The Tesla Legacy (11 page)

Joe set the teacup on the marble-topped coffee table like a Victorian gentleman. This was a room his non-ancestor Nikola Tesla would have understood. Except for the laptop on the ottoman, everything dated from Nikola’s era, and the inventor would have recognized the laptop as a device he had predicted over a hundred years before, one that could wirelessly send and transmit information across the globe.

Nothing here would shock Nikola. For all Joe knew, Nikola Tesla might have visited this underground house and sat in this very parlor. He might have known the designer of one of the largest electrical underground rail systems in the world—one that ran under his very feet. If so, why wouldn’t the man have invited the famous scientist here for tea?

Joe pulled the leather armchair closer to the fire and set his shopping list on the arm. It wouldn’t take him too long to order the parts. He’d have them sent to his lawyer’s office. Mr. Rossi would forward them by bike courier to the information booth. That was how Joe got all his mail.

Before he started ordering, he needed to check his email. He’d been off the grid for most of the day, other than a quick note to his administrative assistant to tell everyone he’d be unreachable.

One (cyan) email had been sorted into his Private folder, and he went there first to see an email from Alan Wright, CEO of Wright Industries. Joe paused before answering it. Alan had sent him a few emails over the months he’d been in New York, and he hadn’t answered any of them. He hadn’t wanted Alan to see him penned up in the tunnels like a hamster.

He skimmed the email. Alan had heard of his father’s death and wished to express his sympathy. How had Alan heard, and why did he care?

Joe hadn’t told anyone but Celeste and Vivian about his father’s death, but the Internet was a giant tattletale, so presumably the whole world knew. Anyway, Alan wanted to meet tomorrow for a drink at The Campbell Apartment—a trendy cocktail lounge in Grand Central Terminal. That couldn’t be an accidental choice. Alan must know he was trapped here.

In some ways, Alan was as trapped as Joe. He could move around the world, but he couldn’t escape from his role as a billionaire CEO. Joe knew the trap of being surrounded by people suddenly afraid to tell him the truth, afraid to open up to him, ready to lie to make him happy, certain his life was far too glamorous for them and their concerns. He wondered if Alan missed being ordinary as much as he did. He tapped out a quick answer, arranging to meet him the next evening at eight (purple) for drinks.

Then he switched over to his Work folder which contained bug reports and a couple of questions from the young software architect he’d been grooming to take over maintenance of the facial recognition engine so that Joe could switch to working on gait recognition.

Gait recognition was new and interesting. In gait recognition, the computer tried to determine a subject’s identity from the way he or she walked. Gait recognition enabled identification from a much farther distance than facial recognition. It was surprisingly effective.

He dealt with those emails before moving to his newest folder, RRT, an abbreviation for Recognition Request Tracking. He whistled in surprise, and Edison lifted his head.

“It’s OK, boy, go on back to sleep,” Joe said.

But it wasn’t OK. Just the opposite. In the last few hours, a million more requests had been made than the week before. That didn’t make sense. Either his software had a bug, or all the governmental agencies in the United States were experiencing a massive crime wave, or something new had come online, probably something automated. His stomach clenched.

List forgotten, he logged into the system and began tracking the requests down, compiling reports of where the requests originated and the reasons why. So far, they all came from a single source.

Edison nudged his knee, but Joe pushed him away. “Busy, Edison.”

The dog dropped his head into Joe’s lap, blocking his view of the screen.

“What do you need?” He looked at the clock on the corner of his computer. He’d been sitting here for hours. “Bedtime?”

Edison wagged his tail and looked meaningfully at the door. The dog didn’t think it was healthy to sit here this long. He was right, of course. But he didn’t have to go to the bathroom. When he did, he stood by the door and gave a bark to let Joe know it was important. Just a single bark, because Edison, or Joe, was well trained.

“It’s going to be a while, buddy,” Joe told him. “Sorry.”

Edison gave him a skeptical look and wandered out toward the kitchen. A crunching sound indicated he had found a midnight snack.

Joe scrolled through the reports he’d just generated. It was unmistakable. The National Security Agency was submitting millions of match requests.

What was their source material? He found that, too. They’d submitted surveillance footage from all across the country—people going into stores, people crossing the street, people leaving church, people eating at McDonald’s. Any of those requests would have been normal, but so many of them at once meant they had tapped into thousands of surveillance cameras and were looking for automated matches of the millions of people who appeared on the videos. Those people couldn’t all be criminals or terrorists—the vast majority of them were innocent. But they were still being tracked.

Millions of innocent people were being tracked.

And Joe had created the monster.

Chapter 15

Vivian checked her phone. She’d been pacing the corridor outside of Mrs. Tesla’s suite for hours. The woman hadn’t come out, although a room-service cart had gone in. Vivian had intercepted it outside the door, searched it, and patted down the bewildered Hispanic waiter.

The elevator dinged, and she tensed, as she had about a hundred times over the course of the evening. So far she’d watched a drunken couple practically have sex in the hall, a bored businessman with a briefcase head straight to his room, four guys in black T-shirts who smelled like pot and couldn’t stop laughing stumble to their room, and a guy lugging what she swore was a monkey in a dog carrier.

Dirk stepped out of the elevator, and she relaxed. He was here to replace her, and she had trusted him with her life for years.

A police officer by day, he sometimes moonlighted for Mr. Rossi’s security company. Mr. Rossi was Tesla’s lawyer. She’d met Tesla when Mr. Rossi had hired her to protect him. But Tesla had given her the slip and disappeared underground—reappearing with the agoraphobia that still plagued him. If she’d kept an eye on him as she should have, he’d be fine today.

“Yo,” Dirk said. The circles under his eyes looked darker than usual, and his jeans and white shirt looked as if he’d slept in them. Not his usual dapper self.

Dirk looked that way only when he had girl trouble, a condition that cropped up about every six months. Dirk had commitment issues.

“Long day?” she asked.

He shrugged and looked around the empty corridor. “Better than yours, by the looks of it.”

She filled him in on the situation, then took the elevator down. This time she didn’t feel so awed by the lobby. The people here weren’t different from anyone else, except they had more money to burn.

She turned up her collar and started walking toward Grand Central in the warm night. Even though it was late, people swarmed around her on the sidewalk, some dressed in formal evening wear, others in grungy torn jeans and covered in piercings. Lucy would look like that if their mother weren’t so strict.

She tapped out a text message to an informant she’d been cultivating at Grand Central. If she didn’t get a response, this was likely a wasted trip. Still, it felt good to be walking and actually getting somewhere instead of just wearing down the carpet.

A few blocks later, she got an answer.

Good. He was sober enough to type, and he hadn’t lost or hocked the phone.

She arranged to meet him in front of Pershing Square restaurant. She was starving, and he likely was, too.

Then she hailed a cab, remembering to ask for a receipt. This was definitely a business expense, and Tesla would have to pay for it.

She climbed out in front of the terminal and jogged across the street. The green Pershing Square sign was turned off, the chairs up on the tables inside. They were always closed this late, something she should have remembered.

A gaunt figure in an Army green jacket emerged from the shadows next to her and grabbed her elbow. She resisted the impulse to smack him because she recognized him from the smell. “Rufus?”

“The same, baby.”

She looked at his thin, leathery cheeks, faded brown eyes, and scraggly black beard. “Not your baby, Roof.”

“You might be, you find out what I have to tell.”

“What you got for me?”

He rubbed his thumb against his fingertips in the universal sign for money.

“Let’s get some food into you first.” She worried about him, even though she knew she shouldn’t.

Once, he’d told her that at night he slept on a bench in Central Park in the summer and next to a warm subway grate in the winter. He slid around the city on his own paths, always one step ahead. At least tonight he looked mostly sober.

A few minutes later they were at an all-night diner, drinking coffee and waiting for two orders of bacon and eggs.

Under the fluorescent lights, Rufus looked even more bedraggled. Grit had settled into the deep lines on his forehead and cheeks, and what was left of his hair didn’t look as if it had been washed or combed since Obama was first elected president.

He’d seen some hard living, had Rufus. But that was why she needed him. He’d been panhandling around Grand Central so long he was practically invisible, and he knew everything that went on there. For a price, he’d share.

“What you got?” She fell into his rhythm of speech.

“Your man was attacked today in the terminal.”

She knew that. “What you know about it?”

“He had moves.” Rufus made a karate-chop motion in the air.

She slid a ten across the table and resisted the urge to ask for a receipt. So far, he hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know, but it was good to keep him on the payroll so he’d keep trying.

“Word in the station is, he took out two cops and ran off.”

“Has he been around since?” she asked.

“Maybe.” Rufus leaned back so the waitress could set a loaded white plate in front of him.

Vivian gave him another ten.

Rufus scooped up the bill, then cut his bacon in half with his fork and ate it, his movements surprisingly dainty.

Vivian usually ate bacon with her fingers, but she decided she’d better up her table manners if Rufus was more refined than she was.

“Saw a guy go into the tunnels.” Rufus took a long sip of coffee. “Not a homeless guy. He dressed in black, clean-shaven. He went down in the tunnels off Track 42, smooth as you like. Never came back.”

Vivian stifled a curse. This was definitely about Tesla.

Too late to call, but she texted Tesla a warning and told him to be on the lookout for a guy dressed in black, maybe the one who attacked him, in the tunnels.

Tesla didn’t answer, but she didn’t expect him to. He kept his phone in that stupid pouch, and collected his messages whenever he felt like it. Besides, he was probably asleep. Like she should be.

But she still worried.

Chapter 16

Joe’s phone rang. He groaned and rolled over in bed. Too early. It rang again, and Edison nudged his arm. Time to get up.

Could the bike couriers be delivering his parts already? If so, he had to get up to the clock to meet them quickly, or they’d take the delivery back. Bike messengers waited for no man.

He yanked the phone off its charger. “Tesla.”

“Still sleeping?” Celeste’s breathless voice sounded surprised. Joe had taken to waking up early since he’d moved underground.

“Late night.” Joe rubbed the stubble on his chin and yawned.

“Carousing?” She laughed.

He filled her in on the near mugging. With his luck, it was probably already in the newspapers or on a blog somewhere, so lying wouldn’t do any good.

“Tell me about this Detective Bailey,” she wheedled.

Celeste was never jealous, always urging him to find a partner, as if it would be easy to find a woman who wanted to live underground with a man who couldn’t go anywhere. As if he wanted anyone but Celeste—the Celeste of his twenties, when they were both young and healthy and easily in love. “Not much to tell.”

“Don’t be like that. I want details.”

“She just took my statement.” Joe checked the time. Already ten. He needed to get showered and shaved.

“Is she cute? She sounds Irish. I bet she has a great accent.”

“She’s a cop.”

“Cops can be cute. Like Beckett on
Castle
.”

“Beckett’s not a cop—she’s an actress.” He didn’t know where this was going, but he was plenty uncomfortable along the way.

“Is Detective Bailey cute like Beckett?”

Edison barked from the front door. He needed to go outside, and pronto by the sound of it. Joe stuffed his feet into a pair of slippers. “I have to take Edison out.”

“Poor baby!” Celeste said. He wasn’t sure if she was talking about him or the dog.

He thudded down the stairs to where Edison waited by the front door. He pulled on a sweatshirt, slipped into his running shoes, and took the dog out.

Edison raced ahead of him to the door that led out to the long tunnel. That’s where they usually went. Joe trotted along after him, stopping to enter the long string of numbers that would open the door.

With a grateful bark, Edison bounded through the door and out into the dimly lit tunnel. His silhouette paused at the end of the tunnel, before he veered off to mark the side of the tunnel, the beginning of his outside territory.

Joe yawned and trudged after him. He picked up the bottle of odor remover that he kept right at that spot and sprayed it onto Edison’s pee. He wasn’t sure if he believed that it broke down the odor on a bacterial level like it said on the package, but he had to admit that it kept the smell at bay.