The Truth

CHAPTER 12: THE PRESENT

“Nikola Tesla.” Quinn held up a black-and-white photograph of a young man with pale skin, dark hair parted in the middle, and sporting a thick mustache. “He was an electrical engineer and scientist who was born in 1856 and died in 1943. He’s known for some very innovative work on electricity and magnetism.” Quinn put the photo down and picked up another old black-and-white image, someone Turcotte recognized. A savage-looking man with scars on both cheeks and intense black eyes. “Tesla met Burton.”

“How do you know that?” Turcotte demanded. Quinn held up a leather-bound manuscript — the lost manuscript of Burton that Professor Mualama had tracked down. “It’s in here.”

Yakov spit. “Another thing Mualama didn’t tell us.”

“And?” Turcotte gripped the arms of his chair, trying to keep his anger toward the archaeologist under control. The man, after all, had been infected by a Swarm tentacle. His actions had not been of his own volition. And he had paid the ultimate price. Turcotte could still see the archaeologist tumbling from the face of Everest in his final act of resistance against the Swarm’s attempt to use him to stop Turcotte from reaching Excalibur.

“I found a scholar who could translate Akkadian,” Quinn continued, “and had her work on the manuscript via fax. Do you want Burton’s words verbatim, or do you want my summary?”

“Summarize,” Turcotte said, checking his watch.

“Burton was being chased by the Watchers, who were afraid his investigations might cause problems and upset the truce. Also, he was being tracked down by the Ones Who Wait and Aspasia’s Shadow.”

“Sounds like he wasn’t making any friends,” Yakov said.

“Because he thought for himself,” Turcotte said. “That’s been a rare commodity throughout history, it appears.”

Quinn continued. “Shortly before his death, Burton ran into Tesla in Paris, acting on a tip he received. It turns out that Tesla was a member of a group that traced its beginning back to Myrddin — Merlin as he is more commonly known.”

“But I thought Merlin had been a rogue Watcher?” Yakov pointed out. “A onetime thing?”

“True, Merlin was a rogue Watcher,” Quinn said. “But it doesn’t look like it was a onetime thing. It appears that Burton was occasionally aided by a clandestine group of rogue Watchers who actually claimed the mantle of being the real Watchers.”

“What?” Turcotte asked irritably. Another thing that wasn’t as it had originally appeared.

“Like the Roman Catholics and the Protestants,” Quinn said, “it appears there was a schism among the ranks of the Watchers precipitated by Merlin’s actions or perhaps even earlier. Burton himself wasn’t really sure about the timing, but he does write that there was a split between those who believed in the original edict as decided at Avalon after the destruction of Atlantis, to remain a neutral group dedicated simply to watching, and a more progressive group, initiated perhaps by Merlin, that dedicated itself to more active measures against the aliens.”

“They haven’t been very helpful,” Yakov muttered.

Quinn shrugged. “How do you know that?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Both sides of the Airlia have committed terrible atrocities against the human race over the millennia but we’re still here. Maybe some of that is due to the active Watchers.”

“Tesla. Burton.” Turcotte shot the words out like bullets. If there had been active Watchers, it didn’t appear they were still around — he checked that thinking. There had been the man in South America — whom Turcotte had thought a Watcher — who had warned of the plague the Mission had let loose. And the destruction of the shuttle Columbia. Perhaps Quinn was right — more had been going on behind the scenes than he realized.

“Burton wrote that Tesla was one of these rogue Watchers, Tesla questioned Burton about his expeditions to northern India. And he told Burton he had made contact with a guardian computer.”

“Where?” Turcotte asked. “Mount Ararat.”

Yakov nodded. “The Kurds did say some people came there now and then. And if they had a Watcher ring or medallion, the Kurds would let them in the mothership cavern.”

Turcotte leaned forward. “So Tesla found the mothership, got into it, and found the Master Guardian?”

“It appears so,” Quinn said. “Why?” Turcotte asked.

“To learn about the Airlia,” Quinn said. “To copy from them?” Yakov wondered.

Quinn shook his head. “Burton is pretty adamant that Tesla wanted nothing to do with taking knowledge from the Airlia. He wanted to learn about their technology in order to counter it.”

Turcotte nodded. “Good. And?”

“That is all that’s in the manuscript about Tesla,” Quinn said. “Burton died — was killed, basically — by Aspasia’s Shadow shortly after that meeting.”

Turcotte rubbed his forehead, feeling the painful pounding of a growing headache. The back of his head still hurt and he wondered if he might have sustained some permanent damage from his time in the death zone on Everest. “OK. Exactly who was Tesla? And how is he connected to Tunguska and the Swarm scout? How did he shoot it down?”

“Nikola Tesla,” Quinn said as he referred to his notes. “He was a Serb, born there in 1856. He was formally trained as an engineer. He came to America in 1884, arriving in New York City with just four cents in his pocket.”

Yakov snorted. “Sounds like the typical American immigrant story.”

“Tesla was anything but typical,” Quinn said. “He went to work for Thomas Edison, but the two soon parted ways over differences of opinion. Edison was an advocate of direct current electricity and Tesla of alternating current. Tesla invented the induction motor, fluorescent lights, and many other things for which others took subsequent credit. However, his obsession was the wireless transmission of power.”

Turcotte had never heard of either Tesla or his theories and inventions. Which was strange considering the everyday things Quinn was saying the man had invented. He thought of the alien shield and how it stopped power and — his train of thought came to a halt as Quinn continued.

“In 1899 Tesla moved to Colorado Springs. There he made a most strange discovery — terrestrial stationary waves.”

“Which are?” Turcotte prompted.

“Tesla believed the Earth itself could be used as a conductor for electrical vibrations of a certain pitch. During his experiments he lit two hundred lamps without any wires between them and the power source, which was twenty-five miles away from the lamps. He also created man-made lightning. He even claimed to have received signals from another planet, a claim that was one of the many reasons he wasn’t taken seriously despite an astounding list of inventions and accomplishments.” “That claim would be taken seriously now,” Yakov noted. “The bouncers,” Turcotte realized. “The best Majestic could ligure was that they used some sort of field that the planet itself generated, right?”

“Right,” Quinn said. “I think Tesla was tapping into the same thing. In fact, I know that some of the scientists who Majestic brought in were using research that Tesla had done. I’ve back-checked and they were trying to make a connection between the Earth’s magnetic field and the bouncer’s propulsion system. Even more basic, they felt there was a tremendous amount of untapped energy in the Earth itself, deep beneath our feet.” “What else?” Turcotte asked. “I just read Tesla’s journal,” Quinn continued. “His journal?” Turcotte asked. “How did you get that?” “Tesla died in New York City in 1943,” Quinn said. “His notes and letters were in a large trunk, which became the property of his nephew”—there was a short pause as Quinn checked his notes—“one Sava Kosanovich, a citizen of Yugoslavia, where the trunk was shipped. It appears that somehow, at the end of the Second World War, the trunk fell into the hands of the intelligence arm of the military there.”

“No surprise there,” Yakov said. “Knowledge is power.”

“Once you told me to check on him, I had a friend in the NATO peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo search the archives and find the trunk. Turns out in all the turmoil at the end of the Cold War a lot of material disappeared from the secret police files and ended up in the public domain. He e-mailed me a copy of the scanned journal just ten minutes ago.”

“What did it say?” Turcotte asked.

“If you read between the lines concerning the supposed messages from the planets, I think Tesla definitely tapped into either a guardian or transmissions between guardians.” “Go on,” Turcotte said.

“He gained some understanding of how Airlia technology functioned and also saw that his own research was along similar lines. Because of his status as a rogue Watcher, he understood we — humans — needed weapons to counter the aliens. I think, perhaps, that is why many people have never heard of him — whereas Edison used his genius for practical inventions for day-to-day living, Tesla’s focus was on something that has never been publicly acknowledged until recently. Because of that, he had to use misdirection when pursuing much of his work.

“Tesla worked on using his nonwire electrical beam transmission as a weapon. He went to New York in 1900 where, with the financial backing of J.P. Morgan, he began construction of what he said was a wireless broadcasting tower that could make contact around the world. It appears from reading his papers that Tesla was not entirely forthcoming to his financial backer. While the huge tower he was building at a place called Wardencliff could transmit radio waves, that was not its primary purpose.

“In his papers Tesla writes that he developed a wireless transmitter that could produce destructive effects at long distances using a certain frequency of radio wave propagated through the Earth itself. Indeed, he claimed he could touch any spot on the globe by sending a transmission through the planet, and even have the inherent energy inside the Earth magnify the power. He claimed that the high-end effect would be the equivalent of the detonation of ten megatons of TNT.”

“Could this new form of power get through a shield wall?” Turcotte asked. “How powerful was it really?”

“Well—” Quinn paused. “That brings me to Tunguska.”

Yakov cut in. “Do you remember General Hemstadt’s last words to me on Devil’s Island?” “I remember you telling me he said something about Tunguska,” Turcotte agreed.

“Yes,” Yakov said. “We never really followed that up.”

“We’ve been a bit busy saving the world,” Turcotte said. “There was a file in the archives we recovered about a German expedition to Tunguska, wasn’t there?”

“I have it here,” Quinn said. “Part of what we were able to rescue from Area 51.” He held up a thin leather portfolio with a swastika on the cover. “The report is dated 1934. In summary, it appears the Germans uncovered remains of an alien craft from Tunguska. That’s where those creatures that Section IV had in the tank, the Okpashnyi came from, which we now know are Swarm. At the end of World War II, the Russians recovered what had been taken.”

Turcotte suppressed a shudder as he remembered the strange object floating in the tank at the underground base on the island of Novaya Zemlya, where Russia’s Area 51 had been. A central orb several feet in diameter and six arms separate from the main body. Each arm had been approximately six feet long, twelve inches thick at one end, tapering to three “fingers,” each about six inches long. While the center orb had been yellowish, the arms had been grayish blue. There were lidded, protruding eyes spaced around the center orb.

Quinn’s voice cut into Turcotte’s remembering. “The Russians formally called it Otdel Rukopashnyi which means ‘section of hands.’ Okpashnyi was the shortened version. There were two recovered — one of which the Germans had done an autopsy on. They found that the center orb housed a four-hemisphere brain surrounded by a very hard skull. The arms, or legs, or tentacles, or whatever you want to call the six appendages, had a nervous system with a complex stem on the end that attached to the orb. The German scientists guessed that the arms were detachable and could function in some manner on their own, away from the orb or perhaps even mate with another orb, either in a sexual manner or to exchange information.

“The Germans took casualties on that mission,” Quinn continued. “Five men dead. Cause — an alien infection after thawing out one of the Okpashnyi bodies. The Germans shot the men to stop the infection from spreading.”

“Could one of the Swarm have survived the crash?” Turcotte asked. “I don’t know,” Quinn said. “It appears so now, though.”

“OK,” Turcotte said. “Tunguska.”

“Many people have wondered what really happened at Tunguska in 1908. I’ve got photos here from the German expedition. You can see that the trees have all been blasted outward from a central point. The most commonly accepted explanation has been that a meteor struck at the epicenter, but the problem with that was that no one could find any remains of the meteor. Given what we know now, and the results of this German expedition, there’s no doubt that an alien craft crashed at Tunguska.

“You think Area 51 was desolate, Tunguska is in the middle of nothing. It’s located in the Central Siberian Upland. If it had not been for the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was built in 1906, the exact site of the crash would probably never have been found. Siberia is half again as big as the United States. Yet at the time the railroad was built and the crash occurred, the population in that region was less than one million.”

“What exactly happened with the crash?” Turcotte asked, checking his watch once more. He was anxious to get going after Artad and the Swarm, but he knew he had to go prepared.

Quinn consulted his notes. “In 1908, on June 30, just after seven in the morning, passengers on the Siberian railroad saw something bright race across the sky and disappear below the horizon to the north. There was an enormous explosion.

“Thirty-seven miles from the epicenter, at the trading station called Vanavara — the nearest place where people were, at least people who survived the explosion — no one knows how many trappers or hunters might have perished closer to the blast — the shock wave knocked buildings down and those in the open were burned by radiation. That was only determined decades later, when original reports from the time were studied by scientists who had the data from Hiroshima available. At the site itself trees were blown outward for dozens of miles.

“It was quite a worldwide event. In London, five hours after the explosion, measuring instruments picked up the shock wave in the air after it had already traveled around the world several times. At first, the English scientists thought perhaps they had recorded a large earthquake somewhere on the planet. But that night there was a strange glow, bright red, in the eastern sky, something they had never seen before. For two months afterward the night sky over England was much brighter than normal. It was so bright in some places that fire wagons were called out by people thinking there was a blaze just over the horizon.

“If it had not been for the sighting from the Siberian railroad, the whole source of the event might have been lost. Even with that, the cause of the explosion was not formally investigated by the Russians for nineteen years.”

“‘Nineteen years’?” Turcotte repeated.

“Ah,” Yakov growled, eager to explain. “You have to remember that that was a turbulent time in my country’s history. The czar in 1908, well, one could not expect much from him, then we went through revolution and civil war not long afterward. You also have to understand the remoteness of the Siberian tundra. I have been in Siberia many times. Thousands upon thousands of miles of nothing but trees with bog underneath. A most desolate and isolated place.”

“So what exactly occurred?” Turcotte asked, eager to get back on track.

“What do we know for certain happened?” Quinn checked his notes. “Those on the train, Tungus tribesmen, and fur traders in the area who were interviewed later reported seeing a fireball streaking through the atmosphere toward the trading post of Vanavara and leaving a trail of light some eight hundred kilometers long. The object approached from a heading of 115 degrees and descended at an entry angle of thirty to thirty-five degrees above the horizon. The fireball — as most described it — continued along a northwestward trajectory until it seemed about to disappear over the horizon. There followed a rapid series of cataclysmic explosions.”

“Not one explosion?” Turcotte asked.

“No. Numerous witnesses reported hearing several blasts in succession.” “That’s strange,” Turcotte said.

“The site was centered on coordinates one-zero-one east by six-two north near the Stony Tunguska River, ninety-two kilometers north of Vanavara. The power of the blast felled trees outward in a radial pattern over an area covering over two thousand square kilometers. Closer to the epicenter, the forest was incinerated, causing a column of flame visible several hundred kilometers away. The fires burned for weeks, destroying a thousand square kilometers of forest. The fires were so vast and intense that they caused tremendous winds, sucking up ash and tundra so violently that they were caught up in the high-altitude air circulation pattern and carried around the world. The initial explosion and aftershocks were heard as far away as eight hundred kilometers.

“From this data it was calculated that the explosion was at least twenty megatons and may have been as high as forty, depending on the altitude of the initial blast.” Quinn looked at Turcotte and Yakov. “To give you an idea of the size, the explosive force that formed Meteor Crater in Arizona was figured to be only three and a half megatons.”

“Was there a crater then?” Turcotte asked.

“Ah, a good question!” Quinn was in his element, working wild data he had uncovered and giving it to others. “I’ll get to that. A most strange recording was made of the earth’s magnetic field at the Irkustk Observatory nine hundred kilometers from the epicenter. At the time they did not know what they were picking up, but comparing those 1908 data with modern records of atmospheric nuclear test explosions shows a remarkable similarity.”

“You’re saying a nuke went off in the atmosphere?” Turcotte asked, confused. “That’s what caused all this? I thought you said an alien ship crashed there. And Tesla caused it? Did he develop a nuke?”

Quinn quickly backpedaled. “I’m saying the results were similar to a nuclear explosion. Just as when you exploded the ruby sphere inside the mothership it added to the force of the nuclear explosions you also initiated. All I have told you are the known facts.

“Now let us move on to current speculation before getting back to what you recovered from the Moscow Archive. Current — before the discovery of the Airlia that is — explanations for the cause of the 1908 Tunguska blast have been numerous. Some say a nuclear blast, which of course necessitates involving aliens, as humans did not posses nuclear weapons at that date.”

“But Von Seeckt did recover the Great Pyramid nuke in 1941,” Turcotte noted. “So we not only know the Airlia had nukes, we know they left at least one sitting around.”

Quinn continued his story. “Others have said it was a black hole striking the planet. Or a small piece of antimatter. Even before the discovery of the Airlia there were those who did say the explosion must have had an extraterrestrial cause — the nuclear power plant of a spacecraft malfunctioning.”

“The mothership wasn’t powered by a nuclear reactor,” Turcotte said. “The UNAOC scientists don’t know what the ruby sphere was exactly, but it wasn’t nuclear. Although as you said, when it exploded it certainly acted like a nuke.”

“The biggest problem with knowing what happened at Tunguska — and no insult to you or your country, Mr. Yakov — is that it took nineteen years before the site was actually first examined,” Quinn said. “A Soviet scientist named Leonid Kulik was the one who organized the first expedition. He’d heard rumors of the explosion from the local tribesmen, the Tungus, and that they had closed off the area, saying it was ‘holy’ land and they were afraid of further enraging the gods who had caused the explosion.”

“Primitive thinking, or perhaps they knew more than the scientists,” Turcotte noted.

Yakov agreed. “I learned traveling around the world to trust in the words of the so-called primitive people.”

Quinn went on. “With backing from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Kulik and his party traveled to the area in 1927. Kulik discovered the epicenter of the blast by the straightforward method of working his way in against the knocked-down trees.

“He also discovered several cleared oval areas that he assumed to be old meteorite craters that had been filled in by time. However, not only were those ‘old’ meteorites never discovered, they never found any remains of the large meteorite everyone assumes caused the 1908 blast.

“There are several curious aspects to Tunguska,” Quinn said. “One is very strange. It was discovered not long ago that there was accelerated growth of biomass material in the area surrounding the epicenter and that accelerated growth has continued to this day. There have also been a number of mutations of animal and plant life in the area. Among the local Tungus tribesmen, it was found that their Rh blood factor is abnormal, even now, almost a hundred years later.”

“What could affect life like that?” Turcotte asked.

“Perhaps radiation,” Quinn said. “But even at nuclear test sites, there haven’t been biological data collected like these. Perhaps,” he ventured, “the Swarm bodies did have some alien-type viruses and they infected the local area — and the Germans when they arrived years later. Or, maybe the craft itself or the weapon used against it propagated a field that affected bioforms.

“The common explanation for the Tunguska event has always been that it was caused by an asteroid,” Quinn continued. “However, we run into the problem of not being able to find the crater and asteroid fragments that would be necessary parts of such an occurrence. Making that explanation even more difficult is that aerial surveys in the 1960s discovered four smaller blast epicenters within the confines of the larger one. That also backs up the claims of witnesses that there were multiple explosions. So what caused the smaller blasts?”

“Secondary explosions from a craft,” Turcotte suggested.

“Perhaps,” Quinn said. “But what caused the primary explosion?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Another, bigger expedition was sent to Tunguska after the Second World War. They found signs of an airburst nuclear explosion, now that they knew what the results of such an event would be. Using the data, the men with their slide rules again estimated the equivalent of a twenty-megaton blast. One thousand times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. You can be assured that generated some interest.

“The Soviet scientists also found traces of the radioactive isotope cesium 137 in the ring structure of trees on the outskirts of the blast that corresponds to the year of the explosion. And still no sign of a crater.

“One of the scientists on the expedition — Gregori Kazakov — said that the explosion at Tunguska had definitely been nuclear and he suggested that it was caused by the nuclear engine of a spacecraft exploding. He said that traces of metallic iron found in the area were fragments from the skin of the spaceship. Other metals found there were from the ship’s wiring. He based his theory on the fact that a spacecraft exploding in midair would leave no crater and form the circular effect of blown-down trees that was noted in the area. They also found traces of metal that they couldn’t identify.”

Turcotte waited, the information coming full circle as Quinn continued.

“Then an aerodynamics expert carefully examined eyewitness reports of the object that had been moving across the sky and concluded that it had to have been under intelligent control. Based on the various reports, the object slowed to around.6 kilometers per second prior to explosion, indicating an attempt to perhaps land — a meteorite would have continued at the same terminal velocity to detonation. He laid out the route according to the various accounts and it appeared — if the accounts from 1908 were to be believed — that the object actually made a significant course change prior to exploding, definitely ruling out an uncontrolled object.

“With this new information the team decided to expand the resources and dig. The thought is that whatever exploded fell to the ground, melted the permafrost, then sank into melted ground. Then the permafrost refroze, effectively burying — and preserving — whatever was there. However, the expedition that went after World War II did extensive digging and found nothing.”

“Because the Nazis had already recovered whatever was there.” Turcotte supplied the missing piece. “It appears so.” Quinn said.

“How were the Germans able to operate so freely in Russia?” Turcotte asked.

“Ah, the 1930s.” Yakov’s voice sounded sad. “A black time for my country. If you remember history, Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler that decade. A most foolish decision given subsequent events.”

“Could there be more to that treaty than meets the eye?” Turcotte suggested. “Perhaps the influence of either the Mission or the Ones Who Wait?”

“That is possible with every event in man’s history,” Yakov said. “Who knows even who Stalin was? Single-handedly he almost destroyed my country. We still struggle to recover from all the policies he enacted; and the millions he killed, they will never be replaced. What he did made no sense.”

“Major Quinn, what did the Germans find?” Turcotte asked. “How intact was the wreckage?” “It was in many pieces,” Quinn said. “The Germans took out as much as they could uncover.” “And it wasn’t a Talon, bouncer, or mothership?”

“Apparently not.”

“Well, what was it exactly? What kind of ship does the Swarm have?” Turcotte asked.

“The Germans never really determined the structure of the craft,” Quinn said. “They didn’t have enough to work with.”

“What was Swarm doing on Earth in 1908?” Yakov asked. “That’s a very good question,” Quinn said.

“An even better question,” Turcotte said, “is how did Tesla destroy their ship in 1908?”

“At the same time as the Tunguska explosion,” Quinn said, “the most significant event occurring in the news was Admiral Peary’s expedition to the North Pole. There are some who speculate that Tesla, desiring to gain publicity for his new device, wanted to send a transmission through the Earth to Peary’s camp, where it would light the entire area.”

“Wait a second.” Yakov was confused. “You said it was a weapon?”

“It depends on the amount of energy transmitted. At a certain low level it could transmit a radio message. At other low levels it could produce a glow. Indeed Tesla claimed shortly after the Titanic disaster that his device — located in the Azores — could prevent similar accidents by lighting the entire Atlantic Ocean at night with a low-level glow.”

Turcotte wasn’t sure how much of this he should believe. A month ago he would have thought it all nonsense, but he had seen so many strange things in the intervening weeks that very little was out of the realm of what he now thought possible. And he desperately needed a weapon, a human weapon, one that was powerful enough to attack the Talons and destroy the Mars transmitter.

“Most of what I am telling you is easily checkable,” Quinn said. “You can look them up in the library or on the Internet. Anyway, these people who believe Tesla was trying to contact Peary speculate that Tesla’s experiment went tragically wrong.

“If you look at a global projection, from Tesla’s tower site on Long Island to Peary’s camp near the North Pole and continuing on a line around the planet, you strike Tunguska straight on. The theory is that Tesla mistook both the power and the direction of his beam and instead hit Tunguska with a powerful electromagnetic pulse, causing the explosion.”

“You sound as if you do not believe that,” Turcotte noted.

“Tesla was a brilliant man,” Quinn said. “Reading his journals convinced me of that. I do not think he made a mistake. I believe the North Pole information was a cover story that was put out to hide the real mission. I think he did exactly what he set out to.”

“And that was?” Yakov prompted. “Destroy the Swarm spacecraft.”

“How did he develop such technology?” Yakov asked. And how could he know the Swarm craft was inbound, then target it?”

“That I don’t know yet,” Quinn said. “I’ve got more research to do. But if he had contact with the Master Guardian in Turkey, he might have been able to find out about the Swarm spaceship being inbound. I’m just telling you all I’ve found out so far.”

“Can we duplicate his weapon?” Turcotte asked. “Can it cut through the Airlia shield?”

“I’m speculating that the Swarm craft must have been guarded by some sort of similar shield,” Quinn said. “Tesla’s weapon seems to have worked on that.”

“Can we duplicate it?” Turcotte asked once more.

“I’m working on the data and construction details,” Quinn said. “His energy projector doesn’t appear to be very complicated.”

“Why has no one tried to duplicate it then?” Turcotte asked.

“No one really appears to have looked,” Quinn said. “As I said, his papers were taken by the Yugoslavian intelligence service and locked away. I’ve put out some feelers for experts on Tesla’s science. There’s one more thing,” Quinn added.

“And that is?” Turcotte asked.

“Tesla traveled to England in 1924.” “So?”

“That’s the same year Irvine left England to try to climb Everest. Tesla mentions in his journal that he met Irvine prior to his departure, but he doesn’t say why.”

“That’s not just a coincidence, is it?” Turcotte asked. “I don’t think so.”

Turcotte leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. “Where are they now?” “Excuse me?” Quinn asked.

“These other Watchers,” Turcotte said. “Where are they now? How come they haven’t done anything?”

Yakov shrugged his large shoulders. “I have not met any of them or seen the results of any of their actions in my years tracking the aliens. Perhaps Tesla was the last?”

Turcotte turned back to Quinn. “Can we make this weapon?”

“I’ve got someone coming — a professor from MIT who has done a lot of work with things Tesla worked on.” Quinn checked his Palm Pilot. “A Professor Leahy. Should be here very soon.”

Turcotte stood. “I hope so. Because we’re taking off within the hour.”