Conspiracies

  "Don't let that damn thing in again!" Zaleski cried, brushing his hair off his forehead. "Little fucker gives me the creeps."

  "For once we agree on something," Kenway said. "It shouldn't be allowed to run free."

  Jack was remembering what Olive had told him about that monkey, how she'd overheard it talking to Roma ... or whoever he was.

  "Let's get back to business," Canfield said.

  "Tesla got royally screwed by J. P. Morgan, you know," Kenway said after a few minutes. "Morgan promised to fund his broadcast power project back at the turn of the century. He let Tesla get the Wardenclyffe tower three-quarters built—"

  "That would be out on Long Island?" Jack said, glancing at Canfield.

  "Yes, of course," Kenway said. "Morgan let him get to a certain point, then suddenly pulled the financial rug out from under him."

  "Why do that?" Jack said. "Broadcast power would be worth zillions."

  "Because Morgan was one of the bankrollers of the One World conspiracy, and he and his fellows came to realize that a cheap energy source like Tesla's broadcast power would rev all the world's economies into high gear. They figured that once the secret was out, they'd lose control of those economies. Tesla had a mysterious breakdown somewhere around 1908 and was never quite the same after."

  "Bullshit," Zaleski said from the other side of the room. "He had a breakdown in 1908, but it wasn't caused by no J. P. fucking Morgan. Tesla had an in on alien technology, that's why he made all his breakthroughs."

  Jack glanced again at Canfield who mouthed, I warned you.

  "Back in 1908, with Morgan pulling the plug on his finances, Tesla needed a dramatic demonstration that his Wardenclyffe tower worked. Peary was making a second try to reach the North Pole at the time, so Tesla contacted the expedition and said they should be on the lookout for an unusual occurrence. On June 30, he aimed a beam of energy from Wardenclyffe to an arctic area where the explosion would be seen by the Perry team. But nothing happened. He thought he'd failed. Then he heard about Tunguska."

  "What's Tunguska?" Jack asked.

  "A place in Siberia," Canfield said. "Half a million square acres of forest were utterly destroyed by a mysterious cataclysmic explosion on June 30, 1908."

  "Right!" Zaleski said. "The same day as Tesla's demonstration. And Tunguska is on the same longitudinal line as Peary's base camp."

  "Researchers have estimated the force of the blast at fifteen megatons," Canfield added. "The boom was heard over six hundred miles away. It's never been explained."

  Zaleski grinned. "But Old Nik knew the truth. His beam had overshot its mark."

  "It was a meteor!" Kenway said.

  "Really?" Zaleski's eyebrows floated halfway to his hairline. "Then how come no meteor fragments were ever found?"

  "An antimatter meteor," Kenway said, not backing down an inch. "When antimatter meets matter, there's cataclysmic destruction, with total annihilation of one or the other."

  "Uh-uh, Miles, old boy. Tesla did it, and the total awesomeness of the destructive power he'd unleashed blew his circuits. He had a nervous breakdown."

  "Wrong," Kenway said. "J. P. Morgan's betrayal caused the breakdown."

  "Gentlemen, please," Canfield said. "We're not going to decide this here. Suffice it to way that something happened to cause Tesla to stop communicating with people for a while and to sell his land and dismantle his tower. Let's just say that Nicola Tesla was never the same after 1908 and leave it at that."

  "All right," Kenway said. "As long as there's no more talk about alien technology."

  "Or New World Order bullshit," Zaleski said.

  "Can we just build this damn thing!" Jack snapped. "I don't want to be at it all night."

  He avoided looking at Canfield. Maybe he'd been right. Maybe including these two had been a bad idea.

  10

  "They're assembling it!" Mauricio cried as he rushed into the room. "And as I was listening at the door I heard Miles Ken way say something about a 'our fearless leader' being a 'phony!' It's all falling apart!"

  "Keep calm," Roma said. "We knew the deception would not last forever."

  Sal Roma—he'd immersed himself in the character so deeply that he'd become comfortable with the name. Might as well keep up the pretense. He didn't care what name he was known by, as long as it was not his own.

  "But this is too close. And we do not have the device—they do!"

  "Just who is 'they?'"

  "Canfield, Kenway, Zaleski, and the stranger."

  "Quite a crew. I wonder if this was what Canfield wanted to see me about—that he had learned about the device?"

  "Who cares why he wanted to see you?" Mauricio screeched. "The device is ours! We are supposed to use it!"

  "And we shall, dear friend. Without the bother of assembling it ourselves. This is all working out very nicely."

  "You are insane! The plan was—"

  "Hush now, Mauricio, before you anger me. The plan is heading for the right place, it is simply taking a different course—I do not know why that is, but in good time I am sure I shall. We need only watch and follow, and step in when it is to our advantage."

  Mauricio crouched on the bedspread, and wrapped his thin arms around his folded legs. His sulking pose. "This will come to a bad end, I tell you."

  "A bad end ... " Roma smiled. "That is the whole point, is it not?"

  SUNDAY

  1

  Assembling the Tesla gizmo turned out to be a much more complicated chore than Jack had anticipated, especially the dome. It was close to two A.M. when they finished.

  The beds had been pushed aside and now a five-foot oil derrick topped with a giant, warty mushroom cap stood in the middle of the floor.

  One weird-looking contraption, Jack thought.

  Something about it gave him the willies.

  Nothing terribly strange about the eight-legged base. A bitch to assemble with all those crisscrossing struts, but it functioned as nothing more than a supporting framework. The dome was a whole other story. Curved sheets of shiny copper studded with dozens of smaller copper globes, larger toward the perimeter, and getting progressively smaller as they neared the center.

  Jack could almost go along with Zaleski about its having been inspired by alien technology. He'd never seen anything like it.

  "This looks a lot like the Wardenclyffe tower," Zaleski said in an awed tone.

  "Tesla never finished the tower," Kenway said.

  "So we've been told," Zaleski replied. "But I've seen renderings of how it was supposed to look, and this is it."

  "Swell," Jack said. "But what's it supposed to do? Broadcast energy? Blow up Siberian woods? What?"

  "I doubt we'll know that until it's finished," Canfield said.

  Kenway tapped one of the gizmo's legs with his booted toe. "What do you mean? It is finished."

  "Not according to this." Canfield held up one of the lids and pointed to the diagram of the dome. "See here? There's supposed to be some sort of light bulb or something in the top center of the dome. Has anybody come across anything like that tonight?"

  Jack shook his head, and saw Zaleski and Kenway doing the same.

  "Kee-rist!" Zaleski said. "Isn't that fucking typical? Just like the model kits I used to get when I was a kid—always a piece missing."

  "You sure that's a bulb?" Kenway said, taking the lid from Canfield. He pulled out a pair of reading glasses and studied the diagram more closely. "Looks more like some sort of crystal to me."

  "Lemme see that," Zaleski said. He peered closely, tilting the lid back and forth. "For once I agree with you, Miles. Look at the facets there. That's definitely some sort of crystal. Big one, I'd guess."

  "Anyone seen a large crystal anywhere?" Canfield said, lifting and shaking the spread on the nearest bed.

  "I have," Jack said, wondering at the surges of excitement suddenly pulsing through him as he remembered a basement ... and an old desk ... and on it, three large, oblong, amber quartz crys
tals ...

  "Where?" Kenway said.

  "Out on Long Island ... in a little town called Monroe."

  2

  Jack checked out the moonless sky as he followed Ken way's pickup truck north along Glen Cove Road. Dawn was still hours away and they were all headed for Monroe.

  But what a job to get to this point.

  First the debate on whether or not to send someone out to fetch a crystal and bring it back. Eventually it was decided that that would take too long, so they all agreed to haul the mini Tesla tower out to Monroe. Canfield, still convinced that the crates had come from Melanie, said that seemed fitting.

  But how to get it there?

  Canfield reluctantly volunteered the back of his specially outfitted van—reluctantly because he didn't see any need for Kenway and Zaleski to come; he and Jack could handle everything just fine.

  But no way were Kenway and Zaleski going along with that.

  So they separated the dome from the tower and loaded both sections into the back of the van.

  But that wasn't the end of it. Zaleski didn't want to ride in Kenway's truck, Kenway didn't want to ride in Zaleski's car. Neither wanted to ride in Canfield's van, and Jack had had enough of them all for one night.

  Finally they got underway—a four-car caravan with Canfield in the lead, chugging through the wee hours of Sunday morning. At least they had the road pretty much to themselves.

  Jack felt a raw uneasiness wriggling through his gut, a vague awareness that he was riding toward big trouble. But he couldn't turn back now. He sensed that the end game was at hand, and wanted this crazy weird gig over and done with—tonight.

  He'd tried to call Lew out in Shoreham to tell him where they were going and ask him if he wanted to meet them in Monroe. But all he'd reached was the Ehler answering machine. He'd tried Lew's hotel room again, but still no answer.

  So where was Lew? Not with Olive, Jack hoped.

  3

  The first thing Jack noticed about Melanie's family home was that the lights were on. The second was Lew's Lexus by the garage—he spotted that when Canfield's headlights raked the front yard as he turned his van into the driveway.

  As Zaleski and Kenway pulled into the curb, Jack drove past the house and parked at the corner of the property, near where he'd spotted the black sedan pulling away after his first visit to the house. He got out and looked around, zipping his warm-up top against the chill. No other cars on the street besides the ones he'd come with.

  Satisfied they hadn't been followed, he walked over Zaleski and Kenway who were watching Canfield lower himself and his wheelchair to the ground on the special elevator platform built into his van.

  "Wait here," Jack told them. "I think Lew's in the house. Let me check first."

  He stepped up to the front door and found it unlocked. He pushed it open and entered the living room.

  "Lew?" he called.

  No answer. He started forward, but a sound—an odd, rasping clink—stopped him. He paused, listening, and heard it again. And again. Slow and rhythmic ... coming from below ...

  Jack slipped through the dining room and kitchen and stopped at the head of the cellar steps. The lights were on below, and no doubt about it—the clinking was coming from down there. Along with another sound.

  Sobbing.

  Just to be on the safe side, Jack pulled the Semmerling as he crept down the stairs. He pocketed it when he saw Lew Ehler kneeling on the basement floor. Lew's back was to Jack, he clutched a heavy pickax, and was chipping away at the concrete around the embedded rope ladder.

  He jumped when Jack touched his shoulder.

  "Wha—?" he cried, looking up at Jack with a tear-streaked face.

  "Hey, Lew," Jack said softly. "What's up?"

  "It's Melanie," he sobbed. "She's down there! I know she's down there and I can't reach her!"

  "Easy, guy," Jack said, hooking a hand under Lew's arm and helping him to his feet. "Come on. Get a grip, okay. You're not going to find her that way."

  He felt the scars on his chest begin to itch again. What was it with this cellar?

  Lew let the pickax fall into the shallow depression he'd chipped in the concrete. As Jack bent to retrieve it, he noticed again the scorch marks around the ladder ... eight of them ...

  And eight legs on the Tesla contraption.

  Suddenly excited, he guided Lew to the chair by the desk—and yes, the big amber crystals were still there, all three of them—then ran upstairs to find the others.

  Outside in the front yard, it took Jack's eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness. He saw that Canfield's van had been backed onto the lawn. Canfield was watching Kenway and Zaleski as they offloaded the mini tower from the rear.

  "Where we going to set this up?" Zaleski said.

  "I think I know just the place. Come inside and see if you agree."

  They left the tower in the van and headed for the house. The three of them lifted Canfield and his wheelchair up the front steps and inside.

  "Boy, does this bring back memories," he said as he rolled through the living room. "Where to?"

  "The basement," Jack said.

  "There's nothing down there."

  Canfield's voice didn't ring quite true. Did he know more about this than he was letting on?

  "You're sure of that?" Jack said.

  They carried Canfield and his chair down the stairs. Lew leaped to his feet when he saw them, his expression shocked.

  "What's going on?" he said.

  "I'll explain in a minute, Lew," Jack told him.

  He led the others over to the spot where Lew had been working with the pickax.

  "What the fuck?" Zaleski said, squatting and tugging on the rope ladder where it disappeared into the cement.

  Kenway stood next to him, hands on hips. "Most unusual."

  "But that's only part of it," Jack said. He touched a number of the scorches with the toe of his sneaker. "Check this out. Eight marks in a rough circle. Can anybody think of anything we've seen recently with an eight-legged, roughly circular base?"

  Canfield cried, "I knew it was from Melanie!"

  "Melanie?" Lew said, pushing his way into the ring. "What's from Melanie?"

  "Explain it to him," Jack told Canfield, "while we get the gizmo."

  He led Zaleski and Ken way back to the van. Zaleski carried the dome on his own, while Jack and Kenway shared the larger, heavier, ungainly load of the derrick-like base.

  Lew grabbed hold of the base as they eased it down the basement steps.

  "Can it be true?" he said to Jack. He had hope in his eyes, and his face wore the closest thing to a smile Jack had seen for days. Obviously Canfield had given Lew his own slant on the origin of the crates. "Is this really from Melanie?"

  "I'm going to have to reserve judgment on that, Lew."

  Zaleski leaned the dome against the couch, then he helped Jack and Kenway guide the tower base toward the chipped concrete and set it down over the end of the ladder. A few minor adjustments in positioning and ...

  "I'll be damned," Kenway said. "You were right."

  The feet of the tower's eight vertical supports fit perfectly over the eight scorch marks.

  "Yeah," Jack said, feeling a growing uneasiness. "But I'm not sure I'm all that glad."

  "Why not?" Canfield said. He cradled the big amber crystals in his blanketed lap.

  "Well, for one thing, it's kind of obvious that another contraption just like this one was positioned here before. Where is it now? The question wouldn't bother me except for the fact that all we have left of the first are these marks that have been burned into the concrete."

  "No scorch marks on the ceiling, though," Canfield said. "Nor on the furniture."

  Good point, Jack thought. It made him feel a little better, but not a whole hell of a lot.

  Zaleski stepped over to the couch and hefted an edge of the dome. "Let's get this sucker attached and see what happens."

  Jack removed his warm-up jacket an
d dropped it onto the couch. He gripped the other side of the dome; together they raised it and set it on the base. A few minutes of tightening nuts and bolts, and the mini Tesla tower was reassembled. Light from the naked incandescents overhead gleamed off the dome's rows of copper globes.

  "And now for the final piece," Canfield said, holding up one of the crystals.

  "You really think that's all it'll take?" Jack said.

  Canfield looked at him. "You have doubts?"

  Jack pointed to the tower. "Where do we plug it in?"

  "Tesla theorized that energy could be gathered free from the atmosphere," Kenway said. "That was why he was such a threat to the One-Worlders."

  "Fine," Jack said, shrugging. "But a crystal? It seems so ... so New Agey. It's just a pretty rock."

  "Not just any rock," Canfield said, twisting the crystal back and forth to catch the light. "It's quartz—which has piezoelectric properties. You've heard of crystal radios, I assume?"

  "Sure."

  "And how many rocks do you know that can rotate the plane of polarized light? Trust me, a crystal is a lot more than 'just a pretty rock.'"

  "Enough bullshitting," Zaleski said, grabbing the crystal from Canfield's hand. "Let's do it."

  Standing on tiptoe, he inserted the crystal into the top center of the dome.

  "Perfect fit," he said, then stepped back.

  Jack did him one better. He retreated all the way to the steps. He didn't trust this thing. All he knew about this Nikola Tesla guy was what he'd been told, and one of the stories involved destroying half a million acres of forest on the far side of the North Pole.

  Come to think of it, the stairs weren't nearly as far away as he would have liked. Albany might not even be far enough. But he stayed where he was and watched.

  Nothing happened.

  That didn't seem to faze the others. They kept waiting patiently in a rough semicircle.

  Jack backed up a little more and seated himself on one of the steps.

  How long do we wait before we call this a bust? he wondered.