The folders were each labeled in old-fashioned handwriting: Letters, Lists, and Long Term. Joe decided to exclude the most boring-looking papers first.
He opened the Letters folder. It contained about ten pages, all written in the Cyrillic alphabet, although he thought that Tesla’s Croatia had used Latin letters. Still, Nikola Tesla had clearly known Cyrillic, or he’d had letters from someone who had. Joe would need to hire someone to translate these documents into English. He photographed each one carefully before returning it to the folder. He’d back them up somewhere safe, just in case.
Next up: Lists. This folder held sheets of paper in various sizes. He pulled out the first one. In the same careful handwriting: pigeon corn, new handkerchiefs, glass globes that will fit in the hand, copper wire. Joe paged through the others. Also lists of various items, some household and others electrical. He couldn’t see anyone wanting these, but he diligently photographed each one.
He took a deep breath and opened the last folder: Long Term. It held four pieces of paper: three blueprints and a newspaper clipping. The top blueprint had a yellow sticky note on it. His father’s small printing was centered in the middle. Be afraid. Tread carefully.
Chapter 13
Ash flicked a bit of dust off his suit. The ribbon cutting was running ridiculously late. The police were working to clear out a crowd of protesters. Usually, protesters came down on his side, but this development was complicated.
He looked across the silvery surface of the Hudson River. The river looked so peaceful and clean that most people couldn’t imagine the toxic soup in the water. It held everything from mercury to PCBs to raw sewage to anything else people had thought to dump into New York’s giant toilet. The hand in his pocket tightened into a fist. Strides had been made — the bottom had been dredged of PCBs, mercury levels in the fish had gone down, mutations were less common — but it was nowhere near enough.
He had taken over the plot of land that protesters now stood on. It still held a ramshackle homeless shelter that had already been condemned. He intended to pull the building down and build a laboratory in its place, one that produced PCB-eating bacteria. The bacteria would be bred here and released into the river, eating away the toxins and excreting harmless waste in return. In fact, one of their byproducts was electricity, and he was working to harness that, too.
His intervention would allow nature to heal herself. The lab was an unquestionable good, but he had spent a fortune battling lawsuits filed by dimwits who thought that beds for a hundred homeless drunkards and addicts were more important than safe water and a clean ecosystem for everyone. How could they care about the comfort of a few people, when the future of the river itself was at stake?
He’d received hate mail and death threats and had been regularly blasted on the Internet. Now they were out there waving signs that said Feed people, not bacteria and Wright is Wrong. He’d been tempted to use Spooky to fight back, but he hadn’t. His cause was big enough to absorb their vitriol. He was big enough. The Breakers took worse without blinking.
“Any minute, Mr. Wright,” said his harried-looking assistant. She’d been talking to the police, demanding that the crowds be cleared far enough for the camera crew to get a good shot of the river.
His secure phone buzzed, and he took it out of his suit pocket, hoping for a distraction, and saw a message from Quantum: suitcase not retrieved. in possession of joe tesla crazy millionaire.
Ash smiled at the telegraphic summary. It was always nice to see Joe belittled. As much as he despised the Breakers, he didn’t loathe them like he did Joe.
Ash had met Joe at a computer-security conference a few years before. Joe had worn jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt with a mushroom cloud on the front like any other paranoid techy. But while he’d looked like everyone else at the conference, he’d been sitting on a company that was soon valued at a billion dollars. A company, ironically, that was working to help law enforcement at the expense of privacy and security. How Joe reconciled that with his own staunch ideas on privacy, Ash never understood. Ash hated Pellucid. It put unprecedented power in the hands of the government and made it even harder for disruptive forces, forces that were not necessarily even illegal, to move unchecked. But Joe seemed not to have such qualms about the few repressing the rights of the many.
Ash had been at the beginning of his divorce then. He’d hoped the marriage would simply end, like a flopped business, and they would move on. But the divorce had drawn out over months as they battled for custody of Mariella, their profoundly autistic daughter. He lost his bid for full joint custody and instead was granted visitation every other weekend. She paid less and less attention to him every time he saw her.
After she’d been diagnosed, he’d funded research into the causes of her condition. Genetics loads the gun and the environment pulls the trigger, he’d been told. What a terrible metaphor to use for a parent whose child had been shot in the brain by an incurable condition.
One of the triggers was PCBs. That was why he was standing here today taking them out of the environment — for her. And she would never even notice.
The protesters’ angry chanting reminded him of his ex-wife, Rosa, and their arguments, more about angry tones than real content. In the midst of that strife, he’d met Joe Tesla at a bar near San Francisco’s Moscone Center. After a few drinks, Joe called him a “sad sack,” and Ash saw pity in those intelligent eyes. That was when he started to truly hate him.
Joe took him to the Golden Gate Bridge. Not, it turned out, to throw the pitiful Ash over the side, but to distract him with a climb to the top of the north tower in the middle of the night. Joe had climbing gear for both of them and a key to the tower.
He never learned how Joe got the key, or how he’d managed to get them up without being caught, but he would never forget staring down at the orange span glowing in the fog below him. The sight gave him a moment of peace and clarity, and a reminder that the rules didn’t apply to him. On the bridge, and in life, he had a perspective on the world that no one else did, and that gave him the right to bring his visions to reality. Just as Joe did. In fact, more of a right, because Ash’s vision would heal the world.
When he heard Joe had moved to New York, he expected a call. Ash had learned how they could get to the top of the Empire State Building and touch the antenna there. It was a simple matter of money. To show off, he had sent Joe a coded invitation to join him on his adventure, but the man never responded.
All Ash’s emails and calls went unanswered. When he saw the Forbes article about Joe’s agoraphobia, he knew why. Shame had driven his old acquaintance into a deep, dark, and lonely hole, and he didn’t want company. Joe deserved pity now, not Ash.
But even a trapped Joe was clever. Maybe they could work on Nikola Tesla’s device together. But what then? Joe wasn’t interested in disrupting the system, and he cared about human life.
He wouldn’t put people in danger. He didn’t share Ash’s big picture. That was why Joe had never turned up on Spooky. He wouldn’t be part of that kind of game. He would have left the homeless shelter there, left the PCBs in the water, let them eat away at the brains of toddlers.
Ironically, only the Breakers would understand his actions. Even if they were on the other side of the spectrum, they had a global perspective. They, too, were above the law.
No, Joe wouldn’t give him unfettered access to the plans for the Oscillator, so he would have to get them from him. If Joe came to grief over it, all the better.