quantum: u don’t have the courage of ur convictions, old man. spooky would be better off without u
geezer: I don’t answer to you
quantum: i don’t ask u questions, because u don’t know anything. maybe u used to, before ur Alzheimer days
geezer: Wisdom is earned
quantum: courage is born, and u didn’t get any. u’ll never do anything great, old man.
Quantum could be cruel, but his tactics ensured that only the strongest and most committed members stayed with Spooky.
geezer: I have access to something great
quantum: viagra? old news, old dude
Quantum was trouble. Ash had researched him when his importance within Spooky grew. He knew his real name, Michael Pham; his current location, also New York City; and that Quantum had been in and out of prison for hacking, stalking, and assault. He was brilliant, but unpredictable, violent, and more radical than the others. At some point, Spooky might have to cut ties with him and disavow that he had ever been part of their group. But not yet. He might still be useful.
So far as Ash could tell, Quantum and Geezer didn’t know each other off-line, or even know they both lived in New York. Good. Ash liked having an overview that others didn’t. Information was power.
geezer: Any Nikola Tesla fans out there?
quantum: who isn’t?
Ash sat up straighter. He had been obsessed with Nikola Tesla since he was a boy.
geezer: I know a guy with a box of Tesla’s original designs.
quantum: sure u do
geezer: Including the Oscillator.
Ash leaned forward. Plans for the fabled Earthquake Machine? Nikola Tesla had said he had once used the Oscillator to create an earthquake in Manhattan, frightening local police. But those words came from an elderly Tesla, one whose lucidity was often disputed. Tesla had said a lot of kooky things, but he’d also said enough brilliant ones that you never knew what to take seriously. The Oscillator was one of his more intriguing claims.
quantum: the one he said could ‘knock down the empire state building with 5 lbs of pressure?’
geezer: That one.
Ash looked around at the steel and glass that encased him. He’d headquartered his company here because of everything the building represented, including reaching for the sky using green technology.
He certainly hadn’t come here for the neighborhood. He shared a floor with the third-largest privately owned corporation in the United States. The Bakers, although he called them the Breakers because all they did was break things, were a brother-and-sister team. Their oil-drilling empire perpetuated legendary environmental destruction, and they were well-known for spending huge sums to finance the right-wing agenda. They were destroying the world faster than Ash could save it, and he had to be reminded of them every time he got out of the elevator.
They had moved into fracking, and were drilling deeper than had ever been possible. Their actions were causing earthquakes and widespread water contamination. They were set to expand their fracking activities into national parks in six months. No place on Earth would be safe from their depredations. Ash had his lobbyists working against theirs, of course, but he’d run out of time.
In weak moments, he thought of moving to another floor entirely, but he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction. He’d tried to buy up the floor, but the Bakers had deeper pockets, and a deeper attachment to their office space because they had spent so much to set it up. They lived in paranoid fear of being hacked, so they had spent a fortune to install a top-notch security system. Their walls were shielded against electromagnetic emanations to keep out any kind of detection, including devices designed to recognize and reconstruct keystrokes. They didn’t even send their data to be backed up off-site. Every single bit of intelligence about their company was in this building.
Could this building be brought low by a device so small it would fit in a pocket? It was a ludicrous thought, but Nikola Tesla had claimed that it could. He’d said more incredible things in his time—and gone on to prove that they were true.
quantum: saw a mythbusters episode on that. device didn’t work. myth busted
geezer: I saw it too. It didn’t knock down the bridge, but it caused vibrations hundreds of feet away. It could cause a lot of panic without being destructive.
quantum: unless nikola=right and mythbusters=wrong. then it could wreak havoc
Quantum liked havoc a little too much. He’d come up from poor beginnings, and he didn’t believe in the system. The first computers he hacked were in the library. Even now, the machines he worked on were probably stolen. He was no white hat hacker, and his connection to financial hacking schemes for profit could bite Spooky in the ass. Still, Ash was attracted to the edgier members of Spooky, becoming bored by those who simply wanted to do right and do good. They weren’t as effective as someone like Quantum, who was willing to take big risks.
quantum: doesn’t matter. oscillator doesn’t exist
Geezer sat back in his chair, bushy brows drawn down in what looked like frustration. He bent down to get something out from under his desk, and his face disappeared from the screen. Behind him, bright sun fell through his window onto what looked like a scale model of the Mars rover. He returned with a sheet of yellowed paper in his hand and a thoughtful expression on his face. For a few seconds, he studied the paper, as if trying to decide whether to reveal it to the group.
Ash’s heart started to race. He had a hunch they needed to see that piece of paper, and he always followed his hunches. He entered the chat room.
ash: care to put ur $ where ur mouth is? show us proof
quantum: hi, ash!
ash: hello, fellow troublemakers
quantum: no proof. just words
geezer: Here’s your proof.
He tapped a few keys, and a file link appeared in the chat room. Ash opened the image file. A yellowed piece of paper with writing appeared on his monitor. He quickly zoomed the image to a readable size.
The writing was unmistakably Nikola Tesla’s. Ash recognized the classic Old World lettering and the forward-slanting N. Dots of darker ink showed in the corners of some letters where Tesla’s fountain pen had paused at the end of a stroke. The document was an original, or a damn fine copy. But it looked like a shopping list.
ash: that’s not for oscillator
geezer: It’s from a larger collection. Plans for Oscillator in that collection
quantum: u can get it, old guy?
geezer: It belonged to another old guy, and was written by yet another old guy—Nikola Tesla himself.
Ash had been through every known collection of Tesla memorabilia, but he never read the document currently on his screen. Geezer must have access to previously unseen material.
ash: what collection?
geezer: A friend of the family. I know them. I can get the plans
quantum: if they let u out of the home to look for it
Ash stared at Geezer’s lined face and wondered what secrets it was hiding.
Ash would have to keep an eye on him. If the Oscillator was out there, he wanted it for himself. Spooky’s job was to shake things up, maybe knock things down. The Oscillator might be a devastating tool—something that could save the world, or destroy it. The possibilities were limitless.
And the Breakers didn’t have one.
He laid his palm against the cool glass shell that separated him from the hot and polluted world outside. With the Oscillator in hand, this building would be fragile. He could wound the Breakers with an act of great physical and metaphorical power, and save countless acres of the most pristine country left in the United States. He could buy himself the time he needed to fight back against their lobbying machine.
What a glorious symbol the Empire State Building laid low would be! American hubris brought to the ground for the world to see by destroying the most iconic building in the city, perhaps the country. The repercussions would be more than financial—the entire modern world would ag
ain feel at risk.
What could he grow from the ashes of that destruction?
Chapter 4
Together Joe and Edison climbed the Employees Only stairs onto Grand Central Terminal’s Track 42. The numbers triggered Joe’s synesthesia (green for four and blue for two). He’d been five (brown) before he discovered everyone else didn’t see colors in their heads when numbers were mentioned, eight (purple) when he realized it let him understand mathematics at a completely different level than others, and sixteen (cyan, orange) when he’d used it to get into MIT and take control of his own life.
Joe glanced at the simple white-faced clock hanging from the ceiling—just after noon (cyan, blue). Lunchtime. He wasn’t hungry, but he thought it best to stick to his routine today.
He picked up the pace and strode across the empty platform and out into the terminal itself. The air felt cooler here, but still uncomfortable. Summer had come even to the vast concourse. The weather brought heat and humidity, but also a lot of women in shorts and miniskirts. An acceptable tradeoff.
He snapped a leash onto Edison and adjusted the dog’s blue psychiatric service vest. Joe didn’t expect to be hassled, but it was easier to put on the vest than have a conversation with some cop.
The dog tugged on the leash, pulling them toward the food court, but when Joe headed over to the Apple balcony, Edison obediently followed. The glowing white apple meant different things to different people, but in Grand Central, it meant free Wi-Fi.
He touched the pocket where he kept his phone in a pouch. He’d designed the pouch to block cellular signals from reaching his phone. It was his mini-Faraday cage. Somebody was marketing them now, but he’d made his years ago. He used the cage so his phone wouldn’t always be communicating with Apple, telling them his location so that they could track his movements. They didn’t need to know what he was doing.
He took out the phone, connected to the free Wi-Fi, and discovered that in less than an hour’s walk, he’d accumulated a long list of work-related emails. California and Pellucid, the company he’d founded, were waking up. He still consulted there. He was helping to catch bad guys, or at least that’s what he used to tell himself. Now he wasn’t so sure.
He scrolled through the list of emails and opened the one he’d most been dreading. It was an automated email sent by a tracker he’d installed in his company’s facial recognition software. The tracker checked to see how many facial recognition requests were made and how quickly they were matched. The volume of faces being fed into the system had skyrocketed to hundreds of times more than expected. Either something new had come online recently, or he had a bug to track down.
By force of habit, he logged into the darknet and scanned through emails sent by those who’d had the opportunity to administer the poison that had caused his agoraphobia. Still nothing interesting, but they would slip up eventually and, right now, all he had was time. He would wait them out.
With a few quick movements, he disconnected and returned to his own email. The last message in his inbox caught his eye again. It had been sitting there for days, and he couldn’t bring himself to delete it.
From: George Tesla
To: Joe Tesla
Subject: Be careful
Son,
I’ve said things I shouldn’t, to people I shouldn’t. I’ve set them on paths. I don’t know where they might lead. Watch your step.
Dad
He sighed. He’d read it many times. It was part of the one-way conversation that his father had started up with him when Joe moved to New York. His father had once been a brilliant statistician and, despite his failings as a father, he’d at least bequeathed Joe the Tesla brains. That should count for something. So, Joe read his daily emails, but he never answered them. He’d never forgiven his father for his many sins of omission and commission during Joe’s childhood.
Today, too late, he wished that he had.
Edison nuzzled his hand. His brown eyes looked worried.
“I’m OK.” Joe scratched the dog behind the ears and dropped the phone into his pouch, cutting himself off from the grid again. “Lunch?”
Edison’s tail wagged at the familiar word, but his eyes said he knew Joe wasn’t OK.
Joe headed over to Grand Central’s underground food court. At the Tri-Tip Grill, he ordered steak sandwiches for himself and for Edison. Joe also got fries and a Coke, but Edison would have to make do with water once they got back to the house.
The dog’s eyes fastened on the brown paper bag, and he licked his lips.
“Soon enough,” Joe said. “Greedy Gus.”
Edison gave him an injured look and stood, ready to go.
By way of apology, Joe fished a piece of meat out of Edison’s sandwich and fed it to him, resting his hand on the dog’s shoulder before they hurried up the long ramp to the concourse.
He usually stopped to admire his surrogate heaven—the green-blue ceiling painted with Zodiac constellations was the only sky he saw these days—but today he gave it only a quick glance because he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A gray and white pigeon flew diagonally across the space, landing behind a carved ship’s wheel far from the floor.
A pair nested at the edge of the green-blue ceiling—the only wild animals in this man-made room. He wished that he had some dry corn to feed them. He and his father had fed the pigeons in Central Park during Joe’s rare visits. His father had practically tamed the pigeons, and they had perched on his wrist and had taken the corn from his palm. Joe would have liked to have tried to tame these two, but suspected that feeding them would draw unwanted attention and maybe get the birds in trouble, so he left them alone and admired them from afar.
He wove between travelers to get to the iconic clock mounted on the round information booth at the very center of the concourse—a familiar meeting place to any New Yorker. The clock read almost 12:30 (cyan, blue: red, black). He tapped on the brass door, and waved to Miss Evaline, the woman who presided over the booth with good-natured authority.
The information booth was built around a large, hollow column. Inside the column, a spiral staircase led to the creaky elevator that would carry Joe and Edison to their underground home.
“Did you have a nice walk?” Miss Evaline opened the door to the concourse and let them in. Curious tourists stopped to look. Civilians didn’t go through that door.
“We did, thank you.” Joe stepped inside and fitted his key into the second door. He needed to go downstairs, and he dreaded it. “How was your morning?”
“Busy. Can’t complain.” She straightened the black cap on her head before stooping to pet Edison. He was on duty, so he kept his serious face, but the tiny wag of his tail betrayed him. He liked her. “But I’m sorry to say you can’t go down right now.”
The bottom fell out of Joe’s stomach. “Why not?”
“Elevator inspection,” she said. “Should only be a few hours.”
Edison licked his hand, but it didn’t calm Joe down.
He thanked Evaline, but the words stuck in his throat. He needed to go home, but he didn’t have time to wind through the tunnels again. He had to be somewhere with Wi-Fi by one (cyan). Quickly, he ran over his Wi-Fi options: the Apple Store—too public; Track 36 (red, orange) by the Station Master’s office—even more public, he might not even get a chance to sit down; and the Hyatt—which would have to do. He could check into a hotel room for a few hours and get the Wi-Fi password from the concierge. Not long ago he would have balked at the expense, but it didn’t matter anymore. After Pellucid went public, he’d never had to worry about money again.
He jogged across the terminal, slid through the hallway separating the Hyatt from Grand Central without looking toward the glass doors leading outside, checked in, and took the elevator up to his temporary room. Even though he’d lived in the Hyatt for months before moving down below, he didn’t feel comfortable in the room. Its anonymity felt wrong, today of all days. This wasn’t where he should be for this call.
But he didn’t have a choice.
He dumped Edison’s sandwich onto a towel in the bathroom and filled the ice bucket with water so the dog could have a drink. Edison bolted his sandwich in three bites and lapped noisily at the water.
Joe glanced at the window that ran along one side of the room. The window looked onto the outside edge of Grand Central Terminal. He never saw the building from the outside.
Sunlight poured through the window onto the carpet. He couldn’t go near the light. The curtain was so close, but he’d have to cross the light to get to it. That wasn’t possible, so he’d have to sit on the floor on the other side of the bed with his laptop in his lap. Not ideal.
Edison trotted across the room, took the curtain gently in his mouth, and pulled it closed. The room was safe again. The dog’s ability to read Joe’s moods and respond was uncanny, and Joe loved him for it. He took another treat out of his pocket and gave it to him.
Joe clicked on the desk lamp and took his phone out of his pocket. He settled down to wait. He had made it with a few minutes to spare. He chewed his sandwich, not tasting it, and washed it down with a swig of cold Coke. He was too upset to stomach the fries.
The clock at the corner of his computer screen read one (cyan). He tapped his fingers against the desktop. He wanted the call to come in, and he didn’t want it to.
His phone rang. Vivian Torres was calling him on FaceTime. Characteristically prompt.
Sweat sprang up on Joe’s palms, and he wiped his hands on his pants before accepting the call.
Vivian looked tanner than usual. She’d been soaking up the summer sun, like nature intended. His father would have been proud of her. She’d also cut her black hair shorter, into a bob. It suited her, but just about everything suited her. Even though she didn’t seem to know it, she was a beautiful woman.
“Torres here. I’m at the entrance to the cemetery,” she said.
Hydraulic brakes sighed behind her, probably from the bus she’d arrived on. She tilted her phone to show a wrought-iron gate with New York Marble Cemetery written across the top.
The Tesla Legacy Page 3