I CALLED 911.”
Tall woman, black sweat suit, a student-athlete maybe, one hand over her mouth, now pointing at Jeremy. Some primal accusation.
“Help!” she screams. Wails. “Heeeeeeeelp!”
“No,” Jeremy says, repeats: “I called for help.”
“Heeeeeelp!” She steps backward.
Jeremy looks at the scene, sees what she sees, a suspect covered in blood.
He looks down, then at the woman, and back down. Yanks his backpack toward him, and, as he does so, pulls the calendar, tears it, obscuring the part with the blood scrawl. Hoping to scramble the coded message, if that’s what it was. He looks at the woman.
“I called 911.” He repeats, implores.
Harry emits a low, feral moan. The intruding woman blinks, calculating, her reboot nearly finished, coming back to life.
“I’m going for help,” Jeremy says.
The woman steps forward to Harry. She’s going to take some action, Jeremy thinks; she took a lifesaving class.
Jeremy looks at the calendar, the message. He rips the top page of the calendar, sliding the torn top page from beneath Harry’s evaporating life.
He runs.
Past the woman, into the anteroom. Hears the bloody squeak of his own sneakers. He scrambles off the shoes and socks. Folds and stuffs the calendar page and the bloody scrawl into his back pocket. Takes off out the door, curls into the hallway, suddenly slows when he sees several students, hand in hand, quickly approaching, drawn by the sound they thought they heard of someone yelling for help.
“Dr. Ives is hurt. I’m going for help.”
The students start to jog forward. Jeremy walks past them, a half jog, and, when he’s past, jogs. Looks down, sees his feet leave no marks. Runs.
When he reaches the stairwell, he pauses. Heads down the stairs to the back.
Seconds later, he’s outside, in a lonely parking lot. He sees a short building to his right, Dwinelle Annex. He hears sirens.
His heart slams in his chest. He could turn around; it’s not too late to go back and explain to the police that he went looking for help and has returned. He has an alibi, right, evidence someone broke into his condo, the surveillance tape with the building manager, logical explanations. Justice will be served.
But there are Jeremy’s fingerprints, on his own knife, in Harry’s back.
He looks ahead, sees the grove of ancient, leafy trees that surround a creek-side path leading to the south of campus. Over the path, the trees converge, their leaves intermingling, taking a shape, something circular.
A clock.
The countdown clock.
Jeremy shakes his head. Blinks. Just trees.
The log cabin.
Ask it. The computer.
Is it right? There will be war. Is that what Harry was telling him? Maybe Harry thinks there’s going to be a conflict and he wants Jeremy to ferret it out on the computer. Maybe Harry thinks the computer knows something. Everything?
Ask it.
Not if he’s in jail.
And something nags him, a factor in this instant algorithm his brain is running: what if the computer’s right, partially right, about the apocalypse? Ask it.
He puts his head down and walks to the grove, the path. When he hits it, he sprints.
TEN MINUTES LATER, at a drugstore on Shattuck, he spends $6.95 for flip-flops. He walks outside, peers across the street in the drizzle to the entrance to the subway, the way to San Francisco. A beat cop stands outside, eyeing people descending into the escalator to the subway tunnel. One tall fellow, thin, wearing a hoodie, passes the cop, gets stopped, questioned.
Jeremy curls back into the drugstore. He buys a red rain slicker, with a hood. He retreats into the bathroom. He pulls on the slicker, looks in the mirror. Sees the smear. Blood, turning brownish, stains his cheek beneath his left eye. He must’ve scratched himself. He looks at his hand. Both hands. Stained. With Harry. He rinses them in the sink.
He rubs his hands on his pants to dry them, feels the phone in his pocket. The phone. Still connected, presumably, to the police. Shit. He yanks it out. He swipes to disconnect the call. Then thinks the better of it. He turns off the phone.
They can’t track him. Not with the phone off. Can they?
Back at the door of the drugstore, he watches the officer. Watches, watches. He hears a screech. The driver of an SUV approaching the nearby light has slammed on his brakes. A bicyclist shouts, unhurt, unhit, but spilled. The officer shakes his head, annoyed at the little things, begins a reluctant walk to the intersection. Jeremy bolts for the subway entrance.
Inside, downstairs, another cop, chatting with a heavyset woman inside the ticket box.
Jeremy walks unnoticed through the turnstiles.
Minutes later, he sits in the empty train, regretting that there are few commuters this time of day, little cover. But he’s made it through the first, most crucial line of defense. The officer at the mouth of the subway will tell people he saw no thin man without shoes trying to escape west.
Likely, Jeremy thinks, he’ll face curious officers, even a dragnet, at the other side of the trip. The subway exit providing a perfect bottleneck through which potential murderers will have to pass.
He exhales, expelling stale air, his senses returning, slides lower into the filthy fabric of the subway seat, stares at the grubby carpet beneath his flip-flops.
Log cabin. What does that mean, Harry? A code? Who else would know of the symbolism of the log cabin, the day when the last pieces of Jeremy’s life fell apart. He pictures it, the day, the group: Emily, Harry, fried chicken and white wine, and Jeremy. Sitting on a blanket under a tree, the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, Harry casually asked whether the algorithm might be improved and Jeremy, without missing a beat, said, “Are these your suggestions or the ones Evan gave you when he had his puppet hand up your ass?”
Harry just looked at him. Then said: “Early in the day to go nuclear against your last ally.”
And that’s just what Jeremy had done. Without warning, he’d severed ties with his last ally. It was, Emily said, so plainly self-destructive, an act by Jeremy to distract himself from the fact he was no longer in control, no longer the center of attention. Or worse: that when it comes down to it, Jeremy feels more comfortable in a state of conflict than in anything approaching vulnerability.
Or, as Harry put it that day at the log cabin: Jeremy, you prefer fighting.
“To what?”
“To truth,” the old man said, shook his head and walked away. He was done fighting.
What truth?
What did Harry mean when he said: “Beware Peace.” And “Statis pugna.” Same thing, really. Something is too calm. Is that what Harry means? Things are too calm? It was one of Harry’s landmark theories that the world actually is safer when there is a constant level of low-level conflict. In fact, while Harry hated war, he did not hate conflict; he thought conflict was a simple way of life, a reality of a world filled with competition for limited resources. The key, he said, was to accept it and manage it, allow it to simmer, just not boil.
Was Harry saying things are getting too peaceful? And thus poised to boil and explode?
Ask it.
Jeremy glances at the two other passengers in his car, a stringy-haired man with a cane standing near the door, bent at the waist, neck craned, eyes downcast, defeated. And another man, seated, locked in a mass-market paperback, wearing a mass-market prefab, no-wrinkle blue shirt.
Jeremy extracts his iPad. He clicks it on. As it comes to life, he paws cautiously at the message in his back pocket. He looks around, pulls the hastily folded paper and shifts it between his legs, outside anyone’s view. He unfolds the deadly origami, glancing up and down, furtive, making sure no one sees. He can make out the message, sort of; the blood has smeared. Jeremy tastes vomit.
Forces himself to look at the symbol, the message. A shape, likely a V, but not totally clear, with numbers on the points; 972, 970 on the top points, and 218-650 at the bottom.
Along the sides: 7, 1, 41, 212, 986, 86.
He finds scratch paper in his backpack and uses a blue pen to copy onto it the symbol and the numbers. He shoves the calendar, the bloody evidence, into his backpack. He looks at the symbol.
A code, obviously. A riddle? A taunt?
218-650 at the bottom.
Not binary. Not computer language, probably. Harry didn’t talk that language, didn’t like anything about computers, even argued they made the world more dangerous by diminishing in-person contact.
And what of the symbol. Is it a letter, or a shape?
Harry was never much into the code-cracking part of war and conflict. He found it boring—the Enigma machine, the efforts by the Allies to crack Nazi and Japanese codes, the use of encryption schemes and misdirection and words born of adding together the first letters of various sentences or paragraphs, dead drops and back-alley whispers.
Is this a message for Jeremy, or for anyone?
Jeremy, feeling intensely self-conscious, looks up, sees his iPad is alive. He looks at the time. It’s just after 4 P.M. It takes a second to pinpoint the significance of the time. He’s supposed to meet Andrea shortly. He pictures the meeting place, Perry’s, an eatery cum pickup joint on the Embarcadero.
He clicks down to the countdown clock. Fifty-one hours, and a half.
Ask it.
Ask it what, Harry?
Who attacked you? Will there be a war?
The computer beeps. Beep, beep, beep. An update. Jeremy doesn’t have to ask it anything. The computer has something to tell him.