The Doomsday Equation

by Matt Richtel

  “Ten minutes enough time for you?”

  She smiles and shuts the door.

  She moves to the window, watches this suave caller walk up the street, hands stuffed in his jean-jacket pockets, so nonchalant.

  She thinks about Jeremy’s hysterical messages. Almost rants. Get out of town. And, again, about her ex-lover’s instincts about her new suitor. She turns and looks at a picture frame over the mantel. The frame is empty. Until three weeks ago, it held a picture of Jeremy and Kent, the pair of them caught smiling together, an unposed, even haphazard image taken on a hike on the cliff above Seal Rock.

  She sighs. She walks back into Kent’s bedroom, finds the boy on the floor encircled by puzzle pieces. Standing beside him, a multicolored robot, whose arms move by remote control, something she picked up at a secondhand store on Geary.

  “You’re dressed. Good.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “Sweetie, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Kent looks up skeptically. His sandy brown hair flops over his eyes and she shoves away a feeling of such love it might crush her insides.

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  He reluctantly rises. “Is it a pony?” An inside joke.

  She leads him down the stairs, into the ratty garage, past the musty old mattress and the cans of paint. She opens the back door. “You’re wearing your pajamas,” he says.

  She pushes him out the back and shuts the door.

  “Can you climb the fence, Kent?”

  “Mom, what—”

  “We’re climbing the fence, Kent. Do you understand me?”

  Kent blinks, recognizing something like terror on the face of his mother.

  CHAPTER 40

  SLOW DOWN. PLEASE.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Nik.”

  Nik’s blinking, but impassive. He nearly steps backward because Jeremy’s rushed in so close. Next to the café, a woman blanketed with newspapers and a sleeping bag, attended by a large stuffed brown bear, stirs from slumber, mumbles.

  “Emily. Kent.” Jeremy now talks through his teeth, a kind of hysterical whisper.

  “You want me to call them, and the police.”

  “No!”

  The woman by the wall rolls over, moans. Jeremy puts his hand on Nik’s shoulder, inviting a rare flinch from the portly aide-de-camp.

  “No. No police. Don’t call that reporter.”

  For just an instant, Nik looks down. Looks up and sees horror on Jeremy’s face.

  “I just left a message, saying to call me and that you had an interesting story. Why—”

  Jeremy sees the bandage on Nik’s right wrist.

  Nik whispers: “I can’t tell if it was from bark, or a rock, or—”

  Bullet graze.

  Jeremy takes Nik by the arm, glances over his shoulder and walks into the café. It reeks of ammonia and glares orange from the shitty paint job that matches plastic flowers kept on vases on the faux wood tables. Behind the counter, a man with a scarf wrapped around his head doesn’t look up.

  Jeremy leads Nik to the one booth, in the corner. The pair slide in. Jeremy taps on his phone, drawing Nik’s gaze.

  “You’ve seen him?”

  Nik takes in the grainy image of a man in his late twenties, dark hair. The surveillance camera has caught the side of the man’s face, accentuating a pronounced nose.

  “Does he look like the cat burglar?”

  Nik looks at him, like: what the hell are you talking about?

  “From the other night, your apartment? You told me a guy tried to break into your house.”

  Again, a clueless look from Nik, then “No.” The assistant shakes his head. “I didn’t get a look at him. Dolorosa scared him away.” Nik’s dog.

  “He was masking an accent, sounding almost too American,” Jeremy thinks aloud. “I need your phone.”

  Nik swallows, clears his throat. He slips a hand between his corpulent belly and the table, paws at his jeans.

  “You left it in the car.”

  “I found a spot a couple of blocks away. I can—”

  Jeremy waves him off. He opens his dialer and punches in Emily’s number. Ring, ring, ring, ring.

  No answer.

  Jeremy puts down the phone. “We’ll have to split up.”

  “Something happened to them?”

  Jeremy lets himself look at Nik. The sweaty forehead, the mismatched sideburns, one nearly a lamb chop and the other a quarter inch shorter, the curl of unkempt hair behind the ear. Jeremy slowly looks up into Nik’s eyes with something plaintive, vulnerable, sees that impassive gaze coming back, locks on to it, shivers. So alone.

  Jeremy’s phone rings. He scoops it to his ear. “E!” For Emily.

  “We have to talk, Atlas.” It’s Andrea. Not Emily.

  “You have her.”

  “Who?”

  He doesn’t have her. Jeremy puts his hand on Nik’s thick arm.

  “Listen, Andrea, goddamn it,” Jeremy starts, and then his phone beeps again. He looks at the screen. He recognizes the number. Without missing a beat, he switches the call over.

  “Are you safe?”

  “What’s going on?” It’s Emily.

  “That guy, the one from the café. Bad news. Worse than that. I’ll come get you. Where are you?”

  “Seal Park. It’s not called that—”

  “What? Where?”

  “At the park, across from Seal Rock. Y’know, with the big tree in the middle and that place where we talked about—” Emily pauses; the stone deck overlooking the Pacific where they once fantasized they’d get married. In the pause, Jeremy looks at Nik, pins the phone against his ear with his shoulder and uses his hands to simulate a steering wheel.

  Nik shakes his head, not getting it. Jeremy says into the phone: “Wait for us at the restaurant.”

  “What?”

  “Wait, like in the trees—Kent’s with you?”

  “Of course. Restaurant?”

  “Seal Rock Café. Wait across the street. You’ll see us in twenty minutes. Me and Nik.”

  Nik is already scooting out of the booth, getting the plan: he’ll run to get the car and come back to get Jeremy. On his way out of the booth, he pauses, reaches into the back pocket of his Dockers, pulls out a folded piece of paper.

  “What’s going on?” Emily asks.

  Jeremy reaches for the paper, unfolds it. Sees two names and phone numbers. Something Nik has dug up for him but Jeremy can’t focus on yet.

  “I don’t know. You’ve got the plan about where to meet?”

  No response.

  “Emily!”

  Both Nik, who is halfway to the door, and the guy behind the counter look up at Jeremy.

  “Emily,” he repeats in his seething whisper.

  “I’m here. Listen—” She pauses. “We love you, Jeremy. Kent . . . I—”

  “Be careful. Twenty minutes.” He’s not sure what to add, then is startled by another beep from his phone. He pulls the phone from his ear, glances at the screen. A notification: the update from the conflict algorithm, Program Princip. The latest results are back. He paws over his shoulder to the leather bag, feeling his savior and burden.

  “Twenty minutes,” he repeats to Emily and hangs up. Across the room, he sees a woman nestle down at a table and pull out a laptop, open it, punch in a password. He looks out the window, beneath the neon sign: “Coffee Made Your Way.” Outside, it’s damp with fog, no sign yet of Nik. Maybe another three or four minutes the way he waddle-jogs.

  Jeremy yanks out the iPad. Opens it, the browser springing to life. Looks at the clock.

  9:30:15.

  9:30:14.

  9:30:13.

  9:30:12.

  He’s mesmerized, tears himself away, swipes away the screen and calls up the log-in to get to the guts of the algorithm.

  “You gonna order?” It’s the guy behind the counter.

  Jeremy nearly responds: “Large cup of coffee for me and a shave fo
r you.” Says: “Large coffee.”

  On the laptop screen, the guts of the algorithm appear. There’s an icon in the center, the thumbnail of dark-eyed Gavrilo Princip, the face of a beta test. It’s blinking. Another answer from this inscrutable computer. Jeremy looks out the window. No Nik. He clicks on the icon.

  An hourglass whirls for just an instant and then a list of names and numbers materializes in the computer window. It’s a list of all the people Jeremy asked the program to assess, to connect to the impending attack, and to determine who among them is most material in bringing about the apocalyptic events in less than ten hours.

  One name stands out, at the top, blinking.

  Jeremy squints. He’s got to be reading it wrong. He brings his nose close to the screen. “You’re fucking with me again.”

  He hears a honk. He startles, looks up to see Nik pulled up outside.

  He looks around the café, sees the woman, bent over her laptop, typing away, the man standing at the counter, arms crossed, steam rising from the giant to-go cup on the counter in front of him. For the first time since this ordeal began with his computer, Jeremy’s wondering not whether his computer is wrong or someone is fucking with him, but, more than that, whether he’s going insane.

  “Your coffee.”

  Jeremy barely hears the words from the guy behind the counter. He scoots from the booth, jeans tacky on the scummy vinyl upholstery, tucks the iPad under his arm. He scoops up the piece of paper left by Nik, hustles to the door.

  “Your coffee!”

  The words barely register as Jeremy flies out the door. Seconds later, he’s inside Nik’s car, inhaling that clean smell. “Stat,” he says.

  “Outer Richmond?”

  Jeremy doesn’t answer Nik, an affirmation in and of itself. Unable to come fully to grips with what he’s seen on his iPad screen, he looks down at the piece of paper Nik left for him.

  “Phone number?”

  Nik says: “VOIP number. We had it in one of our databases. He doesn’t seem to answer. But you asked me to try to reach them. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  The piece of paper reads:

  Evan: 218-293-2254.

  Jeremy feels his face burn, pulsing with adrenaline and recognition. Harry’s death scrawl, the clue. A symbol, looking like a V, connecting a bunch of country codes, and, at the bottom of the image, “218” and “650.”

  The 218 confirmed. Evan’s phone number, the start of it, at least. The “650.”

  “How could I not have seen it?”

  “What?”

  “Area codes.”

  “Evan’s area code—218.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s the area code for Silicon Valley?”

  “I guess there are two, 408 and 65—”

  “650!” Jeremy cuts him off.

  An alliance; Evan and Silicon Valley.

  Is that what Harry meant? Connecting the world?

  “Evan, at the center of it.”

  Nik takes a left on Geary.

  “At the center of it,” Jeremy repeats. He looks up as they pass a bus, coming face-to-face with an advertisement for Google, and the smiling face of the company’s youthful founder turned CEO imploring people to search. But in Russian: искать.

  “I’m at the center of it too.”

  Nik doesn’t answer, not atypically. He’s accustomed to listening to his boss work things out, think aloud. He slows at a yellow light at Masonic, a complicated intersection, four-way lights, beginning to clog with morning traffic, medians thick with trees separating the sides of the street.

  “Blow it.”

  “What?”

  “Blow the fucking light!”

  Nik looks at Jeremy and then around, and then accelerates through the red light. A driver pulling into the intersection lays onto the horn. And then Jeremy hears the siren. A single burst. He looks over his left shoulder and sees that they’ve just blown a red light in front of a police car, or, rather, a cop who has just passed through the intersection heading in the other direction.

  “He has to turn around!”

  “What?”

  “Gun it, take the first right, turn off the car, duck.”

  Nik lays onto the accelerator. Jeremy looks over his shoulder, sees no sign of the police car. The cop, Jeremy realizes, faced daunting logistics finding a place to turn around, given the medians and the thickening commuter traffic.

  Nik turns right at an intersection between a tire store and a single-screen art movie theater.

  “Go up another block, then left.”

  Jeremy sees Nik’s knuckles grip the steering wheel. He might be pushing his unquestioning assistant with these mercurial demands. “I’ll explain everything. We just have to find Emily.”

  Nik glides to the end of the block, turns left, pulls into an empty driveway.

  “Smart,” Jeremy says.

  The pair duck down. Jeremy looks at the screen of his iPad. The near high-speed chase has pumped him even more full with dopamine and cortisol, the fight-or-flight cocktail. He knows now that he’s awake enough to be seeing these results clearly.

  He turns the screen to Nik. The hefty assistant tilts his head, a gesture indicating he’s trying to make sense of this.

  “Gavrilo,” Jeremy says.

  “Princip. What about him?”

  “This computer. This . . . thing.”

  Nik waits for Jeremy to explain.

  “It thinks I’m him.”

  “Gavrilo?”

  Jeremy looks at the results from the beta test, Program Princip. It shows the list of names Jeremy had asked the program to connect to the impending attack. At the top, one name.

  Jeremy Stillwater.

  “I’m the triggerman.”

  “Of what?”

  He puts the cursor over his name.

  “I’m the one who is going to cause the world to end.”

  “Jeremy—”

  Jeremy looks up. He feels hot tears, a salty question forming in his eyes. Not a specific question, just a spasm of wide-open yearning.

  “It doesn’t make any sense. I have nothing to do with these people, this . . . this plot. But the program, it put it all together, all these disparate pieces of data, and it says that it’s me. Tell me it’s wrong.”

  Nik swallows. “I joined you, I followed you, stuck with you, because it’s never wrong, it’s never been wrong. You’re not wrong.”

  It’s more than Nik ever says, serving to shake Jeremy, maybe dumb luck on Nik’s part, maybe a powerful instinct that these are the words that will shake Jeremy back to his impervious self.

  “We can’t call the cops. Not until we get Emily and Kent. Until I get some time to try to piece this together. Even then . . .” He pauses. “It’s safe to go. We’ve lost him.”

  Nik starts the engine and pulls out.

  Jeremy looks at the iPad, his mind flooded by a cascade of images: dead Harry, the numbers and the V; Andrea seducing him to work for the Pentagon, cornering him on a hotel rooftop; Andrea and Evan at odds, or perhaps not; Project Surrogate discovered by Harry at the log cabin.

  All of it somehow adding up to Jeremy himself.

  Nik speeds down California, barely pausing at stop signs, just a few miles to go. Jeremy looks at the piece of paper with the phone number for Evan. Another call first.

  He dials Emily.

  The phone rings. And rings. Jeremy’s clavicle pulses in pain as Emily’s voice mail picks up.

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “Another update from the computer?”

  No, Jeremy thinks. My gut.

  “Gun it.”

  CHAPTER 41

  SITTING ON A rock, surrounded by bushes, Emily and Kent can see through branches to the side of the Seal Rock Café. Inside, they can make out a man spooning something from a plate to his toddler.

  “Was I that small?”

  “Even smaller.” Emily squeezes her arm around Kent’s shoulder, taking advantage of the d
iscomfort of the moment for physical intimacy, which her son seems less and less willing to allow.

  He pulls in close.

  “He got so mad at me,” Kent says.

  Emily turns and looks at her son, noticing a tiny blemish of skin above his lip; she wonders if it might be an early sign of pre-adolescent hormones.

  “About the puzzle,” Kent clarifies. She looks away from him, toward the street in front of the restaurant. A sedan pulls up to the stop sign but then rolls off.

  “Jeremy doesn’t always know how to explain what he’s feeling. He thinks more than he feels.”

  “Sometimes I wish I was little again, like that.”

  “How come, sweetie?”

  Kent swallows, doesn’t answer.

  “Jeremy liked me better when I was little.”

  “Don’t be absurd!” But the protest is too instant, aggressive. She pulls it back. “He’s adjusting. He’s trying to adjust.”

  She frowns. She’s losing Kent at a key moment but it’s hard to explain, let alone understand, causing her to choose inaccessible words that lack precision, meaning.

  They hear rustling in the bushes behind them. They turn, startled. Hear a voice: “Here, Binky. Here dog.”

  The bush rustling gets closer. Mother and child turn around. In their little enclave of bushes stands a big-boned man with a frothy black beard and a heavy coat.

  “Did you see a little dog?”

  “No.” Emily instinctively recoils, begins to stand, pulling her son up with her.

  “I’m sorry,” the man says, his thick accent nearly swallowing his words. But the tone sounds so sincere, out of place, that it pauses Emily.

  Then she takes two steps backward with the boy. Watches with a feeling of inevitability as the man pulls a black metallic object from his jacket. A gun.

  He says, quietly: “Don’t scream or I’ll kill him.”

  CHAPTER 42

  WHERE?” NIK SLOWS a block from the restaurant.

  “Out front. I’ll . . .” Jeremy doesn’t finish his thought, which he’s expressed on autopilot. He’s looking at the iPad screen, the results from Program Princip.

  At the top.

  Princip (most relevant):

  Jeremy Stillwater.