The Doomsday Equation (25 page)

Jeremy shakes his head, not understanding.

“Stuck to the back of your iPad, just a tiny mike, very powerful, though. I knew you’d take it everywhere.”

Now it makes sense.

“You put it there when we were driving around, when I went to find Emily and Kent at the Seal Rock. You needed me to elicit from Evan the precise location of the meeting.” He pauses with another realization. “You tried to bring Andrea and Evan together to incite me, get me to confront them, confront Evan, do whatever was necessary to expose all their plans to you.”

“And now we need to make sure the log-on code works for your computer, to make sure you’re not bullshitting us. Wouldn’t put it past you to want to . . . get the better of someone.”

“Even you, my loyal battery mate.”

Nik holds out his hand and Jeremy withdraws the iPad, runs his hand over the back, feels the spot where he’d found the bug. He passes the iPad over.

Then he watches his hefty assistant turned madman open the cover and then swipe and click until he arrives at the log-in
screen. Nik enters a number from the key fob, then Jeremy’s password.

“Good to go.” The comment seems directed both at no one and at what Jeremy realizes is a growing posse. The big bearded man; a tall white man who had driven the van, now standing next to it; and a short woman with dark hair who had reappeared from the house. For a moment, Jeremy can’t take his eyes from this dazzling creature, and her raw energy. Then he looks away. He doesn’t see the guy with the jean jacket, the one who seduced Emily in the first place. He wants to kill that guy. First.

The bearded man walks over and takes the fob. He walks to the sport utility vehicle, and so does the woman.

“Stop!” Jeremy says. “Please.” Pause. Again: “Please.”

“A new vocabulary word for you.” He nods to Jeremy, as if to say: speak your piece.

“Nik, Perry, whoever you are, look at the computer, the map. Just look at it.”

Nik shrugs, looks down at the device, swipes. Jeremy can tell he’s reached the conflict map when his eyes first blink rapidly, then stop and stare.

“You’re not just going to destroy a plan to bring peace to the Middle East, the Fertile Crescent. You’re going to destroy the world. Look how many people are going to die. I know you believe in the machine, or you wouldn’t have shadowed me for four years. So just, please, look. How many innocent souls?”

Nik swallows. “What kind of world is this,” he whispers. “What kind of world where the combative thrive, where the angry, the immodest and mean grow rich and fat? Where the humble servant winds up serving not God but his fellow man?
What kind of world where if you don’t look the right way or go to the perfect school you’re a second-class citizen, expected to carry everyone’s water.”

The most vulnerable Jeremy’s ever heard Nik, maybe anybody’s ever heard him. Nik clears his throat. He waves the woman and the bearded man into their car.

Jeremy drops to his knees. “Please. I’m begging you.”

The tires of the sport utility vehicle spin on the gravel, get purchase, crunch away.

“It’s a referendum,” Nik says. The whisper is gone, and whatever deep personal well it drew from. “Technology won’t save the world. Business and commerce won’t save the world. Not science, not your machine. They are distractions, existential diversions. Everything we need, He already invented.”

Jeremy feels momentarily struck by the eloquence of the lie, of its talking-point nature, of the misinformation. He says: “You know why the map is all red? Because you are choosing to hold forth about faith and the Messiah, to make your point, when the world is in the most precarious state. Conflict rhetoric rising, weapons of mass destruction rampant and in dangerous hands. You’re throwing a spark into a bucket of flint and gasoline.”

As he says the words, Jeremy realizes just how true that is; the reason the world is going to explode is not merely that Nik and his Guardians are setting off a dirty bomb; it’s that, once the bomb goes off, the fragile world on the brink of conflict will come undone. The computer put all the pieces together.

“Nothing,” Nik says.

“What?”

“Seventy-five million . . . people. Compared with eternal damnation, for all of us. It’s nothing. If we allow secular peace
to root in the Fertile Crescent, there can be no redemption. Ever.” He looks at the house, then back at Jeremy. “Get up. Go inside. You can be with them. You’ve done much more of a service than you realize. You can take solace in that . . .”

“What”

“This thing is right. You were right.” Nik looks down at the tablet. “Fifty-five minutes, seven seconds. Pretty much dead on.” He smiles sadly. “Like I said, you’re going to have quite a view.”

J
EREMY
Z
OMBIE WALKS
to the house. Realizes that Nik isn’t following. No one follows, not the tall white dude, not two darker-skinned men Jeremy now realizes are lingering by the side of the house. One is smoking a cigarette. The air smells like pine and fog. Jeremy lets himself sense the world, appreciate it, for a millisecond, this imperiled Earthly existence.

He pulls on a worn brass handle and opens the front door, prompting a creak. He hears a man’s voice say: “Up here.”

Just inside the entrance, a wooden staircase that once would’ve been grand, bordering on majestic, born of a time of hand craftsmanship. But now its wear and tear and nicks and cuts are evident in light that is both dull and powerful, flooding in from the windows that checker the adjoining rooms.

At the top of the stairs, he sees a figure that fills him with fury. It’s the man who broke into his house, the one from the café, the one who wheedled his way into Emily’s life. Jeremy, in spite of himself, starts sprinting up the stairs. And he doesn’t stop even when the man levels some sort of powerful weapon, a machine gun or something.

“If I bark,” the man says seconds before Jeremy reaches him, “they die.”

Jeremy freezes. He’s two steps from the top, face-to-barrel. Behind the man, a hallway and three closed doors: left, right, straight ahead. “Where are they?”

The man gestures with a nod. “Middle. But first empty your pockets.”

Jeremy pulls out his jean pockets, dislodging a dime.

“You looking for some more hair gel?”

“Cell phone.” The guy doesn’t take the bait. The opposite: “We are looking at a larger good and I’m deeply sorry for any trouble we’ve caused.”

“Like killing Harry and Evan. How does it go: thou shalt not kill, unless it could lead to even more killing?”

“Go ahead.”

Jeremy brushes past the man. He can’t think of any productive way to attack, grab the gun, push the man down the stairs. All high-risk roads with no apparent reward. Jeremy reaches the door in the middle, turns back, sees the guy looking at him.

“The lions will die too.”

The man grimaces. “Not in cages.” He pauses. “Stay in the room.” Pauses again. “It won’t be long.”

Jeremy turns back and opens the door. In the corner, beneath a picture window that stretches nearly the length of the wall, sit Emily and Kent; she’s draped over him like a blanket. The pair practically entangled, a mother-and-child pretzel. She looks up. Dazed. Puts her head back down. “It’s okay,” she whispers to Kent.

Jeremy recognizes the invasion of a surprising, unwelcome thought: my mother would’ve been arguing with the guards, trying to escape, not enveloping me.

He sees a blur. Kent running toward him.

“You did this. You did this!”

Fury, tears, arms and fists whirring, half boy, half adolescent. “You hurt her! You hurt Mom . . .” He reaches Jeremy, arms flailing.

“Kent!” It’s Emily.

Jeremy absorbs the modest blows, can’t decide whether to protect himself or put his arms around the boy.

“Kent!” Emily repeats. She pulls her son from Jeremy, glowers at Jeremy, leers. “Don’t say it. Don’t say it.”

“What, I . . .”

“It’s our own fault, right? I should’ve known. I should’ve picked up this guy’s bad intentions, erred on the side of defense, caution. I should put up boundaries and defend them at all costs. Like you.”

Jeremy’s eyes fill with hot tears. This is what she thinks of him. Even in this moment, she expects from him admonition, superiority.

“I’m sorry, I . . . Emily . . .”

“What? What? Did I hear that, right? Kent, did you hear that? Sorry. Sorry? What, is it new-vocabulary day for Jeremy?”

He shakes his head. Almost Nik’s words when Jeremy had used the word “please.”

He puts his head down. The word will end and these will be his final moments. Caged in the world he built.

“The cat’s in the cradle,” he mutters.

“Now some trick. You’re going to make me guess your reference, chess, a setup? Show how superior you are, how inferior we are? I’m not them. I was never
them,
but to you everyone is a ‘them.’ It’s not
us
and
them
. There never was an
us
. It’s you and the rest of the world. And now you’ve drawn me into one
of your wars with everybody else! They, they put a hood over Kent’s head! I . . .”

Kent throws his arms around his mother’s waist. She’s run out of steam. The pair, though standing, seem to recoil in a hug. It dawns on Jeremy that Emily and Kent have no clue about what is happening. They think they’ve been kidnapped. Maybe they’re collateral damage in some conflict that has embroiled Jeremy. That much is true, sort of, but a conflict the likes of which they can’t possibly imagine.

Jeremy looks out the picture window, and he sees what Nik means by the remarkable view. He sees directly onto the Golden Gate Bridge, and beneath it. Especially beneath it. The top of the bridge is, predictably, enveloped by fog. But the bridge itself, and underneath it, clear. He can make out boats.

On one of them, a secret meeting is taking place to save the world. It will be ground zero.

“Please, please, Emily, let me explain.”

She looks up from Kent. Calmly asks: “Can you get us out of here?”

He shakes his head. Allows himself to admit defeat. “No.”

“Then go. Leave us. Get out!”

H
E STARTS TO
say something. He can’t think of what to say. More than that, he can’t make anything come out. He turns around. Tears stream down his cheeks.

He walks to the door. He opens it. Discovers no one standing outside, or at the stair landing. Doesn’t mean anything. They’re downstairs, out front, wherever. Whatever.

He pauses at the door.

“We could group the colors together. It is a good idea. It was a good idea.”

He shuts the door. He turns to mother and child.

“Kent,” he continues. “We didn’t have to do the corners first, on the rocket ship puzzle.”

It was the puzzle that Jeremy and Kent were doing when they had their first big fight. The one where Kent challenged Jeremy’s authority and Jeremy snapped in his usual way.

“Jeremy, don’t try your obtuse tricks with—”

Kent interjects: “Why can’t I grow up!?”

Emily and Jeremy both look up, startled by the non sequitur. They catch eyes, like parents, then look back at the boy.

“What do you mean, sweetie?”

Kent answers his mother by sitting down.

“He doesn’t like me when I’m not a baby.”

She laughs, bitterly. “Me either.” She looks at Jeremy. “Harry Chapin. ‘The Cat’s in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon.’ The song. I get your reference. It’s about neglecting your child. Not really the right reference, Jeremy.”

He bites his tongue, his instinct to challenge her. He just meant that he knows he’s created this world. He’s reaping what he’s sown.

She says: “That song is about a father and son. Your issue is around your mother, which is beside the point. Your
real
issue isn’t that you learned how to neglect. Your issue is you never learned to let people have space. To be themselves. You can’t love them for what they are, who they are. It’s the opposite of what Harry Chapin is saying. You can’t neglect anything. Not a flaw, a perceived flaw, a difference of opinion, not any threat to your way of thinking, your feeling of superiority, your need to feel superior. Just . . .” She stops. It’s obvious. Just like his mother.

“Just like them,” he says, letting his eyes gaze out the window. “Nik, the Guardians.” He thinks: I’m like them, unforgiving, rigid, more willing to destroy the world than to let differences blossom. “Scorched Earth.”

Finally, Emily gives him a softer look, not soft, but
softer,
a new look. She’s said her piece. She’s run dry of fury. It’s not in her, and never was. Still, he doesn’t feel any forgiveness, no latitude. Instead of walking forward, he sits. It’s his own exhaustion coupled with a deliberate effort to be on their level, a rhetorical, strategic move that remains in him, an instinct he can’t shed.

He notices Emily wears a watch. It’s one he gave her. Rather, one he’d been given by some venture capitalist as a gift for her.
The fact she’s wearing it gives him some hope; maybe it represents a subconscious act on her part—a sign that she has not abandoned him altogether.

“What time is it?”

She looks at the watch. “One thirty. Kent is hungry.”

“Less than twenty minutes,” Jeremy says. He’s hit by a sudden urge to just sit like this, wait for the end, hope his desperate plan has worked and that the end might not yet come, not tell them what’s happening.

But that’s not fair. And, besides, telling them might allow him to bridge the gap, create a narrative, a different conversation to smooth their way into peace.

“Emily, we don’t have much time.”

Without further preface, he starts explaining.

Ten minutes later, they’ve all walked to the window, Jeremy finishing his story, all looking at the distant speck of a charter boat nearing the bridge.

“Ten minutes?” Emily exclaims.

He points to her watch and she holds it up. “Less.”

“It’s too impossible to believe.”

“The boat is there, Emily. These people, downstairs, wherever, they have guns. We’re not imagining this. This plot has been years in the making, decades, centuries. You’re right, it’s impossible to believe. The most powerful things are.”

“Isaac,” Kent whispers.

His hamster. “What will happen to him?”

“There is one, tiny possibility,” Jeremy interjects. “One small chance.”

He feels Emily’s eyes on him.

“I swapped out the access code. A last-ditch thing, a Hail Mary, if you want to get biblical.”

“What are you talking about?”

He explains. He tells Emily and Kent that he’d correctly guessed that the bomb needed an access code and that he himself, unknowingly for so long, was carrying the code: a combination of the random number generated by the key fob and Jeremy’s personal password.

“You gave it to them?” Emily says.

“No. Not exactly.”

He explains that, having guessed this is what they wanted, he created a substitute access code.

“But then how did it work to get into the computer?”

Jeremy says that, a few hours earlier, he was in a café where he saw a woman working with a key fob that looked very much like his own. A standard issue random-number generator. He took the fob when she wasn’t looking. He tossed out his own actual fob. But not before he reprogrammed the algorithm with a new password.

“I’m not totally following, Jeremy. How long now?”

He looks at the watch. Six minutes.

“I knew that they’d test to see whether the access code was accurate, by making me log into the iPad,” he says.

So, he explains, he programmed the iPad to accept
any
combination of numbers and letters. It, in effect, has no password at this point. “You could enter anything into it and get into the guts of the program. But they don’t know that. They think that the number on the woman’s key fob, combined with my password, is the key.”

“Why not just change the access code and give them your key fob?”

“Because they’d have the actual number. Then, conceivably, they could make it work.”

She blinks, calculating. He feels flush with love, attraction. She’s his equal, intellectually, she just never needed to prove it. She’s his great, great superior, emotionally.

“So will your plan work?”

He shrugs. “They bugged me, they could’ve found my fob, the real one. They’ve got a dirty bomb, a real one. So many possibilities. Chief among them: I could be wrong.” He pauses. “There’s a strong likelihood that I’m wrong and that my plan, this . . . last-ditch . . . this idea won’t fool them. Besides,” he says, then pauses again. “The computer still thinks the world is going to end.

“Last I checked.”

“Hail Mary,” Emily says absently.

He swallows.

“They took advantage of me, Em. I was set up from every direction. Used by the Pentagon, by Nik, by the venture capitalists, the peace and conflict community, people just preying on . . .” He pauses, continues: “On my tone-deaf talent.”

Emily looks at him. He can see her deep nurturing instincts. He steps back to avoid her coming to his aid.

“I brought it on myself. I was deaf. I was the center of all of it, the world of peace and conflict, the plots and counterplots, but I was so busy attacking, preparing to attack, that I couldn’t really listen . . . I couldn’t . . .” He pauses, tries to catch his breath, puts his hand to his chest, where it used to ache all the time. It doesn’t anymore.

“Listen.”

“What?” she asks.

He wants to say: love. He can’t get it out. A tear drips.

He feels Kent wrap a leg. Jeremy chokes back a tear, a sob, then doesn’t—choke it back. He lets tears stream down his
face. He feels Emily getting nearer. He wipes his cheeks with his palm and looks at the watch.

He looks at the watch. Two minutes.

“I wanted it to end a different way.” He clears his throat. “But I did want it to end with you. Both of you.”

He recognizes a terrible truth: even if the blast doesn’t go off, the three of them will not possibly escape. “Just like the computer,” he mumbles, “we know too much.”

They look out the window, see the boat nearly beneath the bridge.

Ninety seconds.

He reaches for Emily and puts his arm around her. He wraps a hand around Kent, resting it on the boy’s chest. Mother then kneels, putting her head next to the boy. “I love you more than anything. I’m sorry if I did anything wrong.”

“You were perfect,” the boy responds.

Jeremy listens, feels together with them, so apart. Emily’s eyes are closed, her forehead touching Kent’s, and Jeremy is sure she’s praying.

Forty-five seconds.

He wants to tell them: please forgive me. But it’s not about him.

Forty seconds.

“Look!” Kent points.

A small skiff, a dot, approaches the large boat. It must be the world killers, the Guardians, poised to set the world on fire. Poised, in their view, to save it.

It was right. The computer was right.

Twenty-five seconds.

The skiff nearly collides with the charter. It’s hard to see what’s happening.

Twenty seconds.

Jeremy feels himself kneeling. Joining the pair, huddling with them. He feels Emily lean in, touch her cheek to his cheek.

Fifteen seconds.

There’s an explosion.

Outside the house, a flurry of gunfire. A cascade of rifles, shouts, drowned out by bang, bang, bang.

Emily turns to him. “Andrea,” he mutters. She got his text message. Way too late.

Ten seconds.

They look out the window. They huddle.

More gunfire. Then something like a bomb going off, maybe a car exploding.

:05.

:04.

:03.

:02.