YOU’VE CHANGED,” Andrea says.
Jeremy adjusts to the light inside the car. He sees the long hair, the preternaturally smooth skin, the overall look of someone who doesn’t have to take too many pains to rise from attractive to irresistible but takes pains nonetheless. He tastes her perfume in the back of his throat. She’s got a half smile, knowing, practiced, showing perfect white teeth against light brown skin. But her discomfort is betrayed by the tight cross of her arms against her chest, the way she’s pulled back against the door, as far as she can get from him. Beneath her blouse, he can picture the blue tattoo. Tipsy, one night, she showed him, a jagged knife starting just above her left breast, pointing at an angle toward her heart and cleavage.
“Not the patsy you remember.”
“Your hair. Longer. Nice. And, it’s true, you were always more of a counterpuncher. Usually, you’d wait for the slightest provocation before going on the attack. I’d heard through the grapevine that you’d gotten more aggressive but this is an impressive display by any standard.”
“Grapevine.” He puts the keys into the ignition. Does she mean Evan? He’ll draw her out.
She ignores the edgy comment. Just another Jeremy trap. “Where are we going? I don’t have all night.”
He looks in his hand and discovers he’s holding a plastic key, a fob, one of those newfangled deals that let you start the ignition not by inserting it but by merely pressing a button on the car. He presses, and the car purrs to life.
“You owe me. Besides, it’s a nice night for a drive.”
Jeremy takes in the decked out dashboard, a built-in nav screen, a CD changer, the radio tuned to NPR but with the volume so low it creates only a hum of background chatter.
“Sweet rental for a low-level bureaucrat.”
She shrugs, uncrosses her arms. “I’m rolling my eyes. Are you really planning to drive wearing your backpack?”
Blood rushes to his face. Rookie move, so clearly betraying his attachment to his device. And without realizing he’d done it. He slips out of it and nestles it between the back of his legs and his seat.
He pulls into thickening traffic, eliciting a honk. “You were saying.”
“What was I saying?”
“You owe me.”
“So no foreplay, then. I was hoping we’d have a drink.” She clears her throat. “Jeremy, we’ve always been honest with each other. We talked, and it was real stuff. I always told you what I knew.” She pauses. She shifts, sitting straight back but looking out the window into the rain, a faraway look. She turns back and meets his gaze. She has clear blue eyes, their power undercut with the slightest puffy redness, sleeplessness.
Jeremy turns away, feeling an adrenaline burst he tries not to show. She’s going to lay it out for him, whatever it is. Maybe. Something in her voice sounds far less than revelatory. It sounds sincere, even kind. He remembers their rapport, that handful of conversations where he stretched out on the couch in his sleeping gear—boxer shorts, T-shirt, socks—and got lost in the banter. Work talk turned to personal chat, the edges of flirtation, light pokes around the edges of personal matters. He picked up bits of her failed relationships and a childhood that had a painful core she was careful to guard with thick yellow police tape. He felt kinship with her, liked that she was protecting him amid the brass, but also felt an uneasiness. It’s not that he didn’t trust her intentions, or maybe he did. It was more that he couldn’t get comfortable with her emotions. The playfulness excited him, left him feeling challenged, but feeling that he always had to be on, that low-grade intensity was the price of admission in talking to Andrea. With Emily, by contrast, he could be completely at ease or, rather, as much at ease as he could possibly be.
“No foreplay,” he says. They’ve hit a stop light at Howard. Jeremy, eager to get out of the bumper-to-bumper traffic, puts on his blinker. He reminds himself that Andrea lied about Evan. Urges himself to be careful.
“What I’m about to tell you I didn’t know. I swear that to you.”
He doesn’t say anything. He glances in the rearview mirror at the car that followed him onto Howard. A fancy black sedan. Doesn’t look suspicious. He sees Andrea glance in the passenger-side mirror. Following his gaze? Suspicious herself? Hoping someone is tagging along?
She continues. “I found out a few weeks ago, or that’s when I began suspecting. But this was my first chance to come out without eliciting a fuss. I came out to—”
He interrupts. “Visit another asset.” It’s what she’d told him earlier on the phone. He wants to remind her of her lies. Keep her off balance, keep piling up chits.
He hits a patch of cars, guns the powerful engine and slips into the right lane then back into the left. Buys himself half a block of clear sailing. He passes Third Street. Were he to take a left, he realizes, he could soon be at home. He could query the building manager. Needs to. Was it Andrea who will appear on the surveillance tape, busting into his condo?
“I’m sorry,” Andrea blurts out.
A sizzle burns through him. Jesus, he thinks, it’s the government. They’re the ones who have duped my computer and she’s here to fess up.
“The maps, the warnings. Unbelievable. Harry.”
She shakes her head. She’s not understanding him.
Harry. Dead. He’s holding that back. Does she know? Will she tip her hand?
“Let’s just start with basics. Was Harry involved?”
“With what?”
“Harry introduced us.”
“Okay, so?”
“Why?”
“He consulted for us. He helped us understand patterns of conflict. He said you could do the same. You and your computer.”
“He wanted to see me go down, right? He felt threatened.”
“Jeremy, Harry cherished you, like a son.”
Jeremy feels a terrible twitch, grief. Harry, in a pool of his own blood.
“And Evan is involved too. Don’t lie to me. I know about you and Evan.”
Jeremy flashes on a theory: Evan, starting SEER, a new company that crunches Big Data in order to predict the future, creates the illusion of an impending conflict and then swoops in to save the day and, in the process, lend a helping hand to Jeremy, the mad and incompetent genius with Harry in league. A proof of concept and a marketing coup?
What is SEER? What’s Evan up to?
The half-baked theory makes no sense, clears Jeremy’s brain as instantly as it appeared. Why would they kill Harry? Had he realized the folly and was he threatening to tell Jeremy the truth? It’s all so far-fetched.
“I’m not jockeying for position in this conversation, Jeremy. We can drop the dance. Just hear me out. As it turns out,” she starts, pauses, picks up again, “you were not wrong.”
“About what?”
“Don’t play stupid, Jeremy. This is embarrassing enough. About Al Anbar. And the skirmish at the Afghani-Russian border. Both of them. I had no idea.”
He looks at her, then out the window, eyes glazed at the skewed light of urban neon coming through the prism of drizzle. Al Anbar, the Afghani skirmish, the two mini-conflicts that the U.S. military used as a test of the validity of Jeremy and his algorithm. They told him that he and his computer were wrong, that they had miscalculated the length and nature of the conflict.
“You weren’t wrong,” she repeats. “Put another way, Jeremy, you were right. Your computer was right. You, it—your computer—correctly identified when those conflicts would end, with, frankly, eerie accuracy. Almost like you had a crystal ball.”
He realizes he’s holding his breath. He blinks, hot tears in his eyes. He repeats the words in his head. Did he hear right? He forces himself to pick out an object through the window. It’s an umbrella, being unfurled by a tall woman in a long, shiny raincoat standing next to an ATM.
He feels a pulsing around his clavicle. He puts his hand on his shoulder, suddenly, momentarily, grateful for the pain. It says to him: you are here and this is not a dream.
“Jeremy, we had our reasons. . . .” She pauses. “Not me. I didn’t know. I suppose they had their reasons. That’s a lot of power you had that we didn’t understand. It was, is, a potential game-changer. Understandable enough, right? That’s what I thought too. But I think it’s something else.”
She’s not making sense. But it doesn’t matter. Jeremy’s finally getting a grip on the conversation. He turns to her. “I was right? I was right?!” Not a question; an accusation.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I just—”
“Bullshit!”
She puts up her hands, surrender, and a primal show of defense.
“I know things haven’t worked out for you. But I thought you should know what happened. Maybe there’s some way we can work together in the future. I don’t know. I’m in way over my head here.”
Someplace, in a faraway corner of his brain, he hears a piercing noise, a honking. He looks down at his white-knuckled fists gripping the wheel. Honk. He’s at a green light, cars piling up behind him. HOOOONKK.
He puts his left hand over his right because it keeps him from reaching out and grabbing Andrea. I was right?
“When I started to piece this together I figured they just didn’t want a computer nerd to know more than they did but it’s not that. It’s something else. To be honest, I’m not sure they ever gave a damn about you and your computer.”
He waves her down with a hand. Shut up, shut up! If the computer was right before, then is it right now?
“It’s about something else? Like what? What do you mean they didn’t give a damn about me and the computer?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you,” he roars. “It’s a trap, a game.”
Jeremy pictures Evan coming out of her car. Too many coincidences; how can he now, suddenly, take her confession at face value?
Honk. Finally, he punches the accelerator. She continues: “Why would I make up something this embarrassing? Jeremy, please, I can appreciate the skepticism. You’ve gotten the runaround. So have I. Believe me.”
The sound of her voice makes him want to scream. He paws his pocket, feels his cell phone, making sure it’s there. He pictures Emily, her hair half covering her face, sees Kent. What’s he supposed to do; call her? Warn her? Say what? Emily, you and Kent should arrange transport to the moon, just in case.
In case of what, Jeremy?
The end of the world.
Or maybe, for whatever reason, the government is playing with him—piling lie on lie. Does it have the capacity to mess with his algorithm? Probably, but why? What could its incentive possibly be?
“Give me your phone,” he says.
“Um, no.”
“Fuck you. Log cabin.”
“What?”
“What’s the log cabin?”
“I saw him, Andrea. Evan. I saw you and Evan.”
“What?”
He looks at Andrea. She brings a thumb to her mouth.
“Everything connects together, somehow, all of you. It’s in the V, on Harry’s desk, with the numbers. In the computer.”
“It’s in the computer? What is?”
“Harry’s dead. But you know that.”
“What?” Pause. “Harry Ives?”
Jeremy spits a foul half laugh, opens the door. He starts running.