Glimpse (The Tesla Effect Book 1)

by Julie Drew

  “Ready?” Tesla asked. She handed the crowbar back to Finn, who put it in the messenger bag, along with the hammer.

  Finn ducked his head and stepped over the piece of wall they’d left intact at the bottom and into the newly-revealed hallway. Tesla climbed through behind him, and they walked cautiously down the hall. They passed four identical, unmarked doors on their right, about ten yards between each of them; the wall to the left was smooth and unmarked. They could see that the hallway ended up ahead with another door directly in front of them. Finn stopped, and so did Tesla.

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  Tesla frowned. “I’m not sure. It’s not like I’ve seen the whole facility. I have nothing to compare this to.” She thought for a moment as she unconsciously pulled at her bottom lip with her teeth. Finn watched her and waited, willing himself to be detached.

  “I think we should try these doors,” she said after a moment. “There’s a reason why this section is hidden away, and even if there’s a bad guy behind every one of these doors, there’s no way I can leave before I’ve checked to see if my dad’s here.”

  “I agree,” said Finn. “Are you ready?”

  “Wait, Finn,” she said, her voice soft, hesitant.

  He turned back, prepared to hear her say that she was with Sam now. He was braced for it, had already convinced himself it would be for the best—for both of them.

  “When you don’t want anyone to find what you’ve got, a secret room is useful. But it would also be useful if you don’t want anyone to find you.”

  Sam forgotten, Finn sucked in his breath. “Of course,” he said quietly, as if to himself. “Brilliant.”

  “Yeah, he is,” she said. “In an evil-mad-scientist kind of way.”

  “I didn’t mean Nilsen,” Finn said. “I meant you. It all makes sense now. He was here from the start. Nilsen probably still worked here when this facility was planned and built. And all these years, no one’s been able to track him, he just shows up here and there, and then he’s gone again. Because this has always been his home base, and it’s completely off the grid.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Tesla said. “He’s completely unprincipled, but he’s smart. You’ve got to give him that. His hiding place actually has a built-in, state-of-the-art security system developed and installed by the US government. No wonder no one could find him. Including the US government.”

  Finn shook his head in admiration, however begrudged. “Unbelievable.”

  “So,” Tesla said. “We want to find my father—alive and well—but we have to be prepared to also find Nilsen. And if this has been his base of operations for years, I think it’s safe to say he’s got home court advantage.”

  Finn opened up the messenger bag, gave her back the crowbar, and took the hammer out for himself.

  “Ready?” he asked, and when she nodded, they walked to the first door and turned the handle.

  CHAPTER 34

  It was locked. Tesla tried to relax as she and Finn stood on either side of the door and he had reached out to open it. They remembered all too well the sudden gunshot, the blood and chaos, and the painful recovery that still lay ahead of Beckett.

  “Should we try to force it open?” Tesla wondered if her father might be just a few feet away, separated from her by only a locked door.

  “Let’s try the other three before we decide,” Finn said, and Tesla nodded.

  They moved to the next door and took up their positions, pressed up against the wall to take advantage of what little cover was available. Finn tried the door, and the handle turned and swung inward without a sound. They looked at each other, drew a breath, and Finn led the way inside the dark, silent room.

  He felt the edges of the wall until he encountered what he’d hoped to find: a light switch. He flipped it on and the buzz of a fluorescent light sounded faintly as the room was flooded with a harsh white light. They stepped a little further in, and had just begun to register the military cot, the canned goods, unmarked cardboard boxes stacked high to the left to form a kind of wall, the huge maps pinned to the wall, when Tesla stopped dead in her tracks at the last sound she expected to hear.

  “Who’s there?” asked Aunt Jane.

  The unmistakable voice of Jane Doane had come from behind the boxes. Tesla watched Finn move purposefully behind the wall of cardboard, hammer in hand, and then someone grabbed her from behind and covered her mouth and nose with a thick wad of fabric. She couldn’t breathe. Her heart racing, she flailed about, desperate and terrified, kicking at the legs behind her, hands trying to pry off the arm that now held her around the waist. She screamed but heard only a muted, muffled sound escape her throat as the arm that pinned her to her assailant’s body held her captive, and the wet, heavy cloth that cut off her air supply as well as her voice made it impossible for her to warn Finn. As the wooziness set in she realized the cloth was soaked with some kind of drug and she wondered, with her last conscious thought, what had happened to Finn and how her parents could have been so very wrong about Jane.

  Before she actually knew she was awake, Tesla was aware of the awful, slightly metallic taste in her mouth.

  I was drugged, she remembered. Knocked out. She opened her eyes and squinted against the bright light above her as her eyes slowly focused. She moved to sit up, only to find that her hands and feet were tied. She fought down the wave of panic that threatened to engulf her, aware of that feeling of being pulled again, which made no sense at all. She paused for a moment, taking stock: is it my heart? Some effect of the drug? She couldn’t say for sure, but her instinct told her it was neither of these things. It was physical, the tension was very real, like a wire pulled so tight it was almost vibrating, but it was also, equally, an emotional feeling.

  Move toward the pull, she thought, without the slightest understanding of what the hell that even meant.

  Tesla looked around, took stock of her situation. She lay on her back, on the floor of the room she and Finn had entered. She had been grabbed, drugged unconscious. Her hands were bound in front of her with some sort of flexible plastic band pulled tight—too tight to work them free. Her ankles were similarly bound, but she used the abdominal muscles she had worked all year, with crunches and planks, to sit up so she could look around.

  The cot had a pillow and a blanket on it, neatly made. A small refrigerator hummed at the foot of the bed. Shelves held canned goods, bottled water, a few plates and bowls and utensils. An open door on the opposite wall revealed what looked to Tesla like a small bathroom.

  Her head was still fuzzy, but better, and her heart no longer pounded, Tesla noted, when she heard a soft moan from somewhere behind her and the pull she had felt grew stronger, followed by a faint wave of nausea. She used her feet to turn her body toward the sound and realized it came from behind the stacks of boxes that filled half the room.

  “Who’s there?” she said softly, tentatively, with the exact inflection she’d heard in Jane’s voice just before she had lost consciousness.

  “Tes?” came the groggy reply, and she immediately began to scoot toward the boxes, around the stack that effectively divided the room in two.

  It was Finn, and it seemed to take Tesla forever to get to him. She couldn’t move fast enough, she had never wanted anything so much, to get there, to already be there, even if all she was able to do was press her arm up against his. She felt that pull, and it was almost as if a line connected them and it felt so real she wanted to reach up and grab it and by simply putting one hand over the other drag herself to him by the thing that connected them. As she got closer she saw that just as she had been, he was bound and lay on the floor, but unlike her, he was on his side, and he was clearly injured.

  “Finn,” she said breathlessly as she finally got close, her shoes at last touching the fabric of his shirt as another, stronger wave of nausea washed over her and her head began to ache. “Are you hurt? What happened?”

  “Shhhh,” he said quietly, his face scr
unched up in pain, his eyes barely open as he squinted up at her in the harsh glare of the overhead lights. “World’s. Worst. Hangover.”

  “What happened to you?” she asked again, alarmed.

  “I heard a voice behind these boxes,” he said, his voice a little slurred. “I walked back here, heard a sound from you and—weird, I sort of got dizzy and my vision blurred—but before I could turn around someone hit me—hard—on the back of my head. Now here I am, all trussed up. I started to come to and didn’t know where you were or what had happened…it felt—are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” she assured him. “Somebody grabbed me and put a cloth over my nose and mouth. Knocked me out. Chloroform, maybe—I think that’s what they use in the movies.” She paused, wanting to tell him about the strange pull she’d felt, the oddly physical need to get to him, the nausea and headache, but figured it was all part of the drug still in her system.

  “Did you hear Aunt Jane?” Tesla asked, so softly Finn barely heard her.

  Finn nodded.

  “I guess it’s true, then,” Tesla said. “I had hoped that Lydia was wrong.”

  “Good people do bad things sometimes,” Finn said.

  “Don’t do that,” Tesla said firmly. “I’m not a little girl. I don’t have to hide from the real world, or be protected from it.”

  “I know. And that’s good, Tesla, but it’s still true, you know. We can try to understand—that’s not the same as excusing, or even forgiving. We don’t know the whole story yet.”

  “Sometimes all that matters is what someone does, not why they do it.”

  Finn couldn’t argue with that. He hated to see her bitter and shut down, but he knew it was sometimes necessary in order to grow up and move on with your life. He had certainly had to do his share of it and knew perfectly well that where his father was concerned he was incapable of following his own good advice.

  “We need to get out of here,” Tesla said. “We have to assume that Nilsen—or Jane, or both of them—will come back, and I don’t want to be here when they do.”

  “Agreed,” said Finn. He took a deep breath, rolled onto his back and sat up and the pain in his head exploded, made even his eyes hurt.

  “Whoa, shit,” he said through gritted teeth at precisely the moment Tesla said, “Oh God, my head,” in a voice tight with pain.

  They looked at each other in shocked silence, her shoes now touching his pant leg, her bound hands thrust forward, clutching at the sleeve of his T-shirt, though she didn’t remember reaching out and touching him. His breath was shallow and fast, and hers matched his, like two galloping horses, side by side, who’ve synchronized in some way, without any overt communication, the rhythm of their pounding hooves, the flex and strain of muscle, the flow of blood and oxygen.

  Tesla let go of his shirt, leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, willing the pain and dizziness to recede. What is going on? she wondered. Something has happened—to both of us. “Are you okay?” she asked in a shaky voice

  When he opened his eyes he met hers, two brilliant spots of beauty in this awful hole in the ground. He smiled, just a little, at the concern apparent in her voice. “Yes. My head hurts.”

  “Concussion,” she said forlornly. “Been there.”

  “Okay, doc, you can prescribe something for me later. Maybe a sponge bath.”

  “Yeah, you’re okay,” she said disgustedly, letting go of his shirt and leaning back away from him. “At least as okay as you ever are.”

  “Come closer,” he said suddenly, and without hesitation she scooted in toward him again until her knees, bent and pulled in close to her body, were pressed up against his shoulder. “Can you reach into your bag?”

  “They didn’t take it?” she asked, surprised to see that he still wore it.

  He didn’t answer—he didn’t need to—and she awkwardly got her hands inside the bag’s main compartment.

  “Empty,” she said, as she felt around in the bag.

  “So much for my genius in packing for this little adventure,” he said.

  “Wait,” she said suddenly and turned the bag sideways with her tightly bound hands. “There are other pockets.” She fumbled with the zipper on a small side pocket that wasn’t immediately obvious. He waited, turned a little to the side to make it easier for her.

  “Ha!” she said, loud enough to startle them both, and then she leaned in close to him. Her eyes shone and her cheeks dimpled. “Who’s the genius now?”

  Finn shook his head slowly, both to clear his concussion-rattled brain and to force himself to focus on the rather dire situation they were in instead of her very full, very soft lips that were at the moment so close to his own.

  All he could manage was a vague, “What?”

  “This!” she said triumphantly as she held up the utility knife he had used to cut away Beckett’s shirt where she’d been shot.

  “You are, clearly.” He held out his bound hands to her.

  In moments they were both free. They rubbed their wrists and ankles to restore blood flow and then Tesla stood and gave Finn her hand—which he needed—to help pull him to his feet.

  He took stock: the nausea was better, but he was still dizzy and could not be completely certain that he wouldn’t just fall down again. “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “My head’s better,” she announced.

  “Mine, too,” he said, but stopped short. “Although I don’t get why I started to feel dizzy and nauseous before I got hit.”

  “You’re a copy-cat,” she said lightly. “Sympathy pains for my drugged state, maybe.”

  They went quickly to the door and, naturally, it was locked from the outside. They began to take stock of what was in the room—they wanted tools, but they wanted weapons as well, and Finn, unlike Tesla, would use them if needed. All they found, however, was a fork, and it was made of such soft aluminum that even had they wanted to stab someone with it, there was little doubt that it would merely bend on impact. Tesla’s utility knife was all they had going for them.

  They sat on the edge of the cot, unsure what to do next. “I really wish right now that I had told someone where I was headed,” Finn said, grateful that he felt a little more steady.

  “Yeah, your maverick-ness doesn’t seem quite so appealing at the moment.”

  “So you’re saying it usually does?”

  Tesla ignored him, got up and walked to the door again. Just as she got close enough to reach out and touch the door handle, they heard the click of the lock and the handle slowly turned.

  Finn was up and moving immediately, pulled to her as though his body was doing the thinking for him. He grabbed Tesla’s shoulder and drew her back toward him, toward the cot and the boxes, away from the door. His head still swam but he managed to push Tesla partly behind him as the door swung cautiously inward and Lydia walked in the door.

  “Well, of course you managed to figure this out and get yourselves caught,” she said as she eyed them both and shook her head. “Teenagers as agents. It’s insane,” she muttered.

  “Is this a priority extraction—leave no man behind—or are you here to ground us?” Finn said sarcastically, but relief was plain in his voice.

  “The first for now,” she said. “But don’t rule out the second.”

  Finn grinned and turned toward Tesla, no doubt to make some other cute remark, when Jane Doane walked in the open door and, immediately behind her, Dr. Van Aldan, Director of the Experimental Physics Institute.

  Lydia moved into the room, her eyes on the two newcomers. She seemed coiled, tensed to spring, and Tesla thought she’s definitely got a plan before she turned to look at Jane.

  “Aunt Jane.” Tesla felt stricken now that she faced the petite, dark-haired woman, despite her calm and cynical conversation with Finn about the woman’s betrayal. “How could you—where is my father?”

  “He’s here,” said Jane Doane as she rubbed her wrist, her voice strong, but infinitely sad. “He’s been here all alo
ng. You figured it out.”

  “Dr. Van Aldan,” said Finn coldly. “Or Dr. Nilsen. Which do you prefer?”

  Tesla’s head whipped around and she stared, horrified, at the man she knew as Erik Van Aldan. “You’re…you’re—”

  “Sebastian Nilsen,” he said smoothly. His hands hung by his sides, he looked and sounded as relaxed as if they’d bumped into each other at a coffee shop in town.

  “But…” Tesla stammered, unable to form a coherent thought.

  “You kidnapped Dr. Abbott to get him out of the way before you took your new position as head of the institute,” Finn said, talking fast as the pieces, finally, fell into place. “You had to avoid him when you interviewed for the Director’s job because Abbott would have recognized you immediately, despite the years that have passed and the changes you’ve made to your appearance. He knew you too well to be fooled.”

  “Indeed,” Nilsen said smoothly. “I would have preferred a less messy solution, but he left me no choice—again. The opportunity to head the institute, to have access to this facility and Tasya’s work, well, it was too great to pass up. I sacrificed far too much to create Erik Van Aldan to let it go for the sake of an old college friend.”

  “You were never their friend,” Tesla spat. Her tone introduced a dangerous level of intensity and venom into the conversation that had felt perfectly civil up until this moment. “You stole from them, you were jealous, you were a cheater and a liar all along.”

  “Oh, my dear, you know nothing at all about it,” Nilsen said quietly as he advanced toward Tesla. He actually sounded sad.