The Doomsday Equation (13 page)

D
RIZZLE COATS EVERYTHING
, street, his cheap red slicker, the newspaper boxes and lampposts, the awnings. It pastes the pages of a torn real estate magazine to the sidewalk. An afghan of gray, just the cover Jeremy’s looking for. Makes people lazy, dulls them, puts mud into the machine, why military campaigns work so much better in sunshine.

But, now, the foul cover makes Jeremy feel that one less thing is going against him. He was able to file through the turnstiles with the irritable masses, the two cops a little less motivated, and probably dissuaded from wasting energy on the man interacting with the woman and the boy, talking flirtatiously, happily. He parted ways with Ivory and Johnny at the top of the escalator, their smiles holding a promise of an exchanged Facebook friendship, but not really, since they exchanged no last names or other personal identifiers. Just a little shared walking daydream.

He stands at the corner of the Embarcadero and Mission, looking out onto the Bay Bridge, strewn with wall-to-wall lights of people who mistakenly thought they could beat the commute.

He’s hunting.

Just around the corner, within easy sight, the valet stand for Perry’s. In the next ten minutes or so, he can watch Andrea arrive. He can decide on a course of action. At this point, all bets are off. Maybe she’ll show up with the general and a three-headed alien.

He extracts a phone. Not his iPhone, not the one he used to call 911, but his backup, a flip phone, an old standby that is something you just carry in Silicon Valley, like, because. It’s like being a soldier and carrying an extra ammo magazine.

Jeremy holds his finger over the on button. He wants to believe that the cops, if they are tracing his other phone—totally a possibility but far from a certainty—might not be tracing
this
phone. But he also knows that if they’re tracing the whereabouts of one, using simple triangulating technology, they’re likely tracing both.

Not if he keeps it quick, doesn’t let them get a handle on the signal. He turns on the flip phone. He calls his voice mail on his other phone. There are two messages. The first from Emily: You can’t do that to the boy. It’s not all about you.

The second one also from Emily: Are you okay?

He enters her phone number and taps her a text: “Take Kent to Eddie’s.” He looks up, sees a black sport utility vehicle pull into the circular entrance of a swanky downtown hotel. Looks back down at his device, wonders whether he should add “I love you,” which he tells her only in the dark. Will that get Emily to drive Kent to his uncle Eddie’s house outside Reno?

No, it’ll just engender a cascade of calls and texts from Emily. Or she’ll ignore it as spam or the work of a manic version of Jeremy. Maybe she won’t even recognize the phone number of the second phone.

He pictures her the morning they broke up, after making love on that futon. Or trying to. A rare instance in which Jeremy couldn’t finish. Couldn’t keep going. It’s okay, Emily said, brushing his cheek with the outside of her hand. Without warning, he started in about the bowl of half-eaten raisin bran that Kent had left on the floor, how much the boy needed to start acting his age.

“You’re upset over cereal.”

“You’re not listening.”

And then, before Jeremy could do his thing, Emily said: “I’m done.”

It was like a rifle shot. Cold, true, hollow-point rhetoric. You’d have to have a magic cape to stop the power of her words. And the stuff that came after, the tears and the explanation, really unnecessary. Something had changed, she told Jeremy, in the preceding few days and leading up to them, an even more confrontational Jeremy, as well as a feeling Emily couldn’t shake that he would undermine every beautiful thing.

“You are right. You are right more often than anyone gives you credit for. It doesn’t scare me that you’re almost always right, Jeremy. I like it that you speak your truth. What scares me is that being right isn’t ultimately what it’s about for you. That’s a means to an end. To burn it down.”

She’d had enough. All the while, Jeremy kept thinking about Kent. For days, Jeremy could think only about the boy and the argument they’d had over the rocket ship puzzle—whether to put the borders first as Jeremy suggested or group the pieces by color. Life had been teetering on the precipice, worse than that, Jeremy being held from plummeting by Emily and Kent—all the others having already abandoned him, or he them, and then, splat. Down he went.

In his phone, he texts: “Please.” That should get her attention. She used to beg him to try to learn the proper use of the word “please.” It became almost a joke between them. He’d ask for something and Emily would say “What’s the magic word?” And Jeremy would say: “‘Abracadabra’?”

Jeremy looks at his text. He taps: “I love you and Kent.” He erases it. Taps it again. He feels the sting of tears. Wipes them away. Hits send.

He’s poised to turn off the phone when, instead, he pulls up the calculator. He’s thinking of Harry’s admonition: AskIt. Ask the computer. Is that what Harry meant? If so, ask it
what
?

At the least, Jeremy finds he’s asking
himself
a question: do I believe the computer’s prediction?

For some reason, he just can’t get his head around an answer. He, and his computer, have been so discredited, by so many people close to him. Part of him desperately wants the computer to be right; he will be redeemed; he will show the world; he, alone, will
save
the world. But what if he can’t? What is the cost of being right?

And what is the cost of being wrong? How much more egg can his face withstand? On the corner, he sees a line of newspaper dispensers for the
Chronicle, Examiner, Guardian,
and one of those free real estate throwaways. Is that my play? Call a newspaper, or maybe that local TV reporter who a while ago mentioned Jeremy and his algorithm as part of a bigger story on a new generation of business ideas attracting venture capital?

And say what?
My iPad thinks there’s going to be a war!

Proof. I need some proof, he thinks. He knows what he’d like to ask the computer:

1. Who is responsible for this alleged attack on San Francisco, the one that will ignite a global conflict?
   
2. And what can Jeremy do about it?
   
3. If none of the above, who is fucking with Jeremy? Why?
   

He’s already investigating who might be fucking with him, so he focuses for a moment on the first two questions. They are simple inquiries, at least on their face. But how to ask such questions is another matter altogether, a remarkably complex matter. In fact, it might prove impossible, even for a very good programmer like Jeremy.

The trouble is, in the first place the computer wasn’t built to answer such questions any more than an automobile was built to, say, make a breakfast smoothie. Sure, in theory, both an automobile and a blender are machines, and the car probably could be disassembled and its parts used to build a blender. But not in an eyeblink. No more can this computer, which was built to predict the timing, extent and length of conflict, be easily programmed to divulge who is responsible for an attack, and why.

Maybe he can get there indirectly.

“What if . . .” he says aloud. Then pauses, and looks up to see a woman stride by under an umbrella emblazoned with a Gap logo. She’s glancing at him—the man in the red slicker mumbling to himself. She quickens her pace.

The computer projects that war is imminent because of a change in the world’s circumstances—in a range of different variables. But, Jeremy wonders, would the computer still predict conflict if only one of those variables changed, or several, or a different combinations of variables? Or would the computer
still predict conflict if a single variable were removed from the equation? For instance, Jeremy is asking himself, if the conflict rhetoric in Russia hadn’t intensified, would the computer still prophesy Armageddon? What if there were no increase in the shipments of tantalum?

These are questions that he can ask this computer, at least indirectly. He can, he realizes, ask it to run simulations that remove a particular variable. He can ask it to remove two of the variables. He can mix and match and change the circumstances to see which of the variables are most instrumental in the computer’s projection of conflict.

And then, he can make a key deduction. If one variable stands out, he’ll know where to focus. It’s an idea, at least, a way of taking back some control from this suddenly inscrutable computer, from the conspiracy that has overtaken his life.

The computer has identified nine different potential variables, including the six different changes to rhetoric, tantalum, weather and the arrest. Jeremy does a quick computation of the number of simulations he’s got to ask the computer to crunch. Nine variables, a factorial of nine. Into the calculator on his phone, he does the math: 9 times 8 times 7 times 6 times 5 times 4 times 3 times 2 times 1 = 362,880.

362,880 different combinations of events.

Nothing. Not for a computer with any kind of horsepower.

Might take a few hours. That’s the easy part. But Jeremy’s got to program the computer with the question. How long will that take?

Would it even work?

He grimaces. First, he’s got to deal with Andrea. He glances at the clock. Still a few minutes to go. He’s about to turn off the phone when he sees he’s got a notification. He clicks. It’s a
news flash about tantalum, the precious metal that has seen an explosive rise in shipments.

He clicks and discovers not a news story but a press release. It’s from a company called Elektronic Space Suppliers. Jeremy recalls that’s the company in Turkey that ships tantalum, the company whose stock price has soared. According to the company’s press release, a mere three lines, it has secured a long-term contract to deliver tantalum to a consortium of Silicon Valley companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Google, Intel and others.

On one level, it’s compelling. Very much so. Not that Silicon Valley companies would buy tantalum. Everyone’s in the mobile space. But the fact they’d do so in concert. Why cooperate on something so competitive?

But what could that possibly have to do with war?

He shakes his head, willing away cobwebs and dust and exhaustion, turns off the phone, pulls himself closer to the side of a restaurant behind him. Wants to blend in, a red-slickered object of what he assumes must now be a manhunt.

Jeremy, feeling intensely self-conscious, looks up. His eye again catches the tint-windowed sport utility vehicle, the kind you see all the time in Washington, D.C., a heavy, dark power machine.

The passenger door opens. A man gets out and jogs into the hotel lobby.

No way. Jeremy shakes his head. No way.

T
HE DOCK CREAKS
and groans. Light waves rock the gigantic anchored ships, nothing compared with the powerful sounds produced crossing the Pacific, but then the churn and purr of the engine had covered the clash of ocean and steel.

The man with the beard and the backpack crouches. So much of his life is spent crouching. Hiding, scurrying, the posture of the Lord’s work is not a proud one, not in the era of heretics. In this case, he crouches behind containers at the Port of Oakland. Not far to his left, he can see the ship he stowed away on, which landed hours ago, and now he’s watching the police hustle about.

They’ve found the young man whose neck he broke, whom he ushered into the next life. He had no choice.

And his righteous certitude has been reinforced by the ease with which he escaped the ship onto the dock—safely and with his deadly backpack by his side. God must be here or he’d be in handcuffs right now.

He pulls the backpack close, waiting for the Guardians to find him.

He hears a policeman “comb the place,” and the words take him back to the beginning. He pulls close to the shipping container and thinks about the story, how long his people have been hiding while heretics comb the world for them.

“Your grandfather, Fishl, he knelt and he waited,” his father’s story would begin.

Always the kneeling, always the waiting. He could imagine his grandfather’s beard, and see his father’s own commanding beard, a towering upside-down cone, wisdom in the form of facial hair. The story was always the same. His grandfather knelt, and waited, and listened to the onrush of furious Russian villagers, literally wielding pitchforks, literally on horseback, like a cliché of the horsemen of the apocalypse. If only the world could’ve been so lucky. It wasn’t the end of days, just the end of another poor Jewish village, its inhabitants persecuted because they did exactly as they were told: helped the nobility tax and manage the peasants. Jews, wanting only to be left alone to pursue their beliefs, by happenstance gained middle-class status, upward mobility.

But the Russian peasants didn’t understand that. And finally fed up with the inequities that governed their society, they turned on the Jews, the partners of a noble class that were themselves untouchable with pitchforks. Just another deadly ebb in the ebb and flow of the Jews in European culture. A boatload of pious refugees subject to the waves of change, awaiting final redemption.

His grandfather could hear the wails of the murders on the edges of the village, the shouts and cries of the mothers begging for their babies’ lives. And then, his father tells him, his grandfather heard another voice telling him what he must do.

“Was it . . . ?” the boy would ask. He’d know he couldn’t say “God,” but how could he ask if his grandfather had heard a divine voice?

“No, Moshe,” his father said, understanding the unspoken. “It was the rebbe,” in his devout sect, a divine intermediary, a prophet. “He said, ‘Go that we might live.’ Your grandfather begged to stay. But he was commanded.”

And so, the story went, his grandfather leaped from the window, escaped and eventually became a seedling planted in the verdant valleys in the north of Palestine. And from him sprouted the bloodline, his father, like his great-grandfather a pious man, committed to the word and the ancient code, the Talmud, and not wayward convenience. And certainly not to Israel.

Israel, a heretical concept. At least a secular Israel. In fact, little could be more heretical. Its establishment would, in effect, institutionalize, formalize godlessness. The Messiah might well never come.

“So it is bad that Grandfather came here?” the boy would ask.

“Quite the opposite.” Of course, his father always had the answer. “We are here for a reason, an important reason.”

His father tells him, again, about the Guardians. In ancient times, Rabbi Judah the Prince sent emissaries to inspect pastoral towns. In one, these rabbi emissaries asked to see the city guardian and they were shown a municipal 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 Guardians of the City. Neturei-Karta. From Aramaic. The Jews who would keep this land pure, who would not allow
a secular weed to take root. His father, among their leaders, was hunted for seeking to disrupt the Zionists in 1947 and 1948. So hunted that he was forced to disappear, or maybe the hunters got him.

“Our own people,” his father told him before he packed up a small sack of belongings. It was the last time he saw his father, and that majestic beard. “Tracked down by our own people so that they might do the work of Satan and create a goyish land. Take care of your mother, Moshe. Guard the city.”

The boy thinks of the old words; the Zionists combed the northern valleys for his father, as these heretics surely will comb the belly of the ship for him, the boy, the grandson, now bearded himself, carrying the mission. Neturei Karta. And the stakes so magnified. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be called to such purpose.

And, as always, such risk, and uncertainty. Seeming happenstance that left him with his half of this deadly suitcase, a treasure bestowed by unlikely authorities, inert though it is in its current state.

And then a contact from the Old City, and another contact, calling his tiny cell to action. Giving him clear but incomplete directions, codes, instructions to find an unlikely—even impossible ally—a woman, a Syrian, a Christian. The Guardians, he’s told, are no longer merely Jews, as the world’s mythology heralds. They are Christians, Rastafarians, a secret network, zealots, in the best sense of the word. A simple, abiding, core belief: for the Messiah to come, they must cleanse Jerusalem of the infidels. The nonbelievers.

And the nonbelievers have become so powerful. They hold the key to forever undoing the eternal peace.

Can it be that he and a Christian from Syria, and white men from America, are not enemies but share a common enemy?

These are, anyhow, the rumors. He will believe it when he sees it.

And then he does—he sees it. Rather, he sees her.

A woman like a shadow moves through the open platform, unnoticed, and then scurries between two containers. She is dark-haired and dark-skinned. And soon, she is nearly beside him. How did she find him?

He pulls the backpack tight as she inches near.

She whispers: “Have no fear of atomic energy.”

“Shalom,” he says.

“Salam,” she says, then repeats: “Have no fear of atomic energy.”

The bearded man keeps his back to the voice. “None of them can-a stop-a the time.”

“Redemption Song,” by Bob Marley, the code.

The man looks directly into her face and sees her bright eyes, breaking into a smile.

He recoils. Her smile, it is not joy, but tightly controlled fury, the look of a bloodthirsty animal before a fight, anxious to kill, and eat what it has killed.

“You are Janine,” he stammers.

“That works.”

“The Guardian.”

“No, I am not
the
Guardian. Merely a guardian, as it were, a foot soldier, like you. You will meet him soon. Come. We are in a hurry.”

“There’s a problem?”

By way of an answer, she ushers him with a gentle hand on
his elbow. Moments later, undetected, they’ve made their way into the port parking lot. She opens the door to a dark blue van, loosing from the inside stale air. She gestures him inside.

She eyes his backpack.

“You have done a wonderful thing. Now we have our divine tool.”

“How long before . . .”

“Mere hours.” She guns the engine, accelerating the van out of the lot. “But, first, we have urgent work.”