The Tesla Legacy

by Rebecca Cantrell

  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.

  But from what he’d heard about Joe, he didn’t go anywhere without the dog, so if he was up to something interesting, Ash would wait him out. He took a long sip of cappuccino. His assistant got it from this fantastic coffee shop on the corner. The place had insane lines, but he’d never had to wait in them. Perks of being the boss.

  Edison cut left, west, which meant they were in the E subway tunnel.

  Ash called his assistant in and asked her to take the meeting with the mall guy. She was ambitious and smart, and her eyes gleamed at the thought. If she landed this, he’d let her manage the project and hire someone else to fetch his coffee, and she knew it. He waved her off and went back to watching Joe. His gut told him Joe was going somewhere significant, and that was more important than handling the Arizona deal himself.

  When the green dot turned south again, he looked for Quantum online. He didn’t have anyone else whom he could tap at short notice for something like this, but he still hesitated. He was fairly confident that Quantum would do his best to come through for him, now that he knew the stakes. But would he be able to manage it? He had failed to retrieve the suitcase, had tipped off Joe to his presence, and missed his chance to steal the automaton.

  Joe was now in the tunnel for the A, C, and E subway lines and walking ahead at a pretty brisk pace. A man on a mission. He was a couple of stops away from 34th Street and Penn Station. Ash knew what was there—the hotel where Nikola Tesla died.

  He didn’t have time for a different decision. He found Quantum and sent him to a dark chat room they liked to use.

  ash: new yorker hotel asap

  quantum: why?

  ash: tesla heading there. device related? find him, take it, and go

  quantum: on it

  Ash grinned. It was good that he had Quantum on the case after all, and that the GPS was proving so useful. The device would be out of Joe’s hands and in Ash’s by the end of the day.

  Then he could play with it.

  Chapter 27

  Joe pulled Edison to the side of the tunnel and covered the dog’s ears. A subway train rattled by. Stripes of light from its silver cars passed over their faces. Then the train was gone, its red taillights fading into the tunnel’s darkness.

  “That’s the last train for a while, buddy,” Joe said.

  Edison wagged his tail. He didn’t worry about the trains. He was used to them.

  Joe directed his flashlight at the rough stone ceiling. He was right under the diner next to the New Yorker Hotel, a restaurant called, as whimsy would have it, the Tick Tock Diner. He’d seen pictures online, and it was housed in a silver train car. He would feel at home there, but he could never visit.

  Before they left the house, he’d pulled up the original blueprints for the New Yorker Hotel. It had been built in 1930 with coal-fired steam boilers and generators. Ironically, it ran on direct current—Edison’s invention instead of Tesla’s—and it had once boasted the largest private power plant in the United States. The building hadn’t been modernized to use alternating current until the late 1960s.

  In Nikola Tesla’s time, the basement had been divided into four (green) large rooms—the east and west basements held the boilers and power plant that kept the hotel running. The north basement had stored coal. The south basement, by far the smallest, had held food and restaurant supplies. It wouldn’t have been easy for the inventor to come down and hide something without being observed, but he might have done it. Nikola Tesla had certainly managed far more impossible feats than that.

  Joe’d found blueprints for renovations, too. The hotel had changed hands several times over the years and been renovated again and again, but he was hoping the basements and the steam tunnels that once brought heat into the building had been left untouched. If he was unlucky, the steam tunnels had been walled off. If he was lucky, they were still in use or had been closed off with airtight metal doors
installed and certified by the city. Due to a Byzantine system of rules and regulations put in place to ensure fires were properly contained, those doors were everywhere in the tunnels.

  He moved his headlamp around to find the entrance to the steam tunnel he’d seen on his maps. He had official modern maps, but much more useful was his growing collection of old ones. He had found or bought maps from the many different companies that had run subways, sewage lines, steam tunnels, electrical access, and all the other business the city kept buried beneath its feet. He’d been working off and on for months to consolidate his maps into a single real-time map that would tell him exactly where he could and couldn’t go in the hundred-plus miles of subterranean New York, but he felt as if he had scarcely begun.

  According to his map, the tunnel in front of him ran only a couple of yards. Branching off the side was a door labeled Steam Operations. Bingo.

  He lifted the heavy key ring attached to his belt. Golden light from his headlamp shone on dozens of keys. The original Mr. Gallo had been very clever when he wrote the contract guaranteeing him perpetual free access to everything under Manhattan, and he and his descendants had accumulated a lot of keys in the last century. Those keys were now in Joe’s hands.

  He had long since organized them alphabetically by the kind of doors they opened. His fingers brushed through them until he got to the ones that opened steam tunnels. He pulled out a skeleton key with a square head and a long shank, a Con Edison master key for the branch of its company called Steam Operations. Con Edison had delivered steam to Manhattan since the tunnels were built. Its system had over one hundred miles of mains and service pipes and three thousand manholes, and the company still serviced some of New York’s most famous addresses, from the United Nations buildings to the Empire State Building and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With his keys, Joe had access to all of them—part of the reason he’d had to undergo such an extensive security screening before he moved into his underground house. He could break into a lot of basements.

  He tapped the key thoughtfully. This particular Con Edison key had to be at least fifty years old. He suspected this was one of the last existing keys that would fit this lock. Not the very last key, of course. Even though it had been expressly forbidden, he’d had all the keys copied. He’d given the spare keys to Mr. Rossi to deposit in a safety deposit box. He believed in making backups.

  He took a can of WD-40 (green, black) out of his backpack. He carried his most essential exploring gear—WD-40 (green, black), duct tape, dog treats, protein bars, a glow-in-the-dark tennis ball for games of fetch, water, maps, spare batteries for his headlamp, a Con Edison vest he’d stolen from the basement of the morgue, a change of clothes in case he fell in sewage, and a flashlight stun gun. He’d had to use every one of those items, although he didn’t like to think about it.

  Zipped into the front pocket of his backpack was a new passenger—Nikola Tesla’s automaton. He felt the little guy ought to see where he’d led Joe. He’d waited long enough.

  A couple of squirts on the hinges, in the keyhole, and on the key itself did the trick. The old tumblers turned over quietly, and he opened the heavy door. Back when this was made, things were built to last. Planned obsolescence had yet to become a watchword.

  His headlamp revealed another tunnel, smaller than the last, so narrow he could reach his hands out and touch both sides, and so low the top nearly brushed the top of his head. The sides were painted white, but the bases of the walls had a gray patina of mold that he could smell from where he was standing.

  The pipes that ran down the side of the tunnel were cold. Rust lay in drifts underneath them. They probably hadn’t been used in years, and they’d probably never been used in July. According to his map, they led straight toward the New Yorker Hotel.

  Edison stayed right against Joe’s leg. He didn’t blame him. Not so long ago, the dog had been shot in a steam tunnel that looked much like this one.

  He ran his hand down Edison’s back slowly, again and again, until he felt the dog relax. “It’s OK, boy. We’re safe in here. Nobody around.”

  Edison cocked his head. He closed his eyes, as if listening hard. Apparently he was satisfied with what he heard, because he opened his eyes and wagged his tail.

  Joe was pretty sure they were safe, too. During their long trek through the tunnels, he had neither seen nor heard anyone. He’d waited in alcoves and peeked out, looking for the telltale glow of a flashlight. He’d doubled back a few times, once going through a long, dark tunnel by feel, to make sure they weren’t being followed. Whoever had staked out the clock wasn’t behind them. He hoped.

  He took off his headlamp and used the stun gun flashlight to light his way, in case he needed to use it as a weapon. He swept the light from side to side, illuminating nothing but peeling paint, rusty pipes, and mold. There weren’t even any rat droppings.

  After another look around, he motioned for Edison to go first, then entered the tunnel after him. He carefully locked the door behind him. If anyone was following him, they wouldn’t get through that door.

  Hopefully.

  Chapter 28

  Vivian dodged a pack of Swedish tourists taking pictures at the Washington Square Arch—the Arc de Triomphe of New York. She could have gone around, but she liked walking through the giant, marble monument. It always helped put her problems in perspective. Right now, her biggest problem was the Teslas.

  Neither Tatiana Tesla nor her son had given her any hints as to why would try to steal Tesla’s suitcase, or why she had to set up a team to protect Mrs. Tesla. It seemed like Tesla himself had been the one attacked, not his mother, and he ought to be the one that she was protecting. But he’d categorically refused to let her guard him. Maybe it was a macho thing.

  Speaking of macho, the man she’d been following last night hadn’t wanted to back down. He hadn’t acted like someone who was easily frightened or dissuaded. If his goal was to track Tesla, he’d be back. Hell, he might be back already, and she wasn’t there to protect Tesla. The best thing she could do was investigate, see if this professor had more of an idea of what was going on.

  She stopped next to the fountain. The haze of water droplets scattered by the wind made the air cooler here, and she took a deep breath. The air smelled of chlorine and mildew, which was better than the exhaust fumes and hot pavement of a few moments before.

  She wasn’t just enjoying the view as she dug a penny out of her pocket and tossed it in. She used the motion to take a good long look behind her. The tourists she’d passed were posing next to the arch, one after the other, their white-blond hair gleaming in the sun. Nobody else had come through the arch yet.

  On her journey here, she’d doubled back, cut through alleys, even hopped on and off the subway, to make sure that she wasn’t being followed. A long shot, but she was still careful, especially after last night. So far, she hadn’t seen anyone suspicious.

  A couple paused next to her to take a selfie with the arch in the background, chattering away in Spanish. One wore a red T-shirt, the other a white one, and both wore jeans and espadrilles. Sunlight glinted off their sunglasses as they bounced their heads back and forth, trying to find the right angle for their shot. Some people’s problems were easy.

  She hurried toward the southeast corner of the park. Her destination was a few blocks outside the park: a tall, brick and glass building known as Warren Weaver Hall. It was part of the Courant Institute, and she had an appointment with Professor Patel. She hadn’t been able to reach the other one yet.

  The closer she got to the building, the older she felt. Even though it was summer, kids who seemed like they should still be in high school wandered around. She passed a group of girls who looked younger than Lucy, standing in a circle, all stabbing away at their cell phones with their thumbs and not talking.

  She stopped in front of the building and texted Professor Patel. He was supposed to be in the library, working, while he waited to hear from her. She sensed that he was us
ed to students coming late for meetings.

  But he appeared immediately, walking quickly toward her across the grass.

  “Professor Patel?” she asked. “I’m Vivian Torres, we met at Mr. Tesla’s funeral and spoke on the phone.”

  “Of course you are.” He led her into the building, down a hall, and into an empty classroom. Rows of desks faced a chalkboard and table at the front of the room. It reminded Vivian of high school.

  He pulled one desk to face another and gestured to it. “We can talk here.”

  She sat across from him, although she preferred standing. “Professor Patel, I know this is an unusual circumstance.”

  His dark eyes narrowed. “It most certainly is. Two colleagues dead within such a short time. Nothing suspicious, of course, but still unexpected.”

  “Two?”

  “Professor Egger, of course. You met him at the funeral. Bald man, with a beard.”

  And a yellow bow tie. That explained why she hadn’t been able to reach him, and it made things a lot more worrisome. “Professor Egger is dead?”

  “Overdose, rumor has it. Last night. Found this morning by his cleaning woman.”

  “Why do they think it was an overdose?”

  “He had a heavy load to carry since his wife died. He never got over it, you see.” Patel’s voice quivered slightly.

  “Do you think he overdosed?”

  “That is a matter for the police.” Professor Patel tilted his head to the side. “I thought that might be why you wanted to meet this morning, but it’s not.”

  “Was he the type of person who would overdose?”

  “The type of person who was taking sleeping pills? Yes. The type of person who also drank more than he should sometimes? Yes. The type of person who was also depressed and at risk? Yes.” He patted the top of his desk with one finger. “That does not mean that he intended to die.”