The Tesla Legacy (27 page)

He took the device from his pocket and held it in his open palm. The gray paint looked shabby here, the welds attaching the cylinder to the base comically exaggerated. The Oscillator looked like a cartoon creation, not an object that could do damage in the real world.

But it had done damage. He was convinced that Quantum had tested the device on the High Line tracks as he had said. If it had worked there, it would work here.

Moving quickly, he clamped the device to the beam and turned it on. He’d already determined the correct resonance for steel, and he set the dial to match. He didn’t wait to see if it worked. If it didn’t, he could come back tomorrow and try again.

Instead, he hurried up the gray stairs, past Sage’s empty desk, and to his office. He was sitting at his computer when the surveillance cameras came back on, and he leisurely packed up and walked to the front door on camera.

Time to go home for the day.

Chapter 46

Joe’s computer speakers screamed at him. He blinked at them once or twice, trying to remember what the sound was for.

The Oscillator.

His mother stood in the doorway. “What is making such a sound?”

“My computer.” Joe had already pulled it into his lap. “Send in Vivian.”

“You are not supposed to be—”

“Life or death. I need Vivian.”

She looked at him carefully for a moment, then nodded. “I see.”

She hurried down the stairs and toward the front of the house. His mother never needed extraneous explanations when things were serious. Even when he was a small boy, she had trusted him.

He pulled open the Lamont-Doherty seismograph. The wave pattern was identical to the pattern he had seen from just before the High Line park tracks went down. Something was going on in New York, but this device couldn’t give him any more information. He needed something closer to the point of origin.

A few clicks brought up his network of hacked cell phones. The people carrying them moved around the city. All the phones felt the vibrations, but some more than others. He started comparing results by area. The vibrations were stronger south of Central Park. High Line was south of the park. Was it happening there again? Maybe the damage was caused by a freak localized earthquake after all.

“Sir?” Vivian was at his bedside. His mother stood behind her.

“The Oscillator has been switched on. I’ll be able to give you a building name in a minute. I need to go there and shut it off.”

“If we don’t?” He liked that she didn’t ask a lot of questions either.

“Whatever it’s attached to will collapse. It’s got about an hour, depending on size.” Or at least that’s how long it had taken to bring down the High Line tracks. He flipped through the phones as fast as he could, eyes focusing for a fraction of a second on each one as he judged the relative intensity of the vibrations.

Vivian stood quietly. That helped. No time for talking yet.

“The Oscillator?” his mother asked. “It is a true thing, then?”

“Yup.” He didn’t explain more, attention riveted to each passing phone until he got a match.

“Manhattan,” he said. “South of the park, north of twenty-third.” (blue, red)

“I see, sir.”

Was it at Grand Central? His heart clenched at the thought. “Close to here.”

He pulled up all the phones within a one-mile radius of Grand Central. That left him only a handful. A few in the terminal itself, others in Rockefeller Center, Bryant Park, and near the Empire State Building. The hair on the back of his neck stood up when he realized which phones were getting the strongest signals.

“It’s the Empire State Building,” he said.

His mother sucked in her breath audibly.

“You’re sure, sir?” Vivian had pulled out her cell phone.

“As sure as I can be.” That wasn’t as sure as he’d like to be, but it was better to take extra precautions and look like a fool than it was to let people die.

“I’ll call it in,” she said. “Tell Dirk it’s a kind of sonic bomb and get him to persuade the cops to evacuate the building.”

“The vibration might knock down adjoining buildings, too.” He wasn’t really sure what it would do. But, whatever it did, it would be his fault. If he hadn’t put together the automaton and gone looking for trouble, this wouldn’t have happened. Egger would be enjoying his golden years. Michael Pham would be continuing his life of hacking, and thousands of people wouldn’t be in danger.

He hadn’t shown the wisdom that his father had hoped for. By honoring his father’s wish so carelessly, he had indirectly brought death to Geezer and Quantum. Again, tears threatened to swamp him.

He climbed out of bed, ignoring the dizziness, and walked unsteadily to his closet.

Vivian was already punching numbers into her phone, but she looked over at him. “What are you doing?”

“The Empire State Building has steam heat. I’m going in through the steam access tunnels. I’m the only one who knows how to pinpoint the device’s location and shut it off.”

Vivian paused with her finger in midair. “Put on a hat.”

He touched the back of his head. His fingers touched stubble where his head had been shaved, and spiky plastic stitches. She had a point.

While she talked on the phone, his mother helped him into a wool suit, black dress shoes, and the fedora Celeste had bought him that he’d never had the heart to throw away. Turned out, she was right. It was perfect for certain occasions—like when your head was half-shaved and you needed to go out in public without scaring anyone.

His grown-up clothes weren’t what he usually wore in the subway tunnels, but with luck he’d look like any other businessman if he got caught in the Empire State Building. Instead of like Frankenstein’s monster in a suit.

He tucked his phone into his suit pocket. As long as he had Internet, he could track the vibrations his phone was sensing through the online app he’d used to track everyone else’s phones. Hopefully, he could use the phone to tell him exactly where to look for the device once he got to the building.

He was in the front hall before he noticed that Vivian and his mother were right behind him. “Vivian?”

“I’m coming with you. You’re not getting hurt again on my watch.” She gave him one of her thousand-yard stares.

He’d have to take her down to stop her from following him. Even well, he wasn’t sure that he could do that, and certainly not in his current condition. “Glad to have you on the team.”

Edison bounded in from the parlor and licked his fingers.

His mother looked at him.

“You can’t,” he said. “You have to stay here to explain. If something happens to me, no one else knows the whole story but you.”

Her eyes narrowed, and he was afraid she was going to refuse, but she sighed and stepped back. “I bear the blame for starting this.”

“You don’t,” he said. “Dad does.”

“I passed his words along to you, because I thought they were not true, that they might help you understand his unreal patterns of thinking.”

Joe pulled her into a hug. “All of us Teslas have unreal patterns of thinking.”

She smiled at him, but her eyes shone with tears. “I will see this through to the end, but you must come back so that I don’t have to. You cannot do such a thing to your mother.”

“I don’t intend to,” he said.

He picked up two flashlights and his tool set from the parlor. He might have to take the thing apart when he found it.

Vivian had already opened the front door for him, and resettled her holster. She wasn’t going to pass for a business executive working weekends.

He hurried through and led the way to the tunnel in front of his house. He quickly disabled his security alarm, and both stepped into the semidarkness of the wider tunnel system. Edison ranged a few steps ahead. Joe’s head throbbed, but he ignored it.

“We’ll take the tunnel for the 7 East,” he said. “The steam entrance leads off from there.”

He’d passed the steam tunnel for the Empire State Building many times, but had always wondered about the legality of his keys and figured that security in a building like that had to be tight, so he’d never entered. This time, with the evacuation, security would be even tighter, but he didn’t have a choice.

Edison stuck close to him. The dog didn’t seem nervous, just determined. They’d barely been out in the tunnels together since Joe got beaned, and he was glad to see Edison was calm. Of course, Edison was always calm. So was Vivian.

The weak link in this particular chain was Joe himself.

His head throbbed with each step, nausea came and went in waves, and he was having trouble focusing. But he didn’t have the luxury of tucking himself into bed and waiting until this passed. He had to find the device.

They reached the door to the Empire State Building’s steam tunnel without incident, and only one train had passed. More than that might have caused his head to actually explode, Joe had decided.

He tapped the door once, then pulled the key ring out of his pocket to search for the Con Edison steam master key. He’d need the modern one. “Thanks for saving my keys.”

“Credit goes to Edison. He carried them into the ambulance and gave them to me.”

“Good boy!” Joe said automatically. He wished he’d thought to bring dog treats. Edison would probably earn his weight in dog treats before this was over.

The key turned, and he pushed the metal door open.

“You can just do that?” Vivian sounded surprised.

“Came with the house.” He didn’t have time to explain.

Edison walked next to him as they hurried down the steam tunnel. Vivian drew her gun and went first. The pipes here were freshly painted, the ground underneath so clean it looked as if it had been swept yesterday. It was the tidiest steam tunnel he’d ever seen.

One more door, and they were in the pitch-black basement of the Empire State Building. Someone had pulled the fire alarm, and it blared so loudly that Joe swore he could feel vibrations against his skin. His headache raised a notch with each beat.

He clicked on his flashlight and shone it ahead. Clean white walls, polished linoleum, fluorescent lights overhead that were off. A gray arrow was painted on the wall next to the word
Lobby
.

“You look pale,” Vivian said. “Maybe we should go back where it’s quieter and rest.”

He shook his head. They didn’t have time for his weakness. He needed to think. Vibrations against his skin? That couldn’t have come from the alarms.

Holding tight to his phone with one hand, he pressed it flat against the wall. The phone quivered under his hand with a steady heartbeat. The Oscillator was here, going full tilt. Vivian put her hand next to his and looked at him with worried eyes.

“Not much time,” he said. “You can go home.”

She gave him a look that left no doubt about her intentions. “Where to next?”

Following the arrow, he reached a surprisingly clean stairwell and took the stairs two at a time. The noise threatened to drive him to his knees, but he kept going. He could not let this building be brought down.

He’d take the stairs up one floor past the lobby, then he’d look like one of the evacuees, and could maybe sneak into an elevator. Up he went, until he reached the floor above the lobby. The staircase door opened onto lemon-yellow carpet and a set of closed double doors adorned with a logo that resembled a hammer. He didn’t even want to know what they did in here. He made for the elevators.

Vivian touched his arm. “Stairs are safer.”

“We can’t climb up one hundred and three stories,” he said. “We need to split up the distance. You go to forty-three, I’ll go to eighty-five. When you get there, put your phone against the wall.”

“Why?”

“Give me your phone.” He added her number to his list of monitored phones and handed it back. “I’ll know what vibrations it’s registering.”

Vivian pressed the up button. For a sickening moment, he feared that the elevator might be locked out by the police, or full of people fleeing, but the doors opened almost immediately onto an empty elevator. Apparently, people were following instructions and taking the stairs.

Edison went in ahead of him, Vivian after.

“I don’t like being separated,” she said.

“No time.” He pressed the buttons for floors forty-three (green, red) and eighty-five (purple, brown).

She tried to hand him her gun, but he refused to take it.

“You’ll be more use with it than I am. My vision is…impaired.” A delicate way to explain that he felt light-headed and dizzy and some objects were doubling themselves whenever he looked at them.

She put the gun into her holster. “What’s the plan?”

“We’re going to take readings on multiple floors to pinpoint the location of the device. I’ll go to the top. You start at the middle. We’ll go up or down, depending on how the readings from our phones differ.”

Vivian looked puzzled.

“I’m tracking the device via the sound waves it emits,” he said. “The waves should get bigger the closer we are to the device.”

The elevator stopped on the forty-third (green, red) floor. She held the door open with one hand. “What do I do?”

“Hold your phone against the floor by the elevator,” he said. “And wait.”

The doors closed on her skeptical face.

Edison nudged his hand. A question.

“I’m fine, boy,” he lied. Edison knew it was a lie, but he didn’t challenge him on it, just leaned against his leg, offering the support of his presence. Joe ruffled the fur on the back of the dog’s neck.

The elevator shot up at remarkable speed. He couldn’t hear it moving over the blaring of the fire alarm. Maybe the elevator was soundless, not like the creaky monstrosity that took him home.

He checked out the results from Vivian’s phone. The waves were stronger on the forty-third (green, red) floor than in the basement. The device was up high in the building.

The elevator settled and opened its doors to the eighty-fifth (purple, brown) floor. He pressed his phone against the floor just outside the elevator, ready to compare his readings to Vivian’s, but he knew already that it was stronger here. A lot stronger. The glass door vibrated visibly in front of him.