CHAPTER 9

“What’s wrong, Atlas?”

The sound of the voice sends electricity shooting through him.

Jeremy watches Emily usher Kent out the front door without a look back. Trailing behind, Emily’s suitor. He peeks back at Jeremy, seems to smile. Does he look familiar?

“Why are you calling me?” Jeremy demands.

Andrea Belluck-Juarez laughs. “Just as hostile as I remember. Do you wake up that way or does it usually take enough caffeine to fell an elephant?”

“Calls from blocked numbers make me hostile.”

“You’re the one who answered, Atlas.” Her moniker for Jeremy, deriving partly from an inside joke between them that Department of Defense contractors deserve code names and partly because, she told him, he likes to think he believes he can carry the whole world to safety; he, she jokes, and he alone.

“What’s up?” He’s trying to sound nonchalant, feel her out. But his antennae are bristling. It’s a big coincidence that she’d call mere hours after his computer warned of impending doom.

“I should be asking you that question.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Andrea laughs again. Then explains: “Usually your hostility comes thick with sarcasm and witty repartee. Maybe you really haven’t had your caffeine.”

“Hanging up now.”

“Easy, Atlas. I’m calling because you’re a week late.”

Jeremy swallows, still getting his bearings.

Every two weeks or so for the last eighteen months, Jeremy has called Andrea to ask one question: are you ready to admit I was right? It’s a question referring to his predictions — or, rather, the predictions of his conflict machine — about the length and intensity of conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ever since the military brass there dismissed him as a quack, he’s regularly hounded Andrea to own up to the fact that they somehow duped him. They promised at one point to send him overseas so he could do a real-time test, pitting his algorithm against reality on the ground in Iraq, but the trip never materialized. It was further evidence to Jeremy that they were afraid to allow him to see firsthand the breathtaking value of his technology.

“I was worried you’d lost faith in yourself,” Andrea says.

He looks down at the iPad, swerves his finger across the screen to awaken it, sees the map covered in red.

“So was I right?”

“That’s the Jeremy I know and have some grudging appreciation for.”

He doesn’t answer. On his iPad, he looks at the countdown clock: 59:15:32.

He swallows thickly, flicks away the map and pulls up a window from the background. It shows the calculations he was running overnight, the requests for whether the list of 327 global parameters was accurately reported. The screen reads: “Action complete. Would you like to see the results?”

“No,” Andrea says.

“What?”

“No, you were not right.”

“You want a prediction I’m absolutely one hundred percent correct about?” Jeremy says into the phone.

“Sure.”

“I’m hanging up.”

He pulls the phone from his ear to end the call, hears: “Wait.”

Something in the intensity of the plea causes him to pull the phone back.

“I’m in town. Visiting another asset. Let’s get a drink.”

He rolls the logic around in his mouth, the change in data, the statistical significance of this call. And of the proposition. A drink, from the woman who seduced him into service.

He pictures Andrea, an unlikely cocktail: born in Mexico City of a local and an American doing executive kidnap recovery work for insurance companies, then raised in Idaho, forged with a kind of quiet and abiding patriotism. And undeniably beautiful, and quirky; encyclopedic about the nearest karaoke bar, blessed with a powerful soprano and no fear of showing it off. To inform his standard holier-than-thou worldview, Jeremy wanted to dismiss her as an affirmative action hire, some favor to her father — the kidnap specialist with CIA ties. But she just kept proving herself too smart for that.

After an introduction by Harry, she recruited Jeremy to the Pentagon, got him to let his guard down, put him and his computer in a position to be humiliated. The flash passes and he’s back to his head, wondering why in the world he’s hearing at this moment from a case officer in the Department of Defense.

“Andrea, do you know why they made me your asset?”

“Why?”

“Because they suspected I was a hack, a blowhard. You’re a junior case officer, an affirmative action hire, an effort to doll up an agency, a skirt they could send to low-level meetings on the Hill. They figured they could waste your time with me.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“Ta-ta.”

“But you are right.”

He doesn’t respond to her vague provocation. She clarifies. “You’re right about why they hired me. I’m good at dealing with assholes.”

“Ta-ta.”

“Does tonight work? It’s too small of a world to burn bridges. You never know when we might need each other.”

He grunts something noncommittal, which she takes as assent. “Not the usual spot. Let’s try somewhere new. I’ll call you later.” She hangs up.

He had deliberately chosen the most provocative, childish, offensively sexist language to infuriate Andrea, test her, and still she didn’t hang up or even challenge him. Why not? Because she’s used to dealing with him and has tuned out his bullshit, or for some other reason?

Is she part of some scam?

He’s had his questions from the start, that night she recruited him, consummated his commitment. The government had flown him to Washington, which didn’t seem so odd. Everyone was flying Jeremy everywhere at this point. Consult on this, speak at that, Jeremy finding himself at the gooey center of the world of peace and conflict studies. At his hotel in Georgetown, there was a knock on the door and there stood Andrea, so in opposition to what Jeremy had expected. He’d let down his guard. At a swanky restaurant downstairs, they’d eaten oysters and drunk martinis, which she could put away. She was neither overly flirty nor remotely shy in showing him the edges of the bird tattoo above her left breast. She didn’t mention a thing about the algorithm, his reason for visiting, the thing they’d ask him about at a briefing the next day at the Pentagon.

So when she went to the bathroom, he felt suddenly nervous. He patted his pockets, discovered he was missing the key fob, the access code for the conflict program. He left the table before she returned from the bathroom, rushed up to his room. There was the fob, on the desk, right next to the computer.

He exhaled, felt a kind of shame — not because he’d freaked but because of something in this woman’s power. When she showed up at his door, she’d caused him to forget himself, forget to take his precious fob. Thereafter, he’d worn it around his neck, an amulet, a veritable locket.

After that, over the months, he’d alternately opened himself to Andrea and protected himself from her. Did she like him or was she just recruiting him? Their last in-person interaction, the last time they’d had a drink, was at the usual place, South of Market. She was hemming and hawing about another last-minute cancellation of a trip to send Jeremy to the Middle East. I’m doing my best for you, Jeremy. I believe in you, and it. His computer.

So much brown in her eyes and promise in her voice. Jeremy wondered if this was the night Andrea would finally invite him back to her hotel, allowing him the pleasure of declining, or deciding whether to decline. Then, a surprise interloper: Evan. The slickster happened into the same bar, with a twenty-something date. An awkward moment among the three of them, shattering the rhythm of the night. Andrea petering out, professing to share Jeremy’s distrust of his MBA backer, but whatever momentum he imagined had been there, totally lost.

Back in the present, Jeremy remembers himself, his habit of getting lost in his head, especially lately. He can’t stop puzzling through so many little moments the last few years, these Hansel and Gretel crumbs that have led him to this isolated place. He looks up. The café bristles; a man in a fashionable red rain jacket chomps half a donut in a single bite, then looks around furtively, suggesting to Jeremy that the man’s guiltily wondering if someone might catch him eating too many carbs of the inorganic variety.

Fucking San Francisco. Maybe it should get nuked.

He looks at the phone, then hits the cursor. Yes, he fucking wants to see the results from the program he ran the night before. Just how full of shit is his conflict algorithm? He hits enter.

The screen reads:

327 variables checked.

327 variables accurately reported.

Jeremy feels a painful pulse in his clavicle. The computer has based its results on accurate information.

So that means that the problem isn’t what’s being fed into the computer. It might be that the algorithm itself has been tinkered with, not the inputs, but the equations. The guts.

Jeremy looks up, scans the café. He’s looking for faces that might be looking at him. Some trickster, someone getting even. That, weirdly, he realizes, is his first impulse at this moment. He doesn’t quite put it together that there’s something else compelling this action: he’s feeling humiliated. This fucking computer, this life’s dream turned nightmare, might just be out-and-out wrong. It’s like the Pentagon all over again. Worse than that; a realization not just that his computer is screwing up, but that someone is messing with it, just like messing with the inside of his own brain.

At least that’s got to be the working assumption, that someone is messing with the computer. Who? How?

He looks at the countdown clock, then below it. At the bottom of the screen, Jeremy sees a query: Would you like to see a list of the variables?

Jeremy clicks yes. Yes, he wants to see which variables have changed such that this computer is predicting the end of the world.

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