The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  Then, below it, other headings and names:

  Potentially highly relevant:

  Lavelle Thomson

  Evan Tigeson

  Potentially relevant:

  Andrea Belluck-Juarez

  In other words, Jeremy understands, the computer has determined that he is most responsible for the upcoming attack, but also that the other names have relevance too. Potential relevance.

  “This is not helpful.”

  “I don’t see them.”

  Jeremy looks up to discover they’re in the middle of a U-turn. Nik steers the car into a red zone in front of the Seal Rock, a motel with a restaurant of the same name. Jeremy sees a man walk out holding the hand of an ambling toddler wearing a red hat with earflaps.

  “The problem is that it doesn’t show its work.”

  Nik turns the ignition off, waits, ever the sounding board, for Jeremy to finish the thought.

  “It draws connections, using probabilities and algorithms which, while I wrote them, I’m not totally sure how they work. Just that they work or that I’ve told people that they work.” Jeremy doesn’t add, but thinks: It was right. I was right.

  What if it’s right now?

  “Unless the computer’s been manipulated, or is somehow being used as part of the scheme.”

  “What?”

  Jeremy turns over his shoulder and looks across the street into the park, such as it is, really a vast area of multifaceted terrain, pockets of trees and bushes lining and buffering the outside, a wide-open grassy area in the middle, then, beyond view from here, a stony outcropping that overlooks the ocean. Somewhere in the trees, Jeremy thinks, hide Emily and Kent.

  He reaches for the door.

  “No one had access to it. And what would it tell them, what could it tell somebody? When the world is getting so hot, so confrontational, that an attack would cause a domino effect; when the world is ripe for war.”

  He looks at Nik.

  “Or when it’s getting too peaceful.”

  Nik blinks. “Was this where they were supposed to be? Where are they?”

  Jeremy: “We get them safe and then we get Evan. He’s the key.” Doesn’t add: not me. Instead: “C’mon, Emily!”

  Jeremy flings open the door and takes off, leaving the iPad on the seat. He makes a beeline for the phalanx of trees and clumps of bushes on the edge of the park. As he does so, he passes the father struggling to strap his son into a car seat in one of those mini-SUVs, this with a surfboard strapped to the top.

  Jeremy runs his eyes along the trees and bushes until he comes to a gap halfway down the block, a narrow stone staircase that leads to the innards. He half expects to see Emily and Kent materialize, but they don’t.

  “Emily!”

  He starts to run, stops. Turns back to the man and the boy, their car.

  “Did you see a woman?”

  The man, having succeeded in strapping in his son, walks around the back of the car, nearing Jeremy, who stands in the middle of the street. “Did you see a woman. She was with a boy. I’m supposed to meet them. It’s an emerg—the boy is hurt and I’m his . . .”

  “Kind of flip-flop hair?”

  “Kent. You saw them?!”

  The man pauses from zipping up a formfitting black jacket, suddenly appreciating some gravity. “I saw them through the window, of the restaurant. The boy’s okay, I think. He looked okay.”

  “I didn’t ask for your medical opinion. I asked you where they went. Where?”

  “I . . .”

  “Please.”

  “With . . . with the guy with the beard.”

  “Who?!”

  The guy takes two quick steps toward the driver’s door, clicks it open. “I’m with my son.”

  “Then you’re obviously smart enough to see when a father is scared out of his mind.” Implied with tone: you dipshit.

  “Hey, bud, this isn’t my business.” He climbs into the door, says before he closes it. “They got into a van. The boy and the woman and some guy with a huge beard.”

  “Beard?”

  “Like Moses or Abraham, but black.” He shuts his door.

  “The guy was black?!”

  “The beard!” The man shouts through his window. “A woman with black hair was driving.” The man peels away. But hardly any faster than Jeremy starts sprinting back to Nik. He finds the car door still open, flings himself inside, pauses, nearly sitting on the iPad, allowing himself to register a thought: he’d left this here to see if Nik might open it, tinker with it, glance inside, a test. Nik passed. The tablet and phone remain right where Jeremy left them, seemingly untouched.

  “They went that way.” Jeremy points behind them, toward the ocean. “No police, Nik.”

  “But—”

  “No police!” He pictures Emily and Kent dragged away, stowed in some van, terrified. His clavicle bursts in pain; he squeezes his leg with his hand, willing calm.

  “Let’s get them.”

  Jeremy puts his hand on the keys, holding them in place.

  “No! No . . . They’re safe. They have to be. In danger but, for now, safe. They want me, something from me. They’ll want to trade them. So we have time. If I get the police involved now, there will be no one left to ferret it out, and there can’t be even nine hours left.”

  “Nine . . .”

  Jeremy looks at the countdown clock. Under eight hours and thirty minutes. He needs to do something. Take some action.

  He picks up his phone, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out the phone number, the one for Evan.

  He dials Evan’s number. Ring, ring, ring. “Pick up, Peckerhead!” Ring. No answer, then a generic “The person you are calling has a voice mail that has not yet been set up. If you’d like to—” Before Jeremy can leave a message, his phone beeps with an incoming call. It’s the very number he’s been calling, Evan.

  Jeremy picks up. “What have you done with them?”

  “You have received our correspondence, Jeremy.” Evan’s voice, even and handsome like the man himself, carries mostly charisma, but the fact the businessman doesn’t start with a pleasantry, an overture, betrays stress.

  “I know, Peckerhead. I know. I’m stopping it. I’m crushing you.”

  There is a silence. Evan clears his throat. He nearly laughs, recovers.

  “My lawyers have sent no fewer than a dozen letters asking that you maintain a distance from me and my efforts. I understand that you’re angry over the dissolu—”

  “Cut the shit! I want to know where you’ve taken them. I know about Harry, all of it. You and the high-tech consortium, the tantalum shipments,” He’s just riffing, bluffing, stacking blocks, trying to stack them. “I’m taking you down.”

  “You are a dangerous man,” Evan says, then adds, quietly, “You are not going to fuck this up.”

  “I—” Jeremy, a stalking beast, pauses, taking in some new information he can’t quite read, a tacit admission. Evan’s involved in something, all right, the center of it, just as Harry said.

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Stillwater.”

  “Meet with me!”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Or I’ll expose everything.”

  “You’re a discredited zealot, Jeremy. Enough. Goodbye.”

  “Hello, CNN. Hello, Marines. Hello, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  There’s a pause. “You don’t have a clue what you’re meddling with.”

  “The end of the world.”

  Evan exhales. “I’ll text you a place.”

  “Where? When?”

  Evan disconnects.

  “They want me, they don’t want me, they use me, they discard me.”

  Nik says: “I guess at this point it’s not too much to ask what is going on.” His eyes fall to his wrist, the bandage, then quickly return to Jeremy.

  “Maybe they got what they wanted from me, and my computer.”

  Nik raises his eyebrows, a silent question: who
got what they wanted?

  “Andrea, Evan, maybe both of them. Remember when I flew to Washington, the Pentagon, all that horseshit? Never mind.” Jeremy thinks: too much shorthand. “You drive and I’ll try to make sense of it.”

  Nik starts the engine, takes Jeremy jutting his chin as a cue to head back down on Geary. He again pictures Emily and Kent, blinks it away.

  “They have planned an attack but they’re missing something.”

  “Pronouns.”

  “I don’t know who ‘they’ are. Maybe Evan, maybe someone connected to him, somehow connected to us, to me. Closely. The computer tells me that I am playing a role in the attack, that I’m instrumental, the trigger. But unless I’m insane, truly certifiably insane, I don’t know anything about it. And unless the computer is truly, certifiably insane—” Jeremy pauses. “Unless the computer is wrong, then I have some role that is unknown to me.”

  Jeremy’s eyes come to rest on a diner a half block ahead, next to a tire store. He pictures himself on that first trip to Washington. He remembers returning to his hotel room after drinks with Andrea, thinking something was amiss with his computer. What was it?

  “Let’s eat and think. Can you turn off your cell phone?”

  “It’s off.”

  “If they didn’t need something, they’d have killed me already.”

  Nik pulls the car to the curb. “You realize this sounds—”

  “Forget about the computer. Even without its predictions, Harry’s dead. The guy who was with Emily at the café is the same one who broke into my apartment. Andrea and some henchwoman chased me at gunpoint—”

  “Who?”

  “There was a secret buried at the log cabin. Project Surrogate. For goodness’ sake, Nik, you were shot at yourself. We were nearly killed in the Presidio. And now Evan admits he’s involved in something, maybe the attack itself. There’s a mass of evidence that doesn’t just portend something terrible but, by extension, suggests that the computer is right.”

  It was right. I was right.

  I am Princip.

  Nik pulls the keys from the ignition. Jeremy, lost in thought, climbs from the car. The pair trundle into the diner, impervious to the drizzle. At a table beneath an autographed picture of a drummer for the Grateful Dead, who apparently once ate at the diner, Jeremy drinks coffee and Nik water.

  “Surrogate?”

  “An American plot to destroy Iran’s budding nuclear arsenal.” And with that, Jeremy is off and running, explaining about the bomb, segregated into two parts so that the fringe groups could not detonate without cooperation from one another and from the Americans. He opens the iPad, stares at the bloodred map.

  “You want my guess?” It’s rhetorical. He continues. “Harry was involved, somehow. Of course. He’s the leading authority on conflict, its resolution, consulted by governments. He must’ve been involved in conversations about Surrogate, planning, advising. Another guess: they killed Lavelle Thomson, the lieutenant colonel, whoever ‘they’ is, trying to get hold of the bomb or figure out how to detonate it.

  “But I still don’t get why they’re attacking San Francisco, now. It’s . . .” Jeremy pauses, struck by a thought, just as a waitress arrives with two plates of food; the omelet Jeremy ordered and the same for Nik, who simply said: “ditto.” Jeremy asks the waitress if he can borrow a pen. On the paper tablecloth, he draws the symbol from Harry’s calendar.

  “What does this look like, Nik?”

  “A V, the letter.”

  Jeremy holds up his right hand, then folds into his palm his thumb, ring and pinkie fingers. It leaves his index and middle finger standing. He parts them, creating a V.

  “What does this look like?”

  Nik clears his throat. “Richard Nixon, or . . .”

  “A peace sign.” Jeremy simultaneously says it and lets it sink in. He takes a bite of his food, then pulls his iPhone from his pocket.

  “We’re getting a tacit message,” Jeremy says.

  “What?”

  “My phone’s been on for thirty minutes. If they wanted to find me, they’d have done so already; they could’ve tracked the signal. Why aren’t they coming for me?”

  Nik holds a fork in his hand, his food untouched. “Because they have her, and . . .”

  “Kent.”

  His phone buzzes. There’s an incoming text. Jeremy calls it up, stands, and without a word sprints for the car.

  CHAPTER 43

  LEFT ON MASONIC. Did you help coordinate my trips with Andrea?”

  Nik goes through a yellow light, eliciting a honk from an oncoming Jeep with its top down.

  “Now where?”

  “Veer right at the corner.” Jeremy and Nik are cruising up a hill, passing a grocery store on their left. In the distance, to the right, downtown, the sunnier part of the city, emerges from the fog. “Then left, past the JCC for a few blocks. The trips to Washington and the Middle East?”

  Nik says: “When you didn’t feel like cooperating.”

  “No need to be defensive. I’m trying to understand what they wanted from me, what she wanted from me. They didn’t want the algorithm to predict the future of conflict. She said so herself. They weren’t taking the computer seriously. Did you deal with her or anyone else?”

  “Her, briefly. She—”

  “Left. What?”

  Nik turns. “You remember a board meeting we had, a retreat, at the house by Muir Woods?”

  Jeremy pictures it. Harry went on some diatribe about the coexistence of the coho and silver salmon in Redwood Creek. “What’s that have to do with Andrea?”

  “I came back to the office, and she was there. Late at night.”

  “So.”

  “Here?” They’re across the street from the Jewish Community Center, slowing. Jeremy watches Nik stare at the large, elegant building with a private security guard standing out front.

  In his mind’s eye, Jeremy pictures the Lion of Judah, the symbol for Jerusalem. What was the news report? A man dead with a tattoo of a woman, and a word in Latin: Custos. Guardian.

  So what?

  “No, two blocks ahead, and to the right, there’s a park. Kids and stuff. Evan says he’ll be there. But I want you to drive past it, see what we see, then decide. So Andrea is at our office, and . . . ?”

  “Inside our offices. The ones where we are now. She tells me she’s been trying to get hold of you and that they’ve scheduled one of those trips. She’s there to pick you up.”

  “Inside my office or inside the outer area?” The publicly accessible part.

  No immediate answer. Nik turns right, pausing to let a hearty dark-skinned woman with a double stroller pass through the crosswalk. Nanny central. Nik swallows, trying to remember. “Your office. She said it was open and she was trying to leave you a note. She said the trip was imminent.”

  “How did she seem?”

  Nik doesn’t answer, lightly shakes his head, not getting it.

  “Stressed? Calm?”

  “Not like a burglar, if that’s what you mean.”

  Jeremy takes it in. “You never told me.”

  “She called you that night. I watched her make the call, listened to her.”

  “But the trip didn’t happen.” Jeremy sees the outskirts of the hillside park on the block ahead. “There were a few of those—close scrapes with last-minute Middle East trips.” He can’t remember this particular call or another trip that didn’t materialize. “They told me I was going to be able to field-test my algorithm, first in southern Iraq, then in . . .” He can’t remember the places, all right in that region. “Right around Iran.” He pauses. “Stop, please. Let me out here.”

  Nik looks at Jeremy, like he’d prefer a little more clarity. It’s a look frequently elicited by Jeremy, someone who often divulges little, speaks in fragments and clipped ideas, often in challenges or rebuttals. Even now, maybe especially now.

  “I’m just saying that none of the trips happened, not to Iraq or any of the surro
unding areas. Lots of head fakes. I don’t know what to make of that. I don’t know who or what to trust.” Jeremy looks down at his phone. It’s 11:48. “Peckerhead is not going to be here for a few minutes, if he’s really coming.”

  Jeremy looks up, sees they’ve stopped a half block from the park, in front of a trendy Italian restaurant and a five-and-dime liquor store. Across the street, an artsy movie house and a café featuring organic pastries made by “local artisans.”

  Walking up the street, some doofus in a lion mask and a sign: “The end is near.”

  “Have people no shame?” Nik mutters. He looks ashen.

  “You’re really taking the lion thing hard.” Jeremy puts his hand on Nik’s shoulder, causing his assistant to flinch. If Jeremy’s ever touched him with such a gesture of intimacy, it was accidental and after several pomegranate cocktails, maybe when Nik helped carry his drunken lean-to boss to the car. Nik allows himself to look at Jeremy, take in a glance filled with paternal responsibility.

  “You’re remarkable, Perry.”

  Nik laughs. “I knew I had a real name.”

  “You never stopped believing. You have been a stalwart, PeaceNik. The only one, really.” It’s a statement containing an unspoken question: why?

  “It was fate,” Nik manages, still half smiling, then clears his throat, fidgets, sees Jeremy’s powerful gaze, then manages: “I never lost my faith.”

  Jeremy sees Nik absently scratch his rubbery neck. Sees the chain that holds the cross around Nik’s neck. Jeremy, in an act of subconscious mimicry, feels beneath his shirt, pats the key fob. He puts a hand on Nik’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m not just buttering you up. This is a pep talk. We’re going into . . . battle, forgive the cliché, and I need to know I can count on you, completely.”

  Nik stares straight ahead.

  “I’m going to meet with Evan but it may well be a trap. In fact, I suspect we’re being watched now. I’ve had my phone on forever, so, at the least, Andrea’s probably somewhere around here, maybe . . . who knows who else.”

  “Trap?”

  “He wouldn’t meet me if he didn’t want something from me. Guy never in his life took a meeting that didn’t serve him.”

  The pair falls silent. Jeremy opens the car door, pauses, looks at the liquor store they’re parked near. In the window, a large blown-up rubber bottle of tequila, a kind of kitsch you might see in Las Vegas. “It’s out of place here.”