BEHIND THE TREE.” Jeremy spits out words at Nik, who runs a few steps ahead.
Jeremy glances over his shoulder. They’ve got a good seventy-five yards on the person who exited the van and started shooting. Rather, took one shot. Intentional? Now seems to have paused, looked at Nik’s car, and then is heading their direction. A woman, Jeremy thinks, slightly built, not Andrea or her tall, thin adjunct, and hustling not sprinting.
Could shoot again at any second. But would have to be a hell of a shot to hit someone in this low light, at this distance. And with a handgun, not a rifle.
Jeremy lunges forward, giving a slight shove to Nik to propel him. It’s unnecessary, it dawns on Jeremy; his sugar-fed assistant has surprising speed and dexterity, those hours in the boxing gym.
“She doesn’t care about you,” Jeremy rasps.
Nik keeps going, just a few feet from the big tree, the one where Jeremy and Emily and Harry picnicked, the one at the edge of the Hansel-and-Gretel forest. Beyond it, the Presidio, more tree groves and open space, a maze of hiding places, or a fine place to get shot and not found for weeks.
Jeremy glances over his shoulder. Hears a click.
“Her gun might be jammed.” It’s Nik.
The pair jump behind the tree, huddle.
“Split up?” Nik isn’t even out of breath. He’s read Jeremy’s mind.
Jeremy almost smiles with filial affection.
“She doesn’t care about you, Nik. She needs me.” Spewing his plan, no longer any filter between his thoughts and mouth. “I’ll draw her away. You circle back and tell the reporter and—”
BOOM!
The gun’s report rips through the air. Thwack. A bullet smacks into a tree, their tree, another one?
BOOM!
Leaves and dirt spray at Nik’s feet.
Jeremy falls toward Nik, hoping to blanket him. Push him aside.
“ . . . tell the reporter there’s going to be an attack, and also that chick from CNET, arrange for us to talk. I’ll try them too when I figure out—” He pauses, allows himself to glance around the tree. The woman has stopped midway across the field. She’s trying to get her bearings. She’s short, confident, legs apart, stable, moving like someone with some kind of specialized training. Looks right in the direction of Jeremy, not that it’s certain she can see him.
Jeremy pulls on Nik’s arm, zigzagging, guiding him farther back into the trees.
Nik whispers: “You want me to take that?” The lockbox Jeremy clutches.
“Take the crowbar and smash up her engine. Meet me in two hours at that café with the statue and the view, and . . . 218. Two eighteen!”
“What?”
“Find Evan.”
“Jeremy—”
“Do you understand, PeaceNik. Two hours. And—”
They both pause, hearing the sound of their stalker, deliberate steps, faint, but feet on grass.
Jeremy: “I’m sorry I doubted you. Do you understand?”
Nik whispers. “Reporters. Two hours. Evan. I tried. I don’t . . .”
“Find him!”
With several jabs of his finger, Jeremy points to the right, into the forest, showing Nik where he wants him to go. And without another word, Jeremy runs in the other direction. At least at first, then zigs from behind bushes and up a slight embankment so that he heads directly at the big tree, in the direction of the woman with the gun.
He stops, in a modest clearing amid the foliage and pines, a single eucalyptus to his right. Dawn upon him, the world. The first light. He can see the outline of the woman, and she him. Less than fifty yards apart. The gun held just in front of her with her right hand, steadied with her left. Not yet in firing position.
She raises it. Jeremy runs.
BOOM!
Thwack.
His legs explode, feet spitting bark and grass behind him.
“Arrêtez!”
Stop, French. Or die. And die. Now he can hear her following, as he’d hoped. He hits a second gear, third, clavicle pumping, heart shouting at him for air, alive. A voice in his ears: It was right. I was right.
He crests and slides down a treeless embankment, briefly exposed for want of trees, but then encircled again. Dodging left and right. She’s behind him. He can sense it, still with the decided advantage of the gun, but she can’t keep up and she’s getting farther from Nik, his car, Jeremy’s trap. He imagines his pursuer, for a second, in the greenish gray uniform of the Jerries, Germans trying to fight on two fronts, Jeremy and Nik, spreading her too thin.
Nik will tell the world and Jeremy will unlock the evidence in his hand, put the puzzle pieces together. Redemption.
He churns through this demi-forest, serpentines around a bush to his right, then one on his left, watches a squirrel fly up a tree, thinks: I will save you, all of this. Takes two more steps, and stops. Dead. At the abrupt end of this grove of trees. Before him, a wide-open field. He pictures Gallipoli, nearly half a million killed running at one another’s trenches, conflict at its most extraordinary, the frailties of men—cowed by peer pressure and cowardice, driven by arrogance and dreams of immortality—mowed down by machines powerful well beyond the understanding of those who wielded them.
To Jeremy’s left, more groves he could skirt through and around. He hears the woman, maybe fifty yards behind, picking her way through the trees.
He steps onto the open field, and he sprints, screaming across it. Digging his feet into the grass so he won’t slip, willing his shoes to develop cleats, hearing the crowds at Berlin in the European championships and a fifth-place finish and a Rhodes scholarship. Step, step, run, over a hill, slipping only slightly on the downside, gaining distance between himself and the woman, until at last he reaches another grove of trees, a mess of big and tall and bushy, light emerging above, but in front of him, a veritable forest, far-reaching, the kind of thing that hid the Polish underground from the Nazis. He lets himself turn back. In the middle of the field, she stands. Stopped. Heaving breaths. Gun now at her side. She’s a quarter mile from her car, and Nik’s, defeated.
He puts up his fingers in a V.
Victory.
He turns and begins jogging, picking his way through the grove of trees. He hears Emily’s voice: you’re exhilarated, you’re enjoying this. He shakes his head to make the admonition go away. But no sooner is it gone than he hears Andrea’s voice telling him that conflict crystallizes his thinking. That he’s prone to revelation when under duress and amid competition. Blink, then a vision of his mother, an image from his childhood, she and he squaring off over which movie to see. He’s only eight or nine, wants the grown-up movie. You’re just a child, his mother tells him. They debate the pros and cons; she’s hassling him and he just wants to see the movie about the cars and she wants to see a different one. The more he digs in, the more she smiles, enjoying this sport, and her power.
Up ahead, a small building, made of native redwood, a sign above the door on the near side. Men. A public bathroom. Jeremy sprints the last twenty-five yards across a field, head swiveling, not finding another soul. No parking lot or pavement, no easy access if a would-be killer is circling, just the caw of morning birds and the smell of dew.
Inside the bathroom, he relieves himself. In one of those murky public restroom mirrors, he glances at himself and looks away. He splashes cold water on his face. Palms braced against the chipped wood at the edge of the basin, he thinks: Andrea might be right, and Emily; this conflict, this intensity, has allowed my brain to find answers, fueled me.
Get out of here. Too easy to get trapped.
Back out the door, Jeremy jogs in the direction away from the log cabin, toward the marina, another eighth of a mile, across more open field, then into a patch of trees that feels like it might be in the middle of nowhere. He’s slightly elevated, a mild hump in the landscape, a molehill, but elevated. He thinks of Assisi, in Italy, a city surrounded by plains but set on a hill so that its inhabitants and zealots could see the attacks coming miles away. He pulls out his phones, makes sure that they’re off. Any signal would just draw attention. So too, he checks his iPad to make sure that he’s not connected to his own account, which someone, in theory, could triangulate. He discovers, with relief but not surprise, two different unsecured wi-fi networks. He chooses the one “PresidioX145.”
He calls up the algorithm on the server, logs into it with the key fob, lets it begin to materialize.
First, though, the box, Harry’s treasure. He holds it in a palm, notices the sweat and condensation, feels a chill. Pokes into it: 8773.
T-R-E-E.
What did Harry and Emily say? Jeremy lost the forest for the tree.
Jeremy pushes the black button. Click. It opens.
Onto the ground spills a computer disk. Jeremy half smiles; really, Harry, a computer disk?
He glances around, pulls the keyboard and iPad from the leather bag, attaches the thumb drive. A box appears on the screen showing the contents of the drive. A single document, named “Surrogate.doc.”
He touches it. A note appears: “Do you wish to open this document?” He knows what his computer is really asking him. Could this document have a virus? Does Jeremy know its source?
Jesus, he thinks, what if, after all that, Harry’s sent him some poison pill, some nuclear warhead aimed at the conflict computer?
He scrolls back to the browser, the conflict map. The clock.
11:05:12.
11:05:11.
He returns to the document left by Harry. He taps on it. It opens.