The Doomsday Equation (24 page)

Jeremy yanks open the door, sprints. Adrenaline trumping the pulse in his leg. Doesn’t look down, tumbles, knocking over a cardboard cutout, some marketing thing, hears bottles tumble.

“Hey!” The man behind the counter.

Jeremy flies by him.

“Hey!”

“Police!” Jeremy says. It’s out of his mouth before he can take it back.

In seconds, he’s out the door, head swiveling. A stroller, a delivery truck coming up the street, rain, no bad guy, yet. An idea. It’s been with him.
I am right. It was right.

I am Princip.

He keeps sprinting.

D
ONE, COMMANDER.”

“And you got Jeremy?”

No answer. Silence. Assent. Nik looks out the car window at the drizzle, the playground at the park, a mother pushing a boy. Nik’s heart picks up, adrenaline, then something so beyond sadness. He’s glad he didn’t hear the sound of bullets.

“What next, Nik?”

Nik doesn’t answer.

“Nik?”

“Janine, call me Perry.” Perry, known to so many as Nik, PeaceNik, looks at the boy on the swing. Hopefully destined for a better place. Nik wonders if it would solace the boy to know that Nik himself will join the pile of ashes and dust. The price, the promise, of being Neturei-Karta. The price of being not just a Guardian, but, for this operation,
the
Guardian, the sentry at the top of this show.

They know where the meeting is now, the target. What made Nik think they’d be able to execute the plan without
terrible bloodshed? And, yet, a few deaths somehow feels more painful than the impending apocalypse. Each life an expired spark.

“We need to make sure we get the code,” he says absently. “Lose the body.”

He hears his voice. This is not how he ever talks aloud, just online, in World of Warcraft. Where he’s Commander Perry. An alter ego, or his real ego. What’s the difference? Online he can connect with other Guardians, command, collect other believers, help manage and guide, unseen and unnoticed in an online world filled with code and conflict.

“Of course.” There’s a pause; Nik hears a phone ring. “Hang on,” says Janine, then, “Uh-huh.”

“Perry.”

“What?”

“Small hiccup.”

“What?”

“Small. We’ll take care of it.”

Click.

J
EREMY SPRINTS BACK
across the street, scanning the street. Doesn’t yet see his pursuers.

He reaches the café. At the doorway, wipes off his brow. Slows, stops. Dead stops. One deep breath, looks down, sees the tear in his jeans, over the left calf.

A bullet brush, an ache, like a burn, not pulsing blood. He puts his hand on the spot, feels raw skin, nothing embedded, he guesses, if that’s what bullets do. Maybe it grazed him. Not Evan . . .

Shot clean through. The work of a markswoman.

He pushes away the image of the bull’s-eye in Evan’s forehead, then is struck by a smell, so strange, sour brown sugar. He looks down at its source: on his shirt, red, sticky, Evan’s blood. He tears at the button-down, animal-like, yanking it off, leaving himself with a T-shirt. He looks behind him, still clear, drops the shirt. Takes a deep, deep breath, wipes drizzle from his hair, nearly sopping, opens the café door, wincing at the jingle of bells. Looks down, shocked to see the iPad still in his hand.

Runs his hand along the back, feels the little metallic nodule, smaller than a pebble, than a baby mosquito. A bug.
Stuck with some adhesive. He flicks it off, watches it bounce onto the ground.

Looks up, shocked too to see no one look up. Smoking with self-consciousness, he feels like a gargoyle, a gigantic thumb sticking out, a glaring light, the sun. No one looks, not even the woman on the balcony, the one he realizes might help him yet. He puts his head down, beelines for the back stairs, fingering in his pocket, discovering the bill, pulls it out, a ten that feels like a miracle.

At the top of the stairs, she looks up, half smiles, then cocks her head, like: what possibly could’ve happened to you?

“They’ve finally figured it out,” he says, trying to command calm, feeling that he’s booming terror.

“Who’s figured out what?”

“How to make it pour right when your meter is expiring.”

“They got the shirt off your back.”

Jeremy smiles, tries to, hopes he’s smiling, tries not to look downstairs, toward the door. “I offer you a once-in-a-lifetime deal.”

“You want to buy an umbrella?” She looks at his money.

“I buy you an organic donut and a coffee, or whatever you want. And a tea for me, and I go into the bathroom and dry off and try to restart this day.”

She laughs. “I don’t need your money.”

“Please. No strings attached. I need some better karma.”

She takes his money. “I’ll buy my own.”

She turns down the stairs. The second she’s out of view, he begins to scramble through her pile of papers, underneath them.

It’s a miracle, a real one. He finds just what he’s looking for. He snags it.

He turns around, picks up the bag he left and sprints to the back of the loft, the other side of the balcony, the emergency exit.

Down slippery steel stairs, he finds himself in another alley, a veritable mirror of the one where he and Evan . . . he pushes away the image of felled Evan. Dead, right? Has to be dead. Jesus, Jeremy thinks, pictures it: He had a bullet hole in his head. Right in the middle. A black hole, seared.

And then another recognition: it was a woman, the shooter, in the alley, familiar. The same one from the log cabin? Short-haired, agile, she took shots at Nik and Jeremy, chased Jeremy.

He hears a siren. Cops coming. Is that good, or bad?

He looks across the alley, realizes the buildings on the other side are not businesses but residences. He starts jogging to his left, past the back of the movie theater. Away from the direction of the park, away from the café. On his right, a grinding noise. He jumps. It’s a garage door opening. Jeremy instinctually presses himself against the wall, a move he instantly realizes makes no sense. He’s trying to hide in plain sight. And why? Did someone hear the siren and decide to look? Probably not.

It’s just someone pulling out of the garage. Someone, he can see now, in a heavy car, like a Mercedes, Lexus. Jeremy walks away from the wall, assumes a calm gait, passes across the other side of the garage, gives a hand wave, an instinctive gesture, a polite one, telling the driver: I’m here. The driver slides carefully into the alley, pulls out of the garage, turns on the car’s wipers. It’s a man, driving, sort of, also glancing at a phone, multitasking. Then reaching up to press a button over the visor. The garage starts to close.

The car lurches off.

Jeremy dives. Rolls.

He manages to get inside the garage just before it closes. Holds his breath. Listens. Senses. It’s cool, dimly lit from a bulb enclosed in the garage door opener. No other sound. If someone is in the house, that someone makes no sound Jeremy can hear; he assumes that person wouldn’t hear Jeremy either.

He looks around the garage—wooden shelving to his left neatly stacked with boxes, two mountain bikes hung from the ceiling, across the way, a several-step staircase, leading to a door, presumably leading to the house. He half sprints, half tiptoes across the garage to the stairs and sits against their side; from this spot, Jeremy would be hard to see at a cursory glance if there are people in the house and they decide to check the garage.

What difference does it make?

He’s down to the final hours, maybe minutes or seconds, depending on how quickly he gets discovered by cops, or that sharpshooting woman who drilled a hole in Evan’s head.

He scrambles in his pocket for his phone. He starts to dial Nik. Pauses, something nagging him. Not yet.

He reaches into the bag. Pulls out his external keyboard. He swipes the screen and pulls up the conflict map. All red.

2:22:19.

2:22:18.

2:22:17.

Why did the hours disappear this time? What has changed? He clicks on the update. There’s a headline of an AP story: “Palestinian and Israeli Leaders Spotted in San Francisco.” It’s a half news story, half feature, wordplay, a question of whether there is a summit or a case of mistaken identity. Jeremy can’t focus, it doesn’t matter.

And another story: murals of lions spontaneously painted under the highway overpasses.

Dots connecting to dots.

Jeremy, clawing for sanity, ignoring the pulsing pain in his calf and a haunting image of another dead acquaintance, googles “Lion of Judah.” He speed-reads the Wikipedia entry. To the Jews, the lion was handed down as a symbol from Jacob, the religion’s patriarch, as a symbol of the tribe of Israel. To the Christians, the lion is Jesus, who came from the tribe of Judah.

Okay. And?

He looks up Lion of Judah and Custos. Guardian.

There are many, many entries. He can’t possibly sift through them.

So much evidence, so many urgent priorities, so little clarity. A peace symbol on dead Harry’s desk; a constellation of dishonest brokers surrounding Jeremy, all professing to want not to identify conflict but to bring peace; but not Jeremy, a devotee not of peace but of conflict, and somehow, now, the triggerman, who will set it all off. Or has he set it off already?

Why him? How him?

Because he’s been taken advantage of? Because he’s been manipulated? So easily?

He feels that pulsing around his clavicle, closes his eyes, pats the key fob. What makes Jeremy Jeremy? What makes him unique? This key, this thing that lets him inside this machine, this throbbing around his neck, the idea that he’s not her, his mother, not her. He’s holding the world at bay, with this key, afraid to share his secrets, to let go, not to be in control. Of everything, anything. The algorithm, a conversation, what gets ordered at the restaurant, how it’s cooked. The key
fob, right there, pressing on the edge of his neck, right there at the clavicle, the pulsing.

It’s not cancer. Not like what ate away his parents from the inside. This is worse.

It’s this thing.

He rips it from his neck.

I’m going to come for you, Emily. Kent. I’m not going out of this world alone. You’re not going out of this world alone.

He looks at the random numbers generated on the key fob, connecting to some server somewhere, allowing him access, just him, to the computer. The conflict machine. Or is it the Peace Machine?

Flowing with his half-baked plan, he enters the numbers, followed by his (goofy) password. Tw1nkleKent1201.

Derivation: Twinkle, twinkle little fart, a joking rhyme told between him and Kent; then Kent’s name; then four numbers corresponding to the day he met Emily.

Within seconds, he’s in the guts of the program. He frantically makes a few keystrokes, tinkers with the program, a chance, a flier. Who knows? And what’s the difference anyhow?

Can he rewrite the conflict? Can he rewrite himself?

He finishes his desperate act, drops his head, listens to the distant sirens. He picks up the phone. He starts to dial. He sees the hole in the middle of Evan’s head. A bull’s-eye. Satanic. And, more than that, a damning piece of evidence. The shooter was a professional, a crack shot, a markswoman. How come she missed at the log cabin?

With a deep sigh, he calls Nik.

Ten minutes later, the car pulls up in the alley and Jeremy gets inside. They drive in silence. Nik turns right out of the alley
onto Masonic, heading toward an upward slope and, eventually, the water. A police car passes going in the other direction. Nik’s knuckles clutch the steering wheel, white.

In Jeremy’s head, dots connecting to dots. He’s running algorithms, equations, in his head. He’s allowing himself to see what they add up to, one of the stunning things they add up to.

“You are a patient man, Perry.”

Nik crests the hill in silence. At the top, a miraculous view: the Golden Gate Bridge, the bay, and all of it suddenly highlighted by a break in the weather. A fogless midmorning stretch above one of mankind’s greatest landmarks.

Jeremy, sensing something, turns around. He sees a blue van fall in behind. Its windows are tinted. He reaches into his pocket, feels his phone.

“There never was a cat burglar at your house. Remember, you told me you caught someone trying to break in, on the night my apartment was broken into,” Jeremy says. “You lied about that. You were telling me that so that I’d think you were victimized too.” He pauses. “And at the log cabin, that woman who shot at us. She was your ally too. She wasn’t trying to actually shoot us, not to hit us. She was . . . . trying to scare me. Further the illusion that you and I are on the same side. If she really wanted to shoot us, to kill either of us, she is easily a good enough shot to have done so.” He pictures the bullet hole in Evan’s head. “Same woman who was dead-solid perfect with Peckerhead.

“It was not a bad head fake, Perry. I’d been wondering about you until she shot at us. Then I dismissed my reservations. Well played.”

Nik glides to a four-way stop.

“I’m right, aren’t I, Perry?”

They’re on the edge now of the Presidio, the parklands that stretch from here to the ocean, the bridge. On the other side, a mile away at least, the log cabin. But between here and there, rolling hills, winding roads, massive eucalyptuses, mini-forests, the occasional brick building, a former armory or barracks turned rent-controlled residences.

“I’m calling you Perry because calling you PeaceNik now appears to be a grave misnomer.

“WarNik? Armageddon Nick.” Jeremy looks at him, glaring at him, glowering. Looks again at the curvy road in front of them. “It was you the whole time.”

He blinks, startled. “GuardianNik,” he mutters, one of the last pieces coming together.

I
THINK WE’RE ON
the same page.” Nik’s voice is soft, as always, hinting at deferential, certainly balanced, without irony or judgment. “Guardian Jeremy. You’re the triggerman, an honorary Guardian.”

Jeremy reaches for Nik’s hand and tears it from the wheel. Tries to, a random act of fury. Nik swats Jeremy away with an open hand, a powerful one. He not only dislodges Jeremy’s grasp but plants a punctuating slam on Jeremy’s chest. Jeremy momentarily loses his breath.

Nik swallows. “Please be patient,” he says. “I’ve been, as you say, patient.”

“Patient.” Jeremy has to rasp it out. “Patient?!” He can barely catch his breath. If he attacks Nik, if he launches himself at this mutinous madman, then all could be lost. Any last-ditch hope.

Any chance to find Emily, and Kent.

Jeremy grits his teeth, swallows his instinct to physically attack. “Patient. I’ll say. Four years, just sitting there, waiting. For . . .” He doesn’t finish his question: for what?

The answer is obvious.

They are winding down a hill that twists to the right. But
Nik takes an abrupt left on a small frontage road. They’re heading now to the west, down into a tree-shrouded part of the Presidio, the sky now blocked, the wet leaves having dripped onto the rutted road, creating a feeling they’ve descended into a rain forest. Ahead of them, by the side of the road, a sport utility vehicle. It suddenly pulls in front of them.

Jeremy looks over his shoulder. The van is still there. The one from the log cabin, from the morning they nearly were shot. And, now, in front, the SUV from the drive-by shooting of Evan. He looks back at Nik, wills his right hand to unfurl from a balled fist.

“You signed up with me from the very beginning to monitor the technology. You were waiting to see . . . you didn’t want to see a prediction of war. You wanted to see a prediction of peace?” It’s part question, part revelation.

“You have the best technology on Earth. You have an amazing mind, an Earthly treasure.”

“You don’t want peace?”

“More than anyone, Jeremy. Real peace.”

Jeremy swallows. “The kind that comes with the Messiah.”

Nik’s silence carries affirmation. The cars wind to the right. They start to climb another hill. Ahead, Jeremy can see a break in the high trees, a little donut hole in the green density.

In his pocket, he fingers his phone. He holds it over the send button. On the text screen, a single word: “help.” He’s still not sure if it’s time.

“So you just sat there, like an evil cherub, a knight guarding the holy grail.”

“Neturei Karta.”

Jeremy shakes his head. “What is it? Like a club? Like Dungeons and Dragons but for zealots?”

“The name is an oversimplification. It
was
a group of extreme Orthodox Jews who opposed the establishment of Israel, of a secular Israel. Much bigger than that now. It’s all of us who believe that by secularizing that land, creating a worldly peace, we’re foreclosing real peace, eternal peace. And, really, in concept, the Guardians long precede 1948, the creation of a secular Israel. We are ancient in our devotion to fulfilling God’s covenant, securing a portal for his return. It is a rock-solid value that will save all of us, that so many people believe but so few are willing to defend. Now is the time.”

Jeremy pauses for a moment, struck with a kind of obvious wonder, like someone staring at awe at the Grand Canyon despite having seen pictures of it a million times. What Nik is describing, as insane as it sounds, is not that far removed from a political rift that divides a nation, a world. Infuses hypercharged issues: Antiabortion; pro-choice. Gay marriage. Church and state. Will the Messiah return? Are we creating a world that will allow it?

And then there’s the way Nik delivers it, with trademark nonchalance, humility, like explaining, when asked about the weather, that it’s sunny but there could be rain.

“You’re right,” Nik says. “I was a bit like a knight guarding a grail. My job was to monitor you, the technology, to make sure we were the first to know about the likelihood of a secular peace, a false peace.”

“A knight?”

“What?”

“Just a knight, or
the
knight?”

Nik doesn’t respond.

Jeremy continues. “You were calling the shots. Orchestrating.” An image comes to Jeremy. Nik using all the company’s
communications tools and, more than that, the opportunity to communicate globally with all kinds of actors, all without raising suspicion. After all, the company’s job was to monitor international patterns, observe terrorist activity, even interact with the Pentagon.

“You were connecting with people on World of Warcraft. Your little gang exchanging messages, recruiting the like-minded, playing real war.”

Nik looks deadly serious. “I don’t crave power. I was called. Like you, I wound up in the middle of it, and I assumed the responsibility I was given.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, we’re more democratic than that.”

“So you are in charge.”

Nik almost smiles. “I couldn’t believe they let those lions loose. They knew I wouldn’t approve, so they didn’t tell me. Guardians, they said, could not let the Lion of Judah die in his cell like a common mongrel. The troops took that one upon themselves.”

It’s a nonanswer but it seems to confirm Jeremy’s terror; his loyal sidekick has been the point man on Operation Armageddon.

“It was an outrageous risk, letting those lions go,” Nik continues. “Just the kind of thing that could get us attention from the press or police.” Now he does smile, sadly. “Or your computer. It is so powerful, so sensitive. It sees things, almost as good as . . . He does. I guess you could say it was made in God’s image.”

Jeremy tilts his head, taking in Nik. “I always thought you were so modest.”

“It is one of the highest callings.”

“But that’s not why you wear long-sleeve shirts and long pants,
always. In fact, I can’t say I’ve ever seen you wear shorts. Not once. Even when the fog parted in San Francisco and London.”

Nik clears his throat.

“Let’s see it,” Jeremy says.

Nik swallows. Takes his right hand from the wheel and pulls up the shirt on his left arm to the elbow. Inside it, on the fleshiest part of his beefy inner forearm, beneath the bandage, the small tattoo of a lion on hind legs.

“Can’t show you the leg while driving. Besides, we’re here.”

Jeremy eyes the bandage. “Did you really get hit, by a bullet, at the cabin?”

Nik shakes his head. A convenient scratch, he explains, from falling. Then he turns to Jeremy. “This will be a good vantage point.”

Jeremy looks up. They’re high atop the Presidio, pulling into a dingy gravel driveway, bumpy, lined with tall trees. In the distance, he can see a three-story brick structure. Seconds later, they’re parked in front of it, a modest residence or administrative building. Brick, reddish, ruddy, white-trimmed window frames chipped and frayed from fog and neglect.

“Where are they?” Jeremy means Kent and Emily, which Nik obviously understands.

“We still need the code, Jeremy. All of it.”

Jeremy hears a door slam. He looks up in the gravel semicircular driveway, grass growing through and around rocks. From the driver’s side of the sport utility vehicle steps the short-haired woman who shot at him at the log cabin, and chased him, and then shot Evan. From the passenger side, a hefty bearded man. Both armed.

The driver of the van, maybe a tall male—hard to see through tinted glass—remains seated.

Jeremy opens his own door. As he does so, he hits send on his iPhone, then slips the device between the side of the seat and the door so that it falls into the cracks. Jeremy steps out of the car, feels his legs wobble, slams the door, the phone now inside. Nik comes around the front of the car. He nods to the woman and the bearded man while walking to Jeremy.

“The fob.” He extends a hand.

Jeremy swallows, fingers the chain from around his neck. “You killed the lieutenant colonel, one of the Guardians did. You tortured him until he told you that I was the one who holds the detonation key. And then you killed him.”

Nik looks down. “And then he died.”

Jeremy considers the language, realizes Nik is trying to make the craziest distinction. The lieutenant colonel wasn’t killed, Nik seems to be saying, not in a deliberate act; he died, just expired. Whatever. What’s so obvious now to Jeremy, and so material, is that Nik’s comments confirm what Jeremy had suspected, deduced. The Pentagon was using Jeremy as a piece of the Project Surrogate plan.

One mercenary group had half the dirty bomb.

Another had the other half of the bomb.

Jeremy had the detonation key. Princip.

“The Pentagon never cared about the computer. They wanted to send me to the Middle East. Carrying the fob,” he says with quasi-revelation. “Then, what, they’d tell the mercenary groups, our terrorist allies, that I had the key, and I’d be abducted? Then the key used to detonate the bomb and take out Iran’s nuclear arsenal. The lieutenant colonel must’ve been the one guy, or one of the few, who knew that I was the linchpin. Did Andrea know?”

“I didn’t know. We didn’t know. But, you are right, we knew that
the lieutenant colonel knew. He was the guy on Surrogate, the point man.”

“They were using me all along. They didn’t want my technology. They wanted a carrier pigeon. Someone who could move into and out of countries, someone with a safe passport, a civilian, someone unaware, uncorrupted.”

Nik says: “You can’t be corrupted. You’re only out for yourself.”

Jeremy thinks: When I was first seduced by Andrea, I couldn’t find my key fob. They must’ve copied it.

“No,” Jeremy blurts out. “They replaced it. They fitted me with their own access key. The detonation key. It looked just like my key fob and it was programmed to let me into my computer. But it also would work to set off the bomb.” He shakes his head. “But how did your group get the bomb? Wasn’t it supposed to go to separate, mercenary groups?”

Nik laughs, not condescendingly, like this is genuinely funny. He looks at the woman, as if asking permission to explain, and Jeremy sees she shrugs.

“We are, in a way, different groups. Some would call us militant Christians and Jews, some Rastafarians, like I said. Lucky for us that the Pentagon coordinated Surrogate independently with the Christian and Jewish factions. The U.S. government doesn’t fully grasp what it’s doing in the Middle East, and who it is doing it with. Partnerships there, it goes without saying, are notoriously risky.”

“So they didn’t realize the different groups were connected? They gave the two halves of the bomb to the
same
group?”

“Loosely. Guardians are everywhere. Not everywhere, but planted in enough places. We got lucky.” He pauses. “Not lucky—”

“Lemme guess. Divine intervention,” Jeremy interrupts, then says: “So would you have used the bomb on Iran?”

“If we’d have had the chance, of course. When it didn’t happen, we had the bomb, but no access code. We plotted how we’d get it, and, when we got it, how we’d use it. And your computer helped us figure out when.”

Jeremy lets it sink in, the cascade of betrayals. All these people around him, conspiring, coordinating, plotting.

“Where are they—Emily and the boy?”

Nik nods his head to the woman, who walks over to the van, her feet crunching on gravel. She opens the back of the van, revealing two people, tied together, back to back, white hoods on their heads.

Jeremy starts to run toward the van. “Emily!”

He’s stopped in his tracks by Nik’s beefy hand. And the site of the short-haired Sabra pointing a gun at Emily and Kent.

“Don’t speak,” the woman says to the pair. She has a pidgin accent, a bit of everything. “I am taking you inside a house where you may be reunited with your boyfriend.”

“Mom?”

The woman slaps the white hood covering Kent’s head. He whimpers. Jeremy starts to move again and feels Nik propel him backward with two forceful hands. “The code.”

At gunpoint, Emily and Kent, hooded, stumble into the brick residence, through a front door with peeling paint and a torn door.

“The way you feel about them,” Nik says. “It’s the way I feel about all of it, the world.”

Jeremy, without a millisecond of forethought, throws a wild punch at Nik. His arm whips through the air, a fist missile. Nik ducks to his right, evading the attack, finds his balance, springs
forward with a counterattack. It’s a vicious uppercut that sends Jeremy sprawling backward, then onto his ass on a patch of damp grass and gravel.

“I’ve taken so much shit from you. We all have.” Nik doesn’t sound angry, still his even-keeled self, almost like the punch was phlegm he needed to dislodge from his throat, now cleared. “Give it to me.”

Jeremy fights for a breath. He reaches for the chain on his neck, pulls it over his head, the key fob attached. He tosses it to Nik.

“And your password. The detonation code, we’re told, is both. However it is you get into your computer is how we detonate the bomb.”

Jeremy pauses.

“Or they die,” Nik says. He pauses, then says: “We’ll know whether you’re telling the truth because we’ll test the code by logging into the computer. If it works, you’re telling the truth and then you can be with them.”

“For the next hour until the world ends. And then we’re all dead.”

Nik smiles patiently.

Jeremy swallows.

“TwinkleKent-one-two-zero-one.”

Nik, without missing a beat, reaches into the car and pulls out a piece of paper and a thick, black pen. He hands it to Jeremy.

Jeremy looks at the building holding Emily and Kent. He looks around at the trees. At the woman with the short hair, the bearded man, the sky, the world.

He writes: Tw1nkleKent1201

He tosses the piece of paper to the ground. “Can I go inside?”

“Not until we see if it works.”

“You’re going to—”

“Not the bomb. Not now. Not for an hour or so. We needed to know where the meeting was taking place. It’s been hell getting Evan to divulge the location. We worked sources, seduced executives, tried to get access to the network. It shouldn’t have been that hard. After all, you and Evan were business associates. You’d think he’d have shared everything with us, the names of his partners, our potential partners. But it’s funny how little he actually shared, or trusted you. Fortunately, Evan told you, and we had you bugged.”