The Doomsday Equation (8 page)

W
IKIPEDIA DESCRIBES TANTALUM
as deriving its name from the Greek mythological hero Tantalus. He was the son of Zeus, condemned for eternity to stand in a pool of water beneath a tree of low branches bearing sumptuous fruit that is just, just, just out of reach. The son of God, relegated to an eternity of suffering with satiation just out of reach. Jeremy feels like he can relate.

He’s hoofing it down the Embarcadero, reading his iPad, impervious to the drizzle, trying to focus on substance, not his suffering. He can add his building manager to the sources of it.

The asshole actually took a look inside Jeremy’s apartment and shook his head. His head, clad in a fucking
beret.

“Who else has a key to your place?”

“Does it seem like I’d give the key to a crazed samurai?”

“Are you saying they were Asian?”

“That they did it with a knife. This knife.”

“Your knife.”

“Are you seriously being hostile with me? Condo board’s gonna love this.”

“I’d call the police.”

“I could call the police. I was trying to involve you in the process.”

“What are you asking of me, Mr. Stillwater?”

“Security tapes.”

The building manager gets it. “I’ll make a backup.”

“We should call the cops.”

A few minutes later, Jeremy sat in the manager’s office while the guy did paperwork and called to back up the security tapes—kept on some server somewhere—but he wouldn’t access or let Jeremy see them without getting the proper permissions. The fat jerk seemed reluctant to call the police but promised to do so; Jeremy dismissed a momentary suspicion this guy might’ve attacked his apartment and remembered the manager just generally doesn’t like the police, having once been questioned by the cops about a resident’s harassment claim.

Jeremy, anxious to get to Harry, buries himself in his iPad, lost in the latest feedback from the computer, biding his time. Getting his homework done so that when he confronts Harry face-to-face, he’ll be armed with all the material, about the computer, the alleged changing variables. Aware of the clock, counting down.

56:30:00.

56:29:59.

But counting down to what? An attack, or something else? Nothing at all?

He’s not fully admitting to himself that he’s going to get answers from Harry but, maybe, depending on what the old man has to say, he will let himself ask Harry for help. Or maybe he doesn’t need to. He thinks he knows Harry well enough to understand the message.
Not over the phone.
Translation: get over here. Harry knows something.

Jeremy remains marginally puzzled by the other thing Harry said: “statis pugna.” A pidgin of ancient Greek and Latin that he’s heard Harry say before and that reflects an underlying philosophy of the old codger. Means, more or less, constant state of tension. Harry, while he has devoted his life to sniffing out war, holds that the stability of the world requires a constant, low-level state of conflict. Too much calm in an environment creates a power vacuum, he argues, one that will be volatile until the natural foes gain equal footing and create a balanced state of low-level conflict.

Harry says that it’s how we live our lives—constantly on the edge. We are contained, but barely so, in the way we deal with authority figures, like the meter maid, the opposing player in a pickup basketball game, our bosses and wives. Even basic forms of life, like the single-cell organism, find themselves in a life-or-death struggle against other organisms for precious resources. Up to a point, the best survival strategy is cooperation among organisms, but conflict, certainly its threat, is never far beneath the surface.

Taken to the extreme, détente, the Cold War, two massive nuclear powers, equally armed, mutual assured destruction.

And, for the geeks in the room, wordplay. Ancient Greek and Latin in a verbal tussle.

Was Harry trying to tell Jeremy something else? If so, Jeremy can’t fathom what.

Fifty-six hours, the countdown clock tells him, plenty of time to unearth the joke, figure out what’s going on, be the guy who shoves it up the ass of all the doubters.

Sitting in the manager’s office, Jeremy read about tantalum. The computer had previously told Jeremy that tantalum shipments rose 4,017 percent in recent days, a number that Jeremy
assumed extraordinary. But what, if anything, could a sharp rise in shipments of tantalum have to do with impending global conflict? Or a practical joke, and who is behind it.

He ran a handful of Google searches for “tantalum and 4,017%,” and “tantalum demand,” and “tantalum markets.”

He got tens of thousands of hits. None of them seemed to point to any recent conflict news, most old documents about the tribal violence in the mid-1990s, when African gangs fought for control of the lucrative coltan mines.

Then, even in a few minutes, he learned more than he thought he ever cared to know about how the precious metal is used as a conductor in high-tech electronics, notably phones. But not what he really wanted to know: Who is shipping tantalum, who is demanding it, and why? And does that have anything to do with how someone messed with Jeremy, and how?

Adhering to the mantra “Follow the money,” he visited Yahoo Finance, a web site he learned about in his academic studies as a way to look for companies involved in particular businesses, namely, at the time, arms dealers and their subsidiaries. He needed their names to plug into the conflict algorithm so the computer would know what to search for. In the manager’s office, he searched for companies in the tantalum and coltan industries.

He found a list of a handful of specializing companies. Discovered something odd about one of them. A major tantalum supplier called Elektronic Space Suppliers PLC (ESS), an international company with Turkish headquarters, had seen its share price spike 600 percent in the last week.

Shares in the company, traded on an obscure secondary European stock exchange, rose to $1.50 from 25 cents.

Seems huge, or not so much. The company is a mere penny
stock. The share price was so low to begin with that a 600 percent price rise seems much less interesting than it would be were the company a heavily traded blue chip, like Apple or General Motors. That would be astounding. But a spike in the price in some penny-ante company with Turkish headquarters could be, far from astounding, merely anomalous.

He found the company’s web site. It was, predictably, in English, the international trading language. And predictably, uninformative. It said that it specializes in trading precious metals, particularly tantalum, in southern Europe, the Middle East and the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation, a trading group made up largely of Russia and formerly Soviet states.

Jeremy set up an alert so that he can get an update if any news breaks about the shipments of tantalum. It’ll come right to his phone.

“Tape backed up,” the manager said. And police report made. Jeremy could check back in a few hours. “You can go upstairs but try to keep your fingerprints to yourself.”

Back up in his condo, Jeremy showered; put on clean jeans, T-shirt and a plain gray, light wool J. Crew sweater; filled his backpack with a bunch of survival gear: snack bars, a change of shirt, a backup battery for the iPad, umbrella stuffed tightly into its outer casing.

His phone buzzed. A text, from Nik: “Yeah, maybe.” A response to Jeremy’s text from the night before: noticed anything strange?

Jeremy texted back: go on.

M
OMENTS LATER, AS
he walks out of the building, Jeremy looks at the countdown clock. Fifty-six hours. He pictures
Kent, Emily. Then the guy who tagged along with her at the café. Something about him.

Not an apocalypse, he reminds himself, a personal vendetta. Right?

En route to the subway that will take him to Harry, Jeremy pops into his office, which is on the Embarcadero, not even a few steps off his route to the train.

First thing he notices is that the papers on Nik’s cubicle desk, usually stacked so neatly, look disheveled. On the top, there’s a copy of the
San Francisco Examiner
with a picture of a zoo cage, empty, and a headline: “Lion on Loose.” With a subhead: “Prankster Frees Jungle King.”

On Nik’s computer, a virtual landscape, hills and valleys, a vibrant sun in the background. In the foreground, some oblong green creature with a hammer. World of Warcraft. Jeremy leans in. Along the screen’s side, inscrutable chatter. Someone asking a question of “Commander Perry.” Nik’s given name, Perry, a sidekick in real life, somehow a leader in this nonsense world of virtual, perpetual combat.

The door to Jeremy’s office is closed. Outside it, lying on the ground, the two envelopes that had previously been stuck under his door, from the law firm of Pierce & Sullivan. Two envelopes Jeremy had previously ignored and then, the day before, summarily smashed with his feet on the way out the door.

One of them has been opened. And closed again, sort of, its flap loose. Maybe it unsealed on its own. He bends down, cautiously at first. He looks around the little room. Opens it.

He nearly dismisses it without a close glance, assuming it’s another reminder to attend a deposition at such-and-such a time and place. It has that look and feel. But he finds himself struck by the words in bold, “cease and desist.” He reads the
two paragraphs more closely. This is a letter telling Jeremy to stop contacting Evan, to leave Evan alone. That Evan wishes to cut off all further communications.

Jeremy shakes his head. Confused. Hadn’t Evan been hounding Jeremy, and now he wants to be left alone?

Jeremy looks at the date; it’s from three weeks earlier. Around the time Jeremy was doing a last round of fuck-you calls and taunting emails.

He scoops up the other envelope, same thing, but from two weeks earlier.

Whatever, Evan, you want to disconnect from me, have it your way. The more material value of these letters, at least the one that was unsealed, is that it might suggest possible intrusion.

Jeremy turns his attention to the door of his office, listens carefully, hears nothing from inside, still is cautious as he opens the door.

Sees Nik.

Sitting at Jeremy’s computer. He turns his head and blinks heavily, half man, half big dog.

“Someone turned it on.” Nik wears cargo pants he bought online for eleven dollars and a gray wool sweater with nothing on underneath it. It is standard-issue ascetic. Jeremy once bought Nik some fashionable khaki shorts and a golf shirt and Nik reddened when he opened the package. Never wore them.

“How do you know I didn’t leave it on?”

Nik shakes his head, like he’s gotten hit with a light jab, smacked in the nose with a rolled-up paper. “I thought you always turn it off.” He pauses for a second. “Lately.”

From someone else, a jab back. Not from Nik.

“I didn’t leave it on,” Jeremy says. “And you didn’t turn it on?”

Nik shakes his head. He swivels in the chair. A few books have been tossed on the short gray carpet; the Pepsi can is overturned on the desk, dribbling out the bottom of its contents. Someone spent some time looking around in here.

“How did they get in?”

“Maybe the same guy,” Nik says.

“Same guy as who?”

“My place, last night. Got home late and some cat was banging on the window from the fire escape.”

“Cat?”

“Burglar.” Nik has bags under his already puffy eyes, and a question mark in them. Would Jeremy like to explain what’s going on?

“Rosa just sat there.”

Takes Jeremy a second to make sense of Nik’s reference to his dog, big and lumbering like Nik. Rosa. In full: Doggy Dolorosa. Worthless orphan Nik picked up from a Spanish exchange student back in the day. Nik seems to connect more with animals than with people.

“The usual suspects taking a nail gun to our coffin, trying to,” Jeremy says, pauses, then continues. “What’s up with Evan? Can you find out about his company, some conference he’s holding? I thought Evan was trying to sue for my ideas, not push me away.”

“You don’t read your mail.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I can bring the mail to water . . .”

“But you can’t make me drink. You know I don’t read that stuff unless you tell me to.”

Nik looks down, clears his throat. “With everything going on, I didn’t think it was worth—”

“Never mind.” Jeremy cuts him off. “Find me Evan. Fuck his lawyers. I need to talk to him. Let’s use the Yahoo email account to communicate, the old one. And Harry I’ll take care of myself.”

Nik shakes his head. “Harry?” As in: Harry did this?

“I’m going to find out.”

“You’re going to talk to Harry?”

Jeremy half nods. He wonders whether he even trusts Nik. Where did he come from, this abjectly loyal hangdog? Half British, half American, he appeared one day at Oxford, referred by a professor of conflict studies. He stood at the doorway to the lab, wearing a secondhand black sport coat—looking like a cast-off waiter—staring at the earliest version of the conflict map, a prototype, blinking on the wall. A child of sorts but with a talent for making things orderly, so Jeremy gave him a minimum-wage administrative job he’d gotten grant funding to fill. A few weeks later, one of the graduate assistants saw Nik playing around with the conflict program, messing with the columns, and dragged him in to Jeremy to get fired.

Jeremy asked what Nik was doing.

“This predicts war,” Nik said of the algorithm. “So I wondered if it could predict peace.”

Jeremy laughed. So innocent. Nik. PeaceNik. The son of missionaries, who had traveled the world humbly preaching the word. Nik. First and last guy ever to survive an unauthorized intrusion into the software. The son of well-traveled missionaries, monkish in his own right, devoted to Jeremy the way some people are to a monotheistic God.

“What did he look like?” Jeremy asks.

“Who?”

“The cat.”

Nik shrugs. “Scampered away.”

Jeremy glances at the computer monitors, lit up, but blank, showing only the log-in screens. Whoever had been here, whatever they wanted, they couldn’t find it without the key fob and the password buried inside Jeremy’s brain.