by Matt Richtel
He hears the voices. Outside in the hotel bedroom. He’s still locked in the bathroom. Andrea, presumably, is still outside. The TV, or is she no longer alone?
CHAPTER 30
ELI, RISE.”
He’s been dreaming. The van smells like warm bread, freshly cooked in a brick oven in a bazaar back home. The bearded man is ravenous.
“Challah?” Janine says. “Do I pronounce it correctly?”
Tears fill the bearded man’s eyes.
“We’re here,” says the raven-haired women with the perfect teeth and the soft pink lips and the evil glow in her eyes. She looks tantalizing, like treif, succulent nonkosher food.
How long has the bearded man been asleep? Not long.
“Where are we?”
“Border of Oakland and Berkeley. You’ve heard of Berkeley?”
“It is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,” he says. He looks up, stunned at what he sees on this ramshackle street. “Is this a temple?” he asks.
He’s looking out the van window at a modest street-level establishment, no windows, but ornate doors. Hebrew scrawl, four Stars of David. A temple? It is sandwiched between an apartment building that looks abandoned, with a rusted metal jungle gym on the lawn, and a barbecue restaurant that looks like it should be abandoned.
“No. Not an actual temple. It is, what’s the word, a front. We would not do you such an insult by using a holy place. Keep your head covered, Guardian, please,” Janine says. She hands him a prayer shawl.
He clenches his teeth. Who is she to give him such a garment?
“I ask humbly, Guardian,” Janine says. “It is to protect your identity. Because you are a terrorist.”
He looks at her.
“Like me,” she smiles tightly, and opens the door to the van.
INSIDE, SECONDS LATER, his heart bounces, a rabbit in a warren in his chest. Two dozen people sit in the mock congregation, or stand and mingle. When he enters the surprisingly cavernous sanctuary—its size hidden from the street—all eyes turn to the pair.
His first thought: melting pot.
His second: sacrilege.
White faces, light brown ones, a few dark.
Some with yarmulkes, others crosses. One man kneels on a mat, facing his left. Moaning in Arabic, from the Koran.
“Not the tiny cell you imagined,” Janine says.
“Guardians?” gasps the bearded man.
Janine nods.
“Ange,” comes a voice from the back.
“Curatore.” Another.
“Guardianna.” A woman in the back. Mexican accent.
Tears again sting the bearded man’s eyes. It is as he’s heard. A mélange of the most faithful. Brothers and sisters.
The man on the mat stands, he pulls up his pants leg. On his ankle, a tattoo, a lion on its hind legs.
There is rustling at the front of the congregation, a man in all black going up the stairs to an ark.
“The covenant,” Eli says.
The covenant.
What was agreed upon by God and Abraham. Only through adherence to the word of God will all the nations of the Earth be blessed.
The covenant. No compromise.
Eli looks at the ark, which the man in all black has opened. Sitting inside on soft purple felt is not the Bible, not the Torah, but a metallic cylinder. It is hollow in the middle. A hole that could contain a very large Tootsie Roll or a loaf of freshly baked sourdough bread.
He knows that shape. It’s the shape of the black object he’s been carrying in the backpack. The insides, the guts of the atomic weapon.
He turns to Janine and he sees that light in her eyes, the demonic light. He holds the backpack tight and thinks he might run.
The man who had been kneeling on a mat muttering from the Koran rises. “We don’t have much time, Eli.”
Janine clears her throat. The assembled look in her direction. Clearly, she is a leader here. The leader? It’s not clear to the bearded man.
“We have work to do,” Janine says. “There are complications.”
There are murmurs.
“Guardians!” she commands them. They pause and take her in. “I have a puzzle for you, a question: what do you call a black man flying?”
The assembled seem struck, confused. Is she telling them a joke?
The answer comes from a stout woman, hearty, dressed conservatively in a handsome pants suit. “A pilot, you racist.”
It is a joke, and a few of them get it, and laugh.
“Please remember that we are united, Guardians, by our faith, and united we will succeed. Each here knows his or her job. So let us get the divine weapon where it belongs, and put the rest of the pieces in place. You know where to gather, in that beautiful park.”
A voice says: “The Presidio.”
Janine continues but now she quietly addresses Eli. “Join me. I am told we have a particularly special task.”
Her rare combination of beauty and cruelty, a devil’s charisma, causes him to take a step backward. And then follow her out the door.
CHAPTER 31
JEREMY SWALLOWS, COUGHS, throat dry to the point where he feels like he might choke, presses his ear to the door. He hears at least three sounds: the television and two voices.
Then just the television. Is he imagining things, more than one voice?
He looks next to him on the cool, smooth stone floor, finds his iPad, fingers the screen. It is 4:25. He’s been asleep, he calculates, a little more than three hours.
He looks at the map. Red, red, red. The countdown clock: 14:10:07.
14:10:06.
14:10:05.
He shakes his head. Where did the hours go?
14:10:04.
And there, in the upper right-hand corner, a notification. The results have come back from the test he programmed before he fell asleep. His finger hovers over it, poised to click, even as he tries to make out what’s going on in the bedroom. He can’t make out what’s being discussed on the TV. The tenor and vibe sound like news, maybe the CNN early report.
There’s a knock, knock on his door. A hard rap, not the work of a hand, but a book, an object intended to make a lot of noise. It startles him and he almost topples forward. It must’ve been what woke him. He pictures the dream, his mother, frail but unyielding, Kent, boyish in his pajamas, then unyielding too with his mustache. The puzzle.
“Are you listening?”
Jeremy recognizes Andrea’s voice. He clears his throat. Craves water. “I fell asleep.”
From the other side of the door, Andrea says:
“Harry W. Ives, a renowned professor of conflict studies, was found dead last night from multiple stab wounds. Police said the esteemed scholar was discovered in his office on the Berkeley campus by a student. They have identified and are seeking a suspect described as a white male in his early thirties believed to be an acquaintance of Dr. Ives.”
Jeremy leans his head against the wall. He looks up at the ceiling, sees the air duct. Thinks: I need a trampoline to get into it and a tiny stunt double to slither through the canals to my escape.
“I told you,” he said.
“You didn’t tell me he’d been murdered. Get out here, we need to talk. I know. I can help you.”
“I need to wash up. Give me a second, please.”
He opens his phone, turns it on. While waiting for it to power up, he clicks on the iPad for results from his test. An hourglass appears. In seconds, he’ll know which of the variables is most important in predicting the impending conflict. Or, he thinks, as words begin to materialize, he’ll know the variable or variables most material in predicting the alleged conflict.
On the screen, a header: 362,880 results.
Damn it, Jeremy thinks. His chin falls. Why didn’t I think of it before? This is nine factorial. I’m going to get an endless stream of results, combining and mixing and matching all the different influences. How am I going to wade through the different permutations to determine which is the
most telling? It will take a veritable infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of screens to go through all this shit.
Punctuating his concerns, the results begin to scroll. The first few look like:
CHANGED PARAMETER(S) COUNTDOWN CLOCK MAGNITUDE DELTA
Mexico rhetoric constant 28 hours, 55 minutes 0%
Mexico/Russia constant 28 hours, 55 minutes −9%
Mexico/Russia/Tantalum 28 hours, 55 minutes 1%
The list scrolls and scrolls and scrolls. At first, he’s able to see only the swirl, the unfurling of the data, a ghost whir of returning results.
“Jeremy, do I need to call the front desk to tell them that my husband has locked himself in the bathroom?”
“One sec.”
He forces himself to focus on the first three results to remind himself what he’s looking at. The first column describes which combination of parameters has been held artificially constant by the computer. In other words, in the test represented in the first line, the world is precisely as it is today except that the conflict rhetoric in Mexico was not intensified. Under such a scenario, the countdown clock is unchanged—as represented in column two—and the magnitude of the conflict is unchanged, the number of people projected to die, as represented in column three.
It tells Jeremy that Mexico alone, the rising conflict rhetoric there, is not where he should be focusing his investigations.
But the second line offers a different insight. It says that if the conflict rhetoric is held constant in both Mexico and Russia, then the attack still happens but its magnitude falls. And measurably. The projected deaths drop 9 percent.
What does Mexico have to do with Russia?
In the third line, the shipments of tantalum are kept constant. The countdown clock remains unchanged. The projected deaths rise 1 percent.
He begins scrolling down the list, even as it continues to grow and grow. One permutation after the next. One catches his eye:
CHANGED PARAMETER(S) COUNTDOWN CLOCK MAGNITUDE DELTA
Mexico/Russia/Tantalum/Fertile Cresc/Arrest N/A −100%
Jeremy feels himself stop breathing. A delta of 100 percent.
Meaning: under the scenario in which the computer artificially holds constant the conflict rhetoric in Mexico, Russia, and the Fertile Crescent, and also holds constant shipments of tantalum and the arrest of the arms dealer, there is a 100 percent change in the prediction.
There is no attack.
A clue. Way more than that. The key. It’s in here. Somewhere in here.
“That’s it,” he mumbles.
There’s a vigorous knock on the door.
Jeremy feels the perspiration on his hands, hears a veritable echo inside his head. He’s so tired, can’t tell if he’s understanding her.
“What?”
“I just need to clean myself up.”
The computer was right.
“Lavelle. The lieutenant colonel . . .” Her voice trails off.
Jeremy doesn’t respond. He’s got an idea. He starts clicking on his keyboard. He’s regrouping all the results, the hundreds of thousands of results. He’s grouping them in terms of which results have the highest “magnitude delta,” in other words, which ones wind up with a set of variables under which there will be no predicted attack.
Within seconds, he’s found what he’s looking for. There are eight such scenarios. He looks down the list of them, looking for the common theme. Until it strikes him.
“Impossible,” Jeremy mutters. He leans in close to the computer. “You’ve got to be lying to me.” He tilts his head. “Or you’re very, very good.”
He stands up, gently pushing the iPad on the floor. He lets pass a lightheaded wave, feels the creases uncrease in the jeans he’s been sitting in, sleeping in, the blood drop back down into his numb feet. He shuffles to the mirror, sees the ragged face looking back at him, can’t help noticing the same pointy chin as his mother, the hawkish eyes, but the nose that came from somewhere else altogether. He thinks of her taunting presence in the dream, purporting to hold all the answers in her hand.
He thinks: Screw you. Screw all of you. I’m holding the answers. He glances at the iPad. Impossible. But possible. The country codes, Evan, the Pentagon, they must fit together some way.
And now this, a powerful message from the computer: the chief parameter leading to the prediction of war is that tensions have cooled in the Middle East.
Jeremy flicks on the cold water, lowers his head to the sink, splashes and splashes.
Out of more than three hundred thousand scenarios, there are eight under which there will be no attack whatsoever. Under all eight scenarios, the conflict rhetoric in the Fertile Crescent doesn’t go down. It remains unchanged or, possibly, goes up.
Meaning: the one variable that Jeremy has dismissed as irrelevant—the Middle East seeming more peaceful—is the one most influential in triggering war. Singularly influential. Makes no sense, none. Things have been getting more peaceful in the Middle East, at least from the standpoint of the language of war.
The language of war has been intensifying in so many other places—up sharply in Mexico, moderately in Russia, North Korea, Congo—but it has been falling in the Fertile Crescent. According to the computer, it’s fallen 12 percent in intensity. The collective hue and cry from Israel, Iran, Syria, Egypt, has taken a turn in a positive direction. This is presumably what the world wants. Right?
There’s another basic pattern, one that completely stands to reason: the magnitude of the projected war rises and falls depending on how many of the other conflict parameters are included in the calculation.
For instance, if the rhetoric in North Korea does not intensify, the magnitude of the conflict gets smaller. Fewer people die.
If the Russian arms dealer is not arrested, the magnitude of the conflict gets smaller. Fewer people die.
Same thing if the Mexican conflict rhetoric is held in check. Or if there is no rise in the Random Event Meter: in other words, if the lions aren’t let loose from the zoos.
And if more than one of those parameters is held in check, the magnitude falls even further. For instance, if the dealer is not arrested and the conflict rhetoric stays constant in Mexico and North Korea and Russia, then the magnitude drops precipitously.
And, in the most extreme case, if all the parameters are held in check except the drop in the conflict language in the Fertile Crescent, the magnitude seems to be limited to a single attack: one projected to take place in mere hours, right here in San Francisco.
The computer is telling him something absolutely essential: the most important parameter is the falling conflict rhetoric in the Fertile Crescent. It alone triggers the attack in San Francisco. Without it, no war. And if it is the only change in the last few weeks, then the conflict gets limited to San Francisco.
Is everything else a red herring? Does the tantalum or the arrest of the Russian arms dealer mean nothing? Jeremy senses otherwise; they’re all connected, somehow. But with varying degrees of significance.
Knock, knock on the door.
He towels off.
On his phone, he looks at the time. Nearly 5 a.m. Sees a text. “How can I help?” From Nik. At two in the morning. He’ll be waiting for a response. Jeremy thinks about his dream. The bridge, the view. The puzzle. Harry’s end-of-life warnings.
Jeremy taps back a message. He tells Nik what to do.
He slips the iPad into his backpack. Puts the backpack on, pulls the straps to tighten his swaddled baby on his back. Pulls open the door. “Let’s play chess,” he says.
No sooner has he cracked the door open than he feels a violent push from the other side. Jeremy begins to fall backward, thrown by the tremendous surge. Instinctively, he pushes back, throwing himself against the door, Jeremy in a nutshell, reacting to a push with a pushback of equal weight, greater, his nature fueled by fear, no, terror.
A reverse tug-of-war, bodies pressing and pushing the heavy wood door. Jeremy losing gr
ound. He sees hands grope inside, not just two, not just Andrea. Another woman’s hand.
“Jeremy, we have to talk to you.”
We.
He pushes, strains, feels his feet slip on the stone. He can’t hold this. He sees hair, a face begin to slip through the widening opening of the door; can’t believe his eyes. Her? He pushes back, a surge from his legs and trunk, a last effort to close himself in. The door begins to yield to his will. It’s closing, closing and, then, he can’t find any more reserve. The momentum begins to turn back.
He suddenly thinks: let them come.
He gives one last grunt, a push, but a feint, waits for the inevitable heave back at him. When it comes, he lets go. The door swings open, the women—two women—fly past him, careening, bowling pins in reverse, spinning, slipping forward toward the bathroom counter.
Jeremy leans down and picks up his backpack. And he runs.
CHAPTER 32
CAN YOU FIND a secure line?”
Janine reads the text on her phone. The bearded man cringes; they are driving fifty miles an hour over the Bay Bridge, heading to San Francisco. Janine, steering with a knee, texts back: “Um, yeah, this one.”
Seconds later, her phone rings. She presses a button and a voice comes onto the speaker.
“I won’t repeat this,” the voice says.
The audio quality is bad, choppy, with static. But the bearded man feels a moment of awe. This must be the master Guardian, the one calling the shots.
“We have access to the code.”
The bearded man doesn’t understand. The code? He looks at Janine, who seems to blink rapidly. Processing, troubled.
“Didn’t we always have the code?” she asks into the phone.
“Sabra, there was no point in telling you we didn’t have it when we knew we’d get it.”
She smiles, willing herself to find some external expression that doesn’t match her fury. What was the point of going through all this, the months of prelude—the years—if they didn’t have the code in the first place? I’m not your fucking Sabra. That’s Hebrew, not the right language. I’m Syrian, Christian, Arabic, and no less righteous.
