“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.”