PEACE,” EVAN SAYS.
Jeremy drops his hands. Evan brushes his chest, smoothing out a royal button-down, lightly starched.
“The final frontier.”
“Spare me the soapbox. How does war bring peace?”
Evan shakes his head. “I have five minutes. You can listen or you can do your usual thing and waste your life and my time with confrontation. I think, anyway, you’ve way crossed the line this time. Let’s walk to the park.”
“No.”
Evan looks up and down the alley, a wide berth between businesses and restaurants on each side, lined with plastic blue and green and black recycling, composting and garbage cans. Gathering dusty drizzle.
“You’re going to be part of it. You deserve credit.” Evan’s change in tone, right from the management manual, the supportive uncle, makes Jeremy want to barf. “The last few years, I ran a million scenarios with the algorithm. I was looking for business outcomes; the next great business sectors, the most economical and efficient regions to start a business, put manufacturing, mine new markets. Looking for specifics and proof of concept.”
Jeremy waves his hand; he knows all this.
“I discovered a fascinating by-product, maybe one that wasn’t all that surprising. In regions where business got hot—say, if we hypothetically located a semiconductor plant in a city in Thailand—there was a concurrent outbreak in peace.”
“Thailand isn’t at war.”
“Actually, it’s facing terrible unrest. By peace, I mean: a reduction in variables associated with war, like economic growth, harsh political rhetoric, especially that. Of course, this comes as zero surprise—”
“Morocco.”
“Exactly.” Evan’s face lights up, one of those outbursts not just of genuine enthusiasm but also showing how quickly these two men can connect. “By all rights, Morocco has a terribly volatile demographic mix: urbanites, barely educated desert people, religious Muslim, secular Muslim, the vacationing Europeans. Yeah, they’ve had some Al Qaeda attacks but, well, that’s kind of the point. The extremists can’t stand the fact that, on balance, Morocco is a fairly sane place, at least relative to say, Syria.”
“So what?”
“So I tried like hell to persuade you to make this an economic tool, to try to build both business and political prosperity, a democratizing tool. But you wouldn’t hear of it.”
“Bullshit . . .” Jeremy rolls his eyes.
“Jeremy, you never wanted to do anything that wasn’t expressly your idea. Not that your ideas were bad, far from it. It’s just that others also just might have something valuable to contribute.”
“Keep talking.” Jeremy hears a noise, looks down the alley, sees that a car has turned into it. Something small. Evan pauses for ten seconds to let the Smart Car pass, a man behind the wheel, his dog in the passenger seat. As it passes, the car nearly sprays the men with a puddle.
“Don’t flip him off, Jeremy.”
“What does that have to do with what’s happening today?”
“I took your technology to a few execs, big-time folks, initially hoping, like I told you, to use it as a business tool.”
“And?”
“You know Andres Potemkin?”
Jeremy nods. Of course. A cofounder of Sky Data, one of the biggest makers of large-scale servers, the guts of cloud computing.
“Russian by birth,” Evan says. “A Russian Jew, which is relevant.” In Silicon Valley, unlike the East Coast, people apologize if they ever identify someone by ethnicity, this place considering itself a color-blind meritocracy.
Jeremy feels a buzz. But so what?
“He got immediately jazzed. Well beyond my imagination. He asked if he might run some scenarios himself, and a few days later, he got back to me with some ideas.”
The grimy sweat of uncertainty and revelation forms on Jeremy’s forehead. He listens as Evan starts to explain, a semi-ramble: he explains that Potemkin went to Carlos Fox, the billionaire Mexican chip manufacturer; and Raj Arooth, the venture capitalist; and a very tight group of high, high-level executives at the biggest companies, and, together, they began exploring whether they could use the algorithm to work backward. Meaning: rather than putting business first—to emphasize profits—they’d discover what economic models would lead to peaceful outcomes in imperiled regions.
“It was heady stuff, heavy stuff, incendiary, in an intellectual sense, as I said, a new frontier.” Evan’s voice is going high the way it does when he’s very excited. “This handful of huge thinkers, coming together, competitors, looking not at predicting the future, but . . .” He pauses, realizing he’s about to use his own buzz phrase (“but shaping the future”) and realizing too that this conversation is too real for bumper stickers.
“They’re all immigrants,” Jeremy mutters, a kind of whispered revelation.
“Foreign-born, the preferred term. But, yeah, right, Silicon Valley itself is their model. Peace and prosperity, economic growth through intermingling of cultures. Morocco was a trading crossroads, the place where East and West and North and South once traded. That’s a little bit like Silicon Valley today. Walk into an office and you’ve no idea what color or religion or orientation you’ll be trading with.”
Jeremy says: “So they got together, made a secret plan to join forces, reverse-engineer peace.”
“Couldn’t have said it better myself. They want to join forces to bring an intertwined business community, to build an irrepressible technology economy in the most volatile region in the world.”
“The Middle East.”
Evan nods. “You’re never far behind.” He smiles.
“Mobile phone technology. Semiconductors? A massive joint venture.”
“Impressive. Maybe that computer does work. How did you—”
“Tantalum.” Jeremy’s thinking of the increased shipment of tantalum, used for mobile phones; might be related, a lucky guess. No, more than that, concrete evidence ferreted out by the computer. Tantalum isn’t a red herring after all, not ancillary. The computer has somehow picked up and put together these seemingly disparate developments: a Russian arms dealer arrested, perhaps responsible for selling a bomb; the explosion of conflict rhetoric around the world; the relative calm in the Middle East; the surge in demand for tantalum. Does the computer know they’re connected or is it doing some mystical probability?
“You’ve signed some tantalum contracts, a bunch of them, for use in this . . . venture.”
“Yep.”
“You sought out Harry. He started helping you form alliances. Make some sort of pact among these businesses. To do what—exactly.”
“Seriously?” A rare hint of condescension from the very political Evan.
“You’re not going to tell me.”
“No. I just . . . I’ve told you, a thousand times. At least in general terms the last eighteen months. You haven’t listened. The idea is to bring big companies, their leaders, together and, as you say, reverse-engineer peace by creating economic hubs in places with the deepest traditions of conflict. The promise of technology isn’t being able to predict the future of, say, conflict. It’s being able to use the tools you’ve created to shape the future. Determine what factors are most likely to bring war and then create the conditions that would least likely lead to it—war, conflict.”
“A peace machine.”
“Nice.” Sincere. “Say what you will about the wonky entrepreneurs driving the world’s economy, innovation, computing, but they’re not all about money. Yeah, they, I, don’t mind getting rich. But at some point, there’s a bigger legacy. Besides, it’s an enlightened self-interest. The world gets safer, wealthier; we’ve got a better place for our kids to live and—”
“A lot more consumers.”
“Make e-commerce purchases, not war.” Evan shakes his head lightly, understanding he’s being too cute by half. “The biggest tech executives in the world are about to announce a future of peace and prosperity, peace through prosperity. They’re all immigrants, a multicultural society that runs Silicon Valley, that drives it, and they’ve pulled off the single greatest act of diplomacy the world’s ever seen.”
Evan pauses. In the last few minutes the temperature has dropped half a degree, the fog turning to a light drizzle. Jeremy’s head is down, his neck near his chest, wincing at a pulsing of pain.
“Israel, the West Bank, will get so peaceful they’ll make Morocco look like Gettysburg in 1863. We’re building it in the image of Silicon Valley, not imposing our ideas, just giving rise to economic interdependence in a way that the world has never seen. Not just words, but billions in investment. A production center for mobile technologies, the next generation of devices and software, a digital trading post. We’re going to change the world starting at the cradle of civilization.”
“We. The business leaders?”
Evan smiles. For him, another of those punch-line moments that he lives for. “And the leaders of the stakeholders in the Middle East. Key officials from Israel and the Palestinian territories. We’ll break ground in two days on the road to Ramallah. And everyone is here to meet this afternoon, then announce it tonight.”
Jeremy feels his heartbeat pick up, not in terror, for the moment, but in lockstep with Evan’s enthusiasm, a physiological recognition of the sales power of his former partner.
“We’re going to shock the world. No one knows, other than the highest-level group of stakeholders. We’ve kept the whole thing off the grid.” Evan half laughs. “Cloak-and-dagger stuff. No emails on the subject, personal contact, code names, all the bullshit.”
Evan smiles, continues: “Blood brothers, we all swore not to share the particulars, where, when. I don’t think a single person on Earth knows about today’s meeting, and announcement. Hell, I’ve told everybody I’m out of town.”
“At the JCC? Is that why we’re here?”
“No, what? Too public. We’ve chartered The Idealist.”
Jeremy shakes his head.
“A boat. Most of them are already on it. Safe from any public view. We’ll make peace beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. Like an armistice.”
There’s a pause. Then: “Who doesn’t want peace?” Jeremy suddenly asks.
“What?”
“Harry’s dead.”
Evan doesn’t say anything.
“He’s dead! They took Emily and Kent.”
Evan winces. “They’re looking for you.”
“Who?”
“The police. They tell me you’ve snapped, finally. Totally lost it. Jeremy, I want to help you if I can . . . I’m here because I owe you a lot. I know you mean—”
“You have no idea what’s going on, do you?”
Jeremy leans down and picks up the iPad. He wipes from the cover a coat of drizzle.
“Jeremy, you’re a genius, I grant you—”
“You’re so fucking clueless.”
“Listen to me!” Evan’s tone. “You are . . .” He doesn’t say the next words: fucking clueless. Instead: “A genius, but you’ve been used. Over and over again. I admit. Everyone around you: me, Harry, Andrea, hell, even PeaceNik, Nik, thinks about peace. All of us. You think about conflict. You never really saw this as a peace tool. But it couldn’t exist without you. You were like the sun, the center of this extraordinary, embryonic universe—people and institutions interested in understanding conflict and promoting peace. But, like the sun, you can be dangerous and, to stretch the metaphor, scorching. We all coalesced around you—the government, the academics, the entrepreneurs—but we realized we needed to give you a wide berth. We, if I’m honest, we used you. Let you lead us, in a way, but also took advantage . . .” He pauses. “There’s something so predictable about your urge to conquer, to win. If . . . if something happened with you and Harry, I’ll do what I can to help you. I . . .”
“Took advantage.” Muttered.
“Huh?”
“Look!”
Jeremy’s tone shakes not just Evan, but the alley, echoing down the opening.
“I was right. It was right.” Again, muttered. It somehow pieced together these disparate elements: the Russians, the tantalum, the volatility in general of the world, and, most of all, the likelihood of peace in the Middle East.
Jeremy opens the cover of the iPad. He swivels his finger on the screen, bringing to life the conflict map, drenched in red. No sooner does it materialize than a series of dialogue boxes pop up. A shrill chirp. Updates.
Evan reaches for the iPad. “What’s this?”
He’s looking, not at the screen, but at something on the back of the tablet. Jeremy looks too. He sees a little nodule, a tiny metallic tick.
“Are you bugging me?” Evan bellows.
Jeremy shakes his head. “No. You’re missing the point. Look at the screen.” He turns the iPad back to display the map.
“Is that . . .” Evan doesn’t finish his thought. Instead, he turns his attention down the alley, to a car turning inside, rambling slowly onto the gravel of the bumpy alley.
Jeremy sucks in sharply, clicks on the dialogue box. Countdown clock update: 2:36:12. Two hours, 36 minutes, 12 seconds.
Jeremy shivers. “It’s supposed to be seven hours away, not until tonight.”
“That’s the conflict map?”
“Peckerhead.”
Evan looks up. Sees what Jeremy sees: a steel rod, a barrel, sticking from the driver’s-side window of the oncoming car. A pistol.
“Down!” Jeremy dives toward Evan’s legs, tackling him to the pavement.
Splat. Splat. Splat.
“Evan!”
Jeremy feels his partner’s heavy weight collapse over him, hears screeching. Van tires on wet pavement. It slides ten feet ahead, to Jeremy’s left, skids and stops. Jeremy scrambles. “Evan!”
No answer, dead weight on him, dead. Dead?!
Evan!
His face, his head. A hole . . .
Car doors open. Voices, urgent, woman and man.
Jeremy, no distance between thought and action, movement and instinct, scoots from under the body, sees the back door of the liquor store, dives for it. Into the cove of concrete protecting the door, a little entryway and a concrete overhang.
Splat, splat, splat. Bullets slam into the wall next to him. Splat. A searing pain in his calf.
“Go around front!” A woman’s voice. Glances, sees her shape, a blur, something familiar.
Jeremy yanks open the door, sprints. Adrenaline trumping the pulse in his leg. Doesn’t look down, tumbles, knocking over a cardboard cutout, some marketing thing, hears bottles tumble.
“Hey!” The man behind the counter.
Jeremy flies by him.
“Hey!”
“Police!” Jeremy says. It’s out of his mouth before he can take it back.
In seconds, he’s out the door, head swiveling. A stroller, a delivery truck coming up the street, rain, no bad guy, yet. An idea. It’s been with him. I am right. It was right.
I am Princip.
He keeps sprinting.