  Syria

  China

  “I figured something out.”

  “What?”

  “Country codes. All but the last one. 218-650. The one at the point of the V.”

  “Again: what?” Less frustration in her voice than resignation; she’s long since been accustomed to Jeremy’s communication style, working things out in his head as he goes, chess in every exchange, the stuff of a halting, sparring conversation.

  “It’s the important one, I think. The connection. The Middle East at the top.” Jeremy looks at Andrea, stuck in thought. Country codes. So what? What does the symbol mean?

  Andrea says: “You realize you only figure things out when you’re in a screaming match.”

  He blinks again.

  “I used to get you riled up when we talked, prick at you, get you fired up. You’d have searing insights. Conflict suits you, Jeremy.”<
br />
  “Take a right.”

  “It’s how you communicate, like the other person is simultaneously foe and sounding board.”

  She turns onto Howard. Traffic’s decidedly thinned, downtown, the business district, closing for the night. A lone taxi hurtles in the other direction. Jeremy can’t believe what he’s thinking: Harry was involved with something, instigating something? A conflict? Why? So he could then predict it, stop it, be the hero, prove that he’s the world’s greatest conflict sleuth.

  C’mon, Jeremy, he thinks to himself, even you can’t be that egocentric.

  “What’s ‘log cabin’?”

  Andrea swallows. She says: “We had an affair. But you know that.”

  “You and Evan.”

  Andrea blinks. She looks up at the long block ahead.

  “Where are we . . .” She pauses.

  “I assume you’re familiar with Evan’s offices. Pull over.”

  The building is on the right side of the street, taking up nearly half the block. It’s a checkerboard of dark and light, three-quarters of the offices shut down, mixed in with squares of workaholics, crashing and caffeinated entrepreneurs and litigators. Without further prompting, in silence, Andrea pulls up in front of the maroon-hued structure, with a marblelike exterior and revolving doors leading to a grand entrance, like the hallway to a train station. Inside, behind a desk, a lonely security guard, reading.

  “Okay.” Jeremy’s response, finally, is distant, noncommittal. As if to sarcastically say: whatever you say, Andrea.

  “Not an affair. One night. After one of those ridiculous parties, where you played the reluctant straw-that-stirs-the-drink. But Evan couldn’t let go, that night. Regardless, it’s irrelevant, one night. And not your business.”

  Jeremy looks up at the building. Not sure which office is Evan’s or if he’ll be there. Getting past the security guard is tougher than it looks, Jeremy knows. Condensation obscures the heavy glass windows and doors.

  Andrea puts her hand on Jeremy’s knee, withdraws it. “Please listen.”

  Jeremy half looks at her, acceding, looks away.

  “Why are you here?”

  “To tell you the truth.” She pauses. “And because I’m feeling used.”

  He feels suddenly, totally exhausted. How long has it been since he slept, or slept well? He glances at her phone in his hand, wanting to restart. He paws the list of “recent calls.”

  He can see that she received several calls earlier in the day from Evan, placed several calls herself to both Evan and Jstillwater, received several calls from blocked numbers, placed a handful to a number in the 703 area code. He hits the number. Puts the phone to his ear.

  “I have nothing to hide from you but this is beyond inappropriate.”

  Ring, ring, ring. Voice mail picks up. “You’ve reached Lavelle. I’m unavailable.” Then a beep.

  Jeremy racks his brain.

  “The big shot,” he says.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Thomson.”

  Andrea’s boss, the big boss. The guy who sat at the end of the table at the Pentagon and told Jeremy that his technology didn’t work promised Jeremy he could go overseas to test his technology against real, battlefield conditions, and then never followed through.

  “Lavelle is an odd first name.” An instinctive jab. “You’re pretty anxious to reach the boss. He’s not picking up.”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I’ll need the car keys.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want you to leave me here and I need to go tell Evan that I’m going to the press and the police.”

  “You’re the one that told me to get in touch with Evan.”

  “What?”

  “Your email, earlier today, after we talked.”

  He looks at her: no, I didn’t email you.

  “You asked me to contact Evan. Said it was important.”

  “Bullshit.” Then: “Someone’s been inside my computer.”

  He looks at her again. She shakes her head. Great acting or she has no idea what he’s talking about.

  “Jeremy, we’re allowed to have lives of our own.”

  “What?”

  “A lot of people gravitated to you because of your work; that much is true. I know that was heady, being in the middle of a big conversation. The investors and entrepreneurs and military folks and academics. But we were allowed to have our own lives, our own conversations.”

  He’s feeling plainly mystified. It dawns on him, clearly, he’s got to establish some common ground with her, some vernacular. He’s got to overcome his instinct to keep her off balance. Even if she’s lying to him—presumably she is lying to him—he’s not grounded enough with her to understand how to even poke around for the truth. They’re conversing on different planes; the pronouns, even, may reference different people.

  “What’s Evan doing? What’s SEER, the new venture?” Jeremy recalls looking earlier at Evan’s web site, seeing his partners, big names, like Google, Intel, Sun Microsystems, the major hardware and software players in the Valley, a who’s who. Something about the list tugs at Jeremy, but he can’t figure out what.

  Andrea shrugs.

  “The same companies buying tantalum!” He exclaims it, and then wishes he hadn’t.

  “C’mon, Jeremy. Make some sense.”

  “Tell me the truth, about your sudden reappearance in my life.”

  The glass doors of the office building revolve. Two women stride out, forcefully, ambitious strides of strivers. No umbrellas, impervious to anything but the market forces, which they can fully appreciate.

  From here Jeremy can see if Evan leaves the building. Or if he goes in, which is more likely. Maybe he’s still at that mysterious meeting downtown. Maybe he engineered Jeremy being run over; why? Nothing makes sense.

  He reaches into his backpack. He pulls out the iPad and he pulls out the attachable, external keyboard.

  “I’m telling you: I’ve been used too, Jeremy.”

  “Cute.” He doesn’t even look up. He’s connecting the keyboard. The iPad comes to life. He withdraws to the door and glances, privately, at the map, the clock.

  24:25:00.

  “Spare me the sympathy ploy and tell me the part about how and why the government lied to us.”

  Andrea furrows a brow, not getting what he means, then sees he’s typing on the computer. Us. He and it.

  “I didn’t know, Jeremy. I swear to the ends of the Earth.”

  “Curious word choice. Expecting the world to end?”

  “Focus, Jeremy. Let me answer your question about why I’m here.” She pauses, inhales, exhales. “When your paper came out, when you got all that notoriety, what, a couple of years ago, my bosses asked me to look into the validity of your findings. I made a report. Told them it seemed interesting if nascent. You joined the list of various conversation topics at various meetings. Y’know, Lavelle, the lieutenant colonel, would run down the agenda items, and every few months he’d check in with me about whether you seemed legitimate and whether you’d made any more progress with the technology.”

  Jeremy waves his hand. Meaning: speed forward. Something catches his eye. He looks up at the building’s revolving doors. A man exits and gets slightly bent back by the wind.

  “You know that distracted driving kills thousands of people each year,” Andrea says.

  “We’re parked.”

  “You can’t focus on two things at once, let alone three. I’m laying it out for you. Least you could do is pay full attention.”

  He just smirks.

  “Eventually, they asked me to make contact.”

  Andrea tells Jeremy what she’s told him several times before, in their early meetings. They told her they wanted to know if this kind of Big Data analysis—the latest new, new thing in Silicon Valley—might be applicable to war modeling. Could they predict conflict? Its onset? What might a computer see that gaggles of West Point studs, armed with mountains of historical
analogues, could not?

  “They warned me you were prickly.”

  “Was I as prickly as your other assets?”

  “If you’re trying to test my truthfulness, you already know you were my first asset, such as that word really means: guy who might be able to help us. This is not spy shit, Jeremy. It’s bureaucratic shit.”

  Jeremy again turns the iPad so only he can see it. Eyes the map, sees the red appears to be spreading. The initial attack begetting others, a domino effect in a nuclear era. He swipes away the screen and calls up the algorithm menu, the heart of the conflict algorithm software. It asks for a password.

  Jeremy reaches a finger beneath the silver chain hanging around his neck and pulls it over his head, freeing the key fob. In the process, he gets a whiff of himself, the ripe scent of stress and exhaustion. It triggers his awareness of the pulsing in his temples. He needs caffeine if he’s not going to get sleep.

  The key fob changes its nine-digit number every ten seconds. It shows a new number now. Jeremy types it in, followed by his password. An hourglass appears on the window, the algorithm innards materializing.

  “The rest is what meets the eye, Jeremy. I recruited you, we had you in to talk, we ran the tests, they didn’t work out, we parted ways.”

  He looks up at her.

  “You were after my computer.”

  “I told you that.”

  “No.” He’s eyeing the device, touches the fob.

  “You tinkered with the computer. When I first came to Washington to meet at the Pentagon. You and I had a drink, remember? In the hotel.”

  “Yes, but, no. I didn’t tinker with your computer.”

  “When I got back to my room, someone had monkeyed with it.”

  “You’re making this up as you go.”

  “Yeah, maybe. This is totally unwieldy.”

  “What is?”

  “I can’t work here.” He taps his fingers on the tablet. He needs Nik. Where the fuck is Nik? He should be up at this hour watching infomercials and snacking and waiting for Jeremy to call with an inane administrative request. Jeremy suppresses a moment of panic: what if they’ve come after Nik too?