The Tesla Legacy (16 page)

ash: device worth risk

Said by a man who was not down in the tunnels on a speeding train, knowing that if he jumped he might get his legs cut off or he might land against the third rail and get electrocuted. Not on Quantum’s list of ways to spend the day. He gritted his teeth.

quantum: sorry

ash: more risk, more reward

That sounded promising. It was the first mention of reward. He’d been doing this as a freebie, even blowing off his regular freelance IT work, just for karma points. But cash would be better.

quantum: ??

ash: get what i want any means necessary i’ll make it worth ur while

That sounded pretty vague, but it was a start. Quantum rested his feet on a blocky coffee table that looked as if it came from IKEA.

quantum: any means necessary?

ash: don’t want to know just want results

That meant he didn’t care whether Joe Tesla lived or died.

Sometimes Quantum wondered if Ash was a CEO or a Mafia don. He wanted things done, and he wanted plausible deniability if they were. Would he have businessman loyalty, which was to say none at all, or would he reward loyalty like a Mafia don?

quantum: how much?

ash: bottom 6, u know how and where

Quantum did. Bottom six meant bottom six figures, or $100,000. How and where were easy too—Bitcoins from Spooky’s petty-cash account, simple and untrackable. But he didn’t trust Ash.

quantum: i’m a hacker. i can snatch something, but i don’t do any means necessary

ash: not true

Quantum’s stomach did a backflip.

quantum: ??

ash: i’ve seen ur record, mike pham. i know it’s not complete

Quantum’s stomach went straight from backflip to full-on spinning. Ash knew who he was. He knew about the identity Quantum had abandoned years ago. Nobody in his new world knew his real name. Except Ash.

ash: do this for me and u get the carrot not the stick

He took a deep breath. He didn’t owe Joe Tesla anything. Best plan was to get the device, get paid, and then dive down so deep that Ash would never find him. He sat up straight on the anonymous couch and decided how to play it. Matter of fact.

quantum: i like carrots

Ash would know that was a yes.

ash: then earn them

Quantum looked around the comfortable apartment and sighed. He’d have to be up early. Grand Central opened at 5:30 a.m., and he’d have to stake it out again, but he needed a disguise. He decided to go for beggar. He’d need to skip shaving, buy a filthy jacket off one of the homeless who haunted the terminal, smash up a fedora so he had a battered hat to shield his face from the cameras, and make himself a cardboard sign. If he put a mirror on his begging cup, he’d be able to sit with his back to the clock and still watch it. Hopefully, a clever position and the disguise would be enough to conceal him if that hot Hispanic woman from last night had been sent by Tesla.

If not, he’d have his gun.

Chapter 25

Joe paced around his house—front hall, parlor, billiards room, kitchen, and library. Edison trotted along at his heels. But the yellow dog didn’t have the solution to Joe’s problems.

He made a round of the parlor. The automaton’s metal surface gleamed enticingly in the firelight. The little creation had answers to something, even if it wasn’t his current dilemma. Maybe what he needed was a distraction. He picked up the automaton. “Why was my father scared of you, little fellow?”

The toy didn’t answer.

“And why does it feel like somebody else wants you? Somebody scary.”

Predictably, the toy didn’t answer again.

It couldn’t, being only a toy that didn’t even have a voice box.

Deciding to talk to someone who did, he called Vivian.

“Torres.” The name was clipped and economical, a military greeting.

“It’s me,” he said. “Is my mother all right?”

“Fine,” she said. “I just checked in with Dirk. He’s on shift right now.”

“Do you have some time today?”

“I can make some,” she said.

“Could you meet with those professors from the funeral?”

“Egger and Patel?” Trust her to remember the names.

“Them. Find out if they know who might have wanted to take that suitcase. It had papers that my father left me in it.”

“What kind of papers?”

Joe tightened his grip on Tik-Tok. “Just papers.”

“I’ll get right on it, sir.” Vivian hung up.

Joe looked at the automaton in his hands. Maybe he’d missed something last night in the concourse. Maybe Tik-Tok was trying to tell him something, and he hadn’t seen it. He tucked his feet up in the leather armchair and went over the surveillance footage of the previous night’s adventure under the constellations. A tiny Joe Tesla walked onscreen with an even tinier man and a cheerful-looking dog.

The Joe Tesla of last night had known he was being filmed, but he hadn’t bothered to hide from the camera, even though he was doing unusual things. He carried the toy around, placing it in various locations, watching the little arm paint with light on the walls. Again, the arm never pointed at anything that seemed significant.

Still, something looked familiar in the movements of the arm. They weren’t random. Too much time and care had gone into those movements for them to be random. Nikola Tesla had an extraordinary visual memory. He built all his machines in his head first, not bothering with blueprints, and watched them turn and move, studying them for inefficiencies and improper wear patterns. He spent hours on the models in his head before he built them in the real world.

A man like that would think it child’s play to watch the motions of the arm and remember where the arm had pointed moments before. Joe slowed the footage down until the light from the laser inched slowly across the concourse wall, leaving trails behind it.

He sat up. “I got it, Edison!”

The dog cocked his head and raised his ears.

“Tik-Tok isn’t pointing to anything at all. He’s
writing
.”

A few minutes later he had transcribed Tik-Tok’s gestures. They were numbers and letters, each separated by a short pause:

40 45 10 73 59 38 južni podrum 3

He’d start with the numbers. A dozen colors flashed through his head in a long ribbon. Over four billion (green with a long stretch of black). A huge number. But they weren’t one number. The pauses made them six (orange) numbers, plus the one at the end.

Joe wound the ribbons of colors around in his head, combining and recombining them. But he didn’t find any patterns. He tried entering them into a couple of pattern finders online and came up empty there, too.

Then he sequenced the numbers in order:

10 38 40 45 59 73

He tried everything again, but came up with nothing again.

The numbers weren’t in any mathematical sequence that he could readily find. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t a method to them that Nikola Tesla had known, but it did mean he should broaden his search parameters.

If they weren’t mathematical, maybe they were something physical. They might be the combination of a safe. That was a discouraging thought, because he had no idea where he might find Nikola Tesla’s safe. He’d read up on him recently and knew that he had kept a safe in his hotel room, but it had been emptied after his death. Surely his father wouldn’t have given him a completely impossible task. He pursed his lips. His father was capable of that—he’d given Joe plenty of impossible tasks when he was a kid.

Maybe he was wrong about the numbers. He wound up the automaton and pointed his light at a piece of paper hanging on the wall. He traced each ray of light. The numbers were the same, but, in addition to the pause after every second digit, he noticed a longer pause after the sixth digit and the twelfth one. Maybe it was two separate numbers:

40 45 10

73 59 38

No patterns there, but 40 45 10 looked familiar (green, black; green, brown; cyan, black). Where had he seen those colors before? Somewhere in Grand Central Terminal, he was certain of it. He ran through combinations of tracks, of train schedules, and addresses. Again, nothing.

He closed his eyes and let the ribbon of color float free in his head, figuring out where the numbers needed to attach. A feeling of elation came over him. He knew: 40 degrees, 45 minutes 10 seconds. If you put north on the end, that was the latitude for Grand Central.

A quick check of the GPS app on his phone told him that the latitude for Grand Central was 40°45′10.08″ N, and its longitude was 73°58′35.48″ W. So, whatever he was looking at was close, but not in the terminal.

He entered the numbers that Tik-Tok had drawn and immediately hit a match. New Yorker Hotel, at 481 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York. A quick online search told him that Nikola Tesla had spent the last few years of his life there. He had died, alone, in Room 3327 (red, red, blue, slate) on January 7, 1943. The hotel had changed ownership several times since then and been completely refurbished, but the building still stood.

His heart raced. The automaton had a message for him. It was leading him exactly where Nikola Tesla wanted—his old hotel. His father must have figured that out and been able to find those numbers before the days of the Internet and portable GPS. It had been a much harder task in Nikola Tesla’s time, and in his father’s. Joe almost felt like he was cheating.

But, after that work, had his father really used the device to knock down a bridge, then hidden the device away again? Why hadn’t he destroyed it himself? If it was really so deadly, why would he leave this burden for Joe?

Because he left Joe all his burdens—taking care of his mother, putting himself through school, making a name for the next generation of Teslas, and vowing to never beat on those he loved. So far, so good, but this new task frightened him. He had to push ahead, because he felt responsible for carrying out his father’s last wish, and for keeping this device out of the hands of the man who had tried to steal the suitcase and then followed him onto the train. If the man knew that he had clues to lead him there, who knew what else he might know?

He had a location, but he still needed to figure out what the two words meant.

He typed them into an online translation program, taking a minute to find the z with a hat over it, which was, he found out, called a caron.

južni podrum 3

The language was Croatian, and the words meant
southern basement
.

He couldn’t stop grinning. He had no idea what the final three (red) meant. But this was enough to go on.

Nikola Tesla had left the plans for the automaton with his pigeon keeper and the man’s scientifically inclined young son. He must have expected them to put together the automaton and discover his message. If the newspaper clipping was right, and not the result of his father’s paranoia, his father had discovered the message years ago and had taken something from the hotel’s basement.

But he must have put it back or else he would never have left that yellow note:
Show the wisdom I did not and have the courage to destroy it
.

His father might have doubted his wisdom, but it had never occurred to his father that Joe wouldn’t have the courage go outside and walk a mile to the New Yorker Hotel.

He’d have to find a way around that problem.

Somehow.

Chapter 26

Ash opened the thick glass window. A white feather blew into the room. He watched it dance across the room before settling on his desk. Up here, almost nothing came in from the outside. Pigeons must be nesting above his floor.

He picked up the feather and studied it. Life would always find a way, no matter how much man tried to insulate himself from it.

He found the thought encouraging, and today he needed encouragement. He’d had a useless lunch with the mayor. While he agreed that solar road technology would save the city energy and money—the lots wouldn’t need snow removal, the road tiles could funnel energy into the buildings they surrounded, the energy generated could recharge electric cars—it wasn’t enough. The mayor needed broader political support to even consider such a radical move. The union for road builders was strong, the contracts with asphalt providers were long running, and all the other parties vested in the current system would resist. It would cost Ash a great deal of money, more than he had budgeted, but not more than he could afford.

He would win in the long run, but it might be a very long run indeed. The past was constantly reaching into the future and dragging it down. It would be easier to build a solar-powered road on Mars than in New York City.

His administrative assistant brought him a cappuccino and a printout listing his afternoon schedule. His next meeting was in half an hour with an Arizona mall owner who promised to be a strong beta test site for the solar road technology. Good numbers there would translate into sales, but good numbers in a place as far north as New York would translate into even more.

He browsed his email. Joe Tesla had not responded to his invitation. Ash didn’t like being ignored, so he pulled up his tracking app. The dot that was Edison was moving at a good walking clip, then stopping for over a minute at a time—long enough for a train to pass. So, Mr. Tesla and his faithful hound were in a subway tunnel heading north and west. Probably the 7 Line.

They stopped for a long moment at Times Square, then started moving slowly north toward Central Park. Maybe Joe was meeting his dog walker at a station close to the park. If so, Ash would lose track of Joe’s movements.