The Doomsday Equation (23 page)

L
EFT ON
M
ASONIC
. Did you help coordinate my trips with Andrea?”

Nik goes through a yellow light, eliciting a honk from an oncoming Jeep with its top down.

“Now where?”

“Veer right at the corner.” Jeremy and Nik are cruising up a hill, passing a grocery store on their left. In the distance, to the right, downtown, the sunnier part of the city, emerges from the fog. “Then left, past the JCC for a few blocks. The trips to Washington and the Middle East?”

Nik says: “When you didn’t feel like cooperating.”

“No need to be defensive. I’m trying to understand what they wanted from me, what she wanted from me. They didn’t want the algorithm to predict the future of conflict. She said so herself. They weren’t taking the computer seriously. Did you deal with her or anyone else?”

“Her, briefly. She—”

“Left. What?”

Nik turns. “You remember a board meeting we had, a retreat, at the house by Muir Woods?”

Jeremy pictures it. Harry went on some diatribe about the coexistence of the coho and silver salmon in Redwood Creek. “What’s that have to do with Andrea?”

“I came back to the office, and she was there. Late at night.”

“So.”

“Here?” They’re across the street from the Jewish Community Center, slowing. Jeremy watches Nik stare at the large, elegant building with a private security guard standing out front.

In his mind’s eye, Jeremy pictures the Lion of Judah, the symbol for Jerusalem. What was the news report? A man dead with a tattoo of a woman, and a word in Latin:
Custos
. Guardian.

So what?

“No, two blocks ahead, and to the right, there’s a park. Kids and stuff. Evan says he’ll be there. But I want you to drive past it, see what we see, then decide. So Andrea is at our office, and . . . ?”

“Inside our offices. The ones where we are now. She tells me she’s been trying to get hold of you and that they’ve scheduled one of those trips. She’s there to pick you up.”

“Inside my office or inside the outer area?” The publicly accessible part.

No immediate answer. Nik turns right, pausing to let a hearty dark-skinned woman with a double stroller pass through the crosswalk. Nanny central. Nik swallows, trying to remember. “Your office. She said it was open and she was trying to leave you a note. She said the trip was imminent.”

“How did she seem?”

Nik doesn’t answer, lightly shakes his head, not getting it.

“Stressed? Calm?”

“Not like a burglar, if that’s what you mean.”

Jeremy takes it in. “You never told me.”

“She called you that night. I watched her make the call, listened to her.”

“But the trip didn’t happen.” Jeremy sees the outskirts of the hillside park on the block ahead. “There were a few of those—close scrapes with last-minute Middle East trips.” He can’t remember this particular call or another trip that didn’t materialize. “They told me I was going to be able to field-test my algorithm, first in southern Iraq, then in . . .” He can’t remember the places, all right in that region. “Right around Iran.” He pauses. “Stop, please. Let me out here.”

Nik looks at Jeremy, like he’d prefer a little more clarity. It’s a look frequently elicited by Jeremy, someone who often divulges little, speaks in fragments and clipped ideas, often in challenges or rebuttals. Even now, maybe especially now.

“I’m just saying that none of the trips happened, not to Iraq or any of the surrounding areas. Lots of head fakes. I don’t know what to make of that. I don’t know who or what to trust.” Jeremy looks down at his phone. It’s 11:48. “Peckerhead is not going to be here for a few minutes, if he’s really coming.”

Jeremy looks up, sees they’ve stopped a half block from the park, in front of a trendy Italian restaurant and a five-and-dime liquor store. Across the street, an artsy movie house and a café featuring organic pastries made by “local artisans.”

Walking up the street, some doofus in a lion mask and a sign: “The end is near.”

“Have people no shame?” Nik mutters. He looks ashen.

“You’re really taking the lion thing hard.” Jeremy puts his hand on Nik’s shoulder, causing his assistant to flinch. If Jeremy’s ever touched him with such a gesture of intimacy, it was
accidental and after several pomegranate cocktails, maybe when Nik helped carry his drunken lean-to boss to the car. Nik allows himself to look at Jeremy, take in a glance filled with paternal responsibility.

“You’re remarkable, Perry.”

Nik laughs. “I knew I had a real name.”

“You never stopped believing. You have been a stalwart, PeaceNik. The only one, really.” It’s a statement containing an unspoken question: why?

“It was fate,” Nik manages, still half smiling, then clears his throat, fidgets, sees Jeremy’s powerful gaze, then manages: “I never lost my faith.”

Jeremy sees Nik absently scratch his rubbery neck. Sees the chain that holds the cross around Nik’s neck. Jeremy, in an act of subconscious mimicry, feels beneath his shirt, pats the key fob. He puts a hand on Nik’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m not just buttering you up. This is a pep talk. We’re going into . . . battle, forgive the cliché, and I need to know I can count on you, completely.”

Nik stares straight ahead.

“I’m going to meet with Evan but it may well be a trap. In fact, I suspect we’re being watched now. I’ve had my phone on forever, so, at the least, Andrea’s probably somewhere around here, maybe . . . who knows who else.”

“Trap?”

“He wouldn’t meet me if he didn’t want something from me. Guy never in his life took a meeting that didn’t serve him.”

The pair falls silent. Jeremy opens the car door, pauses, looks at the liquor store they’re parked near. In the window, a large blown-up rubber bottle of tequila, a kind of kitsch you might see in Las Vegas. “It’s out of place here.”

Nik follows Jeremy’s gaze.

“But I guess even the trendiest neighborhoods have alcoholics, the real purists.” Jeremy shakes his head. “I’m a conflict-a-holic.” He smiles sadly. “And prone to the non sequitur. You’ve done a hell of a job listening to me all these years. Drive to the other side of the park. Leave your phone on. I’m going to text you and tell you where to pick me up. If you see me running—I’ll head in that direction—drive by and throw a life preserver.”

Jeremy looks down at the countdown clock. It’s just under eight hours.

“Should we pick a place to meet?”

“Good plan, Nik. If we get disconnected, let’s meet at CPMC.”

“The hospital?”

“Right down at Cherry and California. Close enough for me to walk. There’s a lot of chaos at hospitals, which could come in handy. I’ll come bearing answers, the kind that you can rely on only a human to get, not a computer.”

Nik takes in his boss; he’s unable to put a finger on what is strange about the man he’s shadowed for years. “You sure you don’t want me to stay with you?”

“No one knows me better than you do . . .” Jeremy opens the door, pulls out the bag, slings it over his shoulder, leaves his thought unfinished. “Off with you, Nik.” He shuts the door, watches Nik drive off.

He peers at the park, suspecting Evan’s not there yet, if he’s planning to be there. Knowing that Evan, while he’s generally punctual, is also cautious. He’ll wait until he knows Jeremy’s arrived, or maybe someone is scouting the area.

Jeremy, like a computer juggling if-then statements and what-if scenarios, settles on an idea and sprints across the
street to the café advertising itself as an organic haven. Lost in thought, he pulls open the door, perhaps a little abruptly, causing heads to pop up to see the zealous interloper. Gazes drop again. Jeremy makes for the back of the café, bypassing the counter, sees a sign for restrooms and stairs leading to a handful of tables in a loft, being mounted by a woman toting a steaming mug and a laptop bag.

He falls in line behind her, climbs the stairs and, seconds later, finds himself in the restroom. To Evan’s number, he texts: “Running 15 minutes late.”

He washes his face, starts to look in the mirror, looks away, stung by a momentary fear that he’ll look up and see the bony, ruined outline of his mother’s face, her judgmental, knowing eyes.

He pokes his head out of the restroom door, seeing nothing particularly suspicious. To his right, an emergency exit, a heavy door, evidently leading to stairs or a fire escape, some waste of money required by the overly bureaucratic building codes.

Jeremy looks back onto the loft, sees that the woman he’d followed up the stairs has her face buried in her work. She’s bundled around the shoulders in a fluffy black coat. He starts for the stairs, nearing the woman, sees her, animal-like, stiffen. She’s using her own fob to log into her computer, settling in.

“I’m very sorry for interrupting,” Jeremy says. “I made a huge mistake.”

The woman looks up with a round face and eyes, mid-thirties, no wedding ring, a jogger’s tan, still keeping in shape, fighting age.

Jeremy half smiles. “I only put seven hundred dollars in my parking meter.”

“Seven hundred dollars?”

“Gives me six minutes. If I don’t add another seven hundred in quarters, I’ll get a ticket, then probably arrested. It’s getting draconian. You don’t by chance have quarters for a seven-hundred-dollar bill.”

She laughs. “Been there. You want me to see if I have quarters?”

“I got ’em.” He widens his smile. “I just want to put my stuff down and establish squatter’s rights on this excellent table. Would you mind watching it while I feed the meter? I promise, when I come back, I’ll not interrupt your work again.” A flirtation that suggests just the opposite.

“Are you okay?” the woman asks.

“The idea of a ticket fills me with dread.”

She laughs. “Feed the meter. I’m not going anywhere.”

Jeremy puts down the leather bag.

He jogs down the stairs, pausing at the door to look back at the woman in the balcony loft, lost in her work. He feels the iPad tucked into the front of his shirt, still with him, the bag empty but maybe serving a purpose that Jeremy’s percolating. He looks left at the park, sitting on a hillside, sloping downward in the opposite direction. He takes a right, heading away from the park, considering his two assumptions: that Evan will be late, or cautious, having received Jeremy’s text; and that Evan will approach the park from the high side, the peak of the park, not the bottom of it. A basic tenet of war, seek the higher ground.

He looks up to discover that he’s right. A block away, on the other side of the street, head down in his device, Evan turns the corner. Jeremy starts running. A plan coming together. He wants to reach Evan before his old Peckerhead partner gets
near the park, out of its view, or maybe Evan’s reinforcements. Jeremy passes the movie theater on his right, watching Evan still facing down over his gadget, sees him passing in front of the liquor store, then crosses the street so that he’s now behind Evan.

He hustles behind his ex–business partner and takes him by the elbow.

“What the . . .”

“I need a cold one.”

“A cold . . .”

Jeremy tries to guide Evan into the liquor store. Evan pulls away, then, after several rapid eyeblinks, follows Jeremy inside. Behind the counter, a man looks up, his head wrapped in a red and white kaffiyeh. Jeremy keeps walking to the back of the store, Evan a few steps behind. Then stops. “Jeremy.”

Without looking back, Jeremy reaches under his shirt and pulls out the iPad, holds it over his head, keeps walking. He hears Evan’s loafers click on the cheap liquor store flooring, following.

Seconds later, Jeremy pushes through the doorway marked “Emergency Exit” and finds himself in an alley.

He turns around. Takes in Evan, that smooth skin, the face of commitment, part of the crop of entrepreneurs who believe it when they say their technology companies make money incidentally but are really aimed at changing the world.

Jeremy shoves Evan against the wall.

“Where is she?!”

“Stop!”

Jeremy holds his hands against Evan, the pair looking at the iPad lying on the ground.

“We’re going to do it,” Evan says. “Just like we said.”

“What?”

“Change the world.”

Jeremy swallows, loosens his grip.

“What I’m going to tell you must remain between us.”

Jeremy laughs. But he’s listening.

P
EACE,”
E
VAN SAYS
.

Jeremy drops his hands. Evan brushes his chest, smoothing out a royal button-down, lightly starched.

“The final frontier.”

“Spare me the soapbox. How does war bring peace?”

Evan shakes his head. “I have five minutes. You can listen or you can do your usual thing and waste your life and my time with confrontation. I think, anyway, you’ve way crossed the line this time. Let’s walk to the park.”

“No.”

Evan looks up and down the alley, a wide berth between businesses and restaurants on each side, lined with plastic blue and green and black recycling, composting and garbage cans. Gathering dusty drizzle.

“You’re going to be part of it. You deserve credit.” Evan’s change in tone, right from the management manual, the supportive uncle, makes Jeremy want to barf. “The last few years, I ran a million scenarios with the algorithm. I was looking for business outcomes; the next great business sectors, the most
economical and efficient regions to start a business, put manufacturing, mine new markets. Looking for specifics and proof of concept.”

Jeremy waves his hand; he knows all this.

“I discovered a fascinating by-product, maybe one that wasn’t all that surprising. In regions where business got hot—say, if we hypothetically located a semiconductor plant in a city in Thailand—there was a concurrent outbreak in peace.”

“Thailand isn’t at war.”

“Actually, it’s facing terrible unrest. By peace, I mean: a reduction in variables associated with war, like economic growth, harsh political rhetoric, especially that. Of course, this comes as zero surprise—”

“Morocco.”

“Exactly.” Evan’s face lights up, one of those outbursts not just of genuine enthusiasm but also showing how quickly these two men can connect. “By all rights, Morocco has a terribly volatile demographic mix: urbanites, barely educated desert people, religious Muslim, secular Muslim, the vacationing Europeans. Yeah, they’ve had some Al Qaeda attacks but, well, that’s kind of the point. The extremists can’t stand the fact that, on balance, Morocco is a fairly sane place, at least relative to say, Syria.”

“So what?”

“So I tried like hell to persuade you to make this an economic tool, to try to build both business and political prosperity, a democratizing tool. But you wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Bullshit . . .” Jeremy rolls his eyes.

“Jeremy, you never wanted to do anything that wasn’t expressly your idea. Not that your ideas were bad, far from it.
It’s just that others also just might have something valuable to contribute.”

“Keep talking.” Jeremy hears a noise, looks down the alley, sees that a car has turned into it. Something small. Evan pauses for ten seconds to let the Smart Car pass, a man behind the wheel, his dog in the passenger seat. As it passes, the car nearly sprays the men with a puddle.

“Don’t flip him off, Jeremy.”

“What does that have to do with what’s happening today?”

“I took your technology to a few execs, big-time folks, initially hoping, like I told you, to use it as a business tool.”

“And?”

“You know Andres Potemkin?”

Jeremy nods. Of course. A cofounder of Sky Data, one of the biggest makers of large-scale servers, the guts of cloud computing.

“Russian by birth,” Evan says. “A Russian Jew, which is relevant.” In Silicon Valley, unlike the East Coast, people apologize if they ever identify someone by ethnicity, this place considering itself a color-blind meritocracy.

Jeremy feels a buzz. But so what?

“He got immediately jazzed. Well beyond my imagination. He asked if he might run some scenarios himself, and a few days later, he got back to me with some ideas.”

The grimy sweat of uncertainty and revelation forms on Jeremy’s forehead. He listens as Evan starts to explain, a semi-ramble: he explains that Potemkin went to Carlos Fox, the billionaire Mexican chip manufacturer; and Raj Arooth, the venture capitalist; and a very tight group of high, high-level executives at the biggest companies, and, together, they began
exploring whether they could use the algorithm to work backward. Meaning: rather than putting business first—to emphasize profits—they’d discover what economic models would lead to peaceful outcomes in imperiled regions.

“It was heady stuff, heavy stuff, incendiary, in an intellectual sense, as I said, a new frontier.” Evan’s voice is going high the way it does when he’s very excited. “This handful of huge thinkers, coming together, competitors, looking not at predicting the future, but . . .” He pauses, realizing he’s about to use his own buzz phrase (“but shaping the future”) and realizing too that this conversation is too real for bumper stickers.

“They’re all immigrants,” Jeremy mutters, a kind of whispered revelation.

“Foreign-born, the preferred term. But, yeah, right, Silicon Valley itself is their model. Peace and prosperity, economic growth through intermingling of cultures. Morocco was a trading crossroads, the place where East and West and North and South once traded. That’s a little bit like Silicon Valley today. Walk into an office and you’ve no idea what color or religion or orientation you’ll be trading with.”

Jeremy says: “So they got together, made a secret plan to join forces, reverse-engineer peace.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself. They want to join forces to bring an intertwined business community, to build an irrepressible technology economy in the most volatile region in the world.”

“The Middle East.”

Evan nods. “You’re never far behind.” He smiles.

“Mobile phone technology. Semiconductors? A massive joint venture.”

“Impressive. Maybe that computer does work. How did you—”

“Tantalum.” Jeremy’s thinking of the increased shipment of tantalum, used for mobile phones; might be related, a lucky guess. No, more than that, concrete evidence ferreted out by the computer. Tantalum isn’t a red herring after all, not ancillary. The computer has somehow picked up and put together these seemingly disparate developments: a Russian arms dealer arrested, perhaps responsible for selling a bomb; the explosion of conflict rhetoric around the world; the relative calm in the Middle East; the surge in demand for tantalum. Does the computer know they’re connected or is it doing some mystical probability?

“You’ve signed some tantalum contracts, a bunch of them, for use in this . . . venture.”

“Yep.”

“You sought out Harry. He started helping you form alliances. Make some sort of pact among these businesses. To do what—exactly.”

“Seriously?” A rare hint of condescension from the very political Evan.

“You’re not going to tell me.”

“No. I just . . . I’ve told you, a thousand times. At least in general terms the last eighteen months. You haven’t listened. The idea is to bring big companies, their leaders, together and, as you say, reverse-engineer peace by creating economic hubs in places with the deepest traditions of conflict. The promise of technology isn’t being able to predict the future of, say, conflict. It’s being able to use the tools you’ve created to shape the future. Determine what factors are most likely to bring war
and then create the conditions that would least likely lead to it—war, conflict.”

“A peace machine.”

“Nice.” Sincere. “Say what you will about the wonky entrepreneurs driving the world’s economy, innovation, computing, but they’re not all about money. Yeah, they, I, don’t mind getting rich. But at some point, there’s a bigger legacy. Besides, it’s an enlightened self-interest. The world gets safer, wealthier; we’ve got a better place for our kids to live and—”

“A lot more consumers.”

“Make e-commerce purchases, not war.” Evan shakes his head lightly, understanding he’s being too cute by half. “The biggest tech executives in the world are about to announce a future of peace and prosperity, peace through prosperity. They’re all immigrants, a multicultural society that runs Silicon Valley, that drives it, and they’ve pulled off the single greatest act of diplomacy the world’s ever seen.”

Evan pauses. In the last few minutes the temperature has dropped half a degree, the fog turning to a light drizzle. Jeremy’s head is down, his neck near his chest, wincing at a pulsing of pain.

“Israel, the West Bank, will get so peaceful they’ll make Morocco look like Gettysburg in 1863. We’re building it in the image of Silicon Valley, not imposing our ideas, just giving rise to economic interdependence in a way that the world has never seen. Not just words, but billions in investment. A production center for mobile technologies, the next generation of devices and software, a digital trading post. We’re going to change the world starting at the cradle of civilization.”

“We. The business leaders?”

Evan smiles. For him, another of those punch-line moments that he lives for. “And the leaders of the stakeholders in the Middle East. Key officials from Israel and the Palestinian territories. We’ll break ground in two days on the road to Ramallah. And everyone is here to meet this afternoon, then announce it tonight.”

Jeremy feels his heartbeat pick up, not in terror, for the moment, but in lockstep with Evan’s enthusiasm, a physiological recognition of the sales power of his former partner.

“We’re going to shock the world. No one knows, other than the highest-level group of stakeholders. We’ve kept the whole thing off the grid.” Evan half laughs. “Cloak-and-dagger stuff. No emails on the subject, personal contact, code names, all the bullshit.”

Evan smiles, continues: “Blood brothers, we all swore not to share the particulars, where, when. I don’t think a single person on Earth knows about today’s meeting, and announcement. Hell, I’ve told everybody I’m out of town.”

“At the JCC? Is that why we’re here?”

“No, what? Too public. We’ve chartered
The Idealist
.”

Jeremy shakes his head.

“A boat. Most of them are already on it. Safe from any public view. We’ll make peace beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Like an armistice.”

There’s a pause. Then: “Who doesn’t want peace?” Jeremy suddenly asks.

“What?”

“Harry’s dead.”

Evan doesn’t say anything.

“He’s dead! They took Emily and Kent.”

Evan winces. “They’re looking for you.”

“Who?”

“The police. They tell me you’ve snapped, finally. Totally lost it. Jeremy, I want to help you if I can . . . I’m here because I owe you a lot. I know you mean—”

“You have no idea what’s going on, do you?”

Jeremy leans down and picks up the iPad. He wipes from the cover a coat of drizzle.

“Jeremy, you’re a genius, I grant you—”

“You’re so fucking clueless.”

“Listen to me!” Evan’s tone. “You are . . .” He doesn’t say the next words: fucking clueless. Instead: “A genius, but you’ve been used. Over and over again. I admit. Everyone around you: me, Harry, Andrea, hell, even PeaceNik, Nik, thinks about peace. All of us. You think about conflict. You never really saw this as a peace tool. But it couldn’t exist without you. You were like the sun, the center of this extraordinary, embryonic universe—people and institutions interested in understanding conflict and promoting peace. But, like the sun, you can be dangerous and, to stretch the metaphor, scorching. We all coalesced around you—the government, the academics, the entrepreneurs—but we realized we needed to give you a wide berth. We, if I’m honest, we used you. Let you lead us, in a way, but also took advantage . . .” He pauses. “There’s something so predictable about your urge to conquer, to win. If . . . if something happened with you and Harry, I’ll do what I can to help you. I . . .”

“Took advantage.” Muttered.

“Huh?”

“Look!”

Jeremy’s tone shakes not just Evan, but the alley, echoing down the opening.

“I was right.
It
was right.” Again, muttered. It somehow pieced together these disparate elements: the Russians, the tantalum, the volatility in general of the world, and, most of all, the likelihood of peace in the Middle East.

Jeremy opens the cover of the iPad. He swivels his finger on the screen, bringing to life the conflict map, drenched in red. No sooner does it materialize than a series of dialogue boxes pop up. A shrill chirp. Updates.

Evan reaches for the iPad. “What’s this?”

He’s looking, not at the screen, but at something on the back of the tablet. Jeremy looks too. He sees a little nodule, a tiny metallic tick.

“Are you bugging me?” Evan bellows.

Jeremy shakes his head. “No. You’re missing the point. Look at the screen.” He turns the iPad back to display the map.

“Is that . . .” Evan doesn’t finish his thought. Instead, he turns his attention down the alley, to a car turning inside, rambling slowly onto the gravel of the bumpy alley.

Jeremy sucks in sharply, clicks on the dialogue box. Countdown clock update: 2:36:12. Two hours, 36 minutes, 12 seconds.

Jeremy shivers. “It’s supposed to be seven hours away, not until tonight.”

“That’s the conflict map?”

“Peckerhead.”

Evan looks up. Sees what Jeremy sees: a steel rod, a barrel,
sticking from the driver’s-side window of the oncoming car. A pistol.

“Down!” Jeremy dives toward Evan’s legs, tackling him to the pavement.

Splat. Splat. Splat.

“Evan!”

Jeremy feels his partner’s heavy weight collapse over him, hears screeching. Van tires on wet pavement. It slides ten feet ahead, to Jeremy’s left, skids and stops. Jeremy scrambles. “Evan!”

No answer, dead weight on him, dead. Dead?!

Evan!

His face, his head. A hole . . .

Car doors open. Voices, urgent, woman and man.

Jeremy, no distance between thought and action, movement and instinct, scoots from under the body, sees the back door of the liquor store, dives for it. Into the cove of concrete protecting the door, a little entryway and a concrete overhang.

Splat, splat, splat. Bullets slam into the wall next to him. Splat. A searing pain in his calf.

“Go around front!” A woman’s voice. Glances, sees her shape, a blur, something familiar.