The Tesla Legacy (25 page)

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.

It didn’t take much searching to find the transcript from a chat room where Quantum, Ash, and Geezer had talked about Nikola Tesla and his earthquake device. Geezer, he realized from the transcript, was Egger. Joe’s father must have let something slip about the device to his colleague, and Egger had decided to search for it. But Egger wasn’t the one who had attacked him. Maybe that was Ash or Quantum.

Joe didn’t recognize the name Quantum, but he knew who Ash was. Everyone did. Ash was one of the top hackers in a hacktivist network called Spooky. He was famous, although no one knew his real name. Was Ash Michael Pham? Or was Quantum Michael Pham? Or was Michael Pham neither of them?

Joe admired some of the hacktivists’ goals, but not their methods. If they got their hands on the Oscillator, there was no telling what they might do with it. Some of them were pretty radical, maybe even violent. Maybe they’d even killed Egger.

A tap on the door made him stifle a groan. “What is it?”

“Leandro here. I have my sister on the phone, and she wants to talk to you.”

He closed up the laptop and crammed it under his bed with the books. “All right.”

Leandro pushed open the door with his foot. His blond hair glowed in the light behind him. From this angle he looked like a lion. He waggled a phone in his hand.

“I didn’t know you were here,” Joe said.

Leandro had dropped by off and on during his confinement and had even gone for a few walks in the tunnel with him, probably under instructions from Celeste. Leandro’s knowledge of the tunnels suggested he had spent more time exploring them than he let on. Joe was starting to wonder how much he knew about his old friend after all.

“Just stopped by to make sure you hadn’t died in Great-Grandpa’s bed,” Leandro said.

“I’ve put orders in my will to have the mattress cleaned if I do.”

“Decent of you.” Leandro handed him his cell phone. “Here’s Celeste. Talk to her before she nags me to death.”

“I heard that,” Celeste called.

“Meant you to,” Leandro shouted.

Joe winced at the sound. Leandro smiled at him and left.

“How are you?” Celeste asked. “And really, no sugarcoating things for me because I’m sick. I know people who can beat it out of you. I’ll send them over.”

“Someone got there ahead of them.” His head still throbbed from Leandro’s yelling.

“Tell me everything, omit nothing,” her breathless voice commanded.

He gave her a quick rundown of events and ended by sending her an email with Michael Pham’s photo and identity, because she insisted.

“Got your email. Are you sure this is him?” she asked. “Really sure?”

“Why?”

“This guy is dead,” she said. “It’s all over the news. He poisoned himself at the airport and then stumbled out into the middle of the terminal yelling that he’d set a bomb. It shut down Newark Airport for an entire day. But when they retraced his steps on the surveillance video, they found out that he never set a bomb.”

So, the man who had recovered the Oscillator was dead, just like Egger and Joe’s father. Joe himself should be dead, too. Tears of grief welled up, and he knuckled them off his face. He cried easily since his injury. Or maybe grief over his father’s death was finally catching up to him. He pulled the blanket higher.

“What would a guy like that want with you?” Celeste asked.

He told her about the Oscillator, and also that he thought that Michael Pham might be Quantum. He was convinced he wasn’t Ash. Ash wouldn’t have gotten killed in the airport, and even if he had, he would have tried to retain his anonymity instead of drawing attention to himself with the bomb threat.

She coughed for a few minutes and fell silent.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“Do you ever watch the news?”