The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 25

Joe paced around his house — front hall, parlor, billiards room, kitchen, and library. Edison trotted along at his heels. But the yellow dog didn’t have the solution to Joe’s problems.

He made a round of the parlor. The automaton’s metal surface gleamed enticingly in the firelight. The little creation had answers to something, even if it wasn’t his current dilemma. Maybe what he needed was a distraction. He picked up the automaton. “Why was my father scared of you, little fellow?”

The toy didn’t answer.

“And why does it feel like somebody else wants you? Somebody scary.”

Predictably, the toy didn’t answer again.

It couldn’t, being only a toy that didn’t even have a voice box.

Deciding to talk to someone who did, he called Vivian.

“Torres.” The name was clipped and economical, a military greeting.

“It’s me,” he said. “Is my mother all right?”

“Fine,” she said. “I just checked in with Dirk. He’s on shift right now.”

“Do you have some time today?”

“I can make some,” she said.

“Could you meet with those professors from the funeral?”

“Egger and Patel?” Trust her to remember the names.

“Them. Find out if they know who might have wanted to take that suitcase. It had papers that my father left me in it.”

“What kind of papers?”

Joe tightened his grip on Tik-Tok. “Just papers.”

“I’ll get right on it, sir.” Vivian hung up.

Joe looked at the automaton in his hands. Maybe he’d missed something last night in the concourse. Maybe Tik-Tok was trying to tell him something, and he hadn’t seen it. He tucked his feet up in the leather armchair and went over the surveillance footage of the previous night’s adventure under the constellations. A tiny Joe Tesla walked onscreen with an even tinier man and a cheerful-looking dog.

The Joe Tesla of last night had known he was being filmed, but he hadn’t bothered to hide from the camera, even though he was doing unusual things. He carried the toy around, placing it in various locations, watching the little arm paint with light on the walls. Again, the arm never pointed at anything that seemed significant.

Still, something looked familiar in the movements of the arm. They weren’t random. Too much time and care had gone into those movements for them to be random. Nikola Tesla had an extraordinary visual memory. He built all his machines in his head first, not bothering with blueprints, and watched them turn and move, studying them for inefficiencies and improper wear patterns. He spent hours on the models in his head before he built them in the real world.

A man like that would think it child’s play to watch the motions of the arm and remember where the arm had pointed moments before. Joe slowed the footage down until the light from the laser inched slowly across the concourse wall, leaving trails behind it.

He sat up. “I got it, Edison!”

The dog cocked his head and raised his ears.

“Tik-Tok isn’t pointing to anything at all. He’s writing.”

A few minutes later he had transcribed Tik-Tok’s gestures. They were numbers and letters, each separated by a short pause:

He’d start with the numbers. A dozen colors flashed through his head in a long ribbon. Over four billion (green with a long stretch of black). A huge number. But they weren’t one number. The pauses made them six (orange) numbers, plus the one at the end.

Joe wound the ribbons of colors around in his head, combining and recombining them. But he didn’t find any patterns. He tried entering them into a couple of pattern finders online and came up empty there, too.

Then he sequenced the numbers in order:

He tried everything again, but came up with nothing again.

The numbers weren’t in any mathematical sequence that he could readily find. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t a method to them that Nikola Tesla had known, but it did mean he should broaden his search parameters.

If they weren’t mathematical, maybe they were something physical. They might be the combination of a safe. That was a discouraging thought, because he had no idea where he might find Nikola Tesla’s safe. He’d read up on him recently and knew that he had kept a safe in his hotel room, but it had been emptied after his death. Surely his father wouldn’t have given him a completely impossible task. He pursed his lips. His father was capable of that — he’d given Joe plenty of impossible tasks when he was a kid.

Maybe he was wrong about the numbers. He wound up the automaton and pointed his light at a piece of paper hanging on the wall. He traced each ray of light. The numbers were the same, but, in addition to the pause after every second digit, he noticed a longer pause after the sixth digit and the twelfth one. Maybe it was two separate numbers:

No patterns there, but 40 45 10 looked familiar (green, black; green, brown; cyan, black). Where had he seen those colors before? Somewhere in Grand Central Terminal, he was certain of it. He ran through combinations of tracks, of train schedules, and addresses. Again, nothing.

He closed his eyes and let the ribbon of color float free in his head, figuring out where the numbers needed to attach. A feeling of elation came over him. He knew: 40 degrees, 45 minutes 10 seconds. If you put north on the end, that was the latitude for Grand Central.

A quick check of the GPS app on his phone told him that the latitude for Grand Central was 40°45′10.08″ N, and its longitude was 73°58′35.48″ W. So, whatever he was looking at was close, but not in the terminal.

He entered the numbers that Tik-Tok had drawn and immediately hit a match. New Yorker Hotel, at 481 Eighth Avenue, New York, New York. A quick online search told him that Nikola Tesla had spent the last few years of his life there. He had died, alone, in Room 3327 (red, red, blue, slate) on January 7, 1943. The hotel had changed ownership several times since then and been completely refurbished, but the building still stood.

His heart raced. The automaton had a message for him. It was leading him exactly where Nikola Tesla wanted — his old hotel. His father must have figured that out and been able to find those numbers before the days of the Internet and portable GPS. It had been a much harder task in Nikola Tesla’s time, and in his father’s. Joe almost felt like he was cheating.

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.

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.