by Matt Richtel
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 comple
x, 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.
Jeremy digs a bit deeper. The origin of this flare-up seems to be a news story written a few days earlier in a small online-only newspaper from a town outside Moscow. In the story, a local reporter claimed to have interviewed a former Rosoboronexport engineer who said the corporation was enjoying growing profits from selling nuclear-grade materials on the down low to terrorist cells. The engineer in the article was quoted anonymously. The article was largely dismissed but it also set off a debate about the role of Rosoboronexport, which was one of those topics that occasionally flare up.
“Twelfth Street/City Center!” The voice comes over the speaker inside the subway. “Transfer to the Richmond line. Please expect some delays.”
The words echo somewhere in Jeremy’s brain, pull him from his iPad. It’s his stop, the transfer to Berkeley. The train slows. Jeremy realizes he must hustle if he’s going to get at the front of the line. He slings his backpack over his shoulder, palms the iPad and tucks it under his arm. He stands.
Starts walking to the doors sliding open, thinking about Russia. Like Mexico, and its own explosion of rhetoric in the drug war, it’s hard to see Russia’s linguistic wave as anything more than just one more cresting in intensity in a society engulfed in constant low-grade tension. Cresting, crashing, calming, repeat.
Just one thing sticks in his craw about Rosoboronexport. An article in a small newspaper refers to the leaking of nuclear-grade material. A bomb that got away? Jeremy thinks: Could that be true? Could it be nuclear material?
Jeremy’s struck that this is a bit of an aha moment. Maybe the bomb is key information, perhaps misinformation, that is so material to his computer’s apocalyptic projections?
Someone who was screwing with Jeremy—if anyone was—might be capitalizing on actual events to do it.
He’s so locked in his thoughts, scrambling through the sardines to catch the connecting train, that he doesn’t see the long-necked man taking him in from the subway platform. The man extracts his phone.
CHAPTER 17
ARE YOU MOVING YET?
Janine nearly laughs when she reads the text. What a geek. It’s the stilted formality of someone so outside the norm of modern world communication. Not: R U moving? Or: allgood? Or: cool?
They’ve got a veritable Boy Scout running Operation End-of-the-Earth. An increasingly desperate Boy Scout.
Janine pulls over. She texts back: check. She thinks: I’ll see your arcane, 20th-century vernacular, and raise you.
She breathes deeply, metabolizing chaos. Changing plans, a new checklist: get the bearded Jew, but first, strike against the infidel. With her hands. What she was born to do or, maybe, shaped to do. Nature, nurture. A foolish distinction. All part of the big plan.
She sees a sign for underground parking. Can’t risk getting caught in there, having the car encased, or so easily found by the cops, should it come to that. Then she sees a space on the street, just behind her. She puts the car in reverse and speeds to the opening, narrowly beating a car coming the other direction—the correct direction. Its driver pounds the horn. The driver pulls alongside Janine. The car’s window rolls down. The driver, a student in a hooded sweatshirt, says: WhatTheFuck. Janine rolls down the window of her aging Toyota. She smiles at the young man and shrugs, then, still smiling, nearly flirtatious, channels her go-to thought: your flesh will soon burn. The young man flinches, and he drives away.
A parking spot. In Berkeley, in the rain. You take your miraculous signs where you can get them, Janine thinks. Her grim purpose confirmed. The chaos be damned.
CHAPTER 18
DWINELLE HALL, A rectangular three-story building with red roof tiles in the center of Berkeley’s campus, would be ordinary, certainly unspectacular. But it seems to have gobbled up and embodied the spirit of the yells and protestors and one-man showmen who mount soapboxes and spew ideas or juggle them, or balls and knives—actual and linguistic—the quintessence of the stereotypical Berkeley politicized catcaller. Now absent.
The Dwinelle plaza stands eerily empty, something Jeremy barely registers along with a distant thought: must be spring break. His pause is instantaneous, just enough to take in the condensation coating the walls of the storied hall, and to feel the pain near his sternum. He’s missed his MRI. He thinks: I wonder if my mother felt this sensation before she got her diagnosis.
He strides forward.
“You want war, Harry,” Jeremy mutters, “you’ve got it.”
He descends to the basement, walks to the far right of the building, hearing his feet clop on the ratty tile floor. He’s got a full head of steam when he knocks on the door at the end, the one with the sign. “Harry Ives.”
No answer. The knock reverberates down the hallway. In an unusually self-conscious moment, Jeremy glances down the lonely corridor. He sees a man with floppy hair and a backpack exit an office at the far end of the building. Grad student or associate professor, Jeremy thinks, as the man looks his way, then turns and heads down the hallway and up the staircase. Feeling pity for the man, all these academics.
To Jeremy, there’s something deeply corrupted and corrupting about an environment like academia, where success is so purely subjective. Success depends on selling ideas, which requires convincing people of their merit but not actually asking them to spend money or hard-earned capital to purchase the ideas. It is, to Jeremy, the highest order of rhetorical gamesmanship.
And so, while the idea oppresses him, it also exhilarates him. It is a forum for endless potential conflict, debate, one-upmanship, backstabbing and, better yet, the barely disguised front stabbing.
And none a better foe than Harry, thinks Jeremy, as he nestles his knuckles on the old wise man’s door. He raps again, louder than the first time, and the brown door creaks open. It’s been left slightly ajar.
After modest hesitation, he pushes the door open.
He hears a footstep in the hallway, a cough. Peers back out, sees no one.
He sees that he’s got his iPad in his hand, and that it’s damp from sweat. He opens the cover, sees the countdown clock.
52:03:35.
He stuffs the computer into his backpack, and peeks back into Harry’s office. Rather, he’s looking into a classic anteroom of a professor of the highest esteem at a state university, meaning: drab and small and, to Jeremy, pathetic. It’s smaller than his own Embarcadero office, barely big enough to hold a cheap metal bookcase against the opposite wall, and, against the wall to his left, a desk, probably belonging to Harry’s graduate assistant. On a metal shelf attached to the wall over the desk, he sees a thick rectangular book that he identifies even though he can’t read the words on the spine: Conflict: A History. It is Harry’s well-worn and traveled bible on the subject. Piled on it, three books with titles Jeremy also can’t read, though he thinks he makes out the word “Mesopotamia.”
Next to the bookcase, another doorway, with a frosted square glass window, the portal to Harry War.
“Harry.”
No answer.
Another clop-clop of feet in the corridor.
On the desk, there’s a neat stack of folders, a blue plastic cup with the Cal Bear logo, holding a circle of pens. A laptop. Maybe the computer that Harry and some partner—a grad student, or Evan—are using to scam Jeremy.
He hears a thump from inside Harry’s office. The sound of the old man dropping a book or slamming do
wn the phone.
It’s wartime.
Jeremy turns the handle, opens Harry’s door.
The smell hits him first. Sweet, sticky, fresh. His brain flashes on a piece of conflict trivia, the battle in the early-mid 1800s in South Africa in which ten thousand Zulus fought Voortrekkers. So brutal was the battle that it turned the Ncome River red.
The Battle of Blood River.
Blood. Rivers of blood. He’s standing in rivers of Harry’s blood.
CHAPTER 19
HARRY!”
The aged professor, plopped in his chair, slumps over the desk, folded, like a soggy towel. The old man twitches. Doesn’t he? Hard for Jeremy to tell. Too dark. Lights off, shades down.
Without taking his eyes from Harry, Jeremy reaches behind him on the wall, feels for the light switch. Turns it on, gets a blast of red and terror, an image of Harry turned into a jigsaw puzzle, wounds to neck, and chest, back. A weapon, a knife, protruding from his shoulder.
Jeremy turns off the light.
“Harry. Jesus. Harry.” Quieter this time, self-conscious. The only light now from between the shade slats covering a window over the cot across the small room. Wall-to-ceiling bookshelves, a scattering of folders and files, some in stacks, a tomb of wisdom and learning. And Harry.
The old man twitches again. Jeremy feels something sticky under his shoes. Blood. Horrified, he lifts a sticky foot, nears the desk. Sees Harry’s head is flopped in the other direction, looking away. He touches Harry’s shoulder. No movement now.
Jeremy pulls out his phone. He swipes the screen, tries to, can’t steady himself.
Harry lifts his head, turns to Jeremy, drops his head again.
“Harry. Hang on, Harry. I’ll get help.” Jeremy reaches for the knife. Pauses. Will it do more harm than good?
“L . . .” A sound escapes Harry.
“Harry?”
“Lo . . .” Sounds and gurgles. Blood trickles from the professor’s lips, his eyes glazed and intense, determined.