THE WINDOW OF the black car slides down. Andrea leans over from the driver’s seat.
“Get in, Jeremy.”
He stands.
“Jesus, Are you okay? What happened?” Now she’s looking him up and down.
Jeremy’s palms burn with embedded gravel from his dive and skid.
“Country codes,” he says.
“What?”
“They’re country codes!”
“Did you hit your head?”
Jeremy says: “Get out.”
“I’m sorry, Atlas. I should’ve told you earlier . . . I didn’t know. I didn’t realize that you’d—”
“Get out!”
He reaches for the door handle. He sees Andrea recoil inside. He pulls on the door. It’s locked. He reaches inside. He can feel the interest of a small crowd. He hears someone call for the police.
“I’m driving,” he says.
“What just happened? Your shirt . . . your face . . .”
He reaches inside for the door lock, groping.
“Please move over and let me drive. You owe me.”
“You’re right.”
“You told me already,” Jeremy says. “Move over. You owe me.”
“You’re right. Harry’s dead.” She says it in a loud whisper, suggesting her awareness of the crowd. “It’s on the news now. No details. Heart attack?”
He glowers at her, doesn’t answer. He turns his back, beelines for the sidewalk, starts walking. Ten steps later, she’s pulled up next to him.
“Get in,” she says through the rolled-down passenger window.
He’s still walking. She inches along with him. “You’re in no condition to drive.”
He hears sirens, maybe someone called in the near hit-and-run. He laughs. “Fine.” He stops and turns to her. “But I am in a condition to use the phone.”
“What?”
“You drive. I get your phone.”
“You don’t have a phone?”
“Battery’s dead.”
She grits her teeth. She reaches into a compartment between the seats and pulls out her smartphone. She tosses it onto the passenger seat. She presses a button to unlock the door as Jeremy climbs inside.
“What just happened?” she repeats.
“You tell me.” He looks in the rearview mirror, sees the small crowd, losing interest. “First and Howard.”
She hits the accelerator. “Which is where? And what?”
He squints his eyes, thinking, trying to remember something. Evan’s office; there’s one on the peninsula, obviously, and one nearby.
“Straight ahead and then left. The offices of SEER, but you know all about that.”
“Jeremy—” After a pause, she says: “Who are you calling?”
He doesn’t answer. On her iPhone, he does a Google search: “Country codes.” As it loads, he pulls from his back pocket the piece of paper onto which he’s copied Harry’s symbol and the numbers: 972, 970, 7, 41, 212, 986, 86, 218-650.
He looks at the list of country codes delivered him via Google. The numbers correspond:
Israel
Ramallah, the West Bank
Russia
Switzerland
Morocco
Syria
China
“I figured something out.”
“What?”
“Country codes. All but the last one. 218-650. The one at the point of the V.”
“Again: what?” Less frustration in her voice than resignation; she’s long since been accustomed to Jeremy’s communication style, working things out in his head as he goes, chess in every exchange, the stuff of a halting, sparring conversation.
“It’s the important one, I think. The connection. The Middle East at the top.” Jeremy looks at Andrea, stuck in thought. Country codes. So what? What does the symbol mean?
Andrea says: “You realize you only figure things out when you’re in a screaming match.”
He blinks again.
“I used to get you riled up when we talked, prick at you, get you fired up. You’d have searing insights. Conflict suits you, Jeremy.”
“Take a right.”
“It’s how you communicate, like the other person is simultaneously foe and sounding board.”
She turns onto Howard. Traffic’s decidedly thinned, downtown, the business district, closing for the night. A lone taxi hurtles in the other direction. Jeremy can’t believe what he’s thinking: Harry was involved with something, instigating something? A conflict? Why? So he could then predict it, stop it, be the hero, prove that he’s the world’s greatest conflict sleuth.
C’mon, Jeremy, he thinks to himself, even you can’t be that egocentric.
“What’s ‘log cabin’?”
Andrea swallows. She says: “We had an affair. But you know that.”
“You and Evan.”
Andrea blinks. She looks up at the long block ahead.
“Where are we . . .” She pauses.
“I assume you’re familiar with Evan’s offices. Pull over.”
The building is on the right side of the street, taking up nearly half the block. It’s a checkerboard of dark and light, three-quarters of the offices shut down, mixed in with squares of workaholics, crashing and caffeinated entrepreneurs and litigators. Without further prompting, in silence, Andrea pulls up in front of the maroon-hued structure, with a marblelike exterior and revolving doors leading to a grand entrance, like the hallway to a train station. Inside, behind a desk, a lonely security guard, reading.
“Okay.” Jeremy’s response, finally, is distant, noncommittal. As if to sarcastically say: whatever you say, Andrea.
“Not an affair. One night. After one of those ridiculous parties, where you played the reluctant straw-that-stirs-the-drink. But Evan couldn’t let go, that night. Regardless, it’s irrelevant, one night. And not your business.”
Jeremy looks up at the building. Not sure which office is Evan’s or if he’ll be there. Getting past the security guard is tougher than it looks, Jeremy knows. Condensation obscures the heavy glass windows and doors.
Andrea puts her hand on Jeremy’s knee, withdraws it. “Please listen.”
Jeremy half looks at her, acceding, looks away.
“Why are you here?”
“To tell you the truth.” She pauses. “And because I’m feeling used.”
He feels suddenly, totally exhausted. How long has it been since he slept, or slept well? He glances at her phone in his hand, wanting to restart. He paws the list of “recent calls.”
He can see that she received several calls earlier in the day from Evan, placed several calls herself to both Evan and Jstillwater, received several calls from blocked numbers, placed a handful to a number in the 703 area code. He hits the number. Puts the phone to his ear.
“I have nothing to hide from you but this is beyond inappropriate.”
Ring, ring, ring. Voice mail picks up. “You’ve reached Lavelle. I’m unavailable.” Then a beep.
Jeremy racks his brain.
“The big shot,” he says.
“Lieutenant Colonel Thomson.”
Andrea’s boss, the big boss. The guy who sat at the end of the table at the Pentagon and told Jeremy that his technology didn’t work promised Jeremy he could go overseas to test his technology against real, battlefield conditions, and then never followed through.
“Lavelle is an odd first name.” An instinctive jab. “You’re pretty anxious to reach the boss. He’s not picking up.”
She doesn’t answer.
“I’ll need the car keys.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want you to leave me here and I need to go tell Evan that I’m going to the press and the police.”
“You’re the one that told me to get in touch with Evan.”
“What?”
“Your email, earlier today, after we talked.”
He looks at her: no, I didn’t email you.
“You asked me to contact Evan. Said it was important.”
“Bullshit.” Then: “Someone’s been inside my computer.”
He looks at her again. She shakes her head. Great acting or she has no idea what he’s talking about.
“Jeremy, we’re allowed to have lives of our own.”
“What?”
“A lot of people gravitated to you because of your work; that much is true. I know that was heady, being in the middle of a big conversation. The investors and entrepreneurs and military folks and academics. But we were allowed to have our own lives, our own conversations.”
He’s feeling plainly mystified. It dawns on him, clearly, he’s got to establish some common ground with her, some vernacular. He’s got to overcome his instinct to keep her off balance. Even if she’s lying to him—presumably she is lying to him—he’s not grounded enough with her to understand how to even poke around for the truth. They’re conversing on different planes; the pronouns, even, may reference different people.
“What’s Evan doing? What’s SEER, the new venture?” Jeremy recalls looking earlier at Evan’s web site, seeing his partners, big names, like Google, Intel, Sun Microsystems, the major hardware and software players in the Valley, a who’s who. Something about the list tugs at Jeremy, but he can’t figure out what.
Andrea shrugs.
“The same companies buying tantalum!” He exclaims it, and then wishes he hadn’t.
“C’mon, Jeremy. Make some sense.”
“Tell me the truth, about your sudden reappearance in my life.”
The glass doors of the office building revolve. Two women stride out, forcefully, ambitious strides of strivers. No umbrellas, impervious to anything but the market forces, which they can fully appreciate.
From here Jeremy can see if Evan leaves the building. Or if he goes in, which is more likely. Maybe he’s still at that mysterious meeting downtown. Maybe he engineered Jeremy being run over; why? Nothing makes sense.
He reaches into his backpack. He pulls out the iPad and he pulls out the attachable, external keyboard.
“I’m telling you: I’ve been used too, Jeremy.”
“Cute.” He doesn’t even look up. He’s connecting the keyboard. The iPad comes to life. He withdraws to the door and glances, privately, at the map, the clock.
24:25:00.
“Spare me the sympathy ploy and tell me the part about how and why the government lied to us.”
Andrea furrows a brow, not getting what he means, then sees he’s typing on the computer. Us. He and it.
“I didn’t know, Jeremy. I swear to the ends of the Earth.”
“Curious word choice. Expecting the world to end?”
“Focus, Jeremy. Let me answer your question about why I’m here.” She pauses, inhales, exhales. “When your paper came out, when you got all that notoriety, what, a couple of years ago, my bosses asked me to look into the validity of your findings. I made a report. Told them it seemed interesting if nascent. You joined the list of various conversation topics at various meetings. Y’know, Lavelle, the lieutenant colonel, would run down the agenda items, and every few months he’d check in with me about whether you seemed legitimate and whether you’d made any more progress with the technology.”
Jeremy waves his hand. Meaning: speed forward. Something catches his eye. He looks up at the building’s revolving doors. A man exits and gets slightly bent back by the wind.
“You know that distracted driving kills thousands of people each year,” Andrea says.
“We’re parked.”
“You can’t focus on two things at once, let alone three. I’m laying it out for you. Least you could do is pay full attention.”
He just smirks.
“Eventually, they asked me to make contact.”
Andrea tells Jeremy what she’s told him several times before, in their early meetings. They told her they wanted to know if this kind of Big Data analysis—the latest new, new thing in Silicon Valley—might be applicable to war modeling. Could they predict conflict? Its onset? What might a computer see that gaggles of West Point studs, armed with mountains of historical analogues, could not?
“They warned me you were prickly.”
“Was I as prickly as your other assets?”
“If you’re trying to test my truthfulness, you already know you were my first asset, such as that word really means: guy who might be able to help us. This is not spy shit, Jeremy. It’s bureaucratic shit.”
Jeremy again turns the iPad so only he can see it. Eyes the map, sees the red appears to be spreading. The initial attack begetting others, a domino effect in a nuclear era. He swipes away the screen and calls up the algorithm menu, the heart of the conflict algorithm software. It asks for a password.
Jeremy reaches a finger beneath the silver chain hanging around his neck and pulls it over his head, freeing the key fob. In the process, he gets a whiff of himself, the ripe scent of stress and exhaustion. It triggers his awareness of the pulsing in his temples. He needs caffeine if he’s not going to get sleep.
The key fob changes its nine-digit number every ten seconds. It shows a new number now. Jeremy types it in, followed by his password. An hourglass appears on the window, the algorithm innards materializing.
“The rest is what meets the eye, Jeremy. I recruited you, we had you in to talk, we ran the tests, they didn’t work out, we parted ways.”
He looks up at her.
“You were after my computer.”
“I told you that.”
“No.” He’s eyeing the device, touches the fob.
“You tinkered with the computer. When I first came to Washington to meet at the Pentagon. You and I had a drink, remember? In the hotel.”
“Yes, but, no. I didn’t tinker with your computer.”
“When I got back to my room, someone had monkeyed with it.”
“You’re making this up as you go.”
“Yeah, maybe. This is totally unwieldy.”
“What is?”
“I can’t work here.” He taps his fingers on the tablet. He needs Nik. Where the fuck is Nik? He should be up at this hour watching infomercials and snacking and waiting for Jeremy to call with an inane administrative request. Jeremy suppresses a moment of panic: what if they’ve come after Nik too?
He looks at the computer, and realizes he’s ready. He knows now for certain what he wants to ask it, what he’s fairly sure it can answer. It’s the idea he heard earlier—about asking the computer to delve deeper into the conflict variables and tell him which are the ones most likely leading to an attack. He thinks he knows how to ask it.
“I want to assure you of something, Jeremy.”
“Which is what?”
“We promised you we’d run a field test, then strung you along. I can tell you, with complete and utter confidence, they worked their asses off to make that happen. I got the calls myself, once in the middle of the night: ‘Call Stillwater tomorrow and tell him we’re a go for this weekend.’ They were damn serious. Or they gave me that impression . . .” Her voice seems to trail off.
Jeremy turns back to his computer. Starts to, then notices a rectangular plastic card standing on its edge in a small open compartment in the dashboard, next to the left edge of the radio, the place you’d store parking quarters or mints.
She says: “Yes, I have a hotel for the night. The International. Not far from here. I lied. I don’t have a flight.”
“So you have a flight, or you don’t have a flight. You hated Evan, or had an affair with him. We were wrong or we were right. You are Santa. Or are the Easter Bunny.”
She half laughs.
He looks at the screen, the control deck of the algorithm. The guts. He thinks: I’ve got a question for you, my friend. He puts his fingers on the external keyboard and taps rhythmically.
“I don’t think they were ever serious.”
He blinks, trying to sort out too many inputs with a tired brain. “About sending me on a field test.”
“About you or your computer. I don’t think they gave a damn about some wonk and his algorithm. I think it was about something else. Maybe they were testing me. Maybe he was testing me.”
He looks at the hotel card, back at the computer.
“Lavelle,” she clarifies.
“I know what else I can ask it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jeremy’s thinking of Program Princip, his latest innovation, represented by the icon in the top right of the algorithm’s menu. Could Jeremy use it to identify who to trust? Could he plug into it the names of Andrea and Lieutenant Colonel Lavelle Thomson, Harry Ives, Evan Tigeson? Could Jeremy discover which of them is the functional equivalent of Gavrilo Princip, the bit player turned assassin who ignited World War I?
Could it identify which of the bit players in Jeremy’s life is dangerous, even deadly, maybe contributing to impending apocalypse?
He puts his fingers on the keyboard. Tap, tapping them.
“I need to use your room.”