The Tesla Legacy (26 page)

“I’m not allowed to watch TV or use the computer or read,” he said. “They’d probably tell me I can’t listen to the radio if I had one.”

“I bet you turn on the computer the second your keepers leave the room.”

He laughed. “Maybe sometimes.”

“Maybe every chance you get. But you used to use it for fun things, like flipping me off, or the time you hacked the billboards in Times Square to show me seagulls.”

“Actually, I hacked the cell phones of the people wandering around Times Square and used those to hack the billboards. That’s different,” he said. “Tell me more about the news.”

“They had a segment about the High Line. You’ve heard of it? It’s a set of old elevated train tracks that have been converted into a park.”

One more New York landmark he’d never be able to visit. “Yep.”

“They have one section that’s not open yet. The plants are still growing on it or something. Anyway, it was due to open soon, but it collapsed. The news called it a freak earthquake combined with metal fatigue.”

His head throbbed once, as if trying to tell him to pay attention. His father’s newspaper clipping flashed across his mind. Metal fatigue. “That could be the Oscillator!”

“Now, don’t take that information and go off on some cockamamie quest to save the world. Call in the men with guns and helmets.”

“I’m feeling weak. I need to go rest.”

“Rest, as in immediately go online and start researching, quite against doctor’s orders and my advice?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

He disconnected a few minutes later. Leandro took his phone back, made small talk, and left.

As soon as he was alone, Joe wrote up another email, this time to Mr. Rossi. He explained about the laptop, Egger’s identity and suspicious death, and his potential connection to Spooky and Quantum. Then he detailed everything he knew about Michael Pham, included his picture, and added that he thought that he was Quantum. He asked Mr. Rossi to send someone to pick up the laptop and forward it anonymously to the authorities. Then he made a copy of the hard drive because he suspected he’d never see the laptop again once it left his house.

Due diligence done, he started digging around online. It took longer than he expected to find the records for the seismographs that monitored Manhattan. In California, a state with a lot of earthquake awareness, he could have pulled them off the USGS website in seconds. Here he had to trawl through the USGS site, and Google like crazy, before he ended up at the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network. Clearly, earthquakes weren’t viewed as high-priority on the East Coast.

Eventually, he found the raw seismographic data. Now he had to pinpoint the time that the train tracks had collapsed and work backward from there looking for a pattern. And finding patterns was what he did.

His headache disappeared while he studied the colored seismograph readings. Numbers and colors had never disappointed him in the past, and they didn’t now. An unusual wave pattern had appeared on the seismograph for about an hour before the earthquake, increasing in intensity, but always at a very low level. After about an hour, it abruptly slowed down and then stopped, as if someone had flipped a switch. After that, the wave had dissipated, and the readings went back to normal.

He had a strong sense that the Oscillator had caused those readings. That meant that it generated a clear and recognizable seismic fingerprint. He also had a strong hunch that the High Line was a test, and whoever had the Oscillator intended to use it again. If someone were to put the device into action, how could he track it?

New York didn’t have a lot of seismographic stations. He wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the event with enough accuracy to be useful in time. He might be able to tell if the Oscillator was being used to knock something down, but the search area was so big that he’d never be able to find it and stop it in time.

His eyes chanced upon his cell phone, plugged in next to his bed. It was outside of its Faraday pouch, like it usually was when he was home, so it was transmitting its location. Cell phones always do that, because they are constantly connected to the network. He tapped the phone with his finger. Cell phones always know where they are, and they also know their orientation relative to their surroundings—upside down or right-side up or sideways—because of their accelerometers. Millions of tiny sensors were being carried all around Manhattan, sensors that could read vibrations. They were so finely tuned to vibrations around them that it was possible for a mobile phone to use its accelerometer to determine exactly what was being typed on a nearby keyboard.

And he could hack those phones, download their accelerometer data, and monitor it.

He signed into a hacker website and pulled up a list of hackable phones in Manhattan. He’d used them before when he’d played the prank of broadcasting pictures of seagulls flying on all the billboards in Times Square. If he were going to prevent an attack, he’d need to hack all the phones, because the owners would be moving around the city, and he had no idea where the attack might come from. The more phones, the more data, and the more likely he’d be able to pinpoint the Oscillator’s location before real damage was done.

He paused. Was he any better than the NSA? He was hacking innocent people’s phones without their permission so he could use them as listening devices. He had no right to do that. But thousands of people might die if he didn’t. That was the choice the NSA said they faced every day, too, so how could he fault them without being a hypocrite?

His head pounded, and he wanted to go to sleep, but that wasn’t an option. He had to do something. He had to set up his system, and he had to take information from these phones to save lives. It wasn’t private data, like pictures, emails, and phone calls, but it was still wrong.

And he was going to do it anyway.

Decision made, he returned to practical considerations. First, he would have to set up each phone so that it would broadcast its accelerometer data back to him. That was fairly straightforward. Then, he needed to convert that data to waves in order to match the anomalous seismograph output recorded from the hour before the collapse of the High Line tracks. Finally, he would have to set up an engine to compare each phone’s data to the suspect wave pattern and alert him when it was detected. He could reuse his old pattern-matching code from Pellucid.

He wished that he had a group like Spooky—a place where he could outsource some of this work to get it done more quickly. But he didn’t. He just had himself.

He hoped that his mother and Dr. Stauss left him alone long enough to do what he needed. And that his brain would hold up long enough for him to finish.

Chapter 45

Ash stood in front of the Empire State Building, holding his briefcase. The Oscillator was tucked inside the expensive leather case. Today was Sunday, and he was ready. After he made the decision, waiting the last few days had been difficult, but he’d distracted himself with work and Mariella and fighting with Rosa.

The building’s stone walls soared above him. A pair of tourists was shooting selfies from a block away to get the spire in the background, and a long line waited to buy tickets to the observation platform in spite of the fog that would keep them from seeing far. Everyone wanted to experience the building, and whatever scraps of view they could.

It was a gorgeous icon, he couldn’t deny it, and it didn’t just represent New York. It represented corporate greed and man’s constant striving to overwhelm nature, as best exemplified by the Breakers and their shortsighted efforts. Those things deserved destruction. From the rubble of the building, great things would rise.

Things that he would build.

The spire that had once held King Kong, at least cinematically, wasn’t even visible from where he stood, but he could picture it. He imagined the giant ape holding on with one hand while being strafed by fighter planes, all for the sake of love.

Ash was doing this out of love, too. Love for the entire world, not just a single building. The destruction of this building would set the Breakers back years and let him push through legislation to save the environment while they scrambled to rebuild what they had lost in the rubble.

He walked into the impressive Art Deco lobby and nodded at the pair of security guards. Both were beefy men, once athletic and now just big, probably high school athletes. They didn’t look like they’d be much good in an actual emergency, but maybe they would surprise him when put to the test today.

He set his briefcase on the silver casters and watched it disappear into the black box of the metal detector. He walked through the human metal detector and waited for his briefcase to come out the other side. The Empire State Building’s security would not stop him.

The security guard watching the screen, Rodney Ponder, had watery blue eyes under square glasses. Those eyes barely glanced at the contents of Ash’s briefcase. Rodney wouldn’t have known what to make of the Oscillator if he had noticed it. The device looked innocuous enough. “Working on a Sunday, Mr. Wright?”

“Just a few hours.” Ash held out his hand for the briefcase. “Then I can get home to the family.”

Like anyone would call his and Rosa’s relationship a family.

Rodney handed him the briefcase, handle pointed toward him. “You have a good Sunday then, Mr. Wright.”

Ash nodded without replying.

He strode across the shiny stone floor, past the Art Deco flourishes, and onto the elevator. His card key offered him access to his floor and provided a log of his presence here, as did the surveillance camera mounted in the elevator. He would have to follow his planned protocol carefully to avoid suspicion.

Keeping that in mind, he didn’t glance at the Breakers’ giant teak door when he got out of the elevator, unsustainably harvested as he was sure it was. Instead, he pivoted toward the green Wright logo and went through the glass doors leading into his own company. Transparent doors, nothing to hide.

The weekend receptionist, Sage, looked up when Ash stepped through the door. “Salutations, Mr. Wright.”

Sage had so many piercings that he had to be wanded every time he went through security. Tattoos covered both arms. He was visual proof that Wright was a young company, vibrant and rolling with the trends. Yet he still annoyed Ash.

The young man worked weekends and evenings, trying to show his value and work his way up through the ranks, as he’d been taught. He wouldn’t take the risks that Ash had taken—he would never go off to found his own world. He wasn’t smart enough to recruit for Spooky, but he got things done in his own limited fashion, and he was useful.

“Sage,” Ash responded, but kept walking. No one expected him to stop for conversation, and today, of all days, he would do nothing that would stand out.

Fog occluded the view from his window. A shame, because this would be the last time he’d have been able to see it, but he chose to shut down that avenue of thought. He answered emails, returned calls, did all the things that a busy executive had to do on weekends.

Until he decided that it was time.

He stood and stretched, running his fingers over the smooth grain of his bamboo desk, which was sustainably harvested. A beautiful piece of furniture, and he would miss it. Again, he glanced out the window, but fog still shrouded all but the closest buildings.

No more wishing for a final glimpse of the view. He had made his decision, and he would implement it, just as he had with thousands of decisions before. They had, by and large, helped to heal Earth, and this would, too. It was all about perspective and long-term thinking.

He gathered up his briefcase, resisting the urge to fill it with pictures and plaques that lined his walls. They mattered to him, now, in a way that they hadn’t before. He had barely registered their presence, but now he knew that he would miss them.

Then he hacked into the surveillance cameras for the building. He’d done it before, just for fun, and had turned off various cameras in a random pattern often enough that he hoped the security staff would view this as a routine occurrence. He quickly knocked out the cameras that covered the front door of his company and the stairwell. He also took out those outside the Breakers’ office and a few on floors nineteen, thirty-seven, and fifty-six. They’d be down for about three minutes before someone noticed and rebooted them. He’d tested that, too.

Wright was meant to be seen as an egalitarian company, and he was grateful for that as he prepared to head to the men’s washroom. Most CEOs had private bathrooms, but not Ash. No one would think it unusual that he was using the regular washroom—he did it all the time.

He slipped the Oscillator out of his briefcase and dropped it into his pocket. The device bumped against his hip as he walked, but it was just a light tap. So dangerous, yet it fit in his pocket.

Sage had abandoned his post—probably to use the restroom himself. That was a stroke of luck, and Ash changed his plan accordingly. Instead of using the emergency exit behind the bathroom, he went straight for the front door and down to the stairwell. That would save him at least thirty seconds.

The stairwell was always empty. He’d never seen a soul in it. No one took the stairs to the eighty-fifth floor. Even the most ambitious health nuts recognized that as crazy. The stairs were packed surprisingly close together, so narrow that two people would barely be able to walk side by side. In modern buildings, stairwells had to be bigger.

He hurried down one flight. If he tilted his head, he could see down several floors by looking between the stairs. Vertigo gave him a thrill of panic, and he looked away.

The walls were painted gray to the height of his head, then white above that, and a utilitarian gray steel railing was on both sides. Above the railing someone had knocked a hole in the drywall and exposed a steel beam. The hole had been there for months, and no one had fixed it. Ash could have smashed through the wall anywhere, of course, but he didn’t have to. This hole was the perfect place to set the device.