The Doomsday Equation (19 page)

I
DON’T SAY PLEASE
much, do I?”

The wheels of the Toyota crackle a last time and the car comes to rest at the cabin. Surrounding it, enveloping it, a grassy knoll and then trees. Just a few of the grand eucalyptuses that dot so many of San Francisco’s landmarks, even here in the Presidio. More of them here are mutt trees, short and tall, bushy, a little Hansel-and-Gretel forest of makeshift paths and hollows with the cabin at the gooey center.

Occasionally, the spot gets rented out to wedding parties or for corporate bonding functions. More often, it’s just one of those landmarks where locals in the know picnic, or let their kids roam, or, in the case of Harry, come to think big thoughts.

“I also tend not to ask questions,” Jeremy says.

“Do you have a question?” Nik lifts a chocolate frosted and takes a fat bite.

“If you were a secret, where would you be?”

“In bed.”

Jeremy almost lets himself laugh. He takes in his assistant. Is Nik a simpleton or canny? Quiet because he’s shy or
deferential or for some other reason? Always in the shadows, with access to everything, all Jeremy’s contacts.

“I just asked a question, and now I’m going to say please.”

Nik looks at him.

“Please drive the car over there.” Jeremy points to the far end of the gravel driveway, where the road, such as it is, resolves into a grove of trees. The car should be hidden there from the road. “Please keep your cell phone off, and then please help me start looking.”

Nik, mid-bite, looks up.

“I have no idea for what.” Jeremy opens the car door. He looks at the iPad.

12:32:48. Hours, minutes, seconds, until attack.

He closes the cover. He looks for his trusty backpack, remembers he’s sacrificed it to dupe Andrea and her statuesque henchwoman.

“Can I use your bag?” Jeremy reaches down and lifts Nik’s worn leather bag with the long strap Nik slings over his shoulder, looking like a corpulent bike messenger.

Nik eyes it. Shrugs. “You might want to pull out the library books.”

Jeremy does; sets on the floor a book with a title about defensive boxing; some fitness book,
Build Your Body in God’s Image
; and something about foreign-language phonetics. Nik, always reverent, and quietly trying to better himself. A humble sidekick and nothing more. Right? Jeremy with mild disgust moves aside a hooded orange sweatshirt, almost stiff with perspiration, Nik’s boxing jersey. In its place, Jeremy stuffs his iPad and keyboard into the bag and slings it over his shoulder.

His eyes roll over Nik.

“Academics are not nearly as clever as they’d like to think.
They overcomplicate things, they go for cheap symbolism, their ideas aren’t nearly as sophisticated as they’d have you think.”

“Isn’t Harry dead?”

“I’m not speaking ill. I’m being frank about how to find what we’re looking for.”

“Did Harry tell you about the attack? Why aren’t you telling someone?”

Jeremy, standing at the door, no longer facing Nik but looking at the outlines of the cabin in the darkness, pauses. It’s the first time someone other than Jeremy—or his computer—has taken seriously the idea that there might be an attack.

“And like the sign says, no talking. Go where I’m not. Please.” Jeremy closes the door, takes a crunch step onto the gravel, eyes the sign stuck in the grass near the trees to the left. He can’t read it in the dark but he knows what’s on it: a phone in a circle with a red slash through it, and words underneath: “This is a peaceful place.”

He makes a beeline for the cabin, endures an intruding memory, he and Emily and Harry sitting across the grass, the far side of the knoll, sandwiches and ostensible celebration. Harry looked like particular shit that day, khaki cargo shorts and a wrinkled button-down shirt, patterned with colorful checks and tucked in tight.

“Have you been diagnosed with Pastelsheimer’s?” Jeremy prodded him.

“Alzheimer’s?” Emily asked.

Harry laughed. “I think he means that, at a certain age, you develop clothing dementia. Paisleys and Hawaiian shirts become the order of the day.”

“Props to old Dr. War for self-awareness.”

Laughter. Things had started well enough, Jeremy,
abandoned by the investors and Pentagon, celebrating solidarity with the last of his loyal band of partisans. These guys, and Nik, they’d help him make his way back to conquer the known world or, rather, prevent its conquest by nefarious antagonists, Huns toting nuclear suitcases.

It was shortly thereafter that Harry made the offhand remark when Jeremy glanced at his phone. Jeremy can’t remember the exact comment, something about Jeremy missing the forest for the phone. Jeremy blinked, then, without another beat, said: “It can predict envy too.”

Jeremy felt Emily’s hand on his leg, a squeeze.

“It’s dehumanizing. It can’t fully comprehend conflict and might even contribute to it, Jeremy,” Harry said.

“Careful, Dr. Ives,” Emily said. “You’re talking to a man who has much better relationships with computers than people.”

She laughed when she said it, a joke of course. But no matter. That was that, a land war. The thing that Jeremy objected to most of all wasn’t the content of Harry’s statement, which didn’t totally make sense to him. Rather, what most bothered him was the pointed way Harry said “Jeremy” at the end of his admonition, like a parent to a child, or a sagacious professor to a not-sagacious student.

Jeremy looks out into the darkness.

What’s here, Harry?

The dimmest light shines from inside horizontal windows running along the sides of the log cabin’s tall wooden doors. It’s the only spot of even modest visibility. Maybe the product of a night-light plugged in near the floor inside the door, some modest effort to discourage thieves or high school pranksters or whoever might stumble into this place at night.

The light proves sufficient for Jeremy to make out the one
part of this log cabin that is decidedly modern, the heavy industrial lock on the front door. He thinks, Gonna make it hard to get inside, if it comes to that. That’s suddenly not a priority. “The tree,” Jeremy mumbles. Not the proverbial forest, he’s thinking, an actual tree. He hears footsteps crunching on the gravel behind him. Nik. Apparently getting with the program.

Jeremy starts walking purposefully, a near jog, across the native green-yellow grass, lumpy, pocked with tiny dirt mounds and, literally, molehills. His walk becomes a hundred-yard dash. Dead ahead, the spot where Emily unfurled the picnic blanket. No Kent that day, Jeremy remembers remarking, because the boy had been on a sleepover. “A grown-up thing,” Kent had said, a comment that, for some reason, irked Jeremy. What’s wrong with staying a kid, Kent?

Harry stood at a tree, drawing some kind of diagram with his finger, a professor at a wooden chalkboard, outlining some theory about the superiority of the human mind and how Jeremy might better incorporate feelings and emotions into the war machine.

In the dull black morning, Jeremy finds himself at the same tree, a fat, knotty pine. He walks close, puts a hand on the cool trunk, feels the bumps, makes out some adolescent’s carving. He shakes his head; what am I looking for? He runs a hand around the back, feeling for, what, a hole in the tree that holds a manila folder, magic eight ball, cryptic hologram of Harry explaining the world?

A joy buzzer and a popgun with a flag that says: gotcha?

No, this is not a joke. Harry is dead. The computer was right. People with guns are chasing Jeremy.

He falls to his knees. He starts digging at a lump of soil to the bottom right of the tree. His hands quickly muddy with the
wet ground, his fingers cold and stubbing against dense ground just inches below the surface.

Self-consciously, Jeremy looks behind him. Even with the edges of light of dawn, he can’t see across the field. He thinks he hears his loyal assistant’s footsteps somewhere to the right, maybe on the other side of the building. He finds himself suppressing the urge to call out (Found anything?!), partly because even now he doesn’t want to betray his desperation and vulnerability. And he’s not sure how much to trust Nik. Partly, though, it’s too peaceful to shatter this moment with a shrill cry.

Peaceful, he thinks. Ask it. Harry hates the computer.

Jeremy stands up and starts running. A dead, anxious sprint, his feet slipping beneath him on the damp, fog-drenched grass, that dull ache in his clavicle. But still picking up speed until, less than a half minute later, he stands at the sign. The little one near the grove of trees, not far from the car. He practically slides into the base of it, a baseball player trying to beat the throw to home plate. He pats the lumpy soil and grass around the bottom of the sign, fingers making their way in deliberate but frantic concentric circles toward the base of the sign itself.

He feels the metallic ring.

It’s smooth, maybe an inch beneath the topsoil. On his knees, he paws away scoops of dirt, fingers full of cool, grimy soil and tiny rocks. He frees the top edge of the metallic ring, now realizes that it’s attached around the sign, like a little collar. And he can feel something beneath the ring, attached to it, buried snugly beneath the soil.

He pops up his head, and looks around. Instinctually, hoping for a shovel to materialize from the dark, damp air. Where’s Nik? He must be around the side of the cabin.

Jeremy looks at the sign telling him not to use a phone. “Get
over it. It’s the future.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his clamshell phone, his backup. He pushes it into the ground, a makeshift shovel, an app of the pre-civilization variety. Digs, digs, digs, discovers what he’s been expecting: the ring around the base attaches to a little lockbox, just like the kind that real estate brokers put on the homes they’re showing.

On the front of the box, there are numbers, like those on a rotary phone, and then a larger black button. Inside, something, a secret, a treasure. The answer? Jeremy pushes the black button. Of course, it doesn’t open.

“What’s the code, Harry?”

Jeremy grits his teeth until his whole head pulses. Closes his eyes. Log cabin. AskIt. Beware the Peace. What did Harry say?

Is it one of the numbers from the symbol?

Jeremy puts his hand against the base of the pole. Shoves. Digs his feet into the ground, pushes at the sign. It won’t give, it won’t budge. Jeremy closes his eyes, mustering rage, not having to look hard for it, pushes, feels himself tiring, his hands cutting on the edges of the post.

He lets out a deep grunt, a visceral yell of a tennis player laying into a forehand. He shoves mightily; the sign begins to give. Another big heave and it topples, the bottom popping from a good foot beneath the soil. Jeremy drops down, feels the sharp, ragged tip of the sign. He pulls the metallic ring off it. Free. He’s got it. What? Something. It, a piece of evidence, a key.

“What is it?”

Jeremy turns, sees Nik walking, about halfway across the field.

“Something.”

Nik trudges, trundles, really. Jeremy can hear the scraping of his big legs against one another.

“It’s locked. I need . . . do you have tools?”

Nik pauses, his typical deliberation. “I might.”

Nik starts walking to his car.

Jeremy focuses on the locked box, fingering it, feeling damp grass against his jeans. He poises a finger over the number pad. Harry wouldn’t send him here, not from his deathbed, without some clue as to the code. He thinks back to the numbers on the calendar, most of them country calling codes, all but one. 218-650. The one at the bottom of the V. What is that one?

Into the lockbox, he fingers 218-650.

Waits a second.

Pushes the black button to open the box.

Doesn’t open.

He puts his neck back and looks up at the sky, such as it is; so much low-level, wispy fog, windblown, that the actual sky seems that much more unattainable, blocked. “Give me a sign, Harry War.” He feels his voice catch in his throat. Harry, dead.

What did the codger say:

AskIt.

Peace.

Those aren’t numbers. They could be numbers, Jeremy supposes. He could translate numbers from letters using his phone, in the same way that phone numbers used to be expressed in letters, or the way 800-numbers are often done. He looks at his phone; the word “peace” would start with the number 7, which corresponds with “p.”

He listens to Nik fiddling in his trunk. He decodes “Peace” into 72323.

Punches it in.

Doesn’t open.

“Would this work?”

Jeremy looks up to discover Nik just ten yards away, wielding a crowbar.

“What is it?” Nik asks.

“I doubt it,” Jeremy says, absently answering Nik’s question about whether the crowbar would work. A crowbar. “We need a time machine to go back to talk to that cryptic old cryptographer. You got one of those?”

Nik walks purposefully forward. Heavy metal tool clenched in that thick boxer’s paw.

“Is everything okay, Nik?”

“Huh?”

Jeremy inches backward as Nick shuffles forward.

“Have you been to the zoo lately?”

“The zoo?” He steps closer. “What did you find?”

“You’re obsessed with the lions.”

“I don—”

Nik’s response is cut off by the approach of a car, an explosion of tires on gravel. They look up, trying to make sense of another dawn visitor to the log cabin. Just as Jeremy recognizes something about the van.

“It was behind us.”

“Where?”

“On Broadway.”

“Is this about Harr—”

They hear the first gunshot before he can even make out the person firing.

“Run, Nik.”

“What?”

“Away from me. Run!”

B
EHIND THE TREE
.” Jeremy spits out words at Nik, who runs a few steps ahead.

Jeremy glances over his shoulder. They’ve got a good seventy-five yards on the person who exited the van and started shooting. Rather, took one shot. Intentional? Now seems to have paused, looked at Nik’s car, and then is heading their direction. A woman, Jeremy thinks, slightly built, not Andrea or her tall, thin adjunct, and hustling not sprinting.

Could shoot again at any second. But would have to be a hell of a shot to hit someone in this low light, at this distance. And with a handgun, not a rifle.

Jeremy lunges forward, giving a slight shove to Nik to propel him. It’s unnecessary, it dawns on Jeremy; his sugar-fed assistant has surprising speed and dexterity, those hours in the boxing gym.

“She doesn’t care about you,” Jeremy rasps.

Nik keeps going, just a few feet from the big tree, the one where Jeremy and Emily and Harry picnicked, the one at the edge of the Hansel-and-Gretel forest. Beyond it, the Presidio,
more tree groves and open space, a maze of hiding places, or a fine place to get shot and not found for weeks.

Jeremy glances over his shoulder. Hears a click.

“Her gun might be jammed.” It’s Nik.

The pair jump behind the tree, huddle.

“Split up?” Nik isn’t even out of breath. He’s read Jeremy’s mind.

Jeremy almost smiles with filial affection.

“She doesn’t care about you, Nik. She needs me.” Spewing his plan, no longer any filter between his thoughts and mouth. “I’ll draw her away. You circle back and tell the reporter and—”

BOOM!

The gun’s report rips through the air. Thwack. A bullet smacks into a tree, their tree, another one?

BOOM!

Leaves and dirt spray at Nik’s feet.

Jeremy falls toward Nik, hoping to blanket him. Push him aside.

“ . . . tell the reporter there’s going to be an attack, and also that chick from CNET, arrange for us to talk. I’ll try them too when I figure out—” He pauses, allows himself to glance around the tree. The woman has stopped midway across the field. She’s trying to get her bearings. She’s short, confident, legs apart, stable, moving like someone with some kind of specialized training. Looks right in the direction of Jeremy, not that it’s certain she can see him.

Jeremy pulls on Nik’s arm, zigzagging, guiding him farther back into the trees.

Nik whispers: “You want me to take that?” The lockbox Jeremy clutches.

“Take the crowbar and smash up her engine. Meet me in
two hours at that café with the statue and the view, and . . . 218. Two eighteen!”

“What?”

“Find Evan.”

“Jeremy—”

“Do you understand, PeaceNik. Two hours. And—”

They both pause, hearing the sound of their stalker, deliberate steps, faint, but feet on grass.

Jeremy: “I’m sorry I doubted you. Do you understand?”

Nik whispers. “Reporters. Two hours. Evan. I tried. I don’t . . .”

“Find him!”

With several jabs of his finger, Jeremy points to the right, into the forest, showing Nik where he wants him to go. And without another word, Jeremy runs in the other direction. At least at first, then zigs from behind bushes and up a slight embankment so that he heads directly at the big tree, in the direction of the woman with the gun.

He stops, in a modest clearing amid the foliage and pines, a single eucalyptus to his right. Dawn upon him, the world. The first light. He can see the outline of the woman, and she him. Less than fifty yards apart. The gun held just in front of her with her right hand, steadied with her left. Not yet in firing position.

She raises it. Jeremy runs.

BOOM!

Thwack.

His legs explode, feet spitting bark and grass behind him.

“Arrêtez!”

Stop, French. Or die. And die. Now he can hear her following, as he’d hoped. He hits a second gear, third, clavicle
pumping, heart shouting at him for air, alive. A voice in his ears: It was right. I was right.

He crests and slides down a treeless embankment, briefly exposed for want of trees, but then encircled again. Dodging left and right. She’s behind him. He can sense it, still with the decided advantage of the gun, but she can’t keep up and she’s getting farther from Nik, his car, Jeremy’s trap. He imagines his pursuer, for a second, in the greenish gray uniform of the Jerries, Germans trying to fight on two fronts, Jeremy and Nik, spreading her too thin.

Nik will tell the world and Jeremy will unlock the evidence in his hand, put the puzzle pieces together. Redemption.

He churns through this demi-forest, serpentines around a bush to his right, then one on his left, watches a squirrel fly up a tree, thinks: I will save you, all of this. Takes two more steps, and stops. Dead. At the abrupt end of this grove of trees. Before him, a wide-open field. He pictures Gallipoli, nearly half a million killed running at one another’s trenches, conflict at its most extraordinary, the frailties of men—cowed by peer pressure and cowardice, driven by arrogance and dreams of immortality—mowed down by machines powerful well beyond the understanding of those who wielded them.

To Jeremy’s left, more groves he could skirt through and around. He hears the woman, maybe fifty yards behind, picking her way through the trees.

He steps onto the open field, and he sprints, screaming across it. Digging his feet into the grass so he won’t slip, willing his shoes to develop cleats, hearing the crowds at Berlin in the European championships and a fifth-place finish and a Rhodes scholarship. Step, step, run, over a hill, slipping only slightly on the downside, gaining distance between himself and the
woman, until at last he reaches another grove of trees, a mess of big and tall and bushy, light emerging above, but in front of him, a veritable forest, far-reaching, the kind of thing that hid the Polish underground from the Nazis. He lets himself turn back. In the middle of the field, she stands. Stopped. Heaving breaths. Gun now at her side. She’s a quarter mile from her car, and Nik’s, defeated.

He puts up his fingers in a V.

Victory.

He turns and begins jogging, picking his way through the grove of trees. He hears Emily’s voice: you’re exhilarated, you’re enjoying this. He shakes his head to make the admonition go away. But no sooner is it gone than he hears Andrea’s voice telling him that conflict crystallizes his thinking. That he’s prone to revelation when under duress and amid competition. Blink, then a vision of his mother, an image from his childhood, she and he squaring off over which movie to see. He’s only eight or nine, wants the grown-up movie. You’re just a child, his mother tells him. They debate the pros and cons; she’s hassling him and he just wants to see the movie about the cars and she wants to see a different one. The more he digs in, the more she smiles, enjoying this sport, and her power.

Up ahead, a small building, made of native redwood, a sign above the door on the near side. Men. A public bathroom. Jeremy sprints the last twenty-five yards across a field, head swiveling, not finding another soul. No parking lot or pavement, no easy access if a would-be killer is circling, just the caw of morning birds and the smell of dew.

Inside the bathroom, he relieves himself. In one of those murky public restroom mirrors, he glances at himself and looks
away. He splashes cold water on his face. Palms braced against the chipped wood at the edge of the basin, he thinks: Andrea might be right, and Emily; this conflict, this intensity, has allowed my brain to find answers, fueled me.

Get out of here. Too easy to get trapped.

Back out the door, Jeremy jogs in the direction away from the log cabin, toward the marina, another eighth of a mile, across more open field, then into a patch of trees that feels like it might be in the middle of nowhere. He’s slightly elevated, a mild hump in the landscape, a molehill, but elevated. He thinks of Assisi, in Italy, a city surrounded by plains but set on a hill so that its inhabitants and zealots could see the attacks coming miles away. He pulls out his phones, makes sure that they’re off. Any signal would just draw attention. So too, he checks his iPad to make sure that he’s not connected to his own account, which someone, in theory, could triangulate. He discovers, with relief but not surprise, two different unsecured wi-fi networks. He chooses the one “PresidioX145.”

He calls up the algorithm on the server, logs into it with the key fob, lets it begin to materialize.

First, though, the box, Harry’s treasure. He holds it in a palm, notices the sweat and condensation, feels a chill. Pokes into it: 8773.

T-R-E-E.

What did Harry and Emily say? Jeremy lost the forest for the tree.

Jeremy pushes the black button. Click. It opens.

Onto the ground spills a computer disk. Jeremy half smiles; really, Harry, a computer disk?

He glances around, pulls the keyboard and iPad from the leather bag, attaches the thumb drive. A box appears on the
screen showing the contents of the drive. A single document, named “Surrogate.doc.”

He touches it. A note appears: “Do you wish to open this document?” He knows what his computer is really asking him. Could this document have a virus? Does Jeremy know its source?

Jesus, he thinks, what if, after all that, Harry’s sent him some poison pill, some nuclear warhead aimed at the conflict computer?

He scrolls back to the browser, the conflict map. The clock.

11:05:12.

11:05:11.

He returns to the document left by Harry. He taps on it. It opens.