TWENTY MINUTES LATER, they’ve parked and settled into the International. It’s vaguely Japanese themed, stone and marble, reds and blacks, double-tall glass revolving doors that lead to an expansive lobby, more marble, wood carvings and sculptured bonsai trees.
In the elevator, there’s a television—screens everywhere—showing news headlines. A surfer with a permit to carry a concealed weapon shot the zoo lion walking along an ocean beach.
“Crazy story,” Andrea says. “Tragic.”
There’s a related news nugget: bloggers report that a man found dead outside the San Diego Zoo, alleged to have set free a lion there, had two tattoos: one, previously reported, of a lion standing on hind legs, and a second tattoo. One word: Custos.
“It’s Latin,” Jeremy says.
“What?”
“Guardian.”
Andrea’s not following. “I’m all for animal rights. But give me a break.”
The elevator door opens to the twelfth floor. In the room on the twelfth floor, Jeremy asks for her phone but she scoffs.
Jeremy says: “I can’t have you calling in my coordinates for a strike.”
“You’re right that Evan’s a peckerhead. But he’s right that you not only think there’s a target on your back, you keep pasting one there hoping people will shoot.”
She plops on the bed. In spite of himself, everything, he watches the black skirt inch up above her knee when she sits down. He sits at the desk. His back to her. Stands again and settles in a stiff armchair, paisley patterned, near the window. As he pulls out his iPad, he catches her giving it a look.
It’s remarkable to him that she’s been this pliant, going along with him. Hard to believe that she’d be this accommodating just because she feels guilty for having lied to him. There’s something else going on. She wants something.
On the car ride over, she’d told him that, over the last month, she’d grown suspicious, broadly, about something going on in her office. Lots of chatter, quiet meetings, she’d been left out. She did a little snooping around. She recalled for Jeremy one particular meeting where she asked if she was being left out because she’d somehow messed things up on the conflict algorithm, her one big assignment. A midlevel military manager had laughed. No, he told her, that wasn’t a big deal. It hadn’t been a serious attempt to predict the future. In fact, the guy said, Jeremy had been right, his computer dead-on accurate. But there’d been no point in going further with it. Really, the guy had smirked, you think we were going to entrust our war modeling to some angry geek with an iPhone?
She told Jeremy she’d been seething. It had been an affront to him, and her. What had been the point, she’d asked the guy, of going to all the trouble? He shrugged. “We spend money on stuff.”
She said she’d marched right into the lieutenant colonel’s office. She demanded to know why she’d been used, forced to lie, her time wasted. Simple, he said: not everything here works out, and the lies had a simple, brain-dead origin: no sense in giving an angry Silicon Valley know-it-all the sense that he understood war better than the Pentagon. In a world like this—where everyone can make a case on the Internet, and every case made on the Internet can affect funding and congressional decisions—it didn’t pay to have a second-guesser like Jeremy running loose.
In the hotel room, Andrea fluffs a pillow, puts it behind her back, so she’s sitting upright, looking at him.
“Lavelle is like a father to me,” Andrea had said.
Jeremy’s trying to focus on the iPad screen.
“You hated your father.” Jeremy remembers she’d had a mixed relationship with her father, a fire-and-brimstone blue-collar worker in northern Idaho.
“Loved him but questioned what drove him. Same with Lavelle. Look, Jeremy, I’ve been forthright with you. It’s your turn.”
He doesn’t dignify it with a response, not at first. He wants to talk to his computer. Finally, though: “How have you been used?”
“I’m honestly not sure.”
It seems sincere.
“What do you know about tantalum?”
She shakes her head.
“It’s a precious metal used to make cell phones.”
She shrugs.
“How about Rosoboronexport?”
“Russia’s state-controlled arms dealer?”
“It’s a big deal.”
“General Electric plus Honeywell plus Lockheed, and then some. Why?”
“It’s been in the news lately.”
She nods. “One of their former execs, the chairman, got arrested in Paris.”
“You follow this stuff closely.”
She gives him a look: gimme a break. It’s her job, like someone at Morgan Stanley following the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Then she says: “Tax evasion. But I wouldn’t buy it.”
Jeremy perks up. “He was arrested for some other reason?”
“I honestly have no idea. Rosoboronexport is scary as hell. The company makes and sells massive amounts of weaponry, traditional and nuclear. In a sense, that was once relatively comforting, the idea that a big authoritarian government had everything under one roof. But as Russia has ebbed and flowed between authoritarian and quasi-democratic-slash-capitalistic, this huge company has sprung leaks. Individual entrepreneurs have emerged, taking pieces of the technology, selling off assets, even aligning with rogue nations.”
For a moment, Jeremy is caught up in Andrea, substance and style.
“Maybe the former chairman has gone, to use your word, rogue.” He sees her eyes briefly go to the backpack.
She looks up again, flushes. “Is that what your computer thinks?”
“Why do you ask that?” Pointed.
“Don’t start, Jeremy.”
He doesn’t respond.
“We’re finally having a real conversation. I’d rather not start sparring again.”
“Then just tell me why you’re here, plainly.”
“I’ve told you. I owe you the truth.”
Jeremy straightens; something passes over his face. He looks dead at her. “Get naked and start to do jumping jacks.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You know you wanted me, someone like me, to dominate you. All those nights on the phone, jockeying, flirting. You were waiting for me to take charge.”
She grits her teeth.
“Just topless and push-ups.”
She blinks.
He shrugs. “I’m seeing how much bullshit you’ll endure,” he says. “You want something and until you tell me what and why, I’m going to play my iPad close to the vest. And until then, we can go along like we always have, with one of us in bed wondering when and whether the other’s going to join in.” Momentary pause. “Give me your phone.”
“No.”
“Have a nice nap.”
He stands, takes his gear and walks to the bathroom. Turns around, walks to the minibar, grabs a handful of shit, nuts and cookies and an orange sugar drink. Back inside the bathroom, he locks the door, settles in on the marble floor. Screw Andrea. He can cuddle up with his computer. In the guts of the algorithm, he clicks on a command line: “nstd.exe.” He hits copy. Then he clicks and drops a copy of the program into a box at the bottom right of the screen labeled “rmt server.” The remote server. Jeremy hates putting a copy in the cloud, in the storage space he rents in some Google data center. He doesn’t like anyone, even as secure a company as Google, having access to his secrets.
But he’s got to make sure he’s got a clean copy of his algorithm’s brain before he starts doing surgery.
A message bar appears: “copying. Est time: 9 minutes, 22 sec.”
Jeremy minimizes the box, then decides to wait until the copying is done before he tinkers. While he waits, he thinks about what the computer has already told him.
War is imminent because of a change to: weather; shipments of tantalum; lions loosed from zoos; arrest of a Russian arms dealer; changes to conflict rhetoric in Russia, North Korea, North Korea, Mexico, Congo and the Fertile Crescent.
Now he has time to ask the questions he’d been thinking about earlier: Which of the variables is most telling? If the weather had remained constant, would the computer still predict war? What if the conflict rhetoric in Russia had remained steady, not worsened?
He can ask the computer those questions. He can ask it to run simulations that hold some variables steady and allow others to change, just as they’ve changed in the real world. Mix and match and change the circumstances to see which variable stands out, which is allegedly the one responsible for the projection of war.
Nine variables: heightened conflict language in five regions, diminished war talk in the Fertile Crescent, increase shipments of tantalum, changing weather, the arrest of the Russian billionaire arms dealer.
The number of possible outcomes: 362,880.
Child’s play.
The computer is done copying the file. He sets the iPad down next to him. Stands up, glances in the mirror, nearly recoils. Hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, an Edvard Munch painting.
He splashes water on his face. Rubs the towel hard to dry himself, spur adrenaline. He opens the bathroom door and peeks outside.
Andrea’s eyes are closed, arms crossed over her chest. Asleep. Asleep? She’s beautiful. He wants to be next to her, but not in sweaty entangle; asleep too.
He closes the door, locks it, sits back down. Puts his fingers on the keyboard. And he becomes a blur. He’s typing and thinking at equal speeds, lightning.
Ninety minutes later, he looks over his creation, the product of a nonstop frenzy of human processing. It’s a sea of hash marks and commands, brackets and if-then statements. He looks at the blinking cursor at the bottom. “Not fucking bad.” He hits enter, initiating the inquiry.
He stands, wants to wash his face again. Wobbles with exhaustion. Sits back down. It’s nearly 1 A.M.
He checks the door of the bathroom, makes sure it’s locked. He pulls out the bloody scrawl.
A V, an upside-down triangle, numbers.
Log cabin.
AskIt.
Beware Peace.
Or Beware the Peace.
What did Harry say?
Beware Peace, and then it seemed that he was going to add something.
Jeremy feels his eyes closing. He forces them open, rolls his neck in a circle. He stares up at the vent on the ceiling, wishing for a blast of cold air. He looks down at the computer, does a search on Google News for “tantalum.” He’s looking for the press release that explains how Silicon Valley companies, some consortium, have bought up a bunch of future tantalum contracts. He finds the link to the story. Clicks on it. It reads: link broken.
“What the hell?”
He searches again, tries other search terms, related ones. Nothing comes up. The story is no longer there.
He stares at the screen, disbelief and exhaustion. His head lolls to the right. The next thing he sees is Kent. Unkempt hair, footsy pajamas, a puzzle piece in his hand.