The Tesla Legacy

by Rebecca Cantrell

  Chapter 41

  Joe closed his bedroom door. He’d promised to rest to persuade his mother and Vivian to leave him in peace. They’d agreed to go topside to shop.

  Dr. Stauss was downstairs, probably in the parlor. His mother had installed him in one of the spare bedrooms and herself in one of the others. The doctor seemed to have taken a leave of absence from his regular job to look after Joe round the clock, but at least Dr. Stauss left him some breathing room.

  Joe had snagged his laptop from the parlor and hidden it in his closet. Now he dug behind his clothes and shoes and an old fedora Celeste had talked him into buying years ago, and pulled out the laptop. The doctor had expressly forbidden him computers, TV, or reading. He was supposed to rest his brain, and it was slowly driving Joe insane.

  His brain didn’t like to rest. It liked to think and do things. A week of lying around in a darkened room trying not to think was too much.

  Besides, according to Vivian, the police had only a rough sketch of Joe’s attacker from the security guard who had found. Joe would be able to establish the man’s identity in a matter of minutes. That would barely tax his brain at all.

  With a sigh of relief, he settled down in his bed. Edison gave him a suspicious glance from his blanket on the floor. Apparently, even the dog had been briefed on the rules.

  “Shh!” Joe told him. “Don’t snitch on me.”

  Edison lowered his head to his paws and closed his eyes. Maybe he thought that if he couldn’t see Joe cheating, it didn’t count.

  Joe logged in, connected to the darknet, and hacked into the surveillance cameras for the New Yorker Hotel. He’d hacked into those for Grand Central a thousand times before, so it wasn’t really going to require much cognitive energy to do this. Not enough to count.

  It took him a few tries to get through, as he kept forgetting obvious steps. Dr. Stauss had assured him that gaps in his knowledge at this stage were perfectly normal and that he would get better soon, so long as he rested. He had to hope that the doctor was right. As soon as he was done with this, he would rest.

  He fast-forwarded through footage until he got a good angle on his attacker’s face. It was much clearer than the old images from Grand Central. The police hadn’t been able to do much with the New Yorker Hotel images, but they didn’t have the same tools he did. Pellucid was founded on his ability to clean up images and match faces to surveillance videos. He’d get further.

  Making educated guesses, he ran the image through a few enhancement tools. When it was as clear as it was going to get, he checked it against a backup of the criminal database that his team used for testing purposes. It was an old snapshot of the database, so crimes committed in the past six months wouldn’t be listed, but he hoped that his attacker had been caught for something before that.

  He closed his eyes and let his mind wander. It helped with the pain. Dr. Stauss was probably right about resting.

  His computer dinged, and he looked at the match. That was the man who attacked him in Grand Central, followed him onto the train, tased Edison and locked him up, and dropped a wardrobe on his head. Michael Pham.

  He took a few cleansing breaths to calm himself. If he passed out in bed with his laptop and his mother came in, she’d probably throw it against the wall. He had to be careful.

  When the pain subsided, he tried again. Reading took longer than usual, too, but he was able to glean the big picture. Michael Pham had first been arrested for hacking into his school’s computer network and changing his grades—an offense that should have been sealed as part of his juvenile record, but wasn’t. After that he’d done time for more serious crimes—stealing credit card information from Target and an assault charge that had been pleaded down to self-defense. Not a lot of hackers with assault charges. He was also listed as a person of interest in a homicide, but the police hadn’t been able to link it to him decisively. A tough geek.

  Joe closed his eyes again and thought about the Target hack. It had been a sophisticated scheme using a dancing-baby video as click bait to install a virus that uploaded files while the baby kept dancing. A similar attack had been perpetrated by the hacker collective Spooky against a chemical company, except that they’d used a dancing otter. He couldn’t remember the name of the company, which was odd, but he remembered Dr. Stauss’s words and hoped the loss was temporary.

  Meanwhile, the info gave him another lead on Michael Pham.

  Before he forgot, he forwarded the Pham’s name and picture to Detective Bailey. She’d have to run his name through the system to get the same match that he had, but the police would be able to do that. He hoped she wouldn’t ask where he got the image from, but it was too late to worry about that.

  Could Spooky be behind the Oscillator’s disappearance? He shook his head, and pain knifed through it. Nausea rose right behind it, and he closed his eyes and waited it out. Once the pain subsided to a roar, he tried to think again.

  No. Spooky had never been violent in the past. They were ruthless in exposing the actions and foibles of those they didn’t agree with, but they had never taken direct physical action to harm someone, so far as he knew. Whoever had taken the Oscillator was willing to kill him, and might have killed his father’s friend Professor Egger. That didn’t sound like Spooky.

  Professor Egger. What was going on with the investigation into his death? Vivian had said it was being treated as an overdose, but maybe there was more to it than that. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he had died mysteriously so soon after Joe’s father. Well, maybe it could, but maybe not. He sent another email off to Vivian, telling her to contact the police about Egger, and maybe check back with Patel. Maybe he’d remembered something else.

  So this Michael Pham had a powerful weapon. One that could knock down bridges or buildings or, in the words of Nikola Tesla, split the earth in two.

  Chapter 42

  Vivian stood at the corner of Broadway and East Twelfth. Heat radiated up from the sidewalk. As a kid she’d sometimes pretended that the sidewalks were lava and jumped from crack to crack to keep from being incinerated. Right now, that didn’t seem like such a bad plan.

  She envied the people around her in their shorts and T-shirts while she wore a business suit to conceal her gun. Dirk was at the house with the Teslas, because she’d had to come out here—she was still on duty, and she wasn’t letting her guard down.

  That was why she spotted Professor Patel long before he saw her. Tossing glances over his shoulder every block, he was an easy man to pick out of the crowd. The confident man she’d spoken to a few days ago was gone. She watched his approach and those around him. If he was being followed, his followers were very good, because she didn’t spot anyone.

  When he noticed her, his expression grew even more wary. She turned as if she hadn’t seen him. She’d called him, and he’d said that he would call her back and hung up almost immediately. When he did, she suspected from the background noise that he was using a pay phone. Since he probably had phones in his house, his office, and his pocket, that wasn’t a good sign. Patel was spooked. He’d told her to meet him here, but he hadn’t said why.

  She went into Strand, the giant bookstore where he’d suggested they meet. A wave of air conditioning engulfed her, and she ran her hand through her sweaty hair to bring cold air to her scalp. Shelves towered overhead, crammed with books of every shape and color. Rows and rows of shelves. Strand Book Store advertised that it had eighteen miles of books, and she believed it.

  A red sign on a white pillar told her that she could browse in the Strand Underground, and it made her think of Tesla. She was sure that he would love this place with its quirky titles, the smell of books, and plain metal ladders stationed everywhere. He’d love it, and he’d likely never see it.

  She moved deeper into the store and stopped at a table marked with a sign bearing the silhouette of Venus de Milo and the title Art on the Edge. A clear sightline of the door meant that she’d be able to see Patel and he’d be abl
e to see her as soon as he came in. Given his paranoia level, she didn’t want to approach him. Best to let him approach her.

  Patel entered the store. He saw her right away, but he didn’t come to her. Instead, he walked up to a table of new mysteries. Vivian picked up a brightly colored art book, but didn’t even look at the pages as she slowly flipped through them. All her attention was on Patel in her peripheral vision.

  He picked up a book with an orange stripe across the middle of the cover, paged slowly through it, and slipped a tiny piece of paper between its pages. Then he put the book down and walked out the front door. So much for having a conversation.

  She wanted to run across the room and yank the book off the table immediately, but she strolled toward it slowly, stopping to look at other books, all the while making sure that no one else was interested in the one Patel had handled. Finally, she reached it.

  The cover of his book had a woman in a hat at the top, a streetcar at the bottom, and an orange stripe in the middle that displayed the title and author’s name: City of Ghosts by Kelli Stanley. The book looked pretty interesting, but Vivian flipped to the center and took out the paper. Patel had written:

  Behind Farm City by Novella Carpenter

  She slipped the note into her pants pocket and looked around. Farm City must be a book title, but how was she going to find it in here? Eighteen miles of books were a lot to search, especially since she didn’t know what the book was about and didn’t want to draw attention to it by asking. And why was Patel sending her to a book anyway? He could have written a little more on the damn note.

  She pulled out her phone, brought up thestrandbookstore.com and searched for the title. Apparently, Farm City was about farming and raising chickens. She remembered that egg yolk-yellow bow tie that Egger had worn to the funeral. Behind an egg-farming book was the perfect place for Egger to hide a clue. Maybe Patel was sending her to something that Egger had hidden.

  After a bit of wandering, she found Agriculture & Farming in the used section. She scanned through titles, eventually ending up standing atop a ladder. According to the Internet, the store had two copies of Farm City, and she found them in the dingiest corner on the highest shelf. She bet that no one ever came here.

  As she pulled the books out, she noticed something behind them. After a quick glance to make sure no one was watching, she removed the other books around Farm City. Standing up behind them was a laptop.

  Tesla would have a field day. A secret hidden laptop, and he wasn’t allowed to use the computer. She brought down the laptop and stuck it in her purse, then bought both copies of Farm City, just in case. When she left the store and stepped into the solid heat outside, she felt as paranoid as Patel and had to remind herself not to give herself away by looking up and down the street.

  Chapter 43

  Ash was in his panic room. He’d installed it so he’d have a place where he could be truly alone. None of the servants could penetrate here without the eight-digit access code, and he’d given the numbers to no one. If he died in here, they would be able to retrieve his body only by taking apart the room itself.

  He had furnished the room as a gentleman’s library. Unlike the simple, ecologically sound designs that he used to make a statement in the rest of his homes and offices, this one secret place could reflect his heart’s desire.

  An antique Persian rug covered golden oak planks. He had rescued them both from a nineteenth century house that was being demolished upstate. That house had also given him a red leather wingback chair that Jules Verne himself could have sat in. He’d had to look for the oversized mahogany desk, but it was worth the effort. Pigeonholes held notes and plans and curious objects he’d gathered over the course of his life.

  Right now, the desktop was covered by a giant leather blotter with one item sitting in the center: the Oscillator. The device had rested there for a week. Every night he came in to check on it.

  After he’d found Quantum and dealt with him, he’d been forced to wait again because Quantum’s stunt at the airport had prompted scrutiny of the man’s accounts, and Ash wanted to be sure that Quantum’s connections to Spooky, and to Ash, were not revealed. So far, there was no hint that they had been. Quantum hadn’t left any little time bombs for him after all.

  That meant that Ash could act now, but first he was going to take the device apart so that he would know how it was made. He picked up his camera and filmed the outside casing, then put the camera down to concentrate on the device.

  A few choice curse words and banged knuckles later, he had removed the metal plate that covered the bottom of the device. When he looked inside, he saw gears and pistons and wires meshed together in inexplicable complexity. He was a software guy, not an electrical engineer. Joe Tesla had always tinkered with gadgets, but Ash never had. He regretted that now.

  This left him with a dilemma. He could hire someone to disassemble the device and draw up plans for making another one—and be discreet while doing so. Then, after that person built the new device, Ash could have him eliminated so nothing could be traced back to Ash. It would all take time. The alternative was to view this as a one-time event—this Oscillator would destroy one building and that would be the end of it.

  He didn’t like either of those options.

  Not sure what to do, he picked up the steel plate he’d removed. The outside was painted gray, probably to blend in with its surroundings in the basement, but the inside was bare metal with designs on its surface.

  He brought the plate closer to the light to reveal figures etched into the metal’s surface. They were too tiny to read, so he photographed them and zoomed in on the photographs. At a larger magnification, their purpose was clear—the metal was covered with plans that showed how to build the entire device. Nikola Tesla’s secrets were laid bare in front of Ash.

  He could hire someone to build ten or a hundred at some remote facility with no Internet connectivity. A plane crash on the way home would solve the traceability problem. It was all possible.

  For now, he needed another metal plate to replace this one. He’d keep the original plate in the safe embedded in the floor of the panic room so that he would always be sure to have the plans that it carried on its surface. The photographs were useful, but he wanted the original, too.

  He might not be a tinkerer, but he could definitely screw a new plate onto the bottom of the device. Then, he would use it on the Empire State Building, even though it housed his own office. No one would expect that.

  He could take out the Breakers, cash in on his insurance, and be completely in the clear after the Empire State Building collapsed.

  On Sunday, so that there would be minimal loss of life.

  So thoughtful.

  Chapter 44

  Joe glanced once at his closed door, then cocked his head. No noises from upstairs. He felt like a naughty ten-year-old as he leaned over and peeked under his own bed. No monsters, just two laptops and two copies of that chicken-farming book. One laptop was his, but that wasn’t what interested him right now. He reached for the other one, Egger’s, and pulled it out.

  When he sat up, he felt light-headed. But he was improving quickly. The headaches came less often, and although he still sometimes forgot how to do the simplest things, his mind felt clearer. His mother and Dr. Stauss apparently agreed, because they’d left him alone, instead of sitting by his bed and nagging him about resting.

  A faint smell of lilac drifted up when he leaned back. He adjusted the pillows behind him, then flipped open the laptop. As expected: password protected. Given enough time, he could crack it, but he hoped that he might not need to. Egger had gone to all the trouble of hiding the laptop and telling Patel. He must have known that his life was in danger and wanted someone to find it. So he would have made his password something easy to guess.

  A couple of minutes later, he began to doubt that theory. He’d tried Egger’s name, birthdate, wife’s name and birthdate, and a handful of passwords from a list of the
most common passwords, but had come up empty. If he didn’t guess it soon, he’d have to run some hacking programs that would brute force it by using combinations of dictionary words and symbols, but that would feel like defeat and might take days. He should be able to think this through.

  Patel hadn’t given Vivian the section and shelf name to find the laptop. He’d given her a specific book title. Maybe the books had been more than a marker for the location of the laptop. He fetched them from under the bed, glancing toward Edison’s empty blanket. The dog was out for a walk with Andres Peterson, cavorting in the sun and grass as he deserved, but Joe missed him.

  Back to work. The book’s cover featured a rooster standing on a brick wall with a blue sky behind him. Urban farming. Maybe he ought to try it. Not raising chickens, of course, but he could try to grow things out in the tunnel in front of his house. He had unlimited electricity and water, so why not hook up some grow lights and put in vegetables? If they could theoretically grow plants on the moon or Mars, he ought to be able to put some in down here.

  He blinked. He’d let his mind wander again, and he reminded himself he wasn’t looking at this book to find out how to grow vegetables, he was trying to get into Egger’s laptop. First, he tried the author’s name and book title in varying permutations. Nothing.

  A fresh round of pain pounded through his head with each failure. Pity pain, he decided to call it. He turned the book over, checked the back and the spine for clues, then opened it up. A lightly written dedication was penciled on the inside of the front cover: To my darling Ada. He checked the second book. Same inscription.

  According to the Internet, Mrs. Egger had been named Patsy, and she’d never had children. No Adas. Ada was an uncommon name, quaint to modern ears. Maybe it wasn’t the name—it was the entire inscription.

  He grinned. This was it. Knowing that it would work, he typed in the phrase. He held his breath and pressed the button to log in. The laptop complied. A standard desktop with a picture of a fried egg, sunny-side up, appeared on the screen. He was in.