“No, not that I can remember,” Joe said. His eyes were drawn back to his laptop screen as though he were hypnotized.
“What about anything odd, anything out of place?” Rosen asked patiently.
“Oh, yeah, hey,” Joe said. “There was one thing. Leetsdale kept one picture that wasn’t a simulation description at all.”
“What was it?” Alan asked.
“Well, it was kind of weird. Among all those girlie pictures he had a black and white image of a guy named Nikola Tesla.”
“Who’s Nikola Tesla?” Rosen asked.
“He’s a famous guy here in Colorado Springs, and he should be famous around the world. He was an inventor. He invented AC power, did you know that?”
“That was Thomas Edison,” Alan said.
“Nope,” Joe replied. “Edison invented the lightbulb. Tesla and Thomas Edison were huge rivals. Edison invented DC and Tesla invented AC, and now everybody uses AC power. And whom do people know? Edison. Tesla sold his patents to Westinghouse so he could beat Edison Power. He did, but he died broke and unknown in some fleabag hotel in New York City.”
“Was he from around here?” Alan asked, looking bewildered. “Or was he from the sand dunes?”
“No,” Joe said, his laptop forgotten. “He was born in Croatia and emigrated to America when he was young. He spent a summer here in Colorado Springs in 1899 doing experiments. That’s why they had the Tesla museum here. I wandered in one day and became an instant Teslaphile.”
“A Tesla file?” Alan asked.
“A Teslaphile, with a p-h,” Eileen said with a grin. “As in, the opposite of a phobe. A really big fan.”
“Tesla was very strange, I mean very.” Joe laughed. “He blew the entire power structure in the city one night with his experiments. He used to invite people over for these crazy experiments with electricity. I’ve seen a picture of him sitting in the midst of a tiny lightning storm that he created. He’s reading a book, calm as could be. Anybody else would be afraid he would become a crispy roasted critter, but not Tesla.”
“What does this have to do with the earthquake simulations?” Rosen asked. “Why did Leetsdale put Tesla’s picture in his files?”
“His picture, his name, and a latitude and longitude point,” Joe said. “Hey, I have some books on him that I bought at the Tesla Museum. They were those kind of off-the-wall books, you know, published in somebody’s basement. I never got around to reading them. Let me see if I can find them.” He rose from his chair and left the room, coffee cup in one hand.
“So what does this have to do with the Great Sand Dunes?” Alan asked.
“I don’t know,” Eileen said slowly, feeling a tingle run like a cat’s paws up her spine.
“Hey, Joe,” Rosen called out. “Where was the lat and longitude point?”
“I didn’t plot it,” Joe shouted back. From his voice, he was somewhere in his breakfast nook, rummaging through his wall of books. “I would have, but I got sucked into this New Madrid thing.”
“Can we plot it?” Alan asked.
There was silence from the other room.
“Joe?” Eileen called. There was no response, and the total silence made the hair on Eileen’s arms brush up in an instant. “Joe?” she called again. She started to stand up, her hand going to her gun, when Joe appeared in the doorway.
His face was dead white, pale as if he’d not only seen a ghost, but become one. The handle of his empty coffee cup was clenched in his hand so tightly the knuckles stood out in sharp relief. He was holding some documents in his hands, all large and unwieldy and dusty. They were obviously home-printed, with cheap binding and faded colors.
“What’s the matter?” Alan asked.
Joe said nothing. He turned the top document in his hands around so that it faced Eileen, Rosen, and Alan.
After a few moments that felt like an eternity, Eileen found her voice.
“Nikola Tesla’s Earthquake Machine,” she read calmly.
“It’s getting dark outside,” Joe said. He was standing at the edge of his study window, looking through the blinds. He was looking for strange cars, or people behaving oddly, just in case Eileen, Rosen, and Alan had been followed after all and the killers were waiting for darkness for their strike. The sun had set over the Front Range long ago, and the long twilight was starting to draw down towards full dark. The weather, still and breathless until now, was beginning to change. Little puffs of air, like breaths, were starting to gust in the trees. The temperature was starting to drop rapidly. If Joe had been alone, he would have had the television on long before now, watching the weather reports. As it was, he felt out of touch. There was a big storm coming, and he wanted to see the satellite pictures.
“I feel like those vampire hunters in Dracula,” Alan said. “Worried about the dark.”
“I am worried about the dark,” Eileen said. “If we’re right about this, we’re dealing with something very dangerous.”
“Big enough for the Government to send in assassins?” Alan asked soberly. “Like what happened to Eileen?”
Joe shook his head, still staring out the window.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “The Government, big-G Government, doesn’t really exist. You could no more order some Fort Carson soldiers to come kill us than you could order Eileen and Rosen here to go kill someone. Special Forces, SEALs, Delta Force, they’re professionals. They don’t kill Americans on command, they are Americans. They have a code of honor as long as your arm.”
“Well, what about the CIA, then?” Alan asked stubbornly. “Or the FBI? Like what they did to those religious dialogues at Waco, Texas. That sure wasn’t friendly. Or honorable.”
“It was a total fuckup, is what it was,” Rosen said. Eileen was nodding in agreement, Joe saw.
“People in government can screw up,” she said. “People can be bad. Our government can do bad things by stupidity or accident, like a big, dumb kid. But there are too many good people in government for anything really bad to happen, at least not for long.”
“Japanese-Americans during World War Two,” Rosen said.
“Sure, and slavery, and the eradication of the buffalo to starve the American Indians,” Eileen said. “Really bad things happen. But we aren’t bad by design, like the Nazis or the Communists. Eventually, things get straightened out. There are enough good people to fix the bad things.”
“I wish I had your optimism,” Alan said. “So you don’t think your men-in-black were government men?” Eileen was already shaking her head.
“No, actually, I think they are government men,” she said.
“Okay, now I’m totally confused,” Alan said.
Joe left his place by the window and came to sit by Alan on the long couch. He saw the remote control to the television and suppressed the urge to pick it up.
“I agree with Eileen, I guess. Big Government can’t do this,” Joe said, clasping his hands in front of his knees to keep them away from the remote. “But little government can. A small project could get away with murder. Or a small project could do something really, really good.” He looked over at Eileen and saw her looking gravely back at him. She didn’t smile. They’d saved the world, Eileen and he and some little government people. No one would ever know, except for a tiny few, what they’d done.
“True,” Eileen said. “You can keep a huge secret if you have a small enough group.”
“The Manhattan Project,” Rosen offered.
“The Roswell saucer crash,” Joe said.
“Yes, and the missile defense program,” Alan suggested. “I heard that it was really already deployed—are you all right?”
“Must have swallowed a bug,” Joe said, choking. He cleared his throat and sat up. “Where did you hear that?”
“From Krista,” Alan said sadly. “She thought that there might be something in Colorado that dealt with missile defense, because of NORAD and all. She read some Internet stuff that suggested we might really be able to shoot d
own nuclear weapons in flight. But what she was looking for was environmental pollutants any way she could find them.”
“Well,” Joe said with an effort, “I think if our earthquake people are responsible for Krista Lewis and Jim Leetsdale, then they might be a government-funded project.”
“A top-secret, special-access-word project,” Eileen said. “Small enough to hide murder, if necessary.”
“Rape and murder,” Alan reminded them. His face flushed across the cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. “And I don’t know why we’re still just sitting here talking. We need to get up and go there.”
“Where?” Joe asked in puzzlement.
“There,” Alan said angrily, pointing with his finger at the Colorado map Joe had spread across the coffee table an hour before. Directly in the middle of the Great Sand Dunes, at latitude 37 degrees, 47 minutes and 50 seconds and longitude 105 degrees, 33 minutes and 20 seconds, Rosen had drawn a small and careful X. The latitude and longitude points stored in the picture of Nikola Tesla.
“And what do you propose to do there?” Eileen asked gently. “Have us walk in and arrest these people, if they’re there? For what?”
“For murder,” Alan said. “You said you had hair from Krista’s murderer. Arrest everybody and DNA everybody and then you have your killer.”
“Not a bad plan,” Rosen said, deadpan.
“Yeah, if we lived in China,” Eileen said. “We can’t do that, Mr. Baxter. We have to have some sort of probable cause and we have to have a warrant. We might be able to get one from the sheriff down there, Gonzalez, but—”
“We can get one, I bet,” Alan said. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“First of all, we have to figure out what they’re doing. Then we can figure out why they’ve decided to kill people,” Joe said patiently. “I still think they’re causing earthquakes with a Tesla machine.”
“I still don’t know about this Tesla machine idea,” Rosen said. “I can’t figure out why nobody knows about the earthquake thing. If it really exists, everybody should know about it.”
“You didn’t even know about Tesla until an hour ago,” Joe said with a shrug. “And we’re sitting under electric lights powered by his invention. We run our world on AC power, invented by Nikola Tesla. And not one of you knew that.”
“So call it the Edison Earthquake machine,” Rosen said reasonably. “Why doesn’t the world know about it?”
“I think I can answer that,” Alan said.
Rosen made a go-ahead gesture.
“Because Tesla’s documents got into the government’s hands, somehow,” Alan said. “That’s the answer. That’s why this is a government project.”
“So what about these home-published books?”
“Based on rumors about the earthquake machine,” Alan said. “Just like the books you can read about the Roswell saucer crash. No proof, just rumor.”
“I can’t believe a government project would be assigned to create earthquakes,” Eileen protested. “Anyway, why? They’re not holding anything for ransom, they’re not making money or advancing any kind of agenda. What would be the point?”
“I don’t know,” Joe said stubbornly. “It’s a gut feeling sort of thing. I’m going to check my printer. Maybe there’s something in the reports I’m printing out.”
Joe’s ancient laser printer, beloved and reliable, was also as stinky as a very old dog. When he started to print documents from the Web on the sand dunes and Nikola Tesla, the whole group had fled his study. No one seemed inclined to go back to the hard wooden chairs after sitting on Joe’s couches.
When he returned from his study, a thick handful of papers in his hand, the television was on.
“Hey!” Joe said happily. “I wanted to do that hours ago.”
Eileen shrugged her shoulders guiltily and patted the couch next to her. The nine o’clock news was on and the headlines were all about the Colorado earthquake cleanup. From there the newscasters moved on to the adorable baby eagles at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, then to a birthday celebration of a one hundred-year-old woman in Nebraska.
“Slow news day,” Rosen said.
“The Great Sand Dunes are made of ground quartz, did you know that? And they didn’t exist ten thousand years ago?” Joe read from his papers. “Wow. There’s some talk here about something called the Taos Hum, or something. It’s this weird noise, supposed to originate in the dunes, or maybe down in New Mexico, nobody knows.”
“Probably the earthquake machine,” Eileen said absently, her eyes on the television. “It’s got to make some sort of noise to trigger an earthquake.”
“Weather,” Rosen said. Everyone shut up and leaned towards the set.
Joe felt a sense of satisfaction, seeing the long comber of clouds approaching the Front Range. A huge front had moved in from the California coastline and was making its way across the country. Often this meant sunny weather in the Front Range and a Midwest buried in rain or snow, but sometimes the front combined with a wet low-pressure system moving up from the Gulf of Mexico. This front swept up from New Mexico and had a nickname that sent a shiver down every Coloradan’s backbone.
“An Albuquerque low,” Rosen, Eileen, and Joe said at the same time. The weatherman gave a wolfish smile on the television screen.
“It’s an Albuquerque low, folks,” he said. “Get up early tomorrow. Give yourself plenty of time to get to work in the morning, and be sure to check our listings for closures.”
Joe clicked the remote and the set went dark.
“What’s an Albuquerque low?” Alan asked.
“Big storm, heap big snow,” Joe said. “My gut has been telling me all day there’s something coming in. I hope there aren’t any summer campers left in the woods.”
“Good thing it’s Wednesday and not Saturday,” Rosen said. “Or we’d lose some hikers.”
“I still want to go to the sand dunes,” Alan said stubbornly.
“Not tonight, you don’t,” Joe said. “Where do you live?”
“Pinedale, Wyoming,” Alan said. “It’s a nice little town at the foot of the Wind River Mountain Range and yes, I know all about snow. You guys live in the tropics compared to Wyoming. What’s a little snow? I want to do something.”
“I do, too,” Rosen said. “Because they almost got Eileen, and next time they might get her. Or me.”
“Believe me, we’re not going to relax about this,” Eileen said. “We just need to know more, or we’ll be shoving our heads into a trap.”
“Speaking of knowing more,” Joe said, “here’s about four hundred pages of articles. If we each take a stack of papers, we’ll get through them that much quicker.”
“Oh, no,” Eileen groaned, but she was smiling. She took a stack of papers from Joe. “I hope you gave me some interesting ones.”
“They’re all interesting,” Joe said. “Somewhere in here is our answer. It has to be.”
17
Briargate Subdivision, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Two hours later, snow began to blow through the wind. Joe perched himself next to the window with his stack of documents. He watched the first swirls appear, little gusts of snow travelling quickly down the street as though they had urgent business.
“Eileen, come watch this,” he said quietly. Eileen jerked her head upright and blinked owlishly at him. She’d been dozing over her papers. Joe grinned at her and she smiled guiltily back. She swept her hair back from her forehead and massaged her temples with her narrow hands. Joe suppressed a wave of desire, a need so sharp it was almost pain, to take her to bed and hold her and love her. She looked so tired.
“Snow?” she said softly.
“Snow,” he said.
Alan Baxter was frankly asleep, his head pillowed in the couch and his mouth open. Rosen, who apparently needed no sleep at all, also got up and joined Joe at the window. The three of them watched the thin rags of snow grow heavier and heavier, until the window was a horizontal blur of white. The window
rattled under a gust and sent a swirl of flakes against the glass. The sound was sly and secretive and unfriendly, as though the storm knew they were inside, dry and warm, and resented the walls that kept them safe.
“No killers in this,” Rosen said, and Joe saw his shoulders drop a tiny bit. For Rosen, this was remarkable.
“You were really worried, weren’t you?” Joe asked.
“I’m still worried,” Rosen said.
“I need sleep,” Eileen said. “I can’t read this stuff any more. I’m not getting any of it inside my head. It’s all just words. Listen to this guy.” She took a page at random from her pile of papers and read out loud.
“There were a lot of trucks that were leaving with government files, specifically IRS and tax files, moving them to the eastern parts of California and into Arizona. So, I think that the Northridge quake was somehow artificially induced. And that the quake was induced specifically to relieve the kind of pressure on the San Andreas fault that so many people have been talking about, to relieve the nine-plus megaquakes that were building along the San Andreas up in Lancaster, Palmdale, all the way up into Parkfield and Cloverdale.”
Eileen stopped, her mouth open in surprise.
“Holy shit, that’s it!” Joe said.
“I didn’t see this one,” Eileen said. “I hadn’t read this one yet.”
“What’s that one from?” Rosen asked.
“This is from a conspiracy newsgroup named Truthnet. This person was talking about a conversation they heard on The Art Bell Show.”
“Hey, I listen to him sometimes,” Joe said. “AM Radio. He’s the night owl’s friend.”
“Some of it might be true, evidently,” Rosen said dryly. “What else does it say?”
Eileen read through the paper, bright flags of excitement in her cheeks, her tiredness erased.
“Now, for the last couple of years there’ve been very mysterious hums. One is called the Taos Hum in Colorado and New Mexico, where many people are hearing these very, very odd radio frequencies that some people can hear, that otherpeople cannot. There’s another interesting thing that was reported on CNN, which they call the Monterey Heartbeat. And that there is a thumping, pounding, heartbeat sound that’s being heard directly off the coast of Monterey. And one of the reasons I was able to pinpoint the Northridge quake is because, in my meditations with the Grays, I kept getting ‘man-made, man-made, man-made.’ That word kept flashing across my mind.”
Earthquake Games Page 21