The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  CHAPTER 48

  JEREMY ZOMBIE WALKS to the house. Realizes that Nik isn’t following. No one follows, not the tall white dude, not two darker-skinned men Jeremy now realizes are lingering by the side of the house. One is smoking a cigarette. The air smells like pine and fog. Jeremy lets himself sense the world, appreciate it, for a millisecond, this imperiled Earthly existence.

  He pulls on a worn brass handle and opens the front door, prompting a creak. He hears a man’s voice say: “Up here.”

  Just inside the entrance, a wooden staircase that once would’ve been grand, bordering on majestic, born of a time of hand craftsmanship. But now its wear and tear and nicks and cuts are evident in light that is both dull and powerful, flooding in from the windows that checker the adjoining rooms.

  At the top of the stairs, he sees a figure that fills him with fury. It’s the man who broke into his house, the one from the café, the one who wheedled his way into Emily’s life. Jeremy, in spite of himself, starts sprinting up the stairs. And he doesn’t stop even when the man levels some sort of powerful weapon, a machine gun or something.

  “If I bark,” the man says seconds before Jeremy reaches him, “they die.”

  Jeremy freezes. He’s two steps from the top, face-to-barrel. Behind the man, a hallway and three closed doors: left, right, straight ahead. “Where are they?”

  The man gestures with a nod. “Middle. But first empty your pockets.”

  Jeremy pulls out his jean pockets, dislodging a dime.

  “You looking for some more hair gel?”

  “Cell phone.” The guy doesn’t take the bait. The opposite: “We are looking at a larger good and I’m deeply sorry for any trouble we’ve caused.”

  “Like killing Harry and Evan. How does it go: thou shalt not kill, unless it could lead to even more killing?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Jeremy brushes past the man. He can’t think of any productive way to attack, grab the gun, push the man down the stairs. All high-risk roads with no apparent reward. Jeremy reaches the door in the middle, turns back, sees the guy looking at him.

  “The lions will die too.”

  The man grimaces. “Not in cages.” He pauses. “Stay in the room.” Pauses again. “It won’t be long.”

  Jeremy turns back and opens the door. In the corner, beneath a picture window that stretches nearly the length of the wall, sit Emily and Kent; she’s draped over him like a blanket. The pair practically entangled, a mother-and-child pretzel. She looks up. Dazed. Puts her head back down. “It’s okay,” she whispers to Kent.

  Jeremy recognizes the invasion of a surprising, unwelcome thought: my mother would’ve been arguing with the guards, trying to escape, not enveloping me.

  He sees a blur. Kent running toward him.

  “You did this. You did this!”

  Fury, tears, arms and fists whirring, half boy, half adolescent. “You hurt her! You hurt Mom . . .” He reaches Jeremy, arms flailing.

  “Kent!” It’s Emily.

  Jeremy absorbs the modest blows, can’t decide whether to protect himself or put his arms around the boy.

  “Kent!” Emily repeats. She pulls her son from Jeremy, glowers at Jeremy, leers. “Don’t say it. Don’t say it.”

  “What, I . . .”

  “It’s our own fault, right? I should’ve known. I should’ve picked up this guy’s bad intentions, erred on the side of defense, caution. I should put up boundaries and defend them at all costs. Like you.”

  Jeremy’s eyes fill with hot tears. This is what she thinks of him. Even in this moment, she expects from him admonition, superiority.

  “I’m sorry, I . . . Emily . . .”

  “What? What? Did I hear that, right? Kent, did you hear that? Sorry. Sorry? What, is it new-vocabulary day for Jeremy?”

  He shakes his head. Almost Nik’s words when Jeremy had used the word “please.”

  He puts his head down. The word will end and these will be his final moments. Caged in the world he built.

  “The cat’s in the cradle,” he mutters.

  “Now some trick. You’re going to make me guess your reference, chess, a setup? Show how superior you are, how inferior we are? I’m not them. I was never them, but to you everyone is a ‘them.’ It’s not us and them. There never was an us. It’s you and the rest of the world. And now you’ve drawn me into one of your wars with everybody else! They, they put a hood over Kent’s head! I . . .”

  Kent throws his arms around his mother’s waist. She’s run out of steam. The pair, though standing, seem to recoil in a hug. It dawns on Jeremy that Emily and Kent have no clue about what is happening. They think they’ve been kidnapped. Maybe they’re collateral damage in some conflict that has embroiled Jeremy. That much is true, sort of, but a conflict the likes of which they can’t possibly imagine.

  Jeremy looks out the picture window, and he sees what Nik means by the remarkable view. He sees directly onto the Golden Gate Bridge, and beneath it. Especially beneath it. The top of the bridge is, predictably, enveloped by fog. But the bridge itself, and underneath it, clear. He can make out boats.

  On one of them, a secret meeting is taking place to save the world. It will be ground zero.

  “Please, please, Emily, let me explain.”

  She looks up from Kent. Calmly asks: “Can you get us out of here?”

  He shakes his head. Allows himself to admit defeat. “No.”

  “Then go. Leave us. Get out!”

  CHAPTER 49

  HE STARTS TO say something. He can’t think of what to say. More than that, he can’t make anything come out. He turns around. Tears stream down his cheeks.

  He walks to the door. He opens it. Discovers no one standing outside, or at the stair landing. Doesn’t mean anything. They’re downstairs, out front, wherever. Whatever.

  He pauses at the door.

  “We could group the colors together. It is a good idea. It was a good idea.”

  He shuts the door. He turns to mother and child.

  “Kent,” he continues. “We didn’t have to do the corners first, on the rocket ship puzzle.”

  It was the puzzle that Jeremy and Kent were doing when they had their first big fight. The one where Kent challenged Jeremy’s authority and Jeremy snapped in his usual way.

  “Jeremy, don’t try your obtuse tricks with—”

  Kent interjects: “Why can’t I grow up!?”

  Emily and Jeremy both look up, startled by the non sequitur. They catch eyes, like parents, then look back at the boy.

  “What do you mean, sweetie?”

  Kent answers his mother by sitting down.

  “He doesn’t like me when I’m not a baby.”

  She laughs, bitterly. “Me either.” She looks at Jeremy. “Harry Chapin. ‘The Cat’s in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon.’ The song. I get your reference. It’s about neglecting your child. Not really the right reference, Jeremy.”

  He bites his tongue, his instinct to challenge her. He just meant that he knows he’s created this world. He’s reaping what he’s sown.

  She says: “That song is about a father and son. Your issue is around your mother, which is beside the point. Your real issue isn’t that you learned how to neglect. Your issue is you never learned to let people have space. To be themselves. You can’t love them for what they are, who they are. It’s the opposite of what Harry Chapin is saying. You can’t neglect anything. Not a flaw, a perceived flaw, a difference of opinion, not any threat to your way of thinking, your feeling of superiority, your need to feel superior. Just . . .” She stops. It’s obvious. Just like his mother.

  “Just like them,” he says, letting his eyes gaze out the window. “Nik, the Guardians.” He thinks: I’m like them, unforgiving, rigid, more willing to destroy the world than to let differences blossom. “Scorched Earth.”

  Finally, Emily gives him a softer look, not soft, but softer, a new look. She’s said her piece. She’s run dry of fury. It’s not in her, and never was.
Still, he doesn’t feel any forgiveness, no latitude. Instead of walking forward, he sits. It’s his own exhaustion coupled with a deliberate effort to be on their level, a rhetorical, strategic move that remains in him, an instinct he can’t shed.

  He notices Emily wears a watch. It’s one he gave her. Rather, one he’d been given by some venture capitalist as a gift for her. The fact she’s wearing it gives him some hope; maybe it represents a subconscious act on her part—a sign that she has not abandoned him altogether.

  “What time is it?”

  She looks at the watch. “One thirty. Kent is hungry.”

  “Less than twenty minutes,” Jeremy says. He’s hit by a sudden urge to just sit like this, wait for the end, hope his desperate plan has worked and that the end might not yet come, not tell them what’s happening.

  But that’s not fair. And, besides, telling them might allow him to bridge the gap, create a narrative, a different conversation to smooth their way into peace.

  “Emily, we don’t have much time.”

  Without further preface, he starts explaining.

  Ten minutes later, they’ve all walked to the window, Jeremy finishing his story, all looking at the distant speck of a charter boat nearing the bridge.

  “Ten minutes?” Emily exclaims.

  He points to her watch and she holds it up. “Less.”

  “It’s too impossible to believe.”

  “The boat is there, Emily. These people, downstairs, wherever, they have guns. We’re not imagining this. This plot has been years in the making, decades, centuries. You’re right, it’s impossible to believe. The most powerful things are.”

  “Isaac,” Kent whispers.

  His hamster. “What will happen to him?”

  “There is one, tiny possibility,” Jeremy interjects. “One small chance.”

  He feels Emily’s eyes on him.

  “I swapped out the access code. A last-ditch thing, a Hail Mary, if you want to get biblical.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He explains. He tells Emily and Kent that he’d correctly guessed that the bomb needed an access code and that he himself, unknowingly for so long, was carrying the code: a combination of the random number generated by the key fob and Jeremy’s personal password.

  “You gave it to them?” Emily says.

  “No. Not exactly.”

  He explains that, having guessed this is what they wanted, he created a substitute access code.

  “But then how did it work to get into the computer?”

  Jeremy says that, a few hours earlier, he was in a café where he saw a woman working with a key fob that looked very much like his own. A standard issue random-number generator. He took the fob when she wasn’t looking. He tossed out his own actual fob. But not before he reprogrammed the algorithm with a new password.

  “I’m not totally following, Jeremy. How long now?”

  He looks at the watch. Six minutes.

  “I knew that they’d test to see whether the access code was accurate, by making me log into the iPad,” he says.

  So, he explains, he programmed the iPad to accept any combination of numbers and letters. It, in effect, has no password at this point. “You could enter anything into it and get into the guts of the program. But they don’t know that. They think that the number on the woman’s key fob, combined with my password, is the key.”

  “Why not just change the access code and give them your key fob?”

  “Because they’d have the actual number. Then, conceivably, they could make it work.”

  She blinks, calculating. He feels flush with love, attraction. She’s his equal, intellectually, she just never needed to prove it. She’s his great, great superior, emotionally.

  “So will your plan work?”

  He shrugs. “They bugged me, they could’ve found my fob, the real one. They’ve got a dirty bomb, a real one. So many possibilities. Chief among them: I could be wrong.” He pauses. “There’s a strong likelihood that I’m wrong and that my plan, this . . . last-ditch . . . this idea won’t fool them. Besides,” he says, then pauses again. “The computer still thinks the world is going to end.

  “Last I checked.”

  “Hail Mary,” Emily says absently.

  He swallows.

  “They took advantage of me, Em. I was set up from every direction. Used by the Pentagon, by Nik, by the venture capitalists, the peace and conflict community, people just preying on . . .” He pauses, continues: “On my tone-deaf talent.”

  Emily looks at him. He can see her deep nurturing instincts. He steps back to avoid her coming to his aid.

  “I brought it on myself. I was deaf. I was the center of all of it, the world of peace and conflict, the plots and counterplots, but I was so busy attacking, preparing to attack, that I couldn’t really listen . . . I couldn’t . . .” He pauses, tries to catch his breath, puts his hand to his chest, where it used to ache all the time. It doesn’t anymore.

  “Listen.”

  “What?” she asks.

  He wants to say: love. He can’t get it out. A tear drips.

  He feels Kent wrap a leg. Jeremy chokes back a tear, a sob, then doesn’t—choke it back. He lets tears stream down his face. He feels Emily getting nearer. He wipes his cheeks with his palm and looks at the watch.

  He looks at the watch. Two minutes.

  “I wanted it to end a different way.” He clears his throat. “But I did want it to end with you. Both of you.”

  He recognizes a terrible truth: even if the blast doesn’t go off, the three of them will not possibly escape. “Just like the computer,” he mumbles, “we know too much.”

  They look out the window, see the boat nearly beneath the bridge.

  Ninety seconds.

  He reaches for Emily and puts his arm around her. He wraps a hand around Kent, resting it on the boy’s chest. Mother then kneels, putting her head next to the boy. “I love you more than anything. I’m sorry if I did anything wrong.”

  “You were perfect,” the boy responds.

  Jeremy listens, feels together with them, so apart. Emily’s eyes are closed, her forehead touching Kent’s, and Jeremy is sure she’s praying.

  Forty-five seconds.

  He wants to tell them: please forgive me. But it’s not about him.

  Forty seconds.

  “Look!” Kent points.

  A small skiff, a dot, approaches the large boat. It must be the world killers, the Guardians, poised to set the world on fire. Poised, in their view, to save it.

  It was right. The computer was right.

  Twenty-five seconds.

  The skiff nearly collides with the charter. It’s hard to see what’s happening.

  Twenty seconds.

  Jeremy feels himself kneeling. Joining the pair, huddling with them. He feels Emily lean in, touch her cheek to his cheek.

  Fifteen seconds.

  There’s an explosion.

  Outside the house, a flurry of gunfire. A cascade of rifles, shouts, drowned out by bang, bang, bang.

  Emily turns to him. “Andrea,” he mutters. She got his text message. Way too late.

  Ten seconds.

  They look out the window. They huddle.

  More gunfire. Then something like a bomb going off, maybe a car exploding.

  :05.

  :04.

  :03.

  :02.

  CHAPTER 50

  :01.

  Jeremy closes his eyes.

  A deafening sound.

  CHAPTER 51

  :00.

  CHAPTER 52

  FREEZE!”

  Jeremy turns around.

  Men with guns. Police, federal agents, something. Flak jackets.

  “Thank God.” It’s Emily.

  Jeremy turns to the window. Squints to make clear what he’s seeing: the world is still intact. The skiff, with the Guardians, jetting away.

  “It didn’t work. It didn’t go off!” Emily.

  He
feels a hand on his back, another.

  “Jeremy Stillwater?” A man’s voice, the one attached to the heavy hand on his shoulder. “You’re under arrest.”

  He turns. In the doorway, Andrea. Wearing a bulletproof jacket. And a grim visage. Black ash smudges on her cheeks. In her hand, some sort of heavy black handgun.

  Jeremy: “Andrea. You got my text, you followed the signal.”

  Andrea: “I’d advise you not to say anything further.”

  Handcuffs clapped on him.

  Emily: “What are you doing?”

  The fed: “You’re under arrest for the murders of Harry Ives and Evan Tigeson.”

  He looks at Emily, then at Andrea. “Tell them! About Surrogate!”

  “I advise you to get an attorney, Mr. Stillwater,” she says.

  He searches her eyes, looking for a sign, a wink and a nod, an indication of whose side she’s on. She says: “Dr. Ives was killed with one of your knives.” It sounds almost apologetic. Like: there’s nothing I can do.

  The fed says to her: “Please don’t say anything further.”

  “I . . .” Jeremy looks at the fed, then gets his footing, says: “They’re getting away. You see we were held captive here.” Turns to Andrea: “This is absurd. You obviously had to blast your way in here. It’s not like I was standing outside with a gun. Whoever you killed, that’s who did this . . . Harry, and Evan.”

  An arm yanks Jeremy through the door, and, several heavies at his side, he is escorted down the stairs. Outside. He sees carnage. The van in flames. A body. It’s the guy in the denim jacket, bullet riddled, bloody.

  Something next to him, on the ground, a glint of metal, a smolder of plastic. The iPad and its cover.

  It was wrong. I was wrong.

  Jeremy suddenly tears himself away from the beefy fed holding his left arm and sprints to the body prone beside the van. He dives at it, a human fury. “Freeze,” he hears a chorus behind him say, then feels arms groping at him as he scrambles with his cuffed hand to tear at the shirt of the dead Guardian. Rips the garment, even as he’s being ripped from the body. But before he’s yanked away, he manages to do what he’d hoped: expose this Guardian’s naked torso. On his chest, a tattoo. A lion.