The Doomsday Equation (11 page)

Jeremy digs a bit deeper. The origin of this flare-up seems to
be a news story written a few days earlier in a small online-only newspaper from a town outside Moscow. In the story, a local reporter claimed to have interviewed a former Rosoboronexport engineer who said the corporation was enjoying growing profits from selling nuclear-grade materials on the down low to terrorist cells. The engineer in the article was quoted anonymously. The article was largely dismissed but it also set off a debate about the role of Rosoboronexport, which was one of those topics that occasionally flare up.

“Twelfth Street/City Center!” The voice comes over the speaker inside the subway. “Transfer to the Richmond line. Please expect some delays.”

The words echo somewhere in Jeremy’s brain, pull him from his iPad. It’s his stop, the transfer to Berkeley. The train slows. Jeremy realizes he must hustle if he’s going to get at the front of the line. He slings his backpack over his shoulder, palms the iPad and tucks it under his arm. He stands.

Starts walking to the doors sliding open, thinking about Russia. Like Mexico, and its own explosion of rhetoric in the drug war, it’s hard to see Russia’s linguistic wave as anything more than just one more cresting in intensity in a society engulfed in constant low-grade tension. Cresting, crashing, calming, repeat.

Just one thing sticks in his craw about Rosoboronexport. An article in a small newspaper refers to the leaking of nuclear-grade material. A bomb that got away? Jeremy thinks: Could that be true? Could it be nuclear material?

Jeremy’s struck that this is a bit of an aha moment. Maybe the bomb is key information, perhaps misinformation, that is so material to his computer’s apocalyptic projections?

Someone who was screwing with Jeremy—if anyone was—might be capitalizing on actual events to do it.

He’s so locked in his thoughts, scrambling through the sardines to catch the connecting train, that he doesn’t see the long-necked man taking him in from the subway platform. The man extracts his phone.

A
RE YOU MOVING YET?

Janine nearly laughs when she reads the text. What a geek. It’s the stilted formality of someone so outside the norm of modern world communication. Not: R U moving? Or: allgood? Or: cool?

They’ve got a veritable Boy Scout running Operation End-of-the-Earth. An increasingly desperate Boy Scout.

Janine pulls over. She texts back:
check
. She thinks: I’ll see your arcane, 20th-century vernacular, and raise you.

She breathes deeply, metabolizing chaos. Changing plans, a new checklist: get the bearded Jew, but first, strike against the infidel. With her hands. What she was born to do or, maybe,
shaped
to do. Nature, nurture. A foolish distinction. All part of the big plan.

She sees a sign for underground parking. Can’t risk getting caught in there, having the car encased, or so easily found by the cops, should it come to that. Then she sees a space on the street, just behind her. She puts the car in reverse and speeds to the opening, narrowly beating a car coming the other direction—the correct direction. Its driver pounds the horn.
The driver pulls alongside Janine. The car’s window rolls down. The driver, a student in a hooded sweatshirt, says: WhatTheFuck. Janine rolls down the window of her aging Toyota. She smiles at the young man and shrugs, then, still smiling, nearly flirtatious, channels her go-to thought: your flesh will soon burn. The young man flinches, and he drives away.

A parking spot. In Berkeley, in the rain. You take your miraculous signs where you can get them, Janine thinks. Her grim purpose confirmed. The chaos be damned.

D
WINELLE
H
ALL, A
rectangular three-story building with red roof tiles in the center of Berkeley’s campus, would be ordinary, certainly unspectacular. But it seems to have gobbled up and embodied the spirit of the yells and protestors and one-man showmen who mount soapboxes and spew ideas or juggle them, or balls and knives—actual and linguistic—the quintessence of the stereotypical Berkeley politicized catcaller. Now absent.

The Dwinelle plaza stands eerily empty, something Jeremy barely registers along with a distant thought: must be spring break. His pause is instantaneous, just enough to take in the condensation coating the walls of the storied hall, and to feel the pain near his sternum. He’s missed his MRI. He thinks: I wonder if my mother felt this sensation before she got her diagnosis.

He strides forward.

“You want war, Harry,” Jeremy mutters, “you’ve got it.”

He descends to the basement, walks to the far right of the building, hearing his feet clop on the ratty tile floor. He’s got a
full head of steam when he knocks on the door at the end, the one with the sign. “Harry Ives.”

No answer. The knock reverberates down the hallway. In an unusually self-conscious moment, Jeremy glances down the lonely corridor. He sees a man with floppy hair and a backpack exit an office at the far end of the building. Grad student or associate professor, Jeremy thinks, as the man looks his way, then turns and heads down the hallway and up the staircase. Feeling pity for the man, all these academics.

To Jeremy, there’s something deeply corrupted and corrupting about an environment like academia, where success is so purely subjective. Success depends on selling ideas, which requires convincing people of their merit but not actually asking them to spend money or hard-earned capital to purchase the ideas. It is, to Jeremy, the highest order of rhetorical gamesmanship.

And so, while the idea oppresses him, it also exhilarates him. It is a forum for endless potential conflict, debate, one-upmanship, backstabbing and, better yet, the barely disguised front stabbing.

And none a better foe than Harry, thinks Jeremy, as he nestles his knuckles on the old wise man’s door. He raps again, louder than the first time, and the brown door creaks open. It’s been left slightly ajar.

After modest hesitation, he pushes the door open.

He hears a footstep in the hallway, a cough. Peers back out, sees no one.

He sees that he’s got his iPad in his hand, and that it’s damp from sweat. He opens the cover, sees the countdown clock.

52:03:35.

He stuffs the computer into his backpack, and peeks back into Harry’s office. Rather, he’s looking into a classic anteroom of a professor of the highest esteem at a state university, meaning: drab and small and, to Jeremy, pathetic. It’s smaller than his own Embarcadero office, barely big enough to hold a cheap metal bookcase against the opposite wall, and, against the wall to his left, a desk, probably belonging to Harry’s graduate assistant. On a metal shelf attached to the wall over the desk, he sees a thick rectangular book that he identifies even though he can’t read the words on the spine:
Conflict: A History
. It is Harry’s well-worn and traveled bible on the subject. Piled on it, three books with titles Jeremy also can’t read, though he thinks he makes out the word “Mesopotamia.”

Next to the bookcase, another doorway, with a frosted square glass window, the portal to Harry War.

“Harry.”

No answer.

Another clop-clop of feet in the corridor.

On the desk, there’s a neat stack of folders, a blue plastic cup with the Cal Bear logo, holding a circle of pens. A laptop. Maybe the computer that Harry and some partner—a grad student, or Evan—are using to scam Jeremy.

He hears a thump from inside Harry’s office. The sound of the old man dropping a book or slamming down the phone.

It’s wartime.

Jeremy turns the handle, opens Harry’s door.

The smell hits him first. Sweet, sticky, fresh. His brain flashes on a piece of conflict trivia, the battle in the early-mid 1800s in South Africa in which ten thousand Zulus fought
Voortrekkers. So brutal was the battle that it turned the Ncome River red.

The Battle of Blood River.

Blood. Rivers of blood. He’s standing in rivers of Harry’s blood.

H
ARRY!”

The aged professor, plopped in his chair, slumps over the desk, folded, like a soggy towel. The old man twitches. Doesn’t he? Hard for Jeremy to tell. Too dark. Lights off, shades down.

Without taking his eyes from Harry, Jeremy reaches behind him on the wall, feels for the light switch. Turns it on, gets a blast of red and terror, an image of Harry turned into a jigsaw puzzle, wounds to neck, and chest, back. A weapon, a knife, protruding from his shoulder.

Jeremy turns off the light.

“Harry. Jesus. Harry.” Quieter this time, self-conscious. The only light now from between the shade slats covering a window over the cot across the small room. Wall-to-ceiling bookshelves, a scattering of folders and files, some in stacks, a tomb of wisdom and learning. And Harry.

The old man twitches again. Jeremy feels something sticky under his shoes. Blood. Horrified, he lifts a sticky foot, nears the desk. Sees Harry’s head is flopped in the other direction, looking away. He touches Harry’s shoulder. No movement now.

Jeremy pulls out his phone. He swipes the screen, tries to, can’t steady himself.

Harry lifts his head, turns to Jeremy, drops his head again.

“Harry. Hang on, Harry. I’ll get help.” Jeremy reaches for the knife. Pauses. Will it do more harm than good?

“L . . .” A sound escapes Harry.

“Harry?”

“Lo . . .” Sounds and gurgles. Blood trickles from the professor’s lips, his eyes glazed and intense, determined.

Jeremy lowers on his haunches. He rests his chin on the edge of the wooden desk. Looks into dull eyes.

“I’m getting help. Who did this, Harry? Say a name.”

Harry swallows. Jeremy fingers 911. The touchscreen phone takes only the first number. The sweat, nerves, momentarily locking up the screen. He wipes it against his shirt.

“Is it Evan?”

He dials 911. “Andrea? What are they up to? Why?”

Jeremy looks around, for some sign, some explanation. A neat desk, office intact, the phone knocked from the hook, Harry’s near-lifeless elbow, a protruding knife.

The knife.

Jesus.

He knows that knife. The riveted black polymer, the fat carbon-steel blade.

“They’re setting me up, Harry.”

“Emergency services.” It’s a woman’s voice.

Jeremy says: “Um . . .”

“Hello. Is everything okay?”

“Ambulance. Hurry.”

“Calm down, sir. Is someone hurt?”

“A stabbing. At Dwinelle Hall.”

He doesn’t say: a stabbing with
my own knife
. Just like the one someone stole the night before from Jeremy’s apartment.

A look of excruciating pain crosses Harry’s face, like he wants to say something but can’t make words; distant, forever eyes.

Jeremy reaches around and into his backpack. Does he have anything? Water? He yanks off his backpack and plops it onto the desk. He rummages inside. Shit, didn’t he have water?

Across the desk, Harry, eyes intermittingly closed, taps his finger. Tap, tap, tap. Jeremy wonders: is it Morse code? Another tap, tap.

He looks down where Harry taps. A desk calendar, stained by Harry’s life. Where Harry taps, something scrawled. Words? Letters?

He wants to turn on the light. Doesn’t want to. Can’t. Looks at Harry. If he pulls the knife out, what? The blood pours out? He saves Harry? Kills him?

“Are you there? Sir?” The emergency operator.

“Ives, Harry Ives. In the basement.”

Jeremy puts the phone in his pocket, but doesn’t hang up. They’ll find him, trace the signal. Within seconds, be here in minutes. Harry taps again, twice urgently, once slowed. Jeremy walks around the left side of the desk to see the calendar from Harry’s vantage point. He makes out an image. It’s a V, or an upside-down triangle without the line connecting at the top.

On each point, there’s a number. At the top left of the symbol, “972.” On the top right, 970. Along the right side, more numbers: 7, 41, 212. Along the left side: 986, 86. At the bottom, more numbers still, and then the numbers trail off, leading to Harry’s index finger, shaking.

Bloody scrawl, lowercase, running together. Jeremy clenches his teeth. Begging his brain to make sense of it.

“What is it, Harry?”

“Lo . . .”

“A victory sign?” Jeremy says, exclaims: “Will there be war?”

“Logca—”

Harry tries to shake his head. “Logcab—”

“Log cabin?!” Jeremy blurts.

Harry blinks.

“The argument at the log cabin?
V
for victory. You . . . what does it mean?”

Harry sucks in a labored breath. His beard quivers. Jeremy puts a hand on the old man’s back. Withdraws it to the knife handle, wondering whether to pull it, feels the sensation like it’s submerged in Jell-O. Feels hot tears in the corners of his eyes.

Harry spits something, a word. Jeremy leans down. Harry repeats: “You.”

“What? Harry, what about me?”

Harry doesn’t react. It’s not what Harry means or not clear what Harry means. Jeremy’s inches from his face.

“Please, Harry. Please tell me what to do.”

Harry’s eyes suddenly open. It’s an adrenaline burst, perhaps unknown to him in this moment why: his dying body recognizes that Jeremy, his proud protégé, his unyielding son, is begging, near tears.

Harry wheezes: “AskIt.”

“What?”

Harry extends a finger, points to the backpack sitting on the desk.

“Ask it? Ask the computer? Harry, I’m supposed to ask the computer?”

Harry reaches out and grabs Jeremy’s hand. Jeremy recoils, leans back in. He hears footsteps coming. Nearing, nearing, entering the anteroom. The ambulance?

A voice from outside. “Dr. Ives?” A woman.

“What?” Jeremy implores. “Harry.”

“Peace. Peace . . .”

The thick fingers squeeze Jeremy. Hold them on to the calendar. Harry catches his eye. “Beware Peace . . .” He flinches, jerks, his eyes open quickly, then begin to close.

Jeremy looks up. In the doorway. A woman, drops the book in her hands, screams.