The Doomsday Equation (27 page)

N
ETUREI-
K
ARTA IS A
real movement and organization but I have taken substantial liberties in how I’ve presented it.

The name, Neturei-Karta, is the Aramaic term for “Guardians of the City.” As described in the story, the name derives from an ancient story in which Rabbi Judah the Prince sent rabbi emissaries to inspect pastoral towns. In one, the emissaries asked to see the city guardian and they were shown a guard. The emissaries said this was not a guard, but a city destroyer. The townspeople asked who should be considered a guard, and the rabbis said: “The scribes and the scholars.”

The name ultimately was given to a group of Orthodox Jews who banded together in 1938 to oppose the existence of the state of Israel.

That much is consistent with the explanation of the group on the web site of Neturei-Karta.

The web site explains that the group opposes a state of Israel because the concept of a sovereign Jewish state is contrary to Jewish law. Specifically, the group says, that law forbids Jews
to return to the land of Palestine (from their exile) before the return of the Messiah.

And the web site says: “Jews are not allowed to dominate, kill, harm or demean another people and are not allowed to have anything to do with the Zionist enterprise, their political meddling and their wars.”

But it also states: “The world must know that the Zionists have illegitimately seized the name Israel and have no right to speak in the name of the Jewish people!”

There have been reports that some members of the group praised then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his anti-Zionist sentiments.

The idea that Christians and other groups have banded together with Neturei-Karta is pure fabrication. It is a partial fabrication that some fundamentalists in other religious groups—including Christianity—oppose a secular Israel. Some evangelicals fully support a return of Jews to Israel, a fully Jewish land, because they see it as a stepping-stone for the return of a Christian Messiah. It is not at all far-fetched that some of these people want to see Jews return to Israel, but not secular Jews, whose return could be seen not as a stepping-stone but as a misstep.

This book is not intended in any way as a condemnation of religion or religious heritage, which obviously brings peace and identity to millions. Rather, it is a playing out of views that linger not far beneath the surface for some fundamentalist sects.

Finally, the idea of a peace machine, a computer that could predict conflict, also is drawn loosely from real events. In my journalistic pursuits, I had the privilege of meeting a brilliant innovator named Sean Gourley. He’s worked on research of
“the mathematics of war.” It entails predicting the timing and size of attacks. He cofounded a company called Quid, which uses Big Data—mountains of inputs—to try to predict outcomes in a variety of fields, including conflict and commerce. His technology aimed at predicting conflict is much more embryonic than the program in this story, but nevertheless is extraordinary. Sean, a great and gracious guy (who went to Oxford), is not anything at all like Jeremy Stillwater.

M
Y HEARTFELT THANKS
to a team led by Publisher Liate Stehlik at HarperCollins/William Morrow that is second to none and like family. Thank you for your support, partnership and friendship. A huge thank-you to Tessa Woodward, a terrific, patient editor—of line and ideas. You went the extra mile on this one, and then some. And thanks to Jennifer Hart, Julia Meltzer, Andy Dodds, Alaina Waagner, Peter Hubbard, Nick Amphlett and Doug Jones.

Thanks to David Liss for, once again, sterling insights freely given. And to Susan Tunis, for crucial last-minute triage.

And to my parents for the kind of unconditional support I hope I am emulating with my children.

Thanks to Laurie Liss, a great friend and a great literary agent.

And, above all, thank you to my wife, Meredith, and our little angels, Milo and Mirabel. All my love.

MATT RICHTEL
reports for the
New York Times,
covering a range of issues, including the impact of technology on our lives. In 2010 he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of articles that exposed the pervasive risks of distracted driving and its root causes, prompting widespread reform. He is the author of
A Deadly Wandering,
as well as three novels. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the Columbia Journalism School, he is based in San Francisco, where he lives with his wife Meredith Barad, a neurologist, and their two children.

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FICTION

The Cloud

The Floodgate: A Short Story

Devil’s Plaything

Hooked

NONFICTION

A Deadly Wandering

Cover design by Adam Johnson

Cover photographs: man © by CURAphotography/Shutterstock; code © by Andrey Prokhorov/Getty Images; Earth courtesy of NASA

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE DOOMSDAY EQUATION
. Copyright © 2015 by Matt Richtel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-220118-8

EPub Edition February 2015 ISBN 9780062201195

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