“It was probably Mark Twain riding the comet to heaven.” Taft smirked.
“No, Will. This wasn’t Connecticut. The phenomenon took place over Alaska. The Wrangell mountain range, to be precise.”
“The Wrangell Mountains!” Taft jumped. Robert patiently awaited the president’s response. “That’s … where J. P. Morgan and the Guggenheims are digging.”
“I know. The Alaska Syndicate.” The Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate was the cause of the single biggest scandal in Taft’s administration: the Ballinger affair, the authorized use of Alaskan lands set aside for conservation under President Roosevelt. The controversy took place during the height of Nellie Taft’s illness, and with it her husband’s helplessness. Attorney General Wickersham swore Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger did not break any laws by permitting private use of the land, but legality does not always translate into good policy. Without Nellie’s guidance, the crisis had exploded beyond anything Taft could control.
“You don’t think the Kennecott mines have anything to do with this, do you?” asked the president. The mines were the heart of the syndicate’s activities in Alaska.
“It’s too soon to tell, Will. Additional research is needed. It will require soil samples from parts of the world few people can reach by rail.”
Taft narrowed his eyes. “You’re here about the airship, aren’t you?” he asked, grinning. The president hoped to get a smile out of Robert, but instead the last son of Lincoln merely nodded. Fortunately, that was good enough for Taft to celebrate. “Well! I’m sure Archie should be able to help you. Nellie and I will be at sea for ten days, so please consider the zeppelin yours until we return. Just try to keep a low profile, Bob. The Department of the Interior is a circus right now. I want you to avoid them. Speak with John Hays Hammond instead. He was Guggenheim’s chief engineer for years and is an old friend of mine from Yale. He’s a good man, Bob. I want you to know you can trust him.”
“Thanks, Will. And yes, I know John quite well.”
“Ah, then you’re already ready!” Taft cheered. He considered popping open another bottle of champagne to celebrate, when something hit him like a meteor. “But then, you could have done all this yourself. You knew Nellie and I would be on vacation. The airship was yours for the taking. Why take a boat across the Atlantic to ask me in person? You could have just sent me a wire. Also, what does any of this have to do with…” Taft hesitated. “Your father’s death?”
Robert set down his glass and slipped his hand into his right coat pocket. “For two years, I have been going through my father’s papers for his centennial. Every letter, every correspondence, everything John Hay and I packed before we moved out of the mansion.” Robert paused, his brown eyes staring deep into Taft’s. “Before the Fourth of July, I found a slip to a safe-deposit box the government opened with the Safe Deposit Company of New York. The account was dated May first: the company’s first day of business and two weeks after my father was murdered.6 I paid the bank a visit before I steamed over here. The account for the box was still open. I found this inside.”
Robert pulled a bulky folded handkerchief out of his pocket and rested it gently on the president’s desk. He carefully undressed the bundle, revealing a magnificent gold pocket watch along with a gold chain and a dazzling fob made out of gold-bearing quartz.
Its loveliness glistened in the president’s eyes. “Was this your father’s?” Taft asked.
“I’m not sure,” replied Robert. “My father had several pocket watches, but I never saw him wear this one. However, this piece”—Robert tapped the watch fob—“was in his pocket the night he was assassinated. In all my research, I could never determine how that fob got into his pocket. There is no receipt of sale or repair, no photograph of my father wearing it, no mention of it in any letters; nothing. For decades it tortured me. It shouldn’t exist.”
“You always had the fob?”
“Yes, but not the pocket watch or the chain. I found those in the safe-deposit box.”
Taft moved his hand toward the watch. “May I?”
Robert nodded.
The president gently lifted the timepiece into his thick hands. The watch had the weight of pure gold. At first instinct, Taft gently pressed on its winding crown, opening its lid to reveal a white dial with thin Roman numerals. It was a hunter’s watch, but neither its hands nor its second dial were moving. Taft tried adjusting its time, but the crown would not budge. The elegant device was silent and still.
“How are you supposed to wind this thing?” Taft asked.
“That’s what’s so confusing to me. It’s not meant to be wound. That watch has no keyhole in its case back, no way to adjust its time, and look here.” Robert traced his finger along a cauterized seam on its edge. “I did that. It was the only way I could take a look at its works. The watch was totally sealed when I found it. Waterproof, even. It was as if the watch was not meant to be opened or adjusted. Ever.”
Taft looked at Robert and then back to the timepiece. “Did you find anything unusual inside?”
Robert was near speechless. “Will, this watch is the most unusual device ever built! It has no working power source and no sign that it is anything other than ornamental, but I know for certain that it is functional. Its inner workings show wear as if the device had been running without interruption for decades! Maybe even until recently.”
Taft ran his fingers over the watch’s elegant engravings. For all its technical peculiarities, it was still an enchantingly beautiful work of art. But as Taft admired the timepiece, something marked inside its lid caught his eye:
Сдѣлано
въ
Америкѣ
Taft immediately recognized the Cyrillic script. “Wait a minute. This thing is Russian?”
Robert could not believe he forgot this. “Sorry, Will. I did not see the forest for the trees. You would think that inscription means the watch comes from Russia, but it doesn’t. I shared a rubbing of this with Ambassador Rosen’s people in Washington, and they assured me that the engraving reads ‘Made in America.’”
Taft stared at Robert, surprised.
“There’s more. It may not be the answer we’re looking for, but it’s the best theory I have: Before we purchased Alaska in 1867, the official name for the territory was Russian America.”
“Ah yes, Seward’s folly,” Taft recalled, along with the laughter then-Secretary of State Seward received for the Alaska Purchase. “You know, my father was ambassador to Russia back in the eighties. I wonder if he knew anything about this.” Taft gently set the watch back on its handkerchief as he remembered his late father. “Have you considered asking Frederick Seward about this?”
“Yes, I did,” Robert said with some sadness. “I was hoping he knew something I didn’t about the watch fob, but he’s eighty years old, Will. All he remembers from April fourteenth is the part where his father was stabbed a dozen times while he lay helpless in bed. That madman Lewis Powell nearly murdered the whole Seward household that night. Frederick’s own mother died two months later from the shock of it all. I can’t blame him for only having nightmares to hold on to at this point in his life. Believe me, Will. I know what it’s like.” Robert stopped, not wanting to go into detail about his recent bouts with insomnia.
Judging from Taft’s response, Robert did not need to. “Bob, I would never presume what that terrible night meant for you or for Frederick. But as president, I know full well what it did to this country. If this watch was in any way connected to your father’s murder, I will spare no expense to get you the answers you deserve. But I must know, Bob. What could this pocket watch, or for that matter your father’s assassination, possibly have to do with the recent passing of Halley’s comet?”
Robert stood tall and put his hands behind his back as he spoke. “Mr. President, this pocket watch on your desk is a historic and scientific anomaly. It likely found its way into the White House when Washington, DC, was the most fortified city on
Earth. A piece of it somehow found its way onto my father the night he was killed despite there being no evidence it ever came into his possession. There is no mention of it in any of the government’s inquiries on the assassination. It does not work, it should not work, and yet it somehow functioned flawlessly without human contact up to the turn of the century. And in addition, this watch was supposedly made in one of the most remote, desolate, unknown parts of the world using technology far more advanced than anything from its era or ours.”
“So you’re saying this watch has something to do with the activity you monitored in Alaska?”
“No, Will. I’m saying this watch is proof that there is something in Alaska completely alien to this planet, and that it might have been one of the last things my father learned before he was murdered.”
Chapter IV
Meanwhile …
“Would someone please get the president some damn coffee! I can hear him shouting from here!”
In the bustling, noisy wireless room aboard Airship One, Charles Dyer Norton was hard at work trying to diffuse the most persistent presidential problem since George Washington’s dentures. Not too long ago, Norton had such high hopes as the nation’s new secretary to the president. He was charismatic, assertive, and so shamelessly full of himself that he used to refer to his full title as “assistant president.” Well, Nellie Taft put a quick end to that. Two months later, Norton was working more than one hundred hours a week on a misinformation campaign to keep the president’s new exercise routine a secret. He had a whole team on the airship producing fraudulent interviews, fake letters, doctored photographs, and even forged journal entries to make Taft appear everywhere in the world he was not. For a government employee as self-important as Norton, it was like using a pair of chopsticks to clean up after an elephant. The man was disheveled, exhausted, and surviving on a steady diet of tobacco and coffee. And that was before having to deal with a president as uncontrollable as William Howard Taft’s decoy.
“Dr. Tesla, this is not a matter of money!” Norton dictated over the wireless. He had a cigarette in his hand and another in his mouth as he spoke. “It’s a matter of national security that we maintain the illusion of our presence at Beverly. We need a fully functional android in the president’s likeness by Monday to avoid any suspicion about his”—Secretary Norton had to shut his eyes as he said it—“prizefighting.”
Tesla’s reply arrived promptly on the airship’s modified Burry ticker.
TESLA
NO EXPLANATIONS ARE NECESSARY RE OFFICIAL MATTERS. PUTTING FAITH IN EDISON WAS UNFORTUNATE. A TELAUTOMATON OF THE PRESIDENT’S SIZE WILL TAKE MANY MONTHS TO DEVISE.
“Dr. Tesla, this is dire! We need something now! If it can walk up ramps and wave at crowds without bursting into flames, we’ll take it! Can you do this with any of the designs we sent on the phototelegraph?”
TESLA
ONE MOMENT PLEASE. THERE IS A—
A loud popping sound was picked up on the wireless, forcing Norton and his operators to cover their ears.
“What the dickens?” Norton grimaced.
“Interference, sir,” said one of the wireless operators. “Probably another one of Dr. Tesla’s experiments.”
“God damn these wizards!” Norton cursed. “There’s a malfunctioning automaton in the White House, we’re an Atlantic Ocean away from where we should be, and the only man who can help us is testing an earthquake machine!”
“Sir, I think we have a transmission incoming.”
“Good! What does Dr. Tesla have to say?”
The Burry ticker started printing an unusual array of letters:
LAANI LELLS ANIAA AILAS ISIII AILAN ENNAI IISLN
AALLI INALL IINA
“What the devil?” Norton studied the ticker tape as it printed. “Consarn it! Are you lollygaggers playing correspondence chess on the wireless again?”
“No, sir!”
The ticker continued whirling:
LAANI LELLS ANIAA AILAS ISIII AIEAA ISLIE A
LLEIL SLSII
“Gadzooks!” one of the operators ejaculated. “This looks like a ciphertext!”
“Are we expecting any encoded messages?” asked Norton.
“Not like this, sir. This encryption isn’t one of ours.”
“Fiddlesticks! Keep the ticker rolling, gentlemen. I’ll be right back.”
“Aye, sir,” the operators responded, one of them surreptitiously hiding his chess card from Norton.
Norton opened the white door behind him and rushed into his office. Assistant Secretaries Rudolph Forster and Wendell W. Mischler looked up at their boss from behind tall towers of paper. “Something’s afoul in the wireless room, boys,” Norton said. “Summon Captain Butt and the attorney general immediately.” Norton ducked back into the telegraph office while his assistants fanned through the airship.
“Any word?” Norton asked as he closed the wireless room’s three doors.
“Not a dit.”
“Damnation. Well, just keep the channels clear! I don’t want anyone jamming our lines with—”
The Burry started ticking again.
TESLA
DID YOU JUST SEND ME AN ENCRYPTION?
“Finally!” Norton threw his hands up, losing a cigarette in the process. “Tell Dr. Tesla that we did not send any coded transmissions. And forward him a copy of the ciphertext we received.”
“Aye, sir.”
Norton lit himself a new cigarette. He always carried a third one behind his ear.
From behind him: “Secretary Norton? The attorney general and Captain Butt have arrived.”
“Good, send them in.”
Wickersham and the captain stepped into the wireless room, which by now was overflowing with well-tailored men. Somehow, Secret Service Chief Wilkie was already in the room as well.
“Wilkie! When did you get here?”
“I was on my way to the gents’ room to let off some steam. I just wasn’t expecting there to be an office party.”
Norton groaned. “Fine, you can stay.” Wilkie sat on the edge of a table and lit a new cigar, which made the already cramped room so hot that its operators were wiping sweat off their brows. Attorney General Wickersham and Captain Butt were deep in discussion, Assistant Secretaries Forster and Mischler were standing outside the door, and everyone from the staff room next door filed into the halls of the West Wing for a look. Norton, dizzied by the commotion brewing around him, dabbed his face with a handkerchief and desperately tried to contain the mob.
“Gentlemen,” Norton called to order. Through the crowd, he saw a slender arm waving a pencil. “… and Miss Knox. We intercepted an encrypted message from Nikola Tesla in New York. He says he—”
The Burry ticker responded:
TESLA
I RECEIVED THE SAME TRANSMISSION MINUTES AGO. MORE INCOMING. WILL REWIRE MESSAGES AS THEY COME IN.
“Thank God in heaven,” praised Norton. “Operator, please send Dr. Tesla our thanks.”
“There’s more to this?” asked Captain Butt as he examined the ciphertext.
“Relay that question,” Norton ordered.
TESLA
YES. NOT THE FIRST TIME THIS HAS HAPPENED. NEIGHBORS AND UNFRIENDLY BUSINESSES USE LAB’S LINES WITHOUT PERMISSION. SAVES THEM MONEY AND JAMS OUR FREQUENCIES. POLICE DO NOTHING.
“Sounds like Commissioner Baker needs to be taken off easy street and put onto early retirement,” Wilkie observed while blowing smoke rings onto the back of Norton’s head.
“Sergeant,” said Captain Butt. “Tell Dr. Tesla this encryption is not used by the Army or Navy. Ask him if there is anything he can tell us about it.”
“Aye, Captain.” The operator tapped this out on his Triumph telegraph key. Tesla’s reply arrived before the operator even finished his message.
TESLA
THE TRANSMISSION IS IN A POLYGRAPHIC SUBSTITUTION CIPHER. VERY BASIC. PROBABLY AMATEUR.
Everyone looked to Captain Butt for some answers, but h
e had none. “Who would flood Nikola Tesla’s private lines with encoded messages?” he asked.
“Sweethearts?” Wilkie suggested with a wink to the captain.
“Unlikely,” said Butt. “Dr. Tesla, can you decipher this message for us?”
TESLA
I HAVE ALREADY BEGUN TO. THE MESSAGE IS IN ENGLISH. JUST A MOMENT.
All eyes were on the Burry ticker. Its silence seemed to stretch on forever.
“Is that thing still on?” Captain Butt asked Wilkie.
“What the hell are you asking me for?”
With a jolt of blue lightning, the machine roared to life like a locomotive.
GENTLEMAN FROM NEW YORK
AHOY HOY.
GENTLEMAN FROM PARIS
HULLO.
GENTLEMAN FROM BRUSSELS
HELLO.
GENTLEMAN FROM BOMA
.
GENTLEMAN FROM PHILADELPHIA
GREETINGS.
GENTLEMAN FROM PARIS
GOOD DAY TO YOU. IS THIS EVERYONE?
GENTLEMAN FROM NEW YORK
ALL BUT BOMA.
GENTLEMAN FROM PARIS
BOMA? PLEASE RESPOND.
GENTLEMAN FROM BRUSSELS
BOMA IS FINE. PLEASE CONTINUE.
GENTLEMAN FROM PARIS
VERY WELL. GENTLEMEN, IT IS A PLEASURE TO SPEAK WITH YOU ONCE AGAIN. I BELIEVE OUR BUSINESS PARTNER IN NEW YORK HAS SOMETHING HE WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH US?
GENTLEMAN FROM NEW YORK
I RESPECTFULLY DEFER TO THE GENTLEMAN FROM PHILADELPHIA.
The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy: A Novel Page 4
