The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  On the grass that leads to the beach, someone has erected a placard with a picture of a lion on its hind legs.

  “The Lion of Judah.”

  Jeremy feels the car swerve. He looks up. Nik seems transfixed by the protestors.

  “Nik!”

  He jerks back the wheel. “Sickening.”

  “You’re really broken up about the lions.”

  “Of course it’s going to get shot.”

  Poor Nik. So boyish. “You know much about the Middle East?”

  “My parents, obviously.”

  They’d been missionaries all over the world, including in Jerusalem.

  “So you know the lion is the symbol for Jerusalem,” Jeremy says. “The Lion of Judah.” Then Jeremy shakes his head. He takes in Nik. Studies his pasty sidekick. Looks back out the window.

  “All roads lead there—to Jerusalem.” Almost under his breath. Then: “Where do Harry and Evan fit in? They fit in. It’s all connected.”

  “Evan’s not reachable. He’s out of town.”

  Jeremy blinks. He just saw Evan. Is Nik lying to him?

  “You asked me to find out and so I called his office and his assistant told me that he’s out of town on personal business through the weekend. I told her that I was someone’s assistant too and so she felt comfortable.”

  “A rare bit of manipulation.”

  “And she said he has an important meeting. Something top secret. Even she didn’t know what. She said, ‘You know how important bosses think they are.’”

  “Hmm.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Jeremy points to a sign. There’s an arrow. It reads: “Log Cabin.”

  “He left me something.”

  “Who?”

  Jeremy doesn’t answer. He’s thinking not only about Harry, and the admonition: log cabin. He’s thinking about Emily, who tells Jeremy that he misses the forest for the trees. She means that Jeremy always thinks about winning, confronting every little battle, rather than about the big picture. When it comes to Emily and Jeremy, it means that he doesn’t think about the overall health of the relationship; he thinks about scoring one more point.

  In the case of the “log cabin”—and Harry—Jeremy kept thinking it was a reference to the fight. Maybe that is what Harry was referring to. But there’s another possibility.

  Harry came all the time to the log cabin. It was where he did his thinking, wandering in the grassy knoll of the Presidio, a former military base that symbolized war and came to symbolize the transition to peace. And, Harry would prick Jeremy, no Internet access, so Harry could think in peace, let his brain roam without interruption or digital crutch.

  From the edge of the grove next to the log cabin, there’s a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The view represented in the puzzle in Jeremy’s dream.

  “Not the trees, Nik, the forest.”

  “What forest?”

  “Peace. Nik.”

  They wind up in the darkness, climbing toward the log cabin. Jeremy looks out and sees the very beginning of light, and the tip-top of the bridge. It’s the same view from his dream, the puzzle.

  The road veers to the left. A few more turns to the log cabin, answers.

  CHAPTER 35

  I DON’T SAY PLEASE much, do I?”

  The wheels of the Toyota crackle a last time and the car comes to rest at the cabin. Surrounding it, enveloping it, a grassy knoll and then trees. Just a few of the grand eucalyptuses that dot so many of San Francisco’s landmarks, even here in the Presidio. More of them here are mutt trees, short and tall, bushy, a little Hansel-and-Gretel forest of makeshift paths and hollows with the cabin at the gooey center.

  Occasionally, the spot gets rented out to wedding parties or for corporate bonding functions. More often, it’s just one of those landmarks where locals in the know picnic, or let their kids roam, or, in the case of Harry, come to think big thoughts.

  “I also tend not to ask questions,” Jeremy says.

  “Do you have a question?” Nik lifts a chocolate frosted and takes a fat bite.

  “If you were a secret, where would you be?”

  “In bed.”

  Jeremy almost lets himself laugh. He takes in his assistant. Is Nik a simpleton or canny? Quiet because he’s shy or deferential or for some other reason? Always in the shadows, with access to everything, all Jeremy’s contacts.

  “I just asked a question, and now I’m going to say please.”

  Nik looks at him.

  “Please drive the car over there.” Jeremy points to the far end of the gravel driveway, where the road, such as it is, resolves into a grove of trees. The car should be hidden there from the road. “Please keep your cell phone off, and then please help me start looking.”

  Nik, mid-bite, looks up.

  “I have no idea for what.” Jeremy opens the car door. He looks at the iPad.

  12:32:48. Hours, minutes, seconds, until attack.

  He closes the cover. He looks for his trusty backpack, remembers he’s sacrificed it to dupe Andrea and her statuesque henchwoman.

  “Can I use your bag?” Jeremy reaches down and lifts Nik’s worn leather bag with the long strap Nik slings over his shoulder, looking like a corpulent bike messenger.

  Nik eyes it. Shrugs. “You might want to pull out the library books.”

  Jeremy does; sets on the floor a book with a title about defensive boxing; some fitness book, Build Your Body in God’s Image; and something about foreign-language phonetics. Nik, always reverent, and quietly trying to better himself. A humble sidekick and nothing more. Right? Jeremy with mild disgust moves aside a hooded orange sweatshirt, almost stiff with perspiration, Nik’s boxing jersey. In its place, Jeremy stuffs his iPad and keyboard into the bag and slings it over his shoulder.

  His eyes roll over Nik.

  “Academics are not nearly as clever as they’d like to think. They overcomplicate things, they go for cheap symbolism, their ideas aren’t nearly as sophisticated as they’d have you think.”

  “Isn’t Harry dead?”

  “I’m not speaking ill. I’m being frank about how to find what we’re looking for.”

  “Did Harry tell you about the attack? Why aren’t you telling someone?”

  Jeremy, standing at the door, no longer facing Nik but looking at the outlines of the cabin in the darkness, pauses. It’s the first time someone other than Jeremy—or his computer—has taken seriously the idea that there might be an attack.

  “And like the sign says, no talking. Go where I’m not. Please.” Jeremy closes the door, takes a crunch step onto the gravel, eyes the sign stuck in the grass near the trees to the left. He can’t read it in the dark but he knows what’s on it: a phone in a circle with a red slash through it, and words underneath: “This is a peaceful place.”

  He makes a beeline for the cabin, endures an intruding memory, he and Emily and Harry sitting across the grass, the far side of the knoll, sandwiches and ostensible celebration. Harry looked like particular shit that day, khaki cargo shorts and a wrinkled button-down shirt, patterned with colorful checks and tucked in tight.

  “Have you been diagnosed with Pastelsheimer’s?” Jeremy prodded him.

  “Alzheimer’s?” Emily asked.

  Harry laughed. “I think he means that, at a certain age, you develop clothing dementia. Paisleys and Hawaiian shirts become the order of the day.”

  “Props to old Dr. War for self-awareness.”

  Laughter. Things had started well enough, Jeremy, abandoned by the investors and Pentagon, celebrating solidarity with the last of his loyal band of partisans. These guys, and Nik, they’d help him make his way back to conquer the known world or, rather, prevent its conquest by nefarious antagonists, Huns toting nuclear suitcases.

  It was shortly thereafter that Harry made the offhand remark when Jeremy glanced at his phone. Jeremy can’t remember the exact comment, something about Jeremy missing the forest for the phone. Jeremy blinked, then, without another beat, sa
id: “It can predict envy too.”

  Jeremy felt Emily’s hand on his leg, a squeeze.

  “It’s dehumanizing. It can’t fully comprehend conflict and might even contribute to it, Jeremy,” Harry said.

  “Careful, Dr. Ives,” Emily said. “You’re talking to a man who has much better relationships with computers than people.”

  She laughed when she said it, a joke of course. But no matter. That was that, a land war. The thing that Jeremy objected to most of all wasn’t the content of Harry’s statement, which didn’t totally make sense to him. Rather, what most bothered him was the pointed way Harry said “Jeremy” at the end of his admonition, like a parent to a child, or a sagacious professor to a not-sagacious student.

  Jeremy looks out into the darkness.

  What’s here, Harry?

  The dimmest light shines from inside horizontal windows running along the sides of the log cabin’s tall wooden doors. It’s the only spot of even modest visibility. Maybe the product of a night-light plugged in near the floor inside the door, some modest effort to discourage thieves or high school pranksters or whoever might stumble into this place at night.

  The light proves sufficient for Jeremy to make out the one part of this log cabin that is decidedly modern, the heavy industrial lock on the front door. He thinks, Gonna make it hard to get inside, if it comes to that. That’s suddenly not a priority. “The tree,” Jeremy mumbles. Not the proverbial forest, he’s thinking, an actual tree. He hears footsteps crunching on the gravel behind him. Nik. Apparently getting with the program.

  Jeremy starts walking purposefully, a near jog, across the native green-yellow grass, lumpy, pocked with tiny dirt mounds and, literally, molehills. His walk becomes a hundred-yard dash. Dead ahead, the spot where Emily unfurled the picnic blanket. No Kent that day, Jeremy remembers remarking, because the boy had been on a sleepover. “A grown-up thing,” Kent had said, a comment that, for some reason, irked Jeremy. What’s wrong with staying a kid, Kent?

  Harry stood at a tree, drawing some kind of diagram with his finger, a professor at a wooden chalkboard, outlining some theory about the superiority of the human mind and how Jeremy might better incorporate feelings and emotions into the war machine.

  In the dull black morning, Jeremy finds himself at the same tree, a fat, knotty pine. He walks close, puts a hand on the cool trunk, feels the bumps, makes out some adolescent’s carving. He shakes his head; what am I looking for? He runs a hand around the back, feeling for, what, a hole in the tree that holds a manila folder, magic eight ball, cryptic hologram of Harry explaining the world?

  A joy buzzer and a popgun with a flag that says: gotcha?

  No, this is not a joke. Harry is dead. The computer was right. People with guns are chasing Jeremy.

  He falls to his knees. He starts digging at a lump of soil to the bottom right of the tree. His hands quickly muddy with the wet ground, his fingers cold and stubbing against dense ground just inches below the surface.

  Self-consciously, Jeremy looks behind him. Even with the edges of light of dawn, he can’t see across the field. He thinks he hears his loyal assistant’s footsteps somewhere to the right, maybe on the other side of the building. He finds himself suppressing the urge to call out (Found anything?!), partly because even now he doesn’t want to betray his desperation and vulnerability. And he’s not sure how much to trust Nik. Partly, though, it’s too peaceful to shatter this moment with a shrill cry.

  Peaceful, he thinks. Ask it. Harry hates the computer.

  Jeremy stands up and starts running. A dead, anxious sprint, his feet slipping beneath him on the damp, fog-drenched grass, that dull ache in his clavicle. But still picking up speed until, less than a half minute later, he stands at the sign. The little one near the grove of trees, not far from the car. He practically slides into the base of it, a baseball player trying to beat the throw to home plate. He pats the lumpy soil and grass around the bottom of the sign, fingers making their way in deliberate but frantic concentric circles toward the base of the sign itself.

  He feels the metallic ring.

  It’s smooth, maybe an inch beneath the topsoil. On his knees, he paws away scoops of dirt, fingers full of cool, grimy soil and tiny rocks. He frees the top edge of the metallic ring, now realizes that it’s attached around the sign, like a little collar. And he can feel something beneath the ring, attached to it, buried snugly beneath the soil.

  He pops up his head, and looks around. Instinctually, hoping for a shovel to materialize from the dark, damp air. Where’s Nik? He must be around the side of the cabin.

  Jeremy looks at the sign telling him not to use a phone. “Get over it. It’s the future.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his clamshell phone, his backup. He pushes it into the ground, a makeshift shovel, an app of the pre-civilization variety. Digs, digs, digs, discovers what he’s been expecting: the ring around the base attaches to a little lockbox, just like the kind that real estate brokers put on the homes they’re showing.

  On the front of the box, there are numbers, like those on a rotary phone, and then a larger black button. Inside, something, a secret, a treasure. The answer? Jeremy pushes the black button. Of course, it doesn’t open.

  “What’s the code, Harry?”

  Jeremy grits his teeth until his whole head pulses. Closes his eyes. Log cabin. AskIt. Beware the Peace. What did Harry say?

  Is it one of the numbers from the symbol?

  Jeremy puts his hand against the base of the pole. Shoves. Digs his feet into the ground, pushes at the sign. It won’t give, it won’t budge. Jeremy closes his eyes, mustering rage, not having to look hard for it, pushes, feels himself tiring, his hands cutting on the edges of the post.

  He lets out a deep grunt, a visceral yell of a tennis player laying into a forehand. He shoves mightily; the sign begins to give. Another big heave and it topples, the bottom popping from a good foot beneath the soil. Jeremy drops down, feels the sharp, ragged tip of the sign. He pulls the metallic ring off it. Free. He’s got it. What? Something. It, a piece of evidence, a key.

  “What is it?”

  Jeremy turns, sees Nik walking, about halfway across the field.

  “Something.”

  Nik trudges, trundles, really. Jeremy can hear the scraping of his big legs against one another.

  “It’s locked. I need . . . do you have tools?”

  Nik pauses, his typical deliberation. “I might.”

  Nik starts walking to his car.

  Jeremy focuses on the locked box, fingering it, feeling damp grass against his jeans. He poises a finger over the number pad. Harry wouldn’t send him here, not from his deathbed, without some clue as to the code. He thinks back to the numbers on the calendar, most of them country calling codes, all but one. 218-650. The one at the bottom of the V. What is that one?

  Into the lockbox, he fingers 218-650.

  Waits a second.

  Pushes the black button to open the box.

  Doesn’t open.

  He puts his neck back and looks up at the sky, such as it is; so much low-level, wispy fog, windblown, that the actual sky seems that much more unattainable, blocked. “Give me a sign, Harry War.” He feels his voice catch in his throat. Harry, dead.

  What did the codger say:

  AskIt.

  Peace.

  Those aren’t numbers. They could be numbers, Jeremy supposes. He could translate numbers from letters using his phone, in the same way that phone numbers used to be expressed in letters, or the way 800-numbers are often done. He looks at his phone; the word “peace” would start with the number 7, which corresponds with “p.”

  He listens to Nik fiddling in his trunk. He decodes “Peace” into 72323.

  Punches it in.

  Doesn’t open.

  “Would this work?”

  Jeremy looks up to discover Nik just ten yards away, wielding a crowbar.

  “What is it?” Nik asks.

  “I doubt it,” Jeremy says, abs
ently answering Nik’s question about whether the crowbar would work. A crowbar. “We need a time machine to go back to talk to that cryptic old cryptographer. You got one of those?”

  Nik walks purposefully forward. Heavy metal tool clenched in that thick boxer’s paw.

  “Is everything okay, Nik?”

  “Huh?”

  Jeremy inches backward as Nick shuffles forward.

  “Have you been to the zoo lately?”

  “The zoo?” He steps closer. “What did you find?”

  “You’re obsessed with the lions.”

  “I don—”

  Nik’s response is cut off by the approach of a car, an explosion of tires on gravel. They look up, trying to make sense of another dawn visitor to the log cabin. Just as Jeremy recognizes something about the van.

  “It was behind us.”

  “Where?”

  “On Broadway.”

  “Is this about Harr—”

  They hear the first gunshot before he can even make out the person firing.

  “Run, Nik.”

  “What?”

  “Away from me. Run!”

  CHAPTER 36

  BEHIND THE TREE.” Jeremy spits out words at Nik, who runs a few steps ahead.

  Jeremy glances over his shoulder. They’ve got a good seventy-five yards on the person who exited the van and started shooting. Rather, took one shot. Intentional? Now seems to have paused, looked at Nik’s car, and then is heading their direction. A woman, Jeremy thinks, slightly built, not Andrea or her tall, thin adjunct, and hustling not sprinting.

  Could shoot again at any second. But would have to be a hell of a shot to hit someone in this low light, at this distance. And with a handgun, not a rifle.

  Jeremy lunges forward, giving a slight shove to Nik to propel him. It’s unnecessary, it dawns on Jeremy; his sugar-fed assistant has surprising speed and dexterity, those hours in the boxing gym.