The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  Jeremy looks over his shoulder. The van is still there. The one from the log cabin, from the morning they nearly were shot. And, now, in front, the SUV from the drive-by shooting of Evan. He looks back at Nik, wills his right hand to unfurl from a balled fist.

  “You signed up with me from the very beginning to monitor the technology. You were waiting to see . . . you didn’t want to see a prediction of war. You wanted to see a prediction of peace?” It’s part question, part revelation.

  “You have the best technology on Earth. You have an amazing mind, an Earthly treasure.”

  “You don’t want peace?”

  “More than anyone, Jeremy. Real peace.”

  Jeremy swallows. “The kind that comes with the Messiah.”

  Nik’s silence carries affirmation. The cars wind to the right. They start to climb another hill. Ahead, Jeremy can see a break in the high trees, a little donut hole in the green density.

  In his pocket, he fingers his phone. He holds it over the send button. On the text screen, a single word: “help.” He’s still not sure if it’s time.

  “So you just sat there, like an evil cherub, a knight guarding the holy grail.”

  “Neturei Karta.”

  Jeremy shakes his head. “What is it? Like a club? Like Dungeons and Dragons but for zealots?”

  “The name is an oversimplification. It was a group of extreme Orthodox Jews who opposed the establishment of Israel, of a secular Israel. Much bigger than that now. It’s all of us who believe that by secularizing that land, creating a worldly peace, we’re foreclosing real peace, eternal peace. And, really, in concept, the Guardians long precede 1948, the creation of a secular Israel. We are ancient in our devotion to fulfilling God’s covenant, securing a portal for his return. It is a rock-solid value that will save all of us, that so many people believe but so few are willing to defend. Now is the time.”

  Jeremy pauses for a moment, struck with a kind of obvious wonder, like someone staring at awe at the Grand Canyon despite having seen pictures of it a million times. What Nik is describing, as insane as it sounds, is not that far removed from a political rift that divides a nation, a world. Infuses hypercharged issues: Antiabortion; pro-choice. Gay marriage. Church and state. Will the Messiah return? Are we creating a world that will allow it?

  And then there’s the way Nik delivers it, with trademark nonchalance, humility, like explaining, when asked about the weather, that it’s sunny but there could be rain.

  “You’re right,” Nik says. “I was a bit like a knight guarding a grail. My job was to monitor you, the technology, to make sure we were the first to know about the likelihood of a secular peace, a false peace.”

  “A knight?”

  “What?”

  “Just a knight, or the knight?”

  Nik doesn’t respond.

  Jeremy continues. “You were calling the shots. Orchestrating.” An image comes to Jeremy. Nik using all the company’s communications tools and, more than that, the opportunity to communicate globally with all kinds of actors, all without raising suspicion. After all, the company’s job was to monitor international patterns, observe terrorist activity, even interact with the Pentagon.

  “You were connecting with people on World of Warcraft. Your little gang exchanging messages, recruiting the like-minded, playing real war.”

  Nik looks deadly serious. “I don’t crave power. I was called. Like you, I wound up in the middle of it, and I assumed the responsibility I was given.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, we’re more democratic than that.”

  “So you are in charge.”

  Nik almost smiles. “I couldn’t believe they let those lions loose. They knew I wouldn’t approve, so they didn’t tell me. Guardians, they said, could not let the Lion of Judah die in his cell like a common mongrel. The troops took that one upon themselves.”

  It’s a nonanswer but it seems to confirm Jeremy’s terror; his loyal sidekick has been the point man on Operation Armageddon.

  “It was an outrageous risk, letting those lions go,” Nik continues. “Just the kind of thing that could get us attention from the press or police.” Now he does smile, sadly. “Or your computer. It is so powerful, so sensitive. It sees things, almost as good as . . . He does. I guess you could say it was made in God’s image.”

  Jeremy tilts his head, taking in Nik. “I always thought you were so modest.”

  “It is one of the highest callings.”

  “But that’s not why you wear long-sleeve shirts and long pants, always. In fact, I can’t say I’ve ever seen you wear shorts. Not once. Even when the fog parted in San Francisco and London.”

  Nik clears his throat.

  “Let’s see it,” Jeremy says.

  Nik swallows. Takes his right hand from the wheel and pulls up the shirt on his left arm to the elbow. Inside it, on the fleshiest part of his beefy inner forearm, beneath the bandage, the small tattoo of a lion on hind legs.

  “Can’t show you the leg while driving. Besides, we’re here.”

  Jeremy eyes the bandage. “Did you really get hit, by a bullet, at the cabin?”

  Nik shakes his head. A convenient scratch, he explains, from falling. Then he turns to Jeremy. “This will be a good vantage point.”

  Jeremy looks up. They’re high atop the Presidio, pulling into a dingy gravel driveway, bumpy, lined with tall trees. In the distance, he can see a three-story brick structure. Seconds later, they’re parked in front of it, a modest residence or administrative building. Brick, reddish, ruddy, white-trimmed window frames chipped and frayed from fog and neglect.

  “Where are they?” Jeremy means Kent and Emily, which Nik obviously understands.

  “We still need the code, Jeremy. All of it.”

  Jeremy hears a door slam. He looks up in the gravel semicircular driveway, grass growing through and around rocks. From the driver’s side of the sport utility vehicle steps the short-haired woman who shot at him at the log cabin, and chased him, and then shot Evan. From the passenger side, a hefty bearded man. Both armed.

  The driver of the van, maybe a tall male—hard to see through tinted glass—remains seated.

  Jeremy opens his own door. As he does so, he hits send on his iPhone, then slips the device between the side of the seat and the door so that it falls into the cracks. Jeremy steps out of the car, feels his legs wobble, slams the door, the phone now inside. Nik comes around the front of the car. He nods to the woman and the bearded man while walking to Jeremy.

  “The fob.” He extends a hand.

  Jeremy swallows, fingers the chain from around his neck. “You killed the lieutenant colonel, one of the Guardians did. You tortured him until he told you that I was the one who holds the detonation key. And then you killed him.”

  Nik looks down. “And then he died.”

  Jeremy considers the language, realizes Nik is trying to make the craziest distinction. The lieutenant colonel wasn’t killed, Nik seems to be saying, not in a deliberate act; he died, just expired. Whatever. What’s so obvious now to Jeremy, and so material, is that Nik’s comments confirm what Jeremy had suspected, deduced. The Pentagon was using Jeremy as a piece of the Project Surrogate plan.

  One mercenary group had half the dirty bomb.

  Another had the other half of the bomb.

  Jeremy had the detonation key. Princip.

  “The Pentagon never cared about the computer. They wanted to send me to the Middle East. Carrying the fob,” he says with quasi-revelation. “Then, what, they’d tell the mercenary groups, our terrorist allies, that I had the key, and I’d be abducted? Then the key used to detonate the bomb and take out Iran’s nuclear arsenal. The lieutenant colonel must’ve been the one guy, or one of the few, who knew that I was the linchpin. Did Andrea know?”

  “I didn’t know. We didn’t know. But, you are right, we knew that the lieutenant colonel knew. He was the guy on Surrogate, the point man.”

  “They were using me all along. They didn’t want my technolo
gy. They wanted a carrier pigeon. Someone who could move into and out of countries, someone with a safe passport, a civilian, someone unaware, uncorrupted.”

  Nik says: “You can’t be corrupted. You’re only out for yourself.”

  Jeremy thinks: When I was first seduced by Andrea, I couldn’t find my key fob. They must’ve copied it.

  “No,” Jeremy blurts out. “They replaced it. They fitted me with their own access key. The detonation key. It looked just like my key fob and it was programmed to let me into my computer. But it also would work to set off the bomb.” He shakes his head. “But how did your group get the bomb? Wasn’t it supposed to go to separate, mercenary groups?”

  Nik laughs, not condescendingly, like this is genuinely funny. He looks at the woman, as if asking permission to explain, and Jeremy sees she shrugs.

  “We are, in a way, different groups. Some would call us militant Christians and Jews, some Rastafarians, like I said. Lucky for us that the Pentagon coordinated Surrogate independently with the Christian and Jewish factions. The U.S. government doesn’t fully grasp what it’s doing in the Middle East, and who it is doing it with. Partnerships there, it goes without saying, are notoriously risky.”

  “So they didn’t realize the different groups were connected? They gave the two halves of the bomb to the same group?”

  “Loosely. Guardians are everywhere. Not everywhere, but planted in enough places. We got lucky.” He pauses. “Not lucky—”

  “Lemme guess. Divine intervention,” Jeremy interrupts, then says: “So would you have used the bomb on Iran?”

  “If we’d have had the chance, of course. When it didn’t happen, we had the bomb, but no access code. We plotted how we’d get it, and, when we got it, how we’d use it. And your computer helped us figure out when.”

  Jeremy lets it sink in, the cascade of betrayals. All these people around him, conspiring, coordinating, plotting.

  “Where are they—Emily and the boy?”

  Nik nods his head to the woman, who walks over to the van, her feet crunching on gravel. She opens the back of the van, revealing two people, tied together, back to back, white hoods on their heads.

  Jeremy starts to run toward the van. “Emily!”

  He’s stopped in his tracks by Nik’s beefy hand. And the site of the short-haired Sabra pointing a gun at Emily and Kent.

  “Don’t speak,” the woman says to the pair. She has a pidgin accent, a bit of everything. “I am taking you inside a house where you may be reunited with your boyfriend.”

  “Mom?”

  The woman slaps the white hood covering Kent’s head. He whimpers. Jeremy starts to move again and feels Nik propel him backward with two forceful hands. “The code.”

  At gunpoint, Emily and Kent, hooded, stumble into the brick residence, through a front door with peeling paint and a torn door.

  “The way you feel about them,” Nik says. “It’s the way I feel about all of it, the world.”

  Jeremy, without a millisecond of forethought, throws a wild punch at Nik. His arm whips through the air, a fist missile. Nik ducks to his right, evading the attack, finds his balance, springs forward with a counterattack. It’s a vicious uppercut that sends Jeremy sprawling backward, then onto his ass on a patch of damp grass and gravel.

  “I’ve taken so much shit from you. We all have.” Nik doesn’t sound angry, still his even-keeled self, almost like the punch was phlegm he needed to dislodge from his throat, now cleared. “Give it to me.”

  Jeremy fights for a breath. He reaches for the chain on his neck, pulls it over his head, the key fob attached. He tosses it to Nik.

  “And your password. The detonation code, we’re told, is both. However it is you get into your computer is how we detonate the bomb.”

  Jeremy pauses.

  “Or they die,” Nik says. He pauses, then says: “We’ll know whether you’re telling the truth because we’ll test the code by logging into the computer. If it works, you’re telling the truth and then you can be with them.”

  “For the next hour until the world ends. And then we’re all dead.”

  Nik smiles patiently.

  Jeremy swallows.

  “TwinkleKent-one-two-zero-one.”

  Nik, without missing a beat, reaches into the car and pulls out a piece of paper and a thick, black pen. He hands it to Jeremy.

  Jeremy looks at the building holding Emily and Kent. He looks around at the trees. At the woman with the short hair, the bearded man, the sky, the world.

  He writes: Tw1nkleKent1201

  He tosses the piece of paper to the ground. “Can I go inside?”

  “Not until we see if it works.”

  “You’re going to—”

  “Not the bomb. Not now. Not for an hour or so. We needed to know where the meeting was taking place. It’s been hell getting Evan to divulge the location. We worked sources, seduced executives, tried to get access to the network. It shouldn’t have been that hard. After all, you and Evan were business associates. You’d think he’d have shared everything with us, the names of his partners, our potential partners. But it’s funny how little he actually shared, or trusted you. Fortunately, Evan told you, and we had you bugged.”

  Jeremy shakes his head, not understanding.

  “Stuck to the back of your iPad, just a tiny mike, very powerful, though. I knew you’d take it everywhere.”

  Now it makes sense.

  “You put it there when we were driving around, when I went to find Emily and Kent at the Seal Rock. You needed me to elicit from Evan the precise location of the meeting.” He pauses with another realization. “You tried to bring Andrea and Evan together to incite me, get me to confront them, confront Evan, do whatever was necessary to expose all their plans to you.”

  “And now we need to make sure the log-on code works for your computer, to make sure you’re not bullshitting us. Wouldn’t put it past you to want to . . . get the better of someone.”

  “Even you, my loyal battery mate.”

  Nik holds out his hand and Jeremy withdraws the iPad, runs his hand over the back, feels the spot where he’d found the bug. He passes the iPad over.

  Then he watches his hefty assistant turned madman open the cover and then swipe and click until he arrives at the log-in screen. Nik enters a number from the key fob, then Jeremy’s password.

  “Good to go.” The comment seems directed both at no one and at what Jeremy realizes is a growing posse. The big bearded man; a tall white man who had driven the van, now standing next to it; and a short woman with dark hair who had reappeared from the house. For a moment, Jeremy can’t take his eyes from this dazzling creature, and her raw energy. Then he looks away. He doesn’t see the guy with the jean jacket, the one who seduced Emily in the first place. He wants to kill that guy. First.

  The bearded man walks over and takes the fob. He walks to the sport utility vehicle, and so does the woman.

  “Stop!” Jeremy says. “Please.” Pause. Again: “Please.”

  “A new vocabulary word for you.” He nods to Jeremy, as if to say: speak your piece.

  “Nik, Perry, whoever you are, look at the computer, the map. Just look at it.”

  Nik shrugs, looks down at the device, swipes. Jeremy can tell he’s reached the conflict map when his eyes first blink rapidly, then stop and stare.

  “You’re not just going to destroy a plan to bring peace to the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent. You’re going to destroy the world. Look how many people are going to die. I know you believe in the machine, or you wouldn’t have shadowed me for four years. So just, please, look. How many innocent souls?”

  Nik swallows. “What kind of world is this,” he whispers. “What kind of world where the combative thrive, where the angry, the immodest and mean grow rich and fat? Where the humble servant winds up serving not God but his fellow man? What kind of world where if you don’t look the right way or go to the perfect school you’re a second-class citizen, expected to carry everyone’s
water.”

  The most vulnerable Jeremy’s ever heard Nik, maybe anybody’s ever heard him. Nik clears his throat. He waves the woman and the bearded man into their car.

  Jeremy drops to his knees. “Please. I’m begging you.”

  The tires of the sport utility vehicle spin on the gravel, get purchase, crunch away.

  “It’s a referendum,” Nik says. The whisper is gone, and whatever deep personal well it drew from. “Technology won’t save the world. Business and commerce won’t save the world. Not science, not your machine. They are distractions, existential diversions. Everything we need, He already invented.”

  Jeremy feels momentarily struck by the eloquence of the lie, of its talking-point nature, of the misinformation. He says: “You know why the map is all red? Because you are choosing to hold forth about faith and the Messiah, to make your point, when the world is in the most precarious state. Conflict rhetoric rising, weapons of mass destruction rampant and in dangerous hands. You’re throwing a spark into a bucket of flint and gasoline.”

  As he says the words, Jeremy realizes just how true that is; the reason the world is going to explode is not merely that Nik and his Guardians are setting off a dirty bomb; it’s that, once the bomb goes off, the fragile world on the brink of conflict will come undone. The computer put all the pieces together.

  “Nothing,” Nik says.

  “What?”

  “Seventy-five million . . . people. Compared with eternal damnation, for all of us. It’s nothing. If we allow secular peace to root in the Fertile Crescent, there can be no redemption. Ever.” He looks at the house, then back at Jeremy. “Get up. Go inside. You can be with them. You’ve done much more of a service than you realize. You can take solace in that . . .”

  “What”

  “This thing is right. You were right.” Nik looks down at the tablet. “Fifty-five minutes, seven seconds. Pretty much dead on.” He smiles sadly. “Like I said, you’re going to have quite a view.”