He snatched a quick glance to the side. He needed a tunnel, an open door, anything that would let him and Edison hide or escape.
No exits.
Chapter 10
November 28, 5:46 a.m.
Tunnels
Joe ran, arms close to his sides so that they didn’t strike the train or the tunnel. The screech of metal on metal as the train braked scraped every nerve in his body. If he’d dared to raise his hands, he would have clapped them over his ears.
Silver cars whizzed by close enough to touch. The smell of metal and electricity urged him on.
Light bloomed ahead. The train slowed.
A platform.
The train arrived ahead of him, stopping with a jerk. Joe threw a glance over his shoulder. He jumped across the third rail, ducked past a pillar, and reached the stairs that led to the platform opposite where the train had stopped. Edison tore up the stairs ahead of him.
A few passengers stood waiting for the next train. Joe barreled past them and up toward the terminal itself. He and Edison didn’t stop running until they reached the lobby of the Hyatt.
Once there, he stopped. Sweat soaked his shirt. His heart pounded, and he could not stop shaking. The screech and thunder of the train still rang in his ears. He had almost died down there. A single stumble would have killed him.
Frederick, the concierge, hurried over. “Mr. Tesla, are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” Joe said.
“Let’s sit down.”
Frederick led him to his regular chair by the Starbucks stand. Tiffany was setting up for the start of her day, loading a tray full of pastries into the glass display case. Her eyes widened when she saw him.
Joe sat and examined Edison, running his hands along the dog’s body from head to tail. He was uninjured physically, but the usually mellow dog pressed against Joe’s legs, back bowed with fear.
“It’s OK, Edison,” he said. “It was close, but we’re OK.”
Edison nosed his head between Joe’s leg and the chair, and Joe petted his back.
Tiffany pressed a warm cup into his hand. “Chamomile. It’s calming.”
He realized that they thought he’d had another panic attack. They’d seen him have enough of them as he’d tried over and over again to leave the hotel by the front door. But this time his danger was external.
He took a slow sip of tea, then pulled his cell phone from its special pocket. His hands shook so that he could not dial.
Another sip of tea. A round of deep breaths. He was an expert in recovering from moments when he expected to die. The surprise gift of his panic attacks: They had prepared him to deal with real panic.
“Thanks,” he said. “We’re OK.”
Tiffany and Frederick left him alone. He closed his eyes, willing his breathing to slow, his heart to calm.
He started to dial 911, but stopped before he pressed the Send button. In his current state, they’d never believe him. Even if they did, they’d drag him down to their offices to question him. He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t go outside.
Instead, he called his lawyer, Daniel Rossi. Daniel answered immediately, one of the perks of his Pellucid money.
“There’s a situation down in the tunnels.”
“A situation?” said Daniel. He sounded as if he’d been up for hours.
Joe quietly described everything that had happened, keeping an eye on the nearly empty lobby in case someone might overhear.
“Stay there,” Daniel said. “I’ll take care of this. For the love of God, don’t talk to a single solitary other person about this until I get there.”
He hung up.
Joe fed Edison a treat and finished his tea, feeling his heartbeat slow. He was safe. It was OK. Tiffany and Frederick watched him, but they didn’t seem too worried. He guessed that was one advantage of cracking up regularly in their lobby.
His phone rang. Celeste. He hoped it wasn’t her nurse, Patty, with bad news.
“Joe,” he answered, holding his breath until he heard her voice.
“Good morning!” She sounded breathless, as if she had been the one running instead of him.
“You’re up early.” She never called before ten.
“A little bird told me that you’re in trouble.”
“How?” He’d barely even hung up on Daniel, and he trusted the attorney.
“I know people who know people,” she said.
“Daniel?” he asked.
She laughed. “He would never betray a client. And I would never betray a source.”
How much should he tell her? She had enough to worry about. He needed to protect her. “I found something weird.”
“A partial truth,” she said.
“Are you having a strong day?” Distraction might work.
“Neutral,” she said. “Zero.”
“Black,” he answered automatically. “Like the ocean at night.”
“I like that,” she said. “I’d paint that if I could.”
“It’d be beautiful.”
She let out her breath in what now constituted a laugh. “Are you going to hack into God knows where and put up black waves, like the seagull?”
“Do you want me to?” As soon as he finished meeting with Daniel.
“Not this time,” she said. “Let’s keep it just between us. A secret. Speaking of—”
A hand touched his shoulder, and he jumped.
“Just me.” Daniel held up his hands in mock surrender. “Please tell me that’s not the police.”
“I gotta go, Celeste.” He hung up, hoping that she hadn’t heard Daniel’s words.
Daniel smoothed back his unkempt hair. He looked as if he’d run the whole way. “Have you talked to anyone else? What did you tell Celeste?”
“That I found something weird. That’s all,” Joe said. “Shouldn’t I talk to the police, tell them, too?”
“Under no circumstances.”
“There’s a dead man,” Joe said. “And I was chased by a guy with a gun. Serious stuff.”
“I understood that from your call and relayed the information to Mr. Goldstone from our criminal division,” his lawyer said. “He’ll pass those details along.”
“I don’t have anything to hide.” Joe stroked Edison’s floppy ears. They were both much calmer.
“The first rule of a criminal attorney is that you never let your client talk to the police.” Daniel fiddled with his shirt cuffs. “Ever.”
“I’m not a criminal, and you’re not a criminal lawyer.”
“You hired me to give you advice. I can tell you right now that it’s never in your best interest to talk to the police. Remember how they say ‘anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law’?”
“So?”
“Notice how they don’t say it can be used for you?” Daniel’s voice was low and conversational. No one in the lobby so much as glanced at them. “Mr. Goldstone will report the crime and keep your name confidential.”
Joe had been raised in a circus, and it had been drilled into him that he could never trust the police, that people in authority would always rule against you. Maybe the old rules were right. Maybe his time in the world of pure numbers had made him naïve.
“You said on the phone that you can’t give the police a description because you never saw him and that you can’t identify his voice because he was whispering. There is nothing you can tell them that will help you, and a lot that could harm you.”
Joe had to agree.
Chapter 11
November 28, 6:09 a.m.
Grand Central Hyatt
Vivian marched up the stone stairs to the lobby, looking for trouble. She didn’t find any. She recognized the short concierge from her last visit. The freckled teenage girl working Starbucks didn’t look like a killer. The lobby was otherwise empty, except for her employer, Daniel Rossi, and the man he was talking to. She could see only the back of his head, then he turned slightly, and she recognized
him. Joe Tesla.
She checked out the second floor, or at least as much of it as was visible through the atrium. No one stood along the glass dividers that overlooked the first floor. It was too early to see much activity here. She’d been woken from a sound sleep just a few minutes before, swiped deodorant under her arms, jumped into her clothes, and caught a cab straight here. Mr. Rossi had said that it was urgent.
Mr. Rossi resembled an older George Clooney, and usually traded on it, but this morning his perfect salt-and-pepper hair was disheveled. Tesla, on the other hand, looked flat-out terrible. He’d been pale last time she saw him, but now he was practically ghostly. It made sense, since he didn’t go outside, but it looked creepy, almost supernatural.
To make matters worse, he didn’t just look like a ghost, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. His eyes were wide, he was jiggling his knee, and he petted the dog at his side over and over with little jerky movements. He was very different from the confident man she’d followed six months before.
She moved into Mr. Rossi’s line of sight, but where Tesla couldn’t see her. She’d wait there until Mr. Rossi gave her a signal to approach. In the meantime, she scanned the lobby again. A freshly shaved businessman in a blue suit exited the elevators and headed to the escalator. He held a gleaming black briefcase in one hand, carelessly, as if the contents weren’t that important. Otherwise, no movement.
Mr. Rossi nodded to her, and she walked over to be introduced.
Tesla had a firm handshake, and he paused for a second when he met her eyes. He scrutinized her face for a second longer than usual, as if he recognized her. Did he? He’d been pretty messed up when she’d met him, barely able to walk.
“I’m assigning you Ms. Torres,” Mr. Rossi said. “For close protection.”
Tesla’s eyes narrowed. “You think that I need a bodyguard?”
“I think one would not come amiss,” Mr. Rossi answered. “And I’d advise you to move back into a room at the Hyatt for a few days while this matter is resolved.”
What matter? She’d only heard that she was to meet Mr. Rossi here and provide security for a client. She hadn’t known who it would be until she saw Mr. Tesla, and she still didn’t know why, just that it was urgent.
“I appreciate your concern, but I’m not moving back up here,” Tesla said.
Mr. Rossi smiled his lawyer smile that gave nothing away. “Very well. But do please let Ms. Torres accompany you, at least for the next twenty-four hours.”
Tesla looked as if he wanted to argue, but he nodded. “Let’s get breakfast.”
Mr. Rossi begged off, and she and Tesla and the dog headed out for Grand Central Terminal—a tough place to provide protection.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather eat here?” she asked. “Or somewhere more secluded?”
“No,” Tesla said shortly.
They ended up in the food court at the Tri Tip Grill for breakfast, where Tesla didn’t bat an eyelash when she ordered steak and eggs. Lots of men acted surprised to see a woman eat. Tesla ordered steak and eggs, too, and a double steak, rare, for the dog. Privileges of being a millionaire’s pet.
She kept her eyes moving around the crowded room. Unless an attacker came toward them in slow motion, she’d have trouble spotting him until he was right on top of Tesla. Still, she searched for people who looked at them too long, people with suspicious bulges under their arms that might be guns, men who moved like they had military or law enforcement training.
Vivian was no good at small talk, but she figured she’d better give it a try. “Mr. Rossi says you’re related to Nikola Tesla.”
“On my father’s side. A couple of generations back.” His mouth pursed as if he didn’t want to talk about it.
The plates arrived—no more small talk necessary. The waiter seemed to know the dog and put his plate straight on the floor.
“I didn’t know that they served dogs here,” she said.
“He’s not a regular dog,” Tesla said. “He’s a psychiatric service animal.”
A bad conversational trail to go down. “I hear your company makes facial-recognition software. How does that work?”
His shoulders relaxed fractionally. At last, a safe topic of conversation. “We compare pictures in databases to pictures out in the world to match them up.”
“Surveillance camera pictures are usually pretty unclear,” she said. “How can you recognize a face in them enough to make a match?”
“We use many different factors.” He ran his knife across the egg yolk. “First, we measure the distance between your features—how far apart your eyes are, how deep your eye sockets are, how long your jaw is, in millimeters, stuff like that—and we use the information to create a faceprint.”
“Are those numbers unique?” She touched her jaw.
“Yes,” he said. “If we get a good 3-D image, a faceprint is as unique as a fingerprint. But good 3-D images are hard to come by, so we can’t rely on having them. After we get the measurements, we map the surface and texture of your skin. With that data, and algorithms I developed for rotating faces if the subject isn’t looking into the camera at the right angle, we can tell you apart from your identical twin. Every time.”
Vivian took a long sip of coffee. “So much for all those twin movies.”
He smiled. “That’s a big market for us, identifying twins in movies.”
“I bet.”
She concentrated on her steak for a while before speaking again. “So, you reduce the human face to numbers?”
“If you break it down far enough, everything is numbers.”
“And you’re good with numbers?”
“I see them in my head, as colors, and I can move them around.” His eyes shifted past hers, as if he didn’t want to admit it. “It’s called synesthesia.”
“Cool!” She’d never heard of it.
He gave her the kind of shy smile she hadn’t expected to see from a millionaire.
“What’s it like?” she asked.
“It’s just different,” he said. “My brain has always been different from everybody else’s.”
She nodded.
“It used to be a good thing,” he said. “It got me out of the circus and into the world of technology.”
He didn’t seem coordinated enough to be in an actual circus. Maybe it was a metaphor. “That doesn’t seem too bad.”
He shrugged. “Now that my mind is keeping me trapped inside, being different isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
What could she say to that?
After their conversation, the day went better. They wandered the shops at Grand Central Terminal for a bit, and then he said he wanted to go down to his underground house. She’d heard about the house from Mr. Rossi that morning. It seemed too far-fetched to be real, but so did The Campbell Apartment, also in Grand Central, which had belonged to a 1920s tycoon before eventually being remodeled into a bar, so she supposed there was precedent.
Anyway, getting him someplace less crowded would be a good thing. She didn’t know why he needed protection, but clearly something had happened to him that had scared him enough for him to call Mr. Rossi at six in the morning. Personally, she couldn’t think of a single situation where she would call Mr. Rossi that early. Including nuclear Armageddon.
She let him enter the concourse a little ahead of her, scanning the area. The pillars would give cover to an army, but there was nothing she could do about that.
Straight ahead, people darted back and forth, most arriving for their workdays in the city. Too many to count. Too many to watch. But none raised a red flag.
Tesla made for the center of the concourse and the information booth into which he’d disappeared all those months before. Her niece, Abby, said that the round booth reminded her of a layer cake—waist-high marble, glass windows, glass roof, and the famous clock perched on top like a candle. She remembered watching the movie Madagascar with Abby. The little girl had laughed herself silly when the giraffe got his
head stuck inside that clock.
Tesla tapped on the information booth’s door, and a chubby black woman with the name tag “Evaline” opened the door. This must be the entrance to his underground house. Who had he been visiting down there when he disappeared all those months before?
“I have a guest today, Miss Evaline,” Tesla said. “A Miss Vivian Torres.”
Evaline folded her arms across her ample bosom. “Unless she’s on the authorized list, you know I can’t let her go down there.”
Vivian braced herself for a struggle. She wasn’t going to let Tesla out of her sight, even if it meant that she had to throw him to the ground and hog-tie him. Her orders were clear—keep constant visual contact until notified by Mr. Rossi himself.
“I think she might be on the list,” Tesla said. “She works for Rossi and Rossi.”
Evaline raised one skeptical eyebrow, but typed into a small gray box.
Vivian waited.
“You are authorized, Ms. Torres.” Evaline moved aside. “Come on in.”
Tesla thanked her and opened a nearly invisible door on the edge of the pillar. Vivian had only ever seen it open once before, on the night when she’d been hired to watch him and had lost him right here.
She followed, surprised that it was so easy. Inside, dingy white paint covered the walls. Like most things, the inside was a lot less glamorous than the outside. She’d expected something grander, but this was ordinary.
Tesla motioned her to stand by the wall and lifted a hatch on the floor. Underneath the hatch a set of wrought iron stairs spiraled down. She went first, judging that an attack from behind was less likely than someone hiding beneath the stairs.
Tesla and Edison waited at the top of the stairs. Tesla looked annoyed.
“Clear,” she called up.
They trotted down the stairs, and Tesla pressed the elevator button. Modern steel doors slid aside on an old-fashioned elevator of filigreed wrought iron. Tesla gestured for her to go first and pushed a lever inside to make the elevator go. Was the elevator as old as Grand Central itself—a century? Cool.
The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) Page 8