The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 44

Joe glanced once at his closed door, then cocked his head. No noises from upstairs. He felt like a naughty ten-year-old as he leaned over and peeked under his own bed. No monsters, just two laptops and two copies of that chicken-farming book. One laptop was his, but that wasn’t what interested him right now. He reached for the other one, Egger’s, and pulled it out.

When he sat up, he felt light-headed. But he was improving quickly. The headaches came less often, and although he still sometimes forgot how to do the simplest things, his mind felt clearer. His mother and Dr. Stauss apparently agreed, because they’d left him alone, instead of sitting by his bed and nagging him about resting.

A faint smell of lilac drifted up when he leaned back. He adjusted the pillows behind him, then flipped open the laptop. As expected: password protected. Given enough time, he could crack it, but he hoped that he might not need to. Egger had gone to all the trouble of hiding the laptop and telling Patel. He must have known that his life was in danger and wanted someone to find it. So he would have made his password something easy to guess.

A couple of minutes later, he began to doubt that theory. He’d tried Egger’s name, birthdate, wife’s name and birthdate, and a handful of passwords from a list of the most common passwords, but had come up empty. If he didn’t guess it soon, he’d have to run some hacking programs that would brute force it by using combinations of dictionary words and symbols, but that would feel like defeat and might take days. He should be able to think this through.

Patel hadn’t given Vivian the section and shelf name to find the laptop. He’d given her a specific book title. Maybe the books had been more than a marker for the location of the laptop. He fetched them from under the bed, glancing toward Edison’s empty blanket. The dog was out for a walk with Andres Peterson, cavorting in the sun and grass as he deserved, but Joe missed him.

Back to work. The book’s cover featured a rooster standing on a brick wall with a blue sky behind him. Urban farming. Maybe he ought to try it. Not raising chickens, of course, but he could try to grow things out in the tunnel in front of his house. He had unlimited electricity and water, so why not hook up some grow lights and put in vegetables? If they could theoretically grow plants on the moon or Mars, he ought to be able to put some in down here.

He blinked. He’d let his mind wander again, and he reminded himself he wasn’t looking at this book to find out how to grow vegetables, he was trying to get into Egger’s laptop. First, he tried the author’s name and book title in varying permutations. Nothing.

A fresh round of pain pounded through his head with each failure. Pity pain, he decided to call it. He turned the book over, checked the back and the spine for clues, then opened it up. A lightly written dedication was penciled on the inside of the front cover: To my darling Ada. He checked the second book. Same inscription.

According to the Internet, Mrs. Egger had been named Patsy, and she’d never had children. No Adas. Ada was an uncommon name, quaint to modern ears. Maybe it wasn’t the name — it was the entire inscription.

He grinned. This was it. Knowing that it would work, he typed in the phrase. He held his breath and pressed the button to log in. The laptop complied. A standard desktop with a picture of a fried egg, sunny-side up, appeared on the screen. He was in.

It didn’t take much searching to find the transcript from a chat room where Quantum, Ash, and Geezer had talked about Nikola Tesla and his earthquake device. Geezer, he realized from the transcript, was Egger. Joe’s father must have let something slip about the device to his colleague, and Egger had decided to search for it. But Egger wasn’t the one who had attacked him. Maybe that was Ash or Quantum.

Joe didn’t recognize the name Quantum, but he knew who Ash was. Everyone did. Ash was one of the top hackers in a hacktivist network called Spooky. He was famous, although no one knew his real name. Was Ash Michael Pham? Or was Quantum Michael Pham? Or was Michael Pham neither of them?

Joe admired some of the hacktivists’ goals, but not their methods. If they got their hands on the Oscillator, there was no telling what they might do with it. Some of them were pretty radical, maybe even violent. Maybe they’d even killed Egger.

A tap on the door made him stifle a groan. “What is it?”

“Leandro here. I have my sister on the phone, and she wants to talk to you.”

He closed up the laptop and crammed it under his bed with the books. “All right.”

Leandro pushed open the door with his foot. His blond hair glowed in the light behind him. From this angle he looked like a lion. He waggled a phone in his hand.

“I didn’t know you were here,” Joe said.

Leandro had dropped by off and on during his confinement and had even gone for a few walks in the tunnel with him, probably under instructions from Celeste. Leandro’s knowledge of the tunnels suggested he had spent more time exploring them than he let on. Joe was starting to wonder how much he knew about his old friend after all.

“Just stopped by to make sure you hadn’t died in Great-Grandpa’s bed,” Leandro said.

“I’ve put orders in my will to have the mattress cleaned if I do.”

“Decent of you.” Leandro handed him his cell phone. “Here’s Celeste. Talk to her before she nags me to death.”

“I heard that,” Celeste called.

“Meant you to,” Leandro shouted.

Joe winced at the sound. Leandro smiled at him and left.

“How are you?” Celeste asked. “And really, no sugarcoating things for me because I’m sick. I know people who can beat it out of you. I’ll send them over.”

“Someone got there ahead of them.” His head still throbbed from Leandro’s yelling.

“Tell me everything, omit nothing,” her breathless voice commanded.

He gave her a quick rundown of events and ended by sending her an email with Michael Pham’s photo and identity, because she insisted.

“Got your email. Are you sure this is him?” she asked. “Really sure?”

“Why?”

“This guy is dead,” she said. “It’s all over the news. He poisoned himself at the airport and then stumbled out into the middle of the terminal yelling that he’d set a bomb. It shut down Newark Airport for an entire day. But when they retraced his steps on the surveillance video, they found out that he never set a bomb.”

So, the man who had recovered the Oscillator was dead, just like Egger and Joe’s father. Joe himself should be dead, too. Tears of grief welled up, and he knuckled them off his face. He cried easily since his injury. Or maybe grief over his father’s death was finally catching up to him. He pulled the blanket higher.

“What would a guy like that want with you?” Celeste asked.

He told her about the Oscillator, and also that he thought that Michael Pham might be Quantum. He was convinced he wasn’t Ash. Ash wouldn’t have gotten killed in the airport, and even if he had, he would have tried to retain his anonymity instead of drawing attention to himself with the bomb threat.

She coughed for a few minutes and fell silent.

“Are you OK?” he asked.

“Do you ever watch the news?”

“I’m not allowed to watch TV or use the computer or read,” he said. “They’d probably tell me I can’t listen to the radio if I had one.”

“I bet you turn on the computer the second your keepers leave the room.”

He laughed. “Maybe sometimes.”

“Maybe every chance you get. But you used to use it for fun things, like flipping me off, or the time you hacked the billboards in Times Square to show me seagulls.”

“Actually, I hacked the cell phones of the people wandering around Times Square and used those to hack the billboards. That’s different,” he said. “Tell me more about the news.”

“They had a segment about the High Line. You’ve heard of it? It’s a set of old elevated train tracks that have been converted into a park.”

One more New York landmark he’d never be able to visit. “Yep.”

“They have one section that’s not open yet. The plants are still growing on it or something. Anyway, it was due to open soon, but it collapsed. The news called it a freak earthquake combined with metal fatigue.”

His head throbbed once, as if trying to tell him to pay attention. His father’s newspaper clipping flashed across his mind. Metal fatigue. “That could be the Oscillator!”

“Now, don’t take that information and go off on some cockamamie quest to save the world. Call in the men with guns and helmets.”

“I’m feeling weak. I need to go rest.”

“Rest, as in immediately go online and start researching, quite against doctor’s orders and my advice?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

He disconnected a few minutes later. Leandro took his phone back, made small talk, and left.

As soon as he was alone, Joe wrote up another email, this time to Mr. Rossi. He explained about the laptop, Egger’s identity and suspicious death, and his potential connection to Spooky and Quantum. Then he detailed everything he knew about Michael Pham, included his picture, and added that he thought that he was Quantum. He asked Mr. Rossi to send someone to pick up the laptop and forward it anonymously to the authorities. Then he made a copy of the hard drive because he suspected he’d never see the laptop again once it left his house.

Due diligence done, he started digging around online. It took longer than he expected to find the records for the seismographs that monitored Manhattan. In California, a state with a lot of earthquake awareness, he could have pulled them off the USGS website in seconds. Here he had to trawl through the USGS site, and Google like crazy, before he ended up at the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network. Clearly, earthquakes weren’t viewed as high-priority on the East Coast.

Eventually, he found the raw seismographic data. Now he had to pinpoint the time that the train tracks had collapsed and work backward from there looking for a pattern. And finding patterns was what he did.

His headache disappeared while he studied the colored seismograph readings. Numbers and colors had never disappointed him in the past, and they didn’t now. An unusual wave pattern had appeared on the seismograph for about an hour before the earthquake, increasing in intensity, but always at a very low level. After about an hour, it abruptly slowed down and then stopped, as if someone had flipped a switch. After that, the wave had dissipated, and the readings went back to normal.

He had a strong sense that the Oscillator had caused those readings. That meant that it generated a clear and recognizable seismic fingerprint. He also had a strong hunch that the High Line was a test, and whoever had the Oscillator intended to use it again. If someone were to put the device into action, how could he track it?

New York didn’t have a lot of seismographic stations. He wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the event with enough accuracy to be useful in time. He might be able to tell if the Oscillator was being used to knock something down, but the search area was so big that he’d never be able to find it and stop it in time.

His eyes chanced upon his cell phone, plugged in next to his bed. It was outside of its Faraday pouch, like it usually was when he was home, so it was transmitting its location. Cell phones always do that, because they are constantly connected to the network. He tapped the phone with his finger. Cell phones always know where they are, and they also know their orientation relative to their surroundings — upside down or right-side up or sideways — because of their accelerometers. Millions of tiny sensors were being carried all around Manhattan, sensors that could read vibrations. They were so finely tuned to vibrations around them that it was possible for a mobile phone to use its accelerometer to determine exactly what was being typed on a nearby keyboard.

And he could hack those phones, download their accelerometer data, and monitor it.

He signed into a hacker website and pulled up a list of hackable phones in Manhattan. He’d used them before when he’d played the prank of broadcasting pictures of seagulls flying on all the billboards in Times Square. If he were going to prevent an attack, he’d need to hack all the phones, because the owners would be moving around the city, and he had no idea where the attack might come from. The more phones, the more data, and the more likely he’d be able to pinpoint the Oscillator’s location before real damage was done.

He paused. Was he any better than the NSA? He was hacking innocent people’s phones without their permission so he could use them as listening devices. He had no right to do that. But thousands of people might die if he didn’t. That was the choice the NSA said they faced every day, too, so how could he fault them without being a hypocrite?

His head pounded, and he wanted to go to sleep, but that wasn’t an option. He had to do something. He had to set up his system, and he had to take information from these phones to save lives. It wasn’t private data, like pictures, emails, and phone calls, but it was still wrong.

And he was going to do it anyway.

Decision made, he returned to practical considerations. First, he would have to set up each phone so that it would broadcast its accelerometer data back to him. That was fairly straightforward. Then, he needed to convert that data to waves in order to match the anomalous seismograph output recorded from the hour before the collapse of the High Line tracks. Finally, he would have to set up an engine to compare each phone’s data to the suspect wave pattern and alert him when it was detected. He could reuse his old pattern-matching code from Pellucid.

He wished that he had a group like Spooky — a place where he could outsource some of this work to get it done more quickly. But he didn’t. He just had himself.

He hoped that his mother and Dr. Stauss left him alone long enough to do what he needed. And that his brain would hold up long enough for him to finish.