The Doomsday Equation (10 page)

L
A
P
RENSA
(
M
EXICO CITY)
. Hector Gonzalez, secretary of the National Action Party: “We may not yet declare victory, but with drug war casualties falling for the first time since 2006, we may say we have this menace in our sights. Now we go for the kill.”

La Prensa
. Unnamed drug cartel executive: “The corrupt right wing has soaked this nation’s poor and downtrodden while we have employed and fed and clothed them. The government wants war, then it shall have war.”

Economista,
cover: Hector Gonzalez murdered. WAR!

@ForthePersonas (Twitter): Rise Muertos. It’s the SPRING of the dead. Rise and retake our land!

La Opinion
(Veracruz): Garden Rodents Chewing Lawns; Mayor Declares War on Varmints.

Jeremy shakes his head, making sure he is reading this correctly, then leans back and laughs. The algorithm, sensitive though it has been programmed to be, can’t distinguish a rhetorical attack on drug lords or politicians or terrorists from one on weasels.

It’s merely looking for a broad-based increase in the intensity of language as measured by use of hundreds of keywords identified as either threatening or conciliatory.

He looks up at the packed subway car. Hears the moans. People somehow shocked that a quasi-governmental transit system could be stuck in a tunnel under the ocean, awaiting the re-clearing up of problems on the other end that had been solved and now need resolving. He’d be among the haters but he finds it easier to dismiss his disgruntled fellow commuters than the transit system. Besides, the guy next to him smells like a fucking fish sandwich.

He glances down the list of phrases the program has identified as material from Mexico. In the last few days, the words and phrases have grown so intense as to sound comical: “war,” “eradicate,” “threat to our way of life,” “purge,” “terrorist,” “scorched earth.”

As the words begin to blur together, Jeremy starts to get the picture. He sees the rhetoric spark catch and spread into wildfire; the right wing renews its pledge to end the drug war, the cartels strike back and reinforce their words with attacks, begetting more arrests, tougher language, cycle of violent language. Then the left wing kicks in, condemning the violence, but also, at first, tacitly accusing the United States of fostering the drug market, failing to police its urban demand; then the cartels weigh in, taunting America and, by proxy, the right-wing politicians who ally with hard-liners in the United States.

Cartel: “The United States has jailed our brothers and enslaved our sisters in menial shit jobs. You have feasted on Mexico too long. Beware the riders from the south. We can take down your towers too.”

Jeremy isn’t quite sure if he’s got the exact language, given the fact it goes through a translation program. But, even if it’s close, it’s both insane and loosely cryptic, and the “towers” clearly a reference to 9/11. In fact, the computer has picked it up, highlighting in bold the word “towers.”

He looks closer at the citation. It comes from
Diario de Morelia,
a small daily in Michoacán. The location strikes Jeremy as mildly noteworthy because it is such a central feeder of cheap labor to the United States. He looks for more on the person quoted. It refers only to an anonymous high-ranking captain in Los Negros, the armed contingent of the Sinaloa drug cartel, involved in the border wars.

Jeremy looks at the screen, feels his exhilaration trumped by a wave of exhaustion, perspiration. He wipes his forehead, feels the glisten.

Jeremy looks back at the garble of intensifying language from Mexico. He does a Google search on the threat about the “towers.” He’s wondering if it elicited any response. It materializes slowly, the bandwidth being sucked by the frustrated subway companions.

He finds, in a communiqué from the U.S. State Department, that an undersecretary of state’s office has put out a short press release condemning the use of “inflammatory and irresponsible language.” The release thanks the Mexican government for its “forceful efforts” to shut down the drug trade, which the release characterizes as a “cancer” attacking North America and Central America and their free people.

Jeremy’s seen hundreds of such releases in the past. This one seems unremarkable in every way. It feels like a response the U.S. government was required to make, given the inherently
inflammatory nature of the “towers” language. It’s like the geopolitical version of the “n-word” to describe black people. Always gets a response. And, he suspects, American journalists saw the State Department release as perfunctory and nothing more. No one has written about this.

Rather than setting off bells for Jeremy, the lack of interest by the American press confirms a suspicion that he is harboring. The flare-up in physical and rhetorical attacks coming from Mexico might well be insignificant—not insignificant to those involved, but insignificant as a predictor of global conflict. After all, Jeremy thinks, looking at the texts of the carping Mexicans, the drug war on the border there has raged for a decade. A slow-materializing Wikipedia search tells him that casualties started to grow around 2001, then escalated until the late part of the decade and then, after hitting more than thirty thousand total, began to decline.

This, Jeremy wonders, might actually be a conflict that has peaked. Or, more to the point, it’s a conflict that has been going on for some time. And that means, Jeremy is nearly certain, there have been linguistic flare-ups in the past that have far exceeded what he’s looking at right now.

He opens his palms and puts them against his forehead. He feels a grudging appreciation for Harry, even as he is headed to confront the motherfucker, the transit system willing.

There is no one on Earth better equipped than the eccentric Berkeley professor to put into perspective the rhythm of this Mexico
conflict or, for that matter, the rhythm and pace of any of the other conflicts in the world. Harry War is like a dog and conflict a whistling sound no one else can hear. Harry can tell its tenor and decibel level; he can tell if the sound is shrill or normal. He’s spent a lifetime listening to the different pitches of conflict.

Harry is to war what Warren Buffett is to finance. Just as Buffett seems to be able to see the financial landscape like no one else, Harry can see the geopolitical landscape like no one else.

That’s why they were such a great team, Harry using his gut and Jeremy using his processor. At the same time, Jeremy knew, or believed—in Jeremy’s case knowledge and belief are two inextricable states of mind—that his computer could do far better in the long run at understanding and predicting conflict than could Harry’s brain. To Jeremy, it’s a simple matter of math: Harry’s brain can hold and process only so many different streams of information, whereas Jeremy’s computer can be programmed to hold and process innumerable streams.

And, so, in the end, Jeremy wanted to prove he was his own man, mostly sticking to his own ideas and framing. And he did. After the article came out, Harry called him and, Jeremy can never forget, told him: “Brilliant, young man. You’ll put me out of business. And I’m glad,” he had said with a laugh. “It’s a lot of pressure being wrong most of the time.”

“You’re right more than most.”

“Jeremy, when it comes to this stuff, you can’t afford to ever be wrong.”

Harry War told him: That’s why I’m a tenured professor, with inviolable job security. If I had to test my stuff in the real world, in the private sector, I’d be fired within weeks.

Jeremy mutters: “You’re fucking with me, old man.”

Looks at the spread of red on the map.

He swipes to read about the fall in conflict rhetoric in the Fertile Crescent, as Harry insisted on referring to the region—fecund, Harry said, with ancient seeds of conflict.

The Israeli prime minister, in “off-the-cuff” remarks to reporters, says regional peace remains a distant dream given the radicalized factions in the region, but, he adds, Israel will continue to invite sincere efforts at partnership.

No remark, Jeremy knows, is off the cuff. And it’s hard to believe these remarks constitute cooled rhetoric. So too, is it hard to take too much heart from a recent comment by the Palestinian president saying that Israel must break down the economic barriers and grant his people full economic freedom or else the region could “fall back into a state of chaos.”

Only in the Fertile Crescent, Jeremy shakes his head, does “fall back into a state of chaos” represent things looking up. Beats, he supposes, people threatening to nuke each other back to the Stone Age.

Jeremy’s thoughts are interrupted. “We’ll be moving again shortly,” the subway conductor announces over the intercom. “But expect further delays.”

A murmur in the train. It lurches forward. Jeremy’s phone buzzes. He pulls it from his pocket. Discovers a voice mail. He’s missed a call, from a blocked number.

Something prompts him to look up, that feeling of being watched. He looks halfway down the train, to the connecting cars. Sees the corridor of standing-room-only passengers, arms forced to their sides by the tight quarters. Ordinarily, a midday commute would be mostly empty, but the train delay created a backup on the platform.

Jeremy puts his head down, then looks up quickly. Now he finds his mark; a tall man pressed against the corridor has stuck out a long neck. Intention in eyes that bulge slightly, like someone blew too much air into his head with a pump. This time, Jeremy gives him a smile. If you’re a stranger, accidentally looking my way, I’m deranged. If you’re following me for dark purposes, then come and get me. The guy recoils his neck and then melts into the adjoining car.

Jeremy presses the screen of his phone to hear the voice mail.

“Tonight at five, Atlas. At Perry’s.”

Andrea. Instructions on where to meet. Her voice brings back her intonation and the invitations it carried:
so can you come to Washington; want to meet for a drink at the hotel; I’m up for chatting tonight if you’re free; up for a last-minute trip to the Zagros Mountains to do field work?

It’s not the words she used. Nothing special about the semantics. It’s the tone. The almost imperceptible buzz of a hummingbird outside the window that you’ve got to look at. And that, remarkably, hovers right at eye level, buoyed by a seemingly effortless frazzle of its tiny wings. And then, when you wonder if a magical connection is coming, it darts off.

Sure, he’d come to Washington and meet for a drink, and have those late-night phone calls. She was his ally, dinnered with him and his investors, gently mocking Evan, wondering what they mix into the sports drinks at Stanford business school to make students become obsessed with making everything more efficient. She never asked about Emily; didn’t that suggest romantic interest?

And she could spar. Fun, intense, wordplay, flirtation, or was it just her way of relating to the world? Sometimes, it
seemed, she was on the verge of sharing a secret with Jeremy, a part of herself, maybe an official secret, something. She was just out of reach.

Jeremy agreed to go to the mountains of southern Iraq. She put him off. Then another trip to Afghanistan that materialized and evaporated overnight.

All the while, though, she insisted: his computer was wrong; Jeremy was wrong. So why did she stick with him?

Tonight at five at Perry’s. Too coincidental. She knows something. Harry knows something.

The train roars out of the bottom of the bay, rattling into the East Bay. Just a few stops to City Center, the transfer to Berkeley.

He looks down at his iPad.

“We want freedom, of course. We want to promote freedom. But chaos, no. We must be on the side of order, for the sake of our own society and the furtherance of our values. And I will fight with you, side by side, to preserve those values.”

The words belong to Vladimir Putin. From the rhetoric, it sounds like it could be a speech to the Russian parliament. Or he could be speaking on television to the masses tweeting to insist on greater power for the middle and lower classes, and mobilizing through social networks. But he’s not. The phrase comes from a speech two days earlier at the groundbreaking of a new campus of the Rosoboronexport State Corporation.

Jeremy’s heard of it, Rosoboronexport, this huge arms hub. Long government controlled, then quasi-government controlled. A veritable munitions Walmart, building and serving every deadly product under the sun.

So what?

Jeremy studies the intensifying rhetoric from Russia. The
computer’s report shows a collection of commentary from politicians, newspapers, tweeters that the algorithm has identified as most influential as denoted by the number of their followers and the number of times they’ve been retweeted.

              
@reformredsquare: putin coddles military-ind-complex, a deadly partnership that must be toppled.

              
@restoreorder: CALM! The real danger comes from anarchy, WMD leaked from a sieve of democratization. Save us Putin.

              
@onemanonevote retweeting @restoreorder: Puppet!

Jeremy scrolls through pages of the report, tweets like these, headlines and op-ed pieces, blogs, a speech from Arkady Rybhorov, a Russian billionaire who made his money in land development and who is now challenging Putin for power. The speech refers to Putin’s cozying up with the military-industrial complex, calls upon Putin to do more than support a sterile and humanity-less machine that arms nations and dictators and to do more to police the leaking of dangerous weapons of mass destruction from rogue scientists and soulless entrepreneurs. Well-oiled political bullshit.

Jeremy starts to get the picture. This narrative, this explosion of conflict rhetoric from Russia revolves around the role of Rosoboronexport in influencing both Russia’s internal politics and its geopolitical stance. An op-ed mentions, for example, that 45 percent of Rosoboronexport’s sales go to China, which, the editorial states, obviously markedly impacts Russia’s dealings with its neighbors.