The Tesla Legacy (24 page)

Rage welled up in Joe, and with it more pain. Apparently, there weren’t enough happy pills in the world to temper his fury that someone had hurt his dog.

“Don’t anger yourself,” his mother said. “Dr. Stauss says that getting upset will make your head worse.”

He took a few calming breaths. Self-soothing had become his new way of life. He should be able to manage. “Did they find a device in the corner of the basement?”

Someone tapped on his bedroom door.

“Come in,” his mother called. “He’s awake and talking sensibly.”

That indicated he’d been awake and not talking sensibly before. Great.

With silent steps, Vivian entered his bedroom. She wore jeans and a gray T-shirt and her gun in a shoulder holster. She looked ready to take on a room of armed assassins, and it reminded him again how weak he currently was. “You’re looking better, Mr. Tesla.”

“Miss Torres has been guarding us both round the clock,” his mother said. “After she took you from the hospital.”

“Did they find the Oscillator in the basement?” he asked. “Was it by the wall?”

Vivian shook her head. She explained what the police had been able to piece together about his attack, and that footprints showed that someone had gone to the back of the room and retrieved something, but they didn’t know what it was.

So, his attacker had taken Nikola Tesla’s famous earthquake machine. He’d recognized it the instant he pulled it away from the column, before he’d heard Edison’s sad whimper.

His father had warned him to tread carefully, but he’d been heedless. He’d blundered into one of the most powerful devices ever invented, and he’d let someone take it from him. If it worked, and his attacker used it, all those deaths would be on Joe, and on his father for putting him in the position to begin with. Not that shared guilt made things any easier.

“You need more sleep,” his mother said. “We tire you.”

“I’d like to rest,” he lied.

He couldn’t rest, not until he got the Oscillator back.

Chapter 40

Quantum liked the anonymity of Newark Liberty International Airport. Nothing ever happened in Newark. No one knew who he was, and no one cared.

Security trusted that he belonged to the forged passport he’d used to check in. He was Matt Chang, an Asian guy on a business trip. Nobody looked twice at him.

The generic atmosphere of McGinley’s Irish Pub wrapped around him like a warm blanket of anonymity. He took a long pull of dark Guinness and set his glass on the black granite bar. McGinley’s clearly wasn’t splashing out on authenticity. The bar was the same kind of stone used in a lot of upscale kitchens in the nineties, not a wooden bar like he’d seen in the movies, so the whole place felt more like someone’s kitchen than an Irish pub.

But he didn’t care. In forty-five minutes he’d be on a plane to Dublin. Then he’d see what was real, and what was leprechaun clichés. He’d mingle with the Irish lasses and keep his head down until Ash gave up on him. They had enough high tech in Dublin that an Asian geek from America wouldn’t stick out too much. Plus, he had no links to Ireland. He’d taken a list of likely international destinations that he had no connection to, given each a number, and let a random number generator choose where he should go. If it were up to him, he’d have picked Berlin, which is why he hadn’t let himself pick.

A heavyset man in a nondescript gray business suit sat on a nearby stool. The bar’s overhead lights reflected off his shiny bald spot. He was glued to the soccer match on the bar’s television. Quantum supposed he’d have to learn to like soccer in Ireland.

A commotion in the terminal drew his attention away from the game. A wiry blonde pulling a hot-pink suitcase was screaming at the man standing next to her. He had a hot-pink suitcase, too, obviously a domesticated man, and he’d apparently run over her expensive shoe. She was giving him colorful hell for it.

Quantum reached for his beer without looking and took another sip of the bitter brew. He was facing the terminal now, enjoying the show. No amount of apologizing on the man’s part would make such a transgression right again, that was clear.

The woman took off her shoe and waved it under the man’s nose, so that he could really understand the depth of his crime. Quantum would miss the New Jersey accent and attitude. But he supposed Dublin would have its own charms.

Nausea passed through him, and he swallowed. He hadn’t had Guinness in a while, but he didn’t remember this reaction. Grogginess drove his head toward his chest. He set his beer down so hard that the glass broke, and dark liquid splashed onto his shirt. The businessman was gone. He’d left a crumpled ten-dollar bill on the bar, and he’d taken Quantum’s laptop.

Quantum staggered to his feet, one hand on the bar to steady himself. He’d been poisoned. Ash had found him, and he’d been poisoned, and he was going to die at a cheap chain bar in Newark.

“Are you OK?” The bartender caught hold of his elbow and was trying to get him to sit down again. His blue eyes looked concerned.

Quantum stumbled away from the stool. Plenty of time to sit when he was dead. That was coming soon.

His life didn’t flash before his eyes, and he didn’t think of some girl he’d missed his chance with. All he felt was a desire for revenge.

Ash probably thought he was going to die in the bar, probably had made it look like a heart attack. His death probably wouldn’t even make the nightly news.

Not good enough. He was going to make damn sure that the police investigated his death, did a thorough autopsy, and that his last moments would be splashed all over the Internet for all the world to talk about.

He summoned up the last of his strength and shouted the only words that would do that.

“There’s a bomb in the terminal. I put it here myself.”

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 able 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.