The Doomsday Equation (14 page)

J
EREMY PRESSES HIMSELF
against the building, wants to withdraw his head into his slicker, turtlelike.

Alternatively, he wants to sink his teeth into an attack, a drooling, take-no-prisoners, savage attack.

He knows he wasn’t imagining things. Knows that cocky gait, the too-cool for an umbrella or a jacket, the iPad case tucked under his arm.

What the hell was Evan doing climbing out of a sport utility vehicle across the street?

But that’s only the setup. Jeremy’s staring now around the corner of the building at the punch line.

The SUV dropped off Evan, then sped off, and seconds later appeared around the corner and parked at the valet stand at Perry’s.

The door opened.

One sheer leg, the hem of a knee-length skirt, the other leg. Deliberate, practiced, careful, seductive. Andrea.

He’s watching her now, as she hands the keys to the valet, curtsies a flirtatious little thank-you. All while looking around, swiveling her head, craning her neck to look inside.

I’m right here, Andrea, Jeremy thinks. Watching you lie.

She was the one driving the big sport utility vehicle that dropped off Evan. He’s almost positive, but not
positive
positive. The big car dropped off Evan and sped around the block, out of sight. Then it, or one virtually identical, appeared at the front of Perry’s. Hard to imagine, almost impossible to imagine, it was two different cars.

Andrea opens the rear door, pulls out a handbag off the backseat. Which for some reason makes Jeremy think: handgun. She’s licensed to carry. She once flirted with him by suggesting she’d purchased a pink holster bra.

“Packing a concealed gun is like wearing lingerie,” she told Jeremy. “Even if you’re the only one who knows you’re wearing it, it still makes you feel different.”

“What if you’re wearing both—a gun and lingerie?”

She laughed that syrupy laugh. “Exactly my point.”

She walks into the restaurant. Jeremy looks at the revolving doors of the hotel, then back. Evan barely knew Andrea, right? And what little they knew of each other, they professed to hate.

“We call someone like him an instigator,” Andrea once told Jeremy of Evan. Meaning: he tries to disrupt things so that he can find market opportunities in the rubble. “A business terrorist.”

Jeremy’s not sure of the time, but can safely assume it’s a little past five, the hour of his planned meeting with Andrea.

The rain is intensifying, not yet a downpour but now a challenge to the limits of his cheap slicker. A bus passes, flush with passengers, including one woman Jeremy can see with a cheek matted against the window in a post-work nap. Behind it, a
taxi. Its driver reaches the intersection just in front of Jeremy and makes a sharp U-turn. On any other day, Jeremy lets the driver have it, threatens to call 911, maybe does so.

The driver pulls into the circular entrance of the hotel. Seconds later, Evan slips through the revolving doors. He’s not alone. Next to him, two people: an elegant man in a gray suit, wisps of gray hair to match, tall but slightly bent at the shoulders, weathered, dark-hued skin; and a woman with a pink suit and short, fast steps. Jeremy recognizes them, sort of. People in the high-tech world, big dogs. He pulls himself into the building, close as he might. Wishes for invisibility. Evan and the pair climb into the taxi, and it speeds away.

Jeremy takes a deep breath, looks down, inhales deeply again.

He reaches behind him, feels his backpack. It’s damp but not soaked. He sees the coffee stand across the street, an awning shaking in the wind and three tables beneath umbrellas. Mild shelter but the vantage point he’s looking for.

He decides he must stop thinking. There’s too much to think about, and not enough: not enough data to conclude anything. He must act. He needs more data.

He sneaks a look at the iPad, the clock.

26:40:40.

He shoves the device back into the bag.

Two minutes later, he stands against the side of the coffee hut across the street, a vantage point from which he can look right into the front of Perry’s. He can see someone standing right inside the door, beside the maître d’ stand. Might well be Andrea, a woman almost certainly, given the person’s height, but hard to be sure it’s her because of the drizzle on the
windows. He can see the woman glance at something in her hand, probably a phone. She noodles with it—dialing; reading a text?—then puts it to her ear.

Jeremy scrambles to pull his phone from his pocket. She’s got to be calling him, naturally; that’s what you do when your friend is late. Even if the woman at the front of the restaurant isn’t her, even if Andrea’s sitting at the bar, or at a table, she’s got to be calling him, or she will soon. He turns on his iPhone. He’ll keep it brief, he promises himself, hoping to forestall anyone tracking him as the device comes to life.

The screen flickers and so does a hard truth. Jeremy can’t go to the police, not to Harry, or Evan or Andrea. The media? Who can he turn to for help?

“You want a coffee?”

Jeremy looks up to see a short man with a mustache and an East Indian accent, gleaming teeth in a crescent smile, holding out a coffee in a tall white to-go cup.

“On the house,” the man says in a high voice. “I’m done for the day. Take a pastry, too. Even the pigeons aren’t buying in this shit.”

Jeremy looks at the counter, with a spread of pastries, crumbly muffins, a gooey lemon bar wrapped in plastic, croissants, a half sandwich. “Take a couple,” the man says, cleaning the nozzle of the milk steamer on his industrial espresso maker.

Jeremy pockets the tuna sandwich, bites into a muffin, tasting cranberry, turns to look back at Perry’s.

“A simple thanks would be nice,” the man mutters.

Jeremy almost says: I thought you said they were free. Instead he looks back and says: “I really appreciate it.” But stops short of a completely human truth: I’m having a really bad day. That would be tantamount to an apology for not saying thanks.

His phone rings. With a mouthful of half-chewed muffin, he fumbles the phone and looks at the screen. A 202 area code. He answers.

“You’re late, Atlas.”

He swallows, a strategy forming. “You know how it is.”

“How what is?”

“Having the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

She laughs. “It never fails to amaze me, even surprise me, how you communicate. It’s like Ping-Pong,” she says. “Volleys, deep shots and chip shots, spin, things that keep the other person off balance, even in the most innocuous exchange. Then the occasional overhead smash. Maybe it’s more like Ping-Pong meets chess meets javelin throw.”

“New plan, Andrea.”

“Case in point.” She hesitates. “I like spontaneity.”

“It’s a little weird.”

“Even better.”

“I want you to come outside but stay on the phone with me.”

Finally, silence. Then: “It’s raining.”

“When you get out here give the guy your valet ticket.”

More silence. He can hear her brain clicking and he can guess what she’s thinking: how does he know I parked my car with the valet? It’s a logical assumption that I did so, but still. For his part, Jeremy wants to make sure she stays on the phone, that she can’t alert someone she might be in cahoots with, whoever that might be, or for whatever reason.

“I’m watching you,” Jeremy says.

“What?”

He lets loose a small laugh, to keep her off balance. “I know, Andrea.”

She clears her throat. “Okay, you’re right.”

“About what?”

“This is weird. It’s downright kinky.”

He has to smile. She’s good. She’s not giving an inch, just like his mother.

“What happens after I give my ticket to the valet guy?” She pushes open the door at Perry’s. She had indeed been the woman at the front, near the maître d’ stand. He takes a big slug of coffee, looks around. Is there a place to hide? If not, he’ll soon be in plain sight when she starts looking around.

She walks outside, takes a step, then steps back against the building, remaining mildly protected by the blue awning.

“Is that you, a vision in red?”

“I’m down the block, to your right, around the corner.”

“Bullshit, Jeremy. I’m looking right at you.”

“Are you packing?”

She holds her hands up in the air, the phone away from her head, looking in his direction, as if to say: what the fuck? She brings the phone back to her head.

Jeremy says: “You’re not wearing cargo pants so I’m guessing it’s in your purse.”

“I can’t carry a gun on an airplane.”

“All the same, I want you to give the valet guy your ticket, put your purse in the trunk and then climb into the passenger seat. Tell the man that he’s going to give the keys to your husband.”

“Okay, enough. What the hell is going on, Jeremy?”

“Andrea, I know you’re lying to me. And I know you want something from me. And if you want it, you’re going to have to do it my way.”

She hesitates, looking his way, shaking her head.

“I’m leaving,” he says.

She sighs. “You’re an asshole, Jeremy. You know that. I deserve to be treated better. But then, so do you.”

“Meaning?”

“I owe you one. I’m here to pay my debt. But after that I’m done.” She gestures to a valet who stands beneath the awning, arms crossed. He hustles over and grabs her ticket, says something into a walkie-talkie. She walks back into the restaurant.

Mere seconds later, the sport utility vehicle with the black tinted windows pulls up. Andrea walks to it, opens the back, puts her purse inside, waves the man off when he offers her the keys and points to Jeremy, who is walking across the street.

She climbs into the passenger seat. Jeremy, having reached the other side of the street, scopes his surroundings, unsure what he’s looking for, clicks to power off his phone. He takes the keys of the car, pulls off his rain slicker and hands it and his nearly drained coffee to the bewildered valet, and climbs inside.

Y
OU’VE CHANGED,”
Andrea says.

Jeremy adjusts to the light inside the car. He sees the long hair, the preternaturally smooth skin, the overall look of someone who doesn’t have to take too many pains to rise from attractive to irresistible but takes pains nonetheless. He tastes her perfume in the back of his throat. She’s got a half smile, knowing, practiced, showing perfect white teeth against light brown skin. But her discomfort is betrayed by the tight cross of her arms against her chest, the way she’s pulled back against the door, as far as she can get from him. Beneath her blouse, he can picture the blue tattoo. Tipsy, one night, she showed him, a jagged knife starting just above her left breast, pointing at an angle toward her heart and cleavage.

“Not the patsy you remember.”

“Your hair. Longer. Nice. And, it’s true, you were always more of a counterpuncher. Usually, you’d wait for the slightest provocation before going on the attack. I’d heard through the grapevine that you’d gotten more aggressive but this is an impressive display by any standard.”

“Grapevine.” He puts the keys into the ignition. Does she mean Evan? He’ll draw her out.

She ignores the edgy comment. Just another Jeremy trap. “Where are we going? I don’t have all night.”

He looks in his hand and discovers he’s holding a plastic key, a fob, one of those newfangled deals that let you start the ignition not by inserting it but by merely pressing a button on the car. He presses, and the car purrs to life.

“You owe me. Besides, it’s a nice night for a drive.”

Jeremy takes in the decked out dashboard, a built-in nav screen, a CD changer, the radio tuned to NPR but with the volume so low it creates only a hum of background chatter.

“Sweet rental for a low-level bureaucrat.”

She shrugs, uncrosses her arms. “I’m rolling my eyes. Are you really planning to drive wearing your backpack?”

Blood rushes to his face. Rookie move, so clearly betraying his attachment to his device. And without realizing he’d done it. He slips out of it and nestles it between the back of his legs and his seat.

He pulls into thickening traffic, eliciting a honk. “You were saying.”

“What was I saying?”

“You owe me.”

“So no foreplay, then. I was hoping we’d have a drink.” She clears her throat. “Jeremy, we’ve always been honest with each other. We talked, and it was real stuff. I always told you what I knew.” She pauses. She shifts, sitting straight back but looking out the window into the rain, a faraway look. She turns back and meets his gaze. She has clear blue eyes, their power undercut with the slightest puffy redness, sleeplessness.

Jeremy turns away, feeling an adrenaline burst he tries not to show. She’s going to lay it out for him, whatever it is. Maybe. Something in her voice sounds far less than revelatory. It sounds sincere, even kind. He remembers their rapport, that handful of conversations where he stretched out on the couch in his sleeping gear—boxer shorts, T-shirt, socks—and got lost in the banter. Work talk turned to personal chat, the edges of flirtation, light pokes around the edges of personal matters. He picked up bits of her failed relationships and a childhood that had a painful core she was careful to guard with thick yellow police tape. He felt kinship with her, liked that she was protecting him amid the brass, but also felt an uneasiness. It’s not that he didn’t trust her intentions, or maybe he did. It was more that he couldn’t get comfortable with her emotions. The playfulness excited him, left him feeling challenged, but feeling that he always had to be on, that low-grade intensity was the price of admission in talking to Andrea. With Emily, by contrast, he could be completely at ease or, rather, as much at ease as he could possibly be.

“No foreplay,” he says. They’ve hit a stop light at Howard. Jeremy, eager to get out of the bumper-to-bumper traffic, puts on his blinker. He reminds himself that Andrea lied about Evan. Urges himself to be careful.

“What I’m about to tell you I didn’t know. I swear that to you.”

He doesn’t say anything. He glances in the rearview mirror at the car that followed him onto Howard. A fancy black sedan. Doesn’t look suspicious. He sees Andrea glance in the passenger-side mirror. Following his gaze? Suspicious herself? Hoping someone is tagging along?

She continues. “I found out a few weeks ago, or that’s when
I began suspecting. But this was my first chance to come out without eliciting a fuss. I came out to—”

He interrupts. “Visit another asset.” It’s what she’d told him earlier on the phone. He wants to remind her of her lies. Keep her off balance, keep piling up chits.

He hits a patch of cars, guns the powerful engine and slips into the right lane then back into the left. Buys himself half a block of clear sailing. He passes Third Street. Were he to take a left, he realizes, he could soon be at home. He could query the building manager. Needs to. Was it Andrea who will appear on the surveillance tape, busting into his condo?

“I’m sorry,” Andrea blurts out.

A sizzle burns through him. Jesus, he thinks, it’s the government. They’re the ones who have duped my computer and she’s here to fess up.

“The maps, the warnings. Unbelievable. Harry.”

She shakes her head. She’s not understanding him.

Harry. Dead. He’s holding that back. Does she know? Will she tip her hand?

“Let’s just start with basics. Was Harry involved?”

“With what?”

“Harry introduced us.”

“Okay, so?”

“Why?”

“He consulted for us. He helped us understand patterns of conflict. He said you could do the same. You and your computer.”

“He wanted to see me go down, right? He felt threatened.”

“Jeremy, Harry cherished you, like a son.”

Jeremy feels a terrible twitch, grief. Harry, in a pool of his own blood.

“And Evan is involved too. Don’t lie to me. I know about you and Evan.”

Jeremy flashes on a theory: Evan, starting SEER, a new company that crunches Big Data in order to predict the future, creates the illusion of an impending conflict and then swoops in to save the day and, in the process, lend a helping hand to Jeremy, the mad and incompetent genius with Harry in league. A proof of concept and a marketing coup?

What is SEER? What’s Evan up to?

The half-baked theory makes no sense, clears Jeremy’s brain as instantly as it appeared. Why would they kill Harry? Had he realized the folly and was he threatening to tell Jeremy the truth? It’s all so far-fetched.

“I’m not jockeying for position in this conversation, Jeremy. We can drop the dance. Just hear me out. As it turns out,” she starts, pauses, picks up again, “you were not wrong.”

“About what?”

“Don’t play stupid, Jeremy. This is embarrassing enough. About Al Anbar. And the skirmish at the Afghani-Russian border. Both of them. I had no idea.”

He looks at her, then out the window, eyes glazed at the skewed light of urban neon coming through the prism of drizzle. Al Anbar, the Afghani skirmish, the two mini-conflicts that the U.S. military used as a test of the validity of Jeremy and his algorithm. They told him that he and his computer were wrong, that they had miscalculated the length and nature of the conflict.

“You weren’t wrong,” she repeats. “Put another way, Jeremy, you were right. Your computer was right. You, it—your computer—correctly identified when those conflicts would end, with, frankly, eerie accuracy. Almost like you had a crystal ball.”

He realizes he’s holding his breath. He blinks, hot tears in his eyes. He repeats the words in his head. Did he hear right? He forces himself to pick out an object through the window. It’s an umbrella, being unfurled by a tall woman in a long, shiny raincoat standing next to an ATM.

He feels a pulsing around his clavicle. He puts his hand on his shoulder, suddenly, momentarily, grateful for the pain. It says to him: you are here and this is not a dream.

“Jeremy, we had our reasons. . . .” She pauses. “Not me. I didn’t know. I suppose
they
had their reasons. That’s a lot of power you had that we didn’t understand. It was, is, a potential game-changer. Understandable enough, right? That’s what I thought too. But I think it’s something else.”

She’s not making sense. But it doesn’t matter. Jeremy’s finally getting a grip on the conversation. He turns to her. “I was right? I was right?!” Not a question; an accusation.

“I shouldn’t have said anything. I just—”

“Bullshit!”

She puts up her hands, surrender, and a primal show of defense.

“I know things haven’t worked out for you. But I thought you should know what happened. Maybe there’s some way we can work together in the future. I don’t know. I’m in way over my head here.”

Someplace, in a faraway corner of his brain, he hears a piercing noise, a honking. He looks down at his white-knuckled fists gripping the wheel. Honk. He’s at a green light, cars piling up behind him. HOOOONKK.

He puts his left hand over his right because it keeps him from reaching out and grabbing Andrea. I was right?

“When I started to piece this together I figured they just
didn’t want a computer nerd to know more than they did but it’s not that. It’s something else. To be honest, I’m not sure they ever gave a damn about you and your computer.”

He waves her down with a hand. Shut up, shut up! If the computer was right before, then is it right now?

“It’s about something else? Like what? What do you mean they didn’t give a damn about me and the computer?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t believe you,” he roars. “It’s a trap, a game.”

Jeremy pictures Evan coming out of her car. Too many coincidences; how can he now, suddenly, take her confession at face value?

Honk
. Finally, he punches the accelerator. She continues: “Why would I make up something this embarrassing? Jeremy, please, I can appreciate the skepticism. You’ve gotten the runaround. So have I. Believe me.”

The sound of her voice makes him want to scream. He paws his pocket, feels his cell phone, making sure it’s there. He pictures Emily, her hair half covering her face, sees Kent. What’s he supposed to do; call her? Warn her? Say what?
Emily, you and Kent should arrange transport to the moon, just in case.

In case of what, Jeremy?

The end of the world.

Or maybe, for whatever reason, the government is playing with him—piling lie on lie. Does it have the capacity to mess with his algorithm? Probably, but why? What could its incentive possibly be?

“Give me your phone,” he says.

“Um, no.”

“Fuck you. Log cabin.”

“What?”

“What’s the log cabin?”

“I saw him, Andrea. Evan. I saw you and Evan.”

“What?”

He looks at Andrea. She brings a thumb to her mouth.

“Everything connects together, somehow, all of you. It’s in the V, on Harry’s desk, with the numbers. In the computer.”

“It’s in the computer? What is?”

“Harry’s dead. But you know that.”

“What?” Pause. “Harry Ives?”

Jeremy spits a foul half laugh, opens the door. He starts running.