Jack Wilson
P.O. Box 2000
White Deer, PA 17887
j_p482wl@midpa.net
“This is current?” Burke asked.
“Yes, of course! Is always same address. We are exchanging letters for years.”
“You think he’s in Pennsylvania now?”
Novakovic shrugged. “Yes, maybe. But from here, from Beograd, he goes to Lake Bled.”
“Is that around here?”
“No, no. It’s in Slovenia. Bew-ti-ful place. Mountains, lake, the old hotels.” He bunched his fingers together and kissed them. “Tito had villa there.”
“And you think maybe Wilson’s still there?”
Novakovic made a face. “No no no! He goes to see the notebooks. A few days, a week. Not months.”
“Notebooks?”
“Very special,” Novakovic said. “All of Tesla’s writings – the ones we know – we have them here. In museum. But not Top Secret writings. Your FBI takes these. Long time ago. Sends them on train to Los Alamos. Where they make bombs, you know? But Luka Ceplak, he has his father’s notebooks. Every day, his father is writing. ‘The maestro did this, the maestro did that’ – for thirty years. I have seen them with my own eyes. And sometimes, Tesla himself makes notes on page. This is what Jack Wilson goes to see.”
Burke nodded, but he must have looked puzzled because Novakovic continued. “Luka’s father, Yuri Ceplak, was lab assistant who worked with Tesla in New York, then in Colorado Springs, and then again in New York. He writes hundreds of notebooks! And now they are Luka’s. But will he give them to us? No! He’s stubborn old man. And lonely. Having notebooks, people come to see him. Sometimes, they bring presents.”
“Like what?”
“Vodka.” Novakovic frowned. “You know, your FBI, they lie about the maestro. They are saying he did not keep records, that he works in his head, that he makes no models, no step-by-step. So this is…” he smiled, rolling his hand through the air, searching for the word. “Bullshit.”
Burke laughed. “But this guy, Ceplak-”
“Yuri sees the war coming, and he comes home.”
“You’re talking about the Second World War.”
“Yes, of course. This war. Yuri brings notebooks home. War ends. And we have cold war. Notebooks are going nowhere during cold war.”
“They just stayed with his son,” Burke said.
“No, Luka goes to Australia. Notebooks stay here. Luka’s a physicist at university – in Perth, I think. He comes home only when his father dies. Sixty, sixty-five. Like that.”
“And after that?”
“He’s teaching in Zagreb. But that was long time ago. I don’t think he teaches now for ten years. So maybe we have different story.”
“What do you mean?” Burke asked.
“I’m hoping Luka will let us have the notebooks. I ask Jack Wilson to speak with him of this, but… I think Luka enjoys too much the visits he gets. People come to see notebooks, they take him to lunch, they say, ‘Luka this, Luka that… ’” The curator made a what-can-you-do gesture with his hands.
When Burke asked, Novakovic looked up the particulars for Luka Ceplak, and wrote them on the same sheet of paper with Jack Wilson’s address.
“This is so nice of you,” Burke said, as he got to his feet.
“No problem. You want me to send the abstract on Wilson’s speech? You’ll see, it’s very very interesting.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, I think so,” Novakovic told him. “But, I have to say, I don’t approve. And I don’t think the maestro would approve, either. Tesla, he was heartsick about Tunguska, so… all this talk about weapons? No. I don’t think so.”
Burke frowned. What’s a “Tunguska”? he wondered. “Is that what his speech was about?”
Novakovic nodded. “Yes. He’s talking about Tesla Cannon.” Seeing Burke’s puzzlement, Novakovic smiled. “Is particle-beam weapon. You know” – he made a gesture, his fists coming together and then exploding outward – “Pffft… gone!”
“Really?”
“Yes! Jack’s paper corrects maestro’s eigenvectors to get more accurate focus.”
Burke didn’t know what the museum director was talking about. The whole thing got wilder and wilder. Tesla Cannons? Why not? Beam me up, Scotty. He thanked Novakovic for his help, and made his way downstairs and out to the street. The main thing was, he had what he’d come for: d’Anconia’s name and address. He’d give the information to Kovalenko, and that would be the end of it.
His elation faded at the Internet cafe around the corner from his hotel. An e-mail that he sent to Wilson, with “Tesla” in the subject line, was bounced back almost as soon as he sent it. He checked the address that Novakovic had given him, but there was no mistake. And no Wilson.
Google wasn’t a big help, either. The search engine generated twenty million hits for “Jack Wilson,” which, Burke realized, was entirely predictable. Even so… He went through the first few tiers, and saw that most of the hits concerned a Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop, a fishing lure artisan in Montana, and some Indian who’d died in the thirties. He sighed.
He’d go through them all if he had to, but it didn’t seem a promising path. He clicked on “Advanced Search” and Googled “Jack Wilson” and “Nikola Tesla.” That took him to the page he’d already seen the day before, the list of presenters at the Tesla Symposium, 2005: “J. Wilson/ Stanford University/‘The Tunguska Incident: Calculating Vector Drag in Scalar Pair-Coupling.’” Tunguska.
Bingo!
Burke stared at the screen. Stanford.
If that was legit, knowing Wilson’s alma mater should be useful. There had to be databases you could get to – or at least his sister could. (Meg was a genius at data mining.) Stanford alumni groups, enrollment and graduation records, library cards – maybe even a published master’s or doctoral thesis if Wilson had been a master’s or doctoral candidate. And he must have been. Vector drag? Scalar pair-coupling? I oughta get a Nobel just for typing them, Burke thought.
His sister, Meg, worked for an environmental law group in Charlottesville, and she really knew her way around the Internet. Their dad, amazed by what his daughter could find out about something – or someone – joked that if Meg ever went over to the dark side, she’d make a great identity thief. Cool, she said. I want to be Moby.
But trying to find Jack Wilson via Stanford would take a while, even for Meg. Burke didn’t know when, or even if, Wilson had actually gone there. Or if he’d graduated. Or what his degree was in – if he had one. Physics? Math? Engineering? Science fiction? Stanford was a big place. “Wilson” was not “Heimerdinger.”
He remembered the three-by-five card that the desk clerk had given him. Taking it from his pocket, he found two numbers. There was no reverse lookup on the Internet that gave you international numbers. But he Googled “386 country code” and saw that Wilson’s first call had been to Slovenia. That was probably Luka Ceplak’s number at Lake Bled. The second call had gone to the Ukraine.
His next stop was anywho.com. When the site came up, he put “Jack Wilson” and “White Deer” in the slots and… nothing. He tried “John Wilson.” And again, nothing. The e-mail address had been a phony, and the street address wasn’t any better.
Burke was beginning to get a sinking feeling. Maybe “Jack Wilson” was an alias, too. Maybe “Jack Wilson” was a character in The Fountainhead – in which case, he could forget reopening Aherne & Associates. He tried again, using “Wilson” by itself. Maybe the guy has parents there, he thought. Or a wife, or a cousin – This time, he got a hit. Erica Wilson. Must be a small town, he thought. Only one Wilson.