The Doomsday Equation (26 page)

:01.

Jeremy closes his eyes.

A deafening sound.

:00.

F
REEZE!”

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.

From behind, Jeremy hears a seething whisper: “Next time, I shoot.”

He turns, sees Andrea and others, scampering up. Among the group, a tall, thin woman in a flak jacket. It’s Andrea’s second, her assistant, hired gun, bloodhound. She catches Jeremy’s eye and locks on to it until Jeremy turns back to Andrea. “Where’s Nik?”

Andrea looks away.

The fed looks at the body on the ground, says to Jeremy: “Want to tell us the name of your accomplice?”

In the time it takes Jeremy not to respond, he gets yanked toward a black police car, no mercy now, and a hand pushes down on his head and shoves him into the backseat.

The car pulls away, Emily and Kent, standing at the front of the building, entangled, watching in disbelief.

Y
OU HAVE THE
right to remain silent.”

“Shush, Kent.” She looks at the boy, sitting cross-legged on the ground, looking at Jeremy, a mock serious look in his eyes. She looks at Jeremy, swallows.

Jeremy puts up his hands, surrender. He reaches into his pocket, withdraws it, empty-handed. He pulls his fingers across his lips, as if sealing them, then tosses away the key.

Emily exhales.

Kent smiles. “Let’s do this one!” Jeremy twists his body, reaches behind him, picks up a puzzle box. On the cover, a large monster, Godzilla-like, stepping on a city.

“How about a different one, sweetie?” Emily says it to Kent, but looks at Jeremy.

He opens his palms, like, whatever, smiles.

Kent spills the pieces onto the floor. Jeremy feels something around his chest, a sensation that, for an instant, he can’t interpret. Is it the pain, resurfacing? No, not that, it’s smoother, duller, like the coursing of the morning’s first cup of coffee, or tea. It feels like: thanks. He’s struck by an urge to direct his appreciation, to express gratitude, to send it heavenward,
thank somebody, or something. He realizes he’s got tears welling, again, a lot of that lately. He drops his eyes and lets them focus on a puzzle piece, with green and a touch of slick gray, maybe Godzilla’s toenail.

In his periphery, he allows himself to pick up the colors in Emily’s modestly appointed living room, the red throw carpet, the brownish couch, the worn wood of the shelf over the fireplace. He feels the warmth again spread in his chest, such a far cry from the pulsing pain that plagued him until two weeks ago, when the world nearly ended.

When he removed the key fob from around his neck. When he pulled from his chest the symbol of his burden, his need to be right, his certainty of his righteousness. He didn’t need an MRI. He needed to be relieved, to relieve himself, of his certitude, that singular belief in his own infallibility. Or, rather, he needed to admit to himself what he already knew: He was merely human. Not omniscient. The pain, the excruciating throbbing, was due not to cancer or disease but to a disconnect between the reality of an uncertain, chaotic existence and what he romanticized, idealized, needed.

“I had a fob, and Nik had a cross.”

“What?”

He laughs. “Never mind. I’m waxing idiotic. How we doing this puzzle, Kent?”

“Let’s put all the green pieces together.”

He feels Emily’s hand on his back, rubbing in a gentle circle. He takes a deep, appreciative breath. He picks up a puzzle piece with red jags, maybe fire jutting from a window of a building being stomped by Godzilla. He has another new sensation and tries to place it, and does: fear.

Yes, he’s been temporarily exonerated of the murders of
Harry and Evan. There was sufficient doubt he could’ve pulled off such a crime, doubt cast by the conflicting physical evidence, his lack of any violent history, alibis that put him in too many places other than the murder scenes, particularly at the apparent times of death. Jeremy suspects he got some help from Andrea, or even those above her, suggesting to law enforcement that Jeremy was caught up in a larger terrorist-related plot, details missing, sotto voce, stuff that would fall under federal jurisdiction, the military.

Some suspicion for the murders has fallen on a woman who was consorting with high-tech execs, someone thought to be a prostitute, a woman described by Emily and Kent as radiant but heartless. She’s thought too to have shot Evan. There are rumors that she goes by Janine, among other names, that her fingerprints have traveled the world. That she may have loosed a lion in the San Francisco Zoo. An assassin, a harlot, a zealot, but a practical one, the perfect terrorist. But rumors, ghost trails. The woman has not been further identified, or found.

Nor has there been any discovery of a bearded man, bomb parts that Jeremy alleges exists, or Nik. Perry. Whatever his name is. Gone, just as mysteriously and silently as he appeared one day those many years ago in the lab in Oxford.

Regardless, in a way, they’ve won. Not just because they’ve evaporated. But because they managed to head off the plans of the technology consortium to announce a development in the West Bank. Who knows why? Maybe Evan’s death spooked them. Maybe they sensed danger. Maybe they just decided that their business is, plainly, business. No sense messing with efforts outside, as it is said, their core missions.

Jeremy glances at Emily and feels a surge of passion, not lust, just a craving to stay connected. He takes her in, pausing
momentarily at her ankle, where he sees her blue-tinged Star of David tattoo. He’s struck by her quiet observance of Judaism, how it bolsters her inner peace, how different from Nik’s politicized version of religion. Who has the wisdom to know what’s right?

Then he turns his attention to the cover of the puzzle box. One of Godzilla’s feet pushes halfway through a building, a car pierced by the monster’s toe. The other massive foot hangs in the air, poised to stomp, the edges of a setting sun peeking out from behind the furious green giant. At the edge of the image, a big white dog appears to sprint from danger.

“I know where he is.”

Emily looks at him.

“You’ve done so well.”

He takes her meaning: he’s not touched a computer. He’s even conceded that maybe Harry was right; computers, for all their power, might create major problems. Not just because they aren’t human but because they make us less human. They make us less empathic. More computer communications, Harry has posited—or
had
posited—could mean more conflict. We don’t see who we’re talking to, we flame each other, we bully. We are inured to the responses we engender, just like, Jeremy thinks, I insulate myself from what everyone thought. Maybe, he’s been thinking, he can do a little less of that insulating.

“It wasn’t the computer that told me,” Jeremy says to Emily.

It was an intuition, an impulse. And not one nearly so profound.

He stands up.

“Where are you going?”

“An errand. I promise.” He feels too embarrassed to say now
what he’s thinking but what he once would’ve said without reservation: I’m going to make the world a little bit safer.

“Kent, you’re a big guy now, the man of the house. Please take care of your mother.”

Kent looks up, blinks, something in his eyes, a question.

“Oh yeah, I’ll be back. This puzzle better be finished when I get here.”

T
HE ANCIENT WALL
seems to rise from the ground like a mirage, a chalky brown façade that can’t help lending a terrible and awe-inspiring perspective. They’ve stood so long. They’ve withstood so much. They contain everything.

“You want here?” The Russian taxi driver’s accent communicates decided impatience. Jeremy swallows a response.

He looks back over the walls that fortify the Old City. Jerusalem.

He nods. “Thank you.” He hands the man money.

He stares at the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to Arab East Jerusalem, located on the city’s northwest side. Arch-shaped, gray bricked, majestic and so fragile. How has it survived? He begins a purposeful march.

Inside, past security, he sees blue block letters on a white sign:
via dolorosa
.

The way of grief, the way of suffering. The winding walk; Jesus bearing his cross.

The name of Nik’s dog. Rosa, short for Dolorosa.

Where else would a Guardian come? A Guardian?
The
Guardian.

Jeremy takes in the midday cacophony, the clanging of pots and pans, the merchant shouts and bickers from the hole-in-the-wall trinket sellers, apothecary, the butcher—this, the world’s most ancient mall. A soldier walks by, a young woman, jet-black hair, jet-black rifle. Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics.

Spitting distance from the Wailing Wall, the Jews’ holy prayer site. Behind it, the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest Muslim shrines. Here, the stations of the cross, the final steps of Jesus Christ.

Jeremy looks at a grimy-toothed boy, toes poking through sandals, dirt and grime pasted against his legs, smiling. Jeremy can’t help wondering: Is this the portal—for the Messiah? For something? So much energy here. So much danger.

He sees Nik.

In a doorway, a face, that cherubic jowl, still visible but facing away, angled in the other direction. In a casual conversation with a man in a black robe. Nik, maybe sensing something, begins to turn toward Jeremy. Jeremy presses himself into a doorway, out of Nik’s sight.

Jeremy takes a deep breath, pictures himself grabbing the gun from a soldier—trying to—and drilling a million holes into Nik. Instead, from his pocket, Jeremy extracts his phone. He dials. The line picks up.

“Shalom.”

“Cute, Atlas.”

“No.”

“No, he’s not there?”

“No, please don’t call me Atlas.” Unspoken: I can’t handle that weight. Added again after a pause: “Please.”

Andrea doesn’t respond.

Jeremy says: “Yes, he’s here.”

There’s a pause. “We’ve got it from here.”

“You’ve got it from here.” As in: yeah, right.

“Do you see the candlestick seller?”

Jeremy places a man along the dusty corridor, just a few feet ahead, sitting cross-legged on a blanket covered with silver candlesticks. The man’s wrapped in a shawl, looking like something from an ancient bazaar. Jeremy grunts into the phone.

“Look behind him.”

There’s a doorway, closed on the bottom half, open at the top. Inside, a figure with a dark head covering. The figure pulls back the cover a tad, just enough. It’s a woman, tall and thin, Andrea’s aide-de-camp. A colleague Andrea has told Jeremy she trusts implicitly, brought on initially to help Andrea make sense of all the strange signs, and to help find the missing lieutenant colonel, Lavelle Thomson, their boss, the man behind Surrogate.

The woman covers her face again. Jeremy winces; post-traumatic stress disorder.

“What do you need me for?”

“No substitute for old-fashioned eyeball confirmation from a target’s intimate.”

Jeremy absorbs the jab; he was indeed intimate with Nik and yet, Nik was for so long invisible to Jeremy.

Andrea clears her throat. “Goodbye, Jeremy.”

Jeremy slips out of the doorway, walking away from Nik. He allows himself a look over his shoulder, sees the Guardian looking in the other direction. He picks up his pace, hustles back toward Damascus Gate. He runs out of the city.