The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  “Took advantage.” Muttered.

  “Huh?”

  “Look!”

  Jeremy’s tone shakes not just Evan, but the alley, echoing down the opening.

  “I was right. It was right.” Again, muttered. It somehow pieced together these disparate elements: the Russians, the tantalum, the volatility in general of the world, and, most of all, the likelihood of peace in the Middle East.

  Jeremy opens the cover of the iPad. He swivels his finger on the screen, bringing to life the conflict map, drenched in red. No sooner does it materialize than a series of dialogue boxes pop up. A shrill chirp. Updates.

  Evan reaches for the iPad. “What’s this?”

  He’s looking, not at the screen, but at something on the back of the tablet. Jeremy looks too. He sees a little nodule, a tiny metallic tick.

  “Are you bugging me?” Evan bellows.

  Jeremy shakes his head. “No. You’re missing the point. Look at the screen.” He turns the iPad back to display the map.

  “Is that . . .” Evan doesn’t finish his thought. Instead, he turns his attention down the alley, to a car turning inside, rambling slowly onto the gravel of the bumpy alley.

  Jeremy sucks in sharply, clicks on the dialogue box. Countdown clock update: 2:36:12. Two hours, 36 minutes, 12 seconds.

  Jeremy shivers. “It’s supposed to be seven hours away, not until tonight.”

  “That’s the conflict map?”

  “Peckerhead.”

  Evan looks up. Sees what Jeremy sees: a steel rod, a barrel, sticking from the driver’s-side window of the oncoming car. A pistol.

  “Down!” Jeremy dives toward Evan’s legs, tackling him to the pavement.

  Splat. Splat. Splat.

  “Evan!”

  Jeremy feels his partner’s heavy weight collapse over him, hears screeching. Van tires on wet pavement. It slides ten feet ahead, to Jeremy’s left, skids and stops. Jeremy scrambles. “Evan!”

  No answer, dead weight on him, dead. Dead?!

  Evan!

  His face, his head. A hole . . .

  Car doors open. Voices, urgent, woman and man.

  Jeremy, no distance between thought and action, movement and instinct, scoots from under the body, sees the back door of the liquor store, dives for it. Into the cove of concrete protecting the door, a little entryway and a concrete overhang.

  Splat, splat, splat. Bullets slam into the wall next to him. Splat. A searing pain in his calf.

  “Go around front!” A woman’s voice. Glances, sees her shape, a blur, something familiar.

  Jeremy yanks open the door, sprints. Adrenaline trumping the pulse in his leg. Doesn’t look down, tumbles, knocking over a cardboard cutout, some marketing thing, hears bottles tumble.

  “Hey!” The man behind the counter.

  Jeremy flies by him.

  “Hey!”

  “Police!” Jeremy says. It’s out of his mouth before he can take it back.

  In seconds, he’s out the door, head swiveling. A stroller, a delivery truck coming up the street, rain, no bad guy, yet. An idea. It’s been with him. I am right. It was right.

  I am Princip.

  He keeps sprinting.

  CHAPTER 45

  DONE, COMMANDER.”

  “And you got Jeremy?”

  No answer. Silence. Assent. Nik looks out the car window at the drizzle, the playground at the park, a mother pushing a boy. Nik’s heart picks up, adrenaline, then something so beyond sadness. He’s glad he didn’t hear the sound of bullets.

  “What next, Nik?”

  Nik doesn’t answer.

  “Nik?”

  “Janine, call me Perry.” Perry, known to so many as Nik, PeaceNik, looks at the boy on the swing. Hopefully destined for a better place. Nik wonders if it would solace the boy to know that Nik himself will join the pile of ashes and dust. The price, the promise, of being Neturei-Karta. The price of being not just a Guardian, but, for this operation, the Guardian, the sentry at the top of this show.

  They know where the meeting is now, the target. What made Nik think they’d be able to execute the plan without terrible bloodshed? And, yet, a few deaths somehow feels more painful than the impending apocalypse. Each life an expired spark.

  “We need to make sure we get the code,” he says absently. “Lose the body.”

  He hears his voice. This is not how he ever talks aloud, just online, in World of Warcraft. Where he’s Commander Perry. An alter ego, or his real ego. What’s the difference? Online he can connect with other Guardians, command, collect other believers, help manage and guide, unseen and unnoticed in an online world filled with code and conflict.

  “Of course.” There’s a pause; Nik hears a phone ring. “Hang on,” says Janine, then, “Uh-huh.”

  “Perry.”

  “What?”

  “Small hiccup.”

  “What?”

  “Small. We’ll take care of it.”

  Click.

  CHAPTER 46

  JEREMY SPRINTS BACK across the street, scanning the street. Doesn’t yet see his pursuers.

  He reaches the café. At the doorway, wipes off his brow. Slows, stops. Dead stops. One deep breath, looks down, sees the tear in his jeans, over the left calf.

  A bullet brush, an ache, like a burn, not pulsing blood. He puts his hand on the spot, feels raw skin, nothing embedded, he guesses, if that’s what bullets do. Maybe it grazed him. Not Evan . . .

  Shot clean through. The work of a markswoman.

  He pushes away the image of the bull’s-eye in Evan’s forehead, then is struck by a smell, so strange, sour brown sugar. He looks down at its source: on his shirt, red, sticky, Evan’s blood. He tears at the button-down, animal-like, yanking it off, leaving himself with a T-shirt. He looks behind him, still clear, drops the shirt. Takes a deep, deep breath, wipes drizzle from his hair, nearly sopping, opens the café door, wincing at the jingle of bells. Looks down, shocked to see the iPad still in his hand.

  Runs his hand along the back, feels the little metallic nodule, smaller than a pebble, than a baby mosquito. A bug. Stuck with some adhesive. He flicks it off, watches it bounce onto the ground.

  Looks up, shocked too to see no one look up. Smoking with self-consciousness, he feels like a gargoyle, a gigantic thumb sticking out, a glaring light, the sun. No one looks, not even the woman on the balcony, the one he realizes might help him yet. He puts his head down, beelines for the back stairs, fingering in his pocket, discovering the bill, pulls it out, a ten that feels like a miracle.

  At the top of the stairs, she looks up, half smiles, then cocks her head, like: what possibly could’ve happened to you?

  “They’ve finally figured it out,” he says, trying to command calm, feeling that he’s booming terror.

  “Who’s figured out what?”

  “How to make it pour right when your meter is expiring.”

  “They got the shirt off your back.”

  Jeremy smiles, tries to, hopes he’s smiling, tries not to look downstairs, toward the door. “I offer you a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”

  “You want to buy an umbrella?” She looks at his money.

  “I buy you an organic donut and a coffee, or whatever you want. And a tea for me, and I go into the bathroom and dry off and try to restart this day.”

  She laughs. “I don’t need your money.”

  “Please. No strings attached. I need some better karma.”

  She takes his money. “I’ll buy my own.”

  She turns down the stairs. The second she’s out of view, he begins to scramble through her pile of papers, underneath them.

  It’s a miracle, a real one. He finds just what he’s looking for. He snags it.

  He turns around, picks up the bag he left and sprints to the back of the loft, the other side of the balcony, the emergency exit.

  Down slippery steel stairs, he finds himself in another alley, a veritable mirror of the one where he and Evan . . . he pushes away the image of fe
lled Evan. Dead, right? Has to be dead. Jesus, Jeremy thinks, pictures it: He had a bullet hole in his head. Right in the middle. A black hole, seared.

  And then another recognition: it was a woman, the shooter, in the alley, familiar. The same one from the log cabin? Short-haired, agile, she took shots at Nik and Jeremy, chased Jeremy.

  He hears a siren. Cops coming. Is that good, or bad?

  He looks across the alley, realizes the buildings on the other side are not businesses but residences. He starts jogging to his left, past the back of the movie theater. Away from the direction of the park, away from the café. On his right, a grinding noise. He jumps. It’s a garage door opening. Jeremy instinctually presses himself against the wall, a move he instantly realizes makes no sense. He’s trying to hide in plain sight. And why? Did someone hear the siren and decide to look? Probably not.

  It’s just someone pulling out of the garage. Someone, he can see now, in a heavy car, like a Mercedes, Lexus. Jeremy walks away from the wall, assumes a calm gait, passes across the other side of the garage, gives a hand wave, an instinctive gesture, a polite one, telling the driver: I’m here. The driver slides carefully into the alley, pulls out of the garage, turns on the car’s wipers. It’s a man, driving, sort of, also glancing at a phone, multitasking. Then reaching up to press a button over the visor. The garage starts to close.

  The car lurches off.

  Jeremy dives. Rolls.

  He manages to get inside the garage just before it closes. Holds his breath. Listens. Senses. It’s cool, dimly lit from a bulb enclosed in the garage door opener. No other sound. If someone is in the house, that someone makes no sound Jeremy can hear; he assumes that person wouldn’t hear Jeremy either.

  He looks around the garage—wooden shelving to his left neatly stacked with boxes, two mountain bikes hung from the ceiling, across the way, a several-step staircase, leading to a door, presumably leading to the house. He half sprints, half tiptoes across the garage to the stairs and sits against their side; from this spot, Jeremy would be hard to see at a cursory glance if there are people in the house and they decide to check the garage.

  What difference does it make?

  He’s down to the final hours, maybe minutes or seconds, depending on how quickly he gets discovered by cops, or that sharpshooting woman who drilled a hole in Evan’s head.

  He scrambles in his pocket for his phone. He starts to dial Nik. Pauses, something nagging him. Not yet.

  He reaches into the bag. Pulls out his external keyboard. He swipes the screen and pulls up the conflict map. All red.

  2:22:19.

  2:22:18.

  2:22:17.

  Why did the hours disappear this time? What has changed? He clicks on the update. There’s a headline of an AP story: “Palestinian and Israeli Leaders Spotted in San Francisco.” It’s a half news story, half feature, wordplay, a question of whether there is a summit or a case of mistaken identity. Jeremy can’t focus, it doesn’t matter.

  And another story: murals of lions spontaneously painted under the highway overpasses.

  Dots connecting to dots.

  Jeremy, clawing for sanity, ignoring the pulsing pain in his calf and a haunting image of another dead acquaintance, googles “Lion of Judah.” He speed-reads the Wikipedia entry. To the Jews, the lion was handed down as a symbol from Jacob, the religion’s patriarch, as a symbol of the tribe of Israel. To the Christians, the lion is Jesus, who came from the tribe of Judah.

  Okay. And?

  He looks up Lion of Judah and Custos. Guardian.

  There are many, many entries. He can’t possibly sift through them.

  So much evidence, so many urgent priorities, so little clarity. A peace symbol on dead Harry’s desk; a constellation of dishonest brokers surrounding Jeremy, all professing to want not to identify conflict but to bring peace; but not Jeremy, a devotee not of peace but of conflict, and somehow, now, the triggerman, who will set it all off. Or has he set it off already?

  Why him? How him?

  Because he’s been taken advantage of? Because he’s been manipulated? So easily?

  He feels that pulsing around his clavicle, closes his eyes, pats the key fob. What makes Jeremy Jeremy? What makes him unique? This key, this thing that lets him inside this machine, this throbbing around his neck, the idea that he’s not her, his mother, not her. He’s holding the world at bay, with this key, afraid to share his secrets, to let go, not to be in control. Of everything, anything. The algorithm, a conversation, what gets ordered at the restaurant, how it’s cooked. The key fob, right there, pressing on the edge of his neck, right there at the clavicle, the pulsing.

  It’s not cancer. Not like what ate away his parents from the inside. This is worse.

  It’s this thing.

  He rips it from his neck.

  I’m going to come for you, Emily. Kent. I’m not going out of this world alone. You’re not going out of this world alone.

  He looks at the random numbers generated on the key fob, connecting to some server somewhere, allowing him access, just him, to the computer. The conflict machine. Or is it the Peace Machine?

  Flowing with his half-baked plan, he enters the numbers, followed by his (goofy) password. Tw1nkleKent1201.

  Derivation: Twinkle, twinkle little fart, a joking rhyme told between him and Kent; then Kent’s name; then four numbers corresponding to the day he met Emily.

  Within seconds, he’s in the guts of the program. He frantically makes a few keystrokes, tinkers with the program, a chance, a flier. Who knows? And what’s the difference anyhow?

  Can he rewrite the conflict? Can he rewrite himself?

  He finishes his desperate act, drops his head, listens to the distant sirens. He picks up the phone. He starts to dial. He sees the hole in the middle of Evan’s head. A bull’s-eye. Satanic. And, more than that, a damning piece of evidence. The shooter was a professional, a crack shot, a markswoman. How come she missed at the log cabin?

  With a deep sigh, he calls Nik.

  Ten minutes later, the car pulls up in the alley and Jeremy gets inside. They drive in silence. Nik turns right out of the alley onto Masonic, heading toward an upward slope and, eventually, the water. A police car passes going in the other direction. Nik’s knuckles clutch the steering wheel, white.

  In Jeremy’s head, dots connecting to dots. He’s running algorithms, equations, in his head. He’s allowing himself to see what they add up to, one of the stunning things they add up to.

  “You are a patient man, Perry.”

  Nik crests the hill in silence. At the top, a miraculous view: the Golden Gate Bridge, the bay, and all of it suddenly highlighted by a break in the weather. A fogless midmorning stretch above one of mankind’s greatest landmarks.

  Jeremy, sensing something, turns around. He sees a blue van fall in behind. Its windows are tinted. He reaches into his pocket, feels his phone.

  “There never was a cat burglar at your house. Remember, you told me you caught someone trying to break in, on the night my apartment was broken into,” Jeremy says. “You lied about that. You were telling me that so that I’d think you were victimized too.” He pauses. “And at the log cabin, that woman who shot at us. She was your ally too. She wasn’t trying to actually shoot us, not to hit us. She was . . . . trying to scare me. Further the illusion that you and I are on the same side. If she really wanted to shoot us, to kill either of us, she is easily a good enough shot to have done so.” He pictures the bullet hole in Evan’s head. “Same woman who was dead-solid perfect with Peckerhead.

  “It was not a bad head fake, Perry. I’d been wondering about you until she shot at us. Then I dismissed my reservations. Well played.”

  Nik glides to a four-way stop.

  “I’m right, aren’t I, Perry?”

  They’re on the edge now of the Presidio, the parklands that stretch from here to the ocean, the bridge. On the other side, a mile away at least, the log cabin. But between here and there, rolling hills, winding ro
ads, massive eucalyptuses, mini-forests, the occasional brick building, a former armory or barracks turned rent-controlled residences.

  “I’m calling you Perry because calling you PeaceNik now appears to be a grave misnomer.

  “WarNik? Armageddon Nick.” Jeremy looks at him, glaring at him, glowering. Looks again at the curvy road in front of them. “It was you the whole time.”

  He blinks, startled. “GuardianNik,” he mutters, one of the last pieces coming together.

  CHAPTER 47

  I THINK WE’RE ON the same page.” Nik’s voice is soft, as always, hinting at deferential, certainly balanced, without irony or judgment. “Guardian Jeremy. You’re the triggerman, an honorary Guardian.”

  Jeremy reaches for Nik’s hand and tears it from the wheel. Tries to, a random act of fury. Nik swats Jeremy away with an open hand, a powerful one. He not only dislodges Jeremy’s grasp but plants a punctuating slam on Jeremy’s chest. Jeremy momentarily loses his breath.

  Nik swallows. “Please be patient,” he says. “I’ve been, as you say, patient.”

  “Patient.” Jeremy has to rasp it out. “Patient?!” He can barely catch his breath. If he attacks Nik, if he launches himself at this mutinous madman, then all could be lost. Any last-ditch hope.

  Any chance to find Emily, and Kent.

  Jeremy grits his teeth, swallows his instinct to physically attack. “Patient. I’ll say. Four years, just sitting there, waiting. For . . .” He doesn’t finish his question: for what?

  The answer is obvious.

  They are winding down a hill that twists to the right. But Nik takes an abrupt left on a small frontage road. They’re heading now to the west, down into a tree-shrouded part of the Presidio, the sky now blocked, the wet leaves having dripped onto the rutted road, creating a feeling they’ve descended into a rain forest. Ahead of them, by the side of the road, a sport utility vehicle. It suddenly pulls in front of them.