Authors: Rebecca Cantrell

The Tesla Legacy (29 page)

BOOK: The Tesla Legacy

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Tesla sat back up. He picked up the device and fiddled with it. He used one of his old keys like a screwdriver and took the back off. A few minutes later, he had a pile of metal pieces in his lap.

He raised his arm and tossed a handful down the tunnel. Edison looked out at them as if deciding whether to fetch them back.

Tesla struggled to his feet, and she squelched her instinct to help him. He looked weak, but determined.

He handed her some gears. They were still warm. Back in the building the device had been practically red-hot. She flung them ahead of her. A few pinged off the metal subway tracks.

Together, they walked toward his house, scattering Nikola Tesla’s invention around them as they went.

Chapter 50

Joe set Tik-Tok son the tiny nightstand. The nightstand was jammed between two beds with floral bedspreads. Room 3327, the room where Nikola Tesla died, was smaller and shabbier than he had expected. Edison sat next to the door.

“I bet it didn’t look like that when your creator lived here,” Joe told Tik-Tok. “Back then I heard that it was over twice as big—two rooms combined into a suite.”

Still, it was small, especially considering that he had lived there for ten years and had packed the rooms with pigeon cages and drawings and gadgets. Joe sat on the bed and leaned against the arched headboard. The New Yorker Hotel had been more luxurious in Nikola’s time, more like the Grand Central Hyatt, where Joe himself might have had to while away his days, trapped in a hotel suite not much bigger than his non-ancestor’s.

But he had escaped into the tunnels back to the Gallos’ house. That was a lot to be thankful for. And his mother had scrubbed his house spotless. She’d even sent all the rugs and curtains off for dry cleaning, so the entire house was shades lighter.

Joe looked at the small window. Per his request, the curtains had been drawn closed before he arrived. He hoped that once it got dark outside, he could open them again.

He took a picture of his father out of his bag and set it next to the automaton. The photo was taken when he graduated from college, before he met Tatiana, but she’d somehow acquired it and passed it on to Joe. His father’s gown billowed in front of him, and he sported a narrow 1950s-era tie and thick-framed black glasses. He looked young and happy.

Joe wished he’d met him before his father had clamped the Oscillator to the bridge. The deaths he had caused had hung heavy on him for Joe’s entire life, but the picture showed that he had been carefree once.

Joe touched the top of the picture frame and then Tik-Tok’s round head. He and the automaton had fulfilled his father’s final wish. He’d had the courage to destroy the device, the courage that his father had lacked. But he wasn’t proud of himself—he’d destroyed something that had been capable of great destruction, yes, but it had also been capable of great good. The device had been neutral, but the people who’d used it were not.

Joe wasn’t about to let them go. His attempts to link the attack to Spooky, or to find out the identity of Ash, hadn’t been helped much by the contents of Egger’s laptop, but he wasn’t giving up. It would take time, but he intended to reconstruct the actions of Spooky and find out Ash’s identity.

He’d assembled a database of all of Ash’s communications and was running linguistic analyses against it to find out the patterns in those texts and emails. Given enough time, he was certain that he could identify Ash and track him down. Ash wasn’t someone who could stay out of the spotlight, and somewhere, either in the past or the future, his style of writing would lead Joe right to him. Then he could turn him in for the murders of Quantum and Geezer (Michael Pham and Professor Egger).

But Ash wasn’t Joe’s biggest problem right now. Joe took his phone out of his pocket, and checked his email. More surveillance reports. The NSA wasn’t decreasing the volume of their requests. In fact, they had greatly increased it, probably in response to the attack on the Empire State Building.

But all their data collection hadn’t stopped the attack. All the innocent people who were being spied on as they went about their ordinary lives were no safer. But Joe had stepped over enough lines himself that he wasn’t sure he could condemn the NSA outright for their actions.

He wasn’t sure what to do. He pulled out his laptop and logged into the hotel wireless, then skipped through a couple of accounts to hide his IP address, then accessed Pellucid’s network. His fingers danced across the keys as he called up the final change that he needed to implement to take their power away. His pinky hung over the Enter key. If he pressed that key, he would commit the final changes to the Pellucid code line. He would distort and disable the product that he had built. He could face criminal charges. Bad guys might go free.

But so would good guys. Government agencies would no longer be able to put a name to every face. They wouldn’t be able to use Joe’s creation to track the movements of millions of citizens who had done nothing wrong and would do nothing wrong.

Other software would spring up to fill the gap. It would take other developers a few years longer, but they would eventually achieve Pellucid’s accuracy. His action would only buy all those innocents, none of whom had complained, most of whom wouldn’t complain even if they knew, a few more years of privacy and freedom.

On the edge of his screen he’d put up his father’s last words to him:
I was responsible for this. May God forgive me. Show the wisdom I did not and have the courage to destroy it
.

He did not want to have to write something like that someday. He didn’t want to spend his life regretting what he was responsible for. He took a deep breath, summoning up all his courage.

Then, he pressed the key.

The phone rang, and he jumped. Celeste’s picture flashed on his screen.

“Hey,” she said quietly. “Are you home?”

“Nope.” He felt proud saying it. “I’m in the room where Nikola Tesla died.”

“Morbid.”

He couldn’t deny that. “How’s your day?”

“Five,” she said.

“Brown,” he answered automatically.

“How’s your head?”

“Better. I’m clear for thinking now. And computers. And government interrogations.”

“The news says that Michael Pham was part of a terrorist ring that knocked down the High Line park tracks, and almost brought down the Empire State Building.”

“They might be right.” Edison decided that the small double beds didn’t count as human beds and jumped up next to Joe. He fondled the dog’s ears.

“They don’t mention the Oscillator.”

“Guess that’s going to stay out of the papers then. I’ve told plenty of alphabet-soup government agencies about it.”

“The truth?” she asked.

“That it was invented by Nikola Tesla, stolen from the basement of this very hotel, and that I had to destroy it to take it off the Empire State Building.” So, not the whole truth, but close.

“Ah, that truth,” she said.

“Nobody died,” Joe answered. “So I can still sleep at night.”

“I heard a rumor about the Empire State Building,” she said. “I think you can see it from your room.”

“Curtains are closed.”

“Open them.”

He hesitated, then, heart beating too fast, he leaned over and opened the curtains. The night sky of New York spread out in front of him. But the Empire State Building dominated the view. It still wasn’t open, as all the steel needed to be checked and certified as safe, but the lights were still working. The building was lit up in red and white, and the spire on top was blue.

“It’s July Fourth,” she said. “In a minute there will be fireworks, and I thought we could watch them together.”

It had been months since he’d looked out a window this long. Edison crowded over onto his lap and put his head on Joe’s shoulder, his furry face against Joe’s cheek. Joe hugged him with one arm and held his phone in the other hand. He was safe here. He could do this.

A giant golden firework went off above the building’s tall spire. That spire had almost crashed down to Earth. But it hadn’t.

“It’s beautiful,” said Celeste. “Isn’t it?”

Joe watched the glittering strands of light fall down from the sky before he answered. “It is.”

Acknowledgments

Thank you to everyone who helped Joe Tesla and Edison find their feet in this story. They received literary aid from Kathryn Wadsworth, David Deardorff, Karen Hollinger, Ben Haggard, Judy Heath, and Joshua Corin; psychological advice on agoraphobia from Peter Plantec; and marvelous tea to fuel my writing from my niece Lanessa and my sister Sari. Thanks to my wonderful cover designer, Kit Foster; copy editor, Joyce Lamb; and literary agents, Mary Alice Kier and Anna Cottle. I owe the most to my husband and son—you guys are the best writing family a person could ever have.

Plus a giant thank you to all my readers—you are what make Joe and Edison’s adventures possible.

About the Author

Thank you for reading
The Tesla Legacy
. I hope that you enjoyed the story!

I’m REBECCA CANTRELL, the award-winning and
New York Times
bestselling thriller author of this book. My novels include the Joe Tesla series, starting with
The World Beneath
; the Order of the Sanguines series, starting with
The Blood Gospel
; and the Hannah Vogel mystery series, starting
with A Trace of Smoke
.

If you’d like to find out more about my novels, visit my website at
http://www.rebeccacantrell.com
. I have them all listed there, in order, plus some extra content about researching them and the worlds in which they take place. To purchase them for your Kindle, please go to the next page.

If you’d like to receive advance notice of my upcoming books, please sign up for my newsletter at
http://rebeccacantrell.com/newsletter-for-rebecca-cantrell
. I put it out a few times a year, and I promise never to sell or trade your name.

Or, if you want to see what I’m up to day to day, you can find me on Facebook and Twitter. My husband, son, and I left Hawaii’s sunny shores a few years ago for the adventures of Berlin, Germany.

Author’s Notes

Joe Tesla’s underground world is full of secrets. Some I made up, but others are true. Before you start reading the rest of these notes, take a second to decide which is the most unrealistic claim I make in the fictional world beneath. Now, let’s go through these notes together to see if it’s fact or fiction.

First off, Nikola Tesla did indeed invent a device called the Oscillator or “Tesla’s Earthquake Machine.” On his seventy-ninth birthday, he told reporters that he had used this device to generate an earthquake near his laboratory. When asked what would be required to destroy the Empire State Building, he replied, “Five pounds of air pressure. If I attached the proper oscillating machine on a girder, that is all the force I would need, five pounds. Vibration will do anything. It would only be necessary to step up the vibrations of the machine to fit the natural vibration of the building and the building would come crashing down.” Here is the quote in the
New York World-Telegram
dated July 11, 1935. I’ve also come across the quote in Tesla biographies.
MythBuster
s tried, and failed, to create an oscillator that would knock down a bridge.

On the other hand,
destructive resonance
may have knocked down the Tacoma Narrows Bridge near Seattle. The bridge was known as “Galloping Gertie” because it moved so much during windstorms. Although the bridge was built to withstand wind speeds of a hundred and twenty miles per hour, on a day with a wind speed of only forty-two miles an hour, the bridge collapsed. The video footage of the July 1, 1940 event is eerie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zczJXSxnw

Tesla did have someone who helped him with his pigeons, including collecting wounded pigeons from the streets, but I don’t know his name, and none of my characters is in any way related to him. I’d love to learn more about him, though, so if you find anything out, please send me an email (
mailto:[email protected]
).

Spooky doesn’t exist, but there are other networks of hacktivists and activists spread around the world. The most famous is Anonymous, whose members wear Guy Fawkes masks when speaking for the group in the non-virtual world. The group was named by
Time
magazine one of the world’s
“100 Most Influential People”
in 2012 and has performed hacks against various government agencies, religious organizations, and corporations.

All of the locations in the book, besides Joe Tesla’s house, are real. The cemetery where his father is buried? Here are
pictures
. Grand Central Terminal does contain the information booth, the famous clock, the gorgeous constellations, the Biltmore Room, The Campbell Apartment and the Oyster Bar. If you visit any of Joe’s hangouts, do please send me a picture!

Also by Rebecca Cantrell

Joe Tesla series set in the tunnels under modern day New York City:

The World Beneath