He had taken over the plot of land that protesters now stood on. It still held a ramshackle homeless shelter that had already been condemned. He intended to pull the building down and build a laboratory in its place, one that produced PCB-eating bacteria. The bacteria would be bred here and released into the river, eating away the toxins and excreting harmless waste in return. In fact, one of their byproducts was electricity, and he was working to harness that, too.
His intervention would allow nature to heal herself. The lab was an unquestionable good, but he had spent a fortune battling lawsuits filed by dimwits who thought that beds for a hundred homeless drunkards and addicts were more important than safe water and a clean ecosystem for everyone. How could they care about the comfort of a few people, when the future of the river itself was at stake?
He’d received hate mail and death threats and had been regularly blasted on the Internet. Now they were out there waving signs that said Feed people, not bacteria and Wright is Wrong. He’d been tempted to use Spooky to fight back, but he hadn’t. His cause was big enough to absorb their vitriol. He was big enough. The Breakers took worse without blinking.
“Any minute, Mr. Wright,” said his harried-looking assistant. She’d been talking to the police, demanding that the crowds be cleared far enough for the camera crew to get a good shot of the river.
His secure phone buzzed, and he took it out of his suit pocket, hoping for a distraction, and saw a message from Quantum: suitcase not retrieved. in possession of joe tesla crazy millionaire.
Ash smiled at the telegraphic summary. It was always nice to see Joe belittled. As much as he despised the Breakers, he didn’t loathe them like he did Joe.
Ash had met Joe at a computer-security conference a few years before. Joe had worn jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt with a mushroom cloud on the front like any other paranoid techy. But while he’d looked like everyone else at the conference, he’d been sitting on a company that was soon valued at a billion dollars. A company, ironically, that was working to help law enforcement at the expense of privacy and security. How Joe reconciled that with his own staunch ideas on privacy, Ash never understood. Ash hated Pellucid. It put unprecedented power in the hands of the government and made it even harder for disruptive forces, forces that were not necessarily even illegal, to move unchecked. But Joe seemed not to have such qualms about the few repressing the rights of the many.
Ash had been at the beginning of his divorce then. He’d hoped the marriage would simply end, like a flopped business, and they would move on. But the divorce had drawn out over months as they battled for custody of Mariella, their profoundly autistic daughter. He lost his bid for full joint custody and instead was granted visitation every other weekend. She paid less and less attention to him every time he saw her.
After she’d been diagnosed, he’d funded research into the causes of her condition. Genetics loads the gun and the environment pulls the trigger, he’d been told. What a terrible metaphor to use for a parent whose child had been shot in the brain by an incurable condition.
One of the triggers was PCBs. That was why he was standing here today taking them out of the environment—for her. And she would never even notice.
The protesters’ angry chanting reminded him of his ex-wife, Rosa, and their arguments, more about angry tones than real content. In the midst of that strife, he’d met Joe Tesla at a bar near San Francisco’s Moscone Center. After a few drinks, Joe called him a “sad sack,” and Ash saw pity in those intelligent eyes. That was when he started to truly hate him.
Joe took him to the Golden Gate Bridge. Not, it turned out, to throw the pitiful Ash over the side, but to distract him with a climb to the top of the north tower in the middle of the night. Joe had climbing gear for both of them and a key to the tower.
He never learned how Joe got the key, or how he’d managed to get them up without being caught, but he would never forget staring down at the orange span glowing in the fog below him. The sight gave him a moment of peace and clarity, and a reminder that the rules didn’t apply to him. On the bridge, and in life, he had a perspective on the world that no one else did, and that gave him the right to bring his visions to reality. Just as Joe did. In fact, more of a right, because Ash’s vision would heal the world.
When he heard Joe had moved to New York, he expected a call. Ash had learned how they could get to the top of the Empire State Building and touch the antenna there. It was a simple matter of money. To show off, he had sent Joe a coded invitation to join him on his adventure, but the man never responded.
All Ash’s emails and calls went unanswered. When he saw the Forbes article about Joe’s agoraphobia, he knew why. Shame had driven his old acquaintance into a deep, dark, and lonely hole, and he didn’t want company. Joe deserved pity now, not Ash.
But even a trapped Joe was clever. Maybe they could work on Nikola Tesla’s device together. But what then? Joe wasn’t interested in disrupting the system, and he cared about human life.
He wouldn’t put people in danger. He didn’t share Ash’s big picture. That was why Joe had never turned up on Spooky. He wouldn’t be part of that kind of game. He would have left the homeless shelter there, left the PCBs in the water, let them eat away at the brains of toddlers.
Ironically, only the Breakers would understand his actions. Even if they were on the other side of the spectrum, they had a global perspective. They, too, were above the law.
No, Joe wouldn’t give him unfettered access to the plans for the Oscillator, so he would have to get them from him. If Joe came to grief over it, all the better.
He would track him, and he would take the device from him. Because of his illness, Joe was easier to track in the physical world than most. Since he lived near Grand Central Terminal and never went outside, he’d be easy to find. It would be like the proverb—like taking candy from a baby.
Ash tapped his thumb against the phone’s tiny screen, the grand view from the riverbank forgotten. He could hire surveillance teams, but that was too obvious. He’d tried to track Joe online over the years, just for fun, but the man was practically a ghost. Even his cell phone popped on and off the grid sporadically, showing up at Grand Central Terminal but nowhere else. He’d taken paranoia to a whole new level.
Glancing up to make sure that the event wasn’t ready to start, Ash returned his secure phone to his left pocket and took his regular phone out of his right. He typed up an email explaining he had heard about Joe’s father’s death “through the grapevine” and suggesting they meet for drinks at The Campbell Apartment. The bar was inside Grand Central Terminal, so that shouldn’t be a problem for Joe, although he didn’t mention that.
What would Ash do once he had the Oscillator? Maybe the device could be sent into space, attached to an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and deployed to save the world. Maybe it could destroy the Breakers’ fracking equipment, collapse their boreholes with what looked like fracking-induced earthquakes. That was a good start. Come to think of it, targeted earthquakes could also shake loose enough people to let the planet truly heal, since seven billion was not a sustainable population. He’d save his grandest ambitions for later and start small—with the Empire State Building.
His office there was overinsured anyway, but not by enough to be suspicious. He might start there, but he wouldn’t stop there. He realized he was smiling. The Oscillator was a powerful destructive force. He looked at the crumbling homeless shelter that would be leveled soon. The seeds of its destruction would grow into newer, better creations.
Who knew what the Oscillator might create in the world? It would have to be found. It would have to be tested. But the potential was there.
He must have it.
Only he would dare to use it properly, and to its full potential.
Chapter 14
Joe stood at the billiard table with pages spread out across the green baize. The blueprint with the sticky note on it was for an unnamed device. There was no picture of it fu
lly assembled, but it didn’t look as if it would turn into anything sinister. It looked like a tiny articulated figure run by gears and racks.
Nowadays it would be called a robot, but Nikola Tesla would have called it an automaton. Whatever it was called, it didn’t look worth all the trouble. Its harmless looks must be deceiving.
He read the newspaper clipping, learning about the collapse of a bridge in Connecticut a few months before he was born. Three (red) people had died. The article speculated that metal fatigue was responsible for the disaster. His father had stuck another yellow note on the picture of the broken bridge. On that one he wrote: I was responsible for this. May God forgive me. Show the wisdom I did not and have the courage to destroy it.
Joe had no idea what his father wanted him to destroy. He was hoping that the automaton would give him a clue, because he knew that he would follow his father on one last, crazy adventure and try to do as he asked.
Maybe it would help him to make sense of the man. Maybe it would help him to make sense of himself. Or maybe it was another wild-goose chase. Whatever it was, it was the last thing he had from a father he’d ignored too long.
He studied the newspaper clipping. How like his father to give him this as his final gift—guilt and a confusing request to show wisdom without an explanation as to how or why. Could his father have knocked down the bridge? If so, what did that action have to do with the plans for a tiny automaton?
Joe pored over the plans, making a list of items he would need to build the tiny creature. By the time he finished, his list looked a lot like the lists in Nikola’s folder.
His neck cracked when he straightened up. Too long bending over the billiard table. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. Time for bed, but he still had stuff to do.
First, he gathered the original plans and put them in the old cardboard box his father had saved for him. Even though he’d photographed every scrap of paper in the box and backed up the photos, he felt as if he ought to lock the box in a safe, just in case.
But he didn’t have a safe. He didn’t need one, because his entire house was more secure than most banks. He took the box upstairs to his office and stashed it in a closet behind boxes of turn-of-the-century Christmas decorations. It seemed like the last place anyone would look.
He stuck his parts list in his pocket and went down to the kitchen to make a cup of chamomile tea. Some previous inhabitant of the house had purchased an electric kettle made out of copper. Based on the wiring, he thought the device had been created in the 1930s. So far, it had always worked, and it had never threatened to set the house on fire, but he reminded himself, again, that it might be a good idea to take it apart and replace the electronics. He had no intention of parting with the dinged kettle itself. It belonged to the house.
Tea in hand, he headed to the parlor. His upstairs office was fine during the day, but he preferred to spend his evenings working on his laptop in the parlor. He liked the warmth of the fireplace. Edison did, too. The dog was stretched out in front of the artificial flames, snoring away.
Joe set the teacup on the marble-topped coffee table like a Victorian gentleman. This was a room his non-ancestor Nikola Tesla would have understood. Except for the laptop on the ottoman, everything dated from Nikola’s era, and the inventor would have recognized the laptop as a device he had predicted over a hundred years before, one that could wirelessly send and transmit information across the globe.
Nothing here would shock Nikola. For all Joe knew, Nikola Tesla might have visited this underground house and sat in this very parlor. He might have known the designer of one of the largest electrical underground rail systems in the world—one that ran under his very feet. If so, why wouldn’t the man have invited the famous scientist here for tea?
Joe pulled the leather armchair closer to the fire and set his shopping list on the arm. It wouldn’t take him too long to order the parts. He’d have them sent to his lawyer’s office. Mr. Rossi would forward them by bike courier to the information booth. That was how Joe got all his mail.
Before he started ordering, he needed to check his email. He’d been off the grid for most of the day, other than a quick note to his administrative assistant to tell everyone he’d be unreachable.
One (cyan) email had been sorted into his Private folder, and he went there first to see an email from Alan Wright, CEO of Wright Industries. Joe paused before answering it. Alan had sent him a few emails over the months he’d been in New York, and he hadn’t answered any of them. He hadn’t wanted Alan to see him penned up in the tunnels like a hamster.
He skimmed the email. Alan had heard of his father’s death and wished to express his sympathy. How had Alan heard, and why did he care?
Joe hadn’t told anyone but Celeste and Vivian about his father’s death, but the Internet was a giant tattletale, so presumably the whole world knew. Anyway, Alan wanted to meet tomorrow for a drink at The Campbell Apartment—a trendy cocktail lounge in Grand Central Terminal. That couldn’t be an accidental choice. Alan must know he was trapped here.
In some ways, Alan was as trapped as Joe. He could move around the world, but he couldn’t escape from his role as a billionaire CEO. Joe knew the trap of being surrounded by people suddenly afraid to tell him the truth, afraid to open up to him, ready to lie to make him happy, certain his life was far too glamorous for them and their concerns. He wondered if Alan missed being ordinary as much as he did. He tapped out a quick answer, arranging to meet him the next evening at eight (purple) for drinks.
Then he switched over to his Work folder which contained bug reports and a couple of questions from the young software architect he’d been grooming to take over maintenance of the facial recognition engine so that Joe could switch to working on gait recognition.
Gait recognition was new and interesting. In gait recognition, the computer tried to determine a subject’s identity from the way he or she walked. Gait recognition enabled identification from a much farther distance than facial recognition. It was surprisingly effective.
He dealt with those emails before moving to his newest folder, RRT, an abbreviation for Recognition Request Tracking. He whistled in surprise, and Edison lifted his head.
“It’s OK, boy, go on back to sleep,” Joe said.
But it wasn’t OK. Just the opposite. In the last few hours, a million more requests had been made than the week before. That didn’t make sense. Either his software had a bug, or all the governmental agencies in the United States were experiencing a massive crime wave, or something new had come online, probably something automated. His stomach clenched.
List forgotten, he logged into the system and began tracking the requests down, compiling reports of where the requests originated and the reasons why. So far, they all came from a single source.
Edison nudged his knee, but Joe pushed him away. “Busy, Edison.”
The dog dropped his head into Joe’s lap, blocking his view of the screen.
“What do you need?” He looked at the clock on the corner of his computer. He’d been sitting here for hours. “Bedtime?”
Edison wagged his tail and looked meaningfully at the door. The dog didn’t think it was healthy to sit here this long. He was right, of course. But he didn’t have to go to the bathroom. When he did, he stood by the door and gave a bark to let Joe know it was important. Just a single bark, because Edison, or Joe, was well trained.
“It’s going to be a while, buddy,” Joe told him. “Sorry.”
Edison gave him a skeptical look and wandered out toward the kitchen. A crunching sound indicated he had found a midnight snack.
Joe scrolled through the reports he’d just generated. It was unmistakable. The National Security Agency was submitting millions of match requests.
What was their source material? He found that, too. They’d submitted surveillance footage from all across the country—people going into stores, people crossing the street, people leaving church, people eating at McDonald’s. Any of those requests wou
ld have been normal, but so many of them at once meant they had tapped into thousands of surveillance cameras and were looking for automated matches of the millions of people who appeared on the videos. Those people couldn’t all be criminals or terrorists—the vast majority of them were innocent. But they were still being tracked.
Millions of innocent people were being tracked.
And Joe had created the monster.
Chapter 15
Vivian checked her phone. She’d been pacing the corridor outside of Mrs. Tesla’s suite for hours. The woman hadn’t come out, although a room-service cart had gone in. Vivian had intercepted it outside the door, searched it, and patted down the bewildered Hispanic waiter.
The elevator dinged, and she tensed, as she had about a hundred times over the course of the evening. So far she’d watched a drunken couple practically have sex in the hall, a bored businessman with a briefcase head straight to his room, four guys in black T-shirts who smelled like pot and couldn’t stop laughing stumble to their room, and a guy lugging what she swore was a monkey in a dog carrier.
Dirk stepped out of the elevator, and she relaxed. He was here to replace her, and she had trusted him with her life for years.
A police officer by day, he sometimes moonlighted for Mr. Rossi’s security company. Mr. Rossi was Tesla’s lawyer. She’d met Tesla when Mr. Rossi had hired her to protect him. But Tesla had given her the slip and disappeared underground—reappearing with the agoraphobia that still plagued him. If she’d kept an eye on him as she should have, he’d be fine today.
“Yo,” Dirk said. The circles under his eyes looked darker than usual, and his jeans and white shirt looked as if he’d slept in them. Not his usual dapper self.
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