The Tesla Legacy (15 page)

A man in silk pajamas appeared in the doorway she’d just vacated. He brandished a baseball bat.

“I saw the guy who kicked your car,” she said. “Do you want me to stay so you can file a police report?”

His eyes flicked to the dent she’d made in his fender. She felt a pang of guilt, but better his insurance company covered the damage than that she had to shoot the guy she’d been following.

“Did you get a good look at him?” he asked.

“Better than you did.” She called a cab while he thought that over. At least he’d lowered the bat.

She gave him a quick description of the guy. Maybe she’d get lucky and the cops would pull him in for damaging the car. Yeah, and maybe Santa Claus would give her a ride home in his sleigh.

She took the cab.

Chapter 22

At three a.m. (red), Joe gathered up the automaton and took the elegant elevator up to the concourse. He hoped the guy who had been following him hadn’t somehow managed to evade Grand Central security and was still inside. Joe had kept an eye on the surveillance cameras while watching TV, and he’d seen only the regular nightly cleaning crew moving about the terminal.

A few minutes later he and Edison were alone in the vast room. Illuminated stars on the ceiling glowed softly. He had read that the LEDs installed in 2010 were equipped with special light-blocking filters so that each star glowed with the same relative brightness as its counterpart out in space. He liked that.

He carried Tik-Tok over to the corner under the constellation for Cancer the crab. Nikola Tesla was born on July 10 (cyan, black), which meant his astrological sign was Cancer. If Alan was right, and Nikola had spent nights here, walking the concourse alone, maybe Cancer would have special meaning for him, and maybe Joe’s father would have known that. Edison’s claws clicked against the marble as he walked, a sound Joe never heard during the noise and bustle of the day.

With a clink, he set the metal man on the polished floor and lined him up with Beta Cancri, the brightest star in the constellation. He wound him up, each click loud in the empty room. Tik-Tok raised his arm. Joe had changed the simple red bulb on the end to a laser pointer. He hoped the little man’s arm might point to the Oscillator.

But it didn’t.

He moved the man to various locations around the terminal, trying all the stars of Cancer, then Hercules, and then each constellation in turn. He even climbed the information booth and positioned the man atop the clock, trying not to think about the fact that each face of the clock was made of high-grade polished opal and that Sotheby’s had put a replacement value on each face of between two and a half and five million dollars. He’d also heard that the clock faces were made of opalescent glass, which would make them significantly cheaper. He hoped the second explanation was true.

Roger, the older gentleman who washed the floors, raised an eyebrow when he saw Joe crawling around with a doll, but he didn’t say anything. Joe officially had the run of the place, so he was allowed to be there, and he was considered eccentric enough that nobody questioned him. Perks of being a crazy rich guy.

By the time 5:30 a.m. (brown: red, black) rolled around, his knees hurt from kneeling on the cold Tennessee marble, his fingers were sore from winding up the little man, and Edison was sleeping on the bottom stair of the East Staircase.

The station would open to travelers soon, and he’d accomplished nothing. He felt as if he’d betrayed his father’s memory by not being smart enough to solve the puzzle left for him. More was expected of him, even if he wasn’t a Tesla after all.

Chapter 23

Joe woke up late and grouchy. He fed Edison and put on a cup of coffee. His coffee maker was a work of modern-day wonder, even if it didn’t match the décor. Some compromises he was willing to make.

He switched on the flames in the parlor and stared into them until he had enough caffeine in his system to think about his email. Regular work stuff, more surveillance matches from what had to be the most massive government surveillance program ever, and a few private emails.

One from Alan Wright inviting him to play tennis later in the week. Did Alan even play tennis? Maybe he was reaching out because Joe’s father had died, but that didn’t mean Joe had to play tennis with him, did it? Plus, Alan didn’t strike him as a reacher-outer. He must want something. But what?

One from Vivian saying she’d followed a man matching the description that Joe had given her to the Chrysler Building, where he seemed to work, but had lost him afterward. She must not have gone to bed. She didn’t ask any questions about why he wanted to have the man followed, which was good given that his best answer was a bunch of paranoid worries about a box of papers from Nikola Tesla that only had instructions for how to build a windup toy.

The toy stood on the mantel next to a human skull and a black statue of the Egyptian cat-headed goddess Bastet. It looked right at home among the other Victorian-era collectibles.

Joe admired the toy’s clever design, then took a long sip of coffee and braved the surveillance folder. More requests. Hundreds of thousands from computers that he’d traced to the National Security Agency. Someone was fishing, and they’d scooped up all the fish they could find.

What could he, Joe Tesla, do about it? The National Security Agency had enough lawyers on its payroll that he’d never be able to prove the volume of requests was illegal. He could leak the results to a whistle-blower website like WikiLeaks, but that wouldn’t do more than spark a month of outraged navel-gazing.

Doing nothing wasn’t an option either.

He took a shower and got dressed, but when he returned to the parlor, his laptop was still there with its millions of facial recognition match requests next to the stubborn little automaton. Neither was showing him the way forward.

With a sigh, he sat down and stared into the flames again. Edison inched closer to him, brown eyes watching his every move. That helped Joe make his decision. It was no good to have your every move watched unless you knew the watcher and loved him.

So, he would have to deal with the NSA. First, he’d have to remove any traces that he’d logged its activities. The government agency shouldn’t know that he had been watching it watch everyone else. That took only a few minutes. He’d written the underlying code, after all, and he knew what to tweak.

His next actions were straightforward, but the consequences were profound. If caught, he’d go to jail—probably some nasty federal jail where they’d arrange for him to be housed in a glass cell staring out at nature on all sides. Sweat filmed his palms just thinking about it.

Even worse, he would have to break his greatest creation. He would have to sabotage the facial recognition engine that underpinned everything Pellucid did. And it wouldn’t be enough to just break it. If the software stopped working, they’d roll back to an earlier version. He had to create an algorithm that would slowly decrease the number of possible matches across time. It would have to be so gradual that no one would be able to pinpoint when it started, and so subtle that it would look like a scalability bug that crept in when the system was stressed beyond its original design parameters. And it had to be so pernicious that it could never be fixed.

He had to create a digital version of Celeste’s ALS—barely recognizable symptoms at first, then incurable creeping paralysis. The system had been his life for years now—the last thing he thought of before he went to bed and the first thing he thought of when he woke up. He dreamed the numbers and colors that made it run. And now he had to turn all the colors to black.

Edison sensed his mood and dropped his head in Joe’s lap. His tail wagged once.

“You can’t help me with this one, buddy,” Joe said. “I’ve got to do it.”

He connected to the darknet to hide his IP address, then logged into Pellucid’s system using the account of an intern who had left the company. With any luck, his actions would never be traced back this far, but if he was, she’d have an alibi—she was trekking in Tibet and completely off the grid.

Hours ticked by as he skipped through the code, changing tiny pieces here and there, hiding his intent in hundreds of places across thousands of lines of code. Colors flashed through his head as he calculated numbers and percentages, but the colors were muted and dark. He’d never experienced this before, but he knew they had changed their color because they were sad.

He was crippling something bright and amazing because it was too powerful, too dangerous, and always in the wrong hands. He had created this monster with the best of intentions, but as his father always said,
the road to hell is paved with good intentions
. He was going to have to kill his creation, not quickly, but with a thousand tiny cuts, until its colors and numbers had bled out.

Andres Peterson called in the afternoon. Andres was his dog walker—the man who made sure that Edison got the fresh air and sunshine he deserved. Celeste had recommended the Estonian artist when Joe was looking for someone, but she had warned him that Andres would be very famous someday, and he’d have to get another dog walker.

Joe’s mind was still connected to the lines of code that he had created as he took Edison up the elevator. He greeted Evaline in a daze, barely spoke to Andres, and went back down to his work.

By the time Andres’s next text reached him, Joe’s latticework of deceit was complete. But he didn’t have the heart to put in the final line of code, the one that would set it all in motion. It would destroy his creation, and it could destroy his life.

He scrolled through the surveillance reports one last time. He thought of the millions of dollars that he and his colleagues would lose when his changes reached full effect and Pellucid’s stock tanked. They’d all sold enough to be comfortable for the rest of their lives, but that didn’t mean they wanted to lose the rest.

He thought of the millions of people who had lost their privacy to his machine. He weighed their rights against the people who might be harmed if the NSA could no longer use the software. The innocents who might die because his software didn’t identify those intent on doing harm.

And he didn’t write that final line.

Instead, he went up to collect Edison. The dog panted happily next to the information booth. When Joe bent to pet him, he smelled like grass and dog. He’d been soaking up summer, just as Joe’s father would have wanted. What if Joe had tried to forgive the man, and they’d spent one last summer together? Would that have been so wrong?

Andres wore ripped jeans and a rust-tinged cotton shirt. His curly hair was disheveled from the wind, and he was sporting the beginning of a tan. Joe suspected the only time he spent outside was with Edison and otherwise spent his days in his studio crafting his giant metal sculptures. They were gloomy, but Joe liked them. Celeste adored them.

“Edison runs like a champion,” Andres said. “Even in the heat he could not be stopped. We went to Central Park so he could roll in grass. He loves grass.”

“Were you a good boy?” Joe asked Edison. Somebody ought to be.

“He is always good,” Andres said. “You are lucky to have such a fine animal.”

Joe nodded and handed Andres his money. He always paid Andres in cash. Andres was one person he interacted with for whom there was no paper trail. He even had Andres text and call him using an app that kept his location secret and deleted the texts every twenty-four (blue, green) hours. Anyone who hung around Grand Central would know of their connection, but they weren’t linked online. That anonymity had saved Edison’s life once when Joe was under electronic surveillance and the dog was wounded. It was worth preserving.

Andres crumpled the bill and pushed it into his front pants pocket. “In my country I had such a dog once, a fine, brave fellow, but the neighbor said he ate her chicken, and he had to be destroyed.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He did not eat the chicken, of course.” Andres’s pale blue eyes flashed. “But everyone knew that this neighbor was an informer for the government, and we could do nothing. Her husband shot the dog in front of my house. I was seven years old.”

Joe dropped his hand to Edison’s shoulder, touching the scar where Edison had been shot a few months before. He imagined a seven-year-old watching his dog get shot and die in front of him.

“I’m sorry.” It seemed so inadequate.

Andres shrugged. “It is over now, and I can play with your Edison every day, even get money for that. In this country that is so free. Those are good things.”

Andres patted Edison one last time and slouched off toward the giant front doors.

Joe watched him go, out into a country that he thought was free, but wasn’t.

Chapter 24

Quantum liked his borrowed apartment. After being confronted by that woman, he didn’t feel safe going home. Who knew how long she’d been following him before he noticed her?

So he’d done what he usually did when he went to ground. He found an apartment marked as empty on Airbnb, using an algorithm he’d invented to search the database for unrented temporary apartments. Once he found one that he liked, he’d hack the owner’s email account and find out how he had tenants pick up keys. Then it was an easy matter to show up at a convenience store with fake ID and pretend to be a renter or to retrieve the key from under a mat or a coded mailbox.

This apartment was particularly nice. It had a widescreen TV and Wi-Fi, and the last tenant had left the fridge partially stocked. Quantum was settling in when his phone buzzed. Ash. It had been hours since Quantum told him that he’d lost Joe, and he knew Ash was furious. He was going to have to take his lumps and smile. If he could manage it.

ash: details

quantum: he jumped off train in tunnels

ash: u didn’t pursue?

quantum: train moving before i could