‘We look like a couple of hoboes,’ Roberta said, breaking the silence, gazing at their dishevelled reflection in a window on the other side of the tracks.
‘You smell like a Connemara Smokehouse mackerel,’ he told her with a faint smile.
‘Gee, thanks for that one. It’s not just me, I assure you.’
When the train arrived, the two hoboes sat at the rear of a near-empty carriage with just a small gang of harmless drunks for company. As they rattled away from the station, one of the gang came reeling up the aisle with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, looking for a light. With a pang of regret, Ben told him he didn’t have one. The drunk sniffed the air and peered curiously at their blackened faces and dirty clothes. ‘What happened to you two?’ he slurred.
‘Got caught in an earthquake,’ Ben told him, and the drunk shambled back to his friends looking puzzled.
Roberta gave a dry smile. ‘So, are you still in denial, or what?’
‘I can’t explain what I saw,’ he said. ‘But I won’t deny it either.’
‘Okay. Time for the backstory. 1898, New York City. Nikola Tesla was in his Houston Street basement laboratory when—’
‘I thought you said he was Serbian.’
‘He was, but he emigrated to the States in 1884, went to work for Thomas Edison and later became a US citizen. It was in New York, well over a century ago, that he designed and built the prototype of the oscillator device you saw today. Once it was completed he had to test it, and Tesla being Tesla, he did that by tuning it to the resonant frequency of the building in whose basement the lab was housed. A crazy thing to do, but then he was a pretty crazy guy by all accounts. According to the story, as he cranked up the power he and his assistants heard first a hum, then a crack, then another, then the whole building began to tremble, along with neighbouring buildings with similar resonant frequencies. Mayhem in the street. The fire department and police reserves rushing to the scene, everyone convinced a mega-quake was about to happen. And who knows what would’ve happened, if Tesla hadn’t taken a hammer to his machine before it could run away with itself and do too much damage.’
Ben just shook his head and wished he had his cigarettes.
Roberta went on: ‘Now, that wasn’t enough for Tesla, so he built a second oscillator, this time about the size of an alarm clock. He took the machine to a construction site in the Wall Street district and clamped it to one of the support beams of a ten-storey building. Within minutes, he said the structure began to creak and weave, and all the steel workers came rushing down to ground level in a panic because they thought the building was going to fall apart. In the middle of the chaos, Tesla just slipped the machine back in his pocket and made his exit, knowing – and I’m quoting – “I could have laid the whole edifice flat in the street”. Is all this sounding a little more plausible now?’
It was, but Ben was still having trouble digesting it. ‘And this was the same kind of machine Claudine built.’
Roberta nodded. ‘Hers was an update, that’s all. It’s essentially a very simple concept. The original oscillator used just five pounds of air pressure acting on a pneumatic piston. Tesla initially pretended to the New York authorities that his Houston Street experiment must have been an earthquake, but he later claimed that the same five pounds of pressure could have dropped the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River or brought down the Empire State Building. In fact, the larger the structure, the easier it is theoretically to destroy, because the resonant frequency gets lower as mass increases. Like I told you before, Ben, there’s no limit to what it can do. Remember how I said that Tesla believed he could split the world in two? With a large enough machine, no problem.’
‘How large is large?’ Ben asked, looking at her in bewilderment.
‘Not as large as you might imagine,’ Roberta said. ‘Claudine once told me that Tesla claimed a scaled-up version of his device weighing two hundred pounds and measuring three feet high would be capable of transmitting motive power anywhere through the earth, over any distance. Sounds about right to me.’
‘This is some pretty wild story you’re telling me.’
‘But you don’t need proof any more that it’s not crazy, right? You’ve seen this working with your own eyes. That should be able to convince even you.’
Ben shrugged helplessly. ‘All right. You’ve got me. But I have a question. Why the hell isn’t this stuff more widely known about? I mean, unless I’m missing something, it would seem fairly important.’
‘Because,’ Roberta explained, ‘in common with a lot of other very important discoveries, which would include things like the secret of potentially creating eternal life or transmuting base elements into gold, it’s been so wrapped up in hokum and conspiracy theories that it became, as far as science was concerned, an untouchable subject. That’s why hardly anyone remembers the name Tesla anymore. In mainstream academic research circles, just to mention it makes you out to be a total crank.’ She pulled a dark smile. ‘And believe me, I’ve spent enough of my science career dealing with untouchable subjects to know what I’m talking about. That’s one way to see why so few people know about Tesla’s work. The other way to see it is as a deliberate cover-up, engineered by certain people who didn’t want the public to know about it, for their own reasons. In which case the whole nutty conspiracy element provides the perfect smokescreen, just like the whole Roswell thing in the 1940s was deliberately allowed to be sidetracked by disinformation about aliens and UFOs, to protect the truth that the US government were developing secret aircraft technology.’
‘So now you’re saying the US government were implicated in this.’
‘Well, they did take an interest in him from early on,’ Roberta said. ‘He was paid millions by the War Department to develop all kinds of diabolical secret weapons, none of which ever went into production. In 1917 he patented a wireless engine that he claimed could wipe out an entire naval fleet from ten thousand miles away, just by pulling a lever. Then years later in the lead-up to World War II, he unveiled plans for a so-called particle “death beam” weapon that was supposed to be able to bring down whole squadrons of enemy aircraft at a stroke or cause a million-strong army to drop dead in its tracks like some Bolt of Thor that would protect any nation who possessed it from foreign invasion. As you can imagine, it never got past the theoretical stage. I guess Julius Oppenheimer’s lovely atom bomb project was more in line with conventional wisdom and won over the government’s hearts and money instead.’
‘I’m glad that one didn’t catch on,’ Ben said. ‘Sounds like I’d have been out of a job.’
Ignoring his stab at levity, Roberta went on, ‘But the powers-that-be never lost interest in him, no matter how wacky his ideas became. It’s pretty certain that immediately after Tesla’s death in almost complete poverty at the age of eighty-six in January 1943, agents of the FBI, the Office of Alien Property and the War Department conspired to magic away, impound and safeguard a bunch of his secret weaponry papers, blueprints and design plans. The legend is that, with the tacit knowledge of J. Edgar Hoover and various military top brass, sometime that January they broke into the safe in Tesla’s room in the New Yorker Hotel, where he’d spent the last years of his life, and stole vital information along with a key to another vault at the Governor Clinton Hotel.’
‘Which contained pink dinosaur eggs and a set of Hitler’s lost dentures,’ Ben said.
‘Not exactly,’ she corrected him with a hard look. ‘If you go along with the stories, and Claudine said there was good evidential reason to do so, it was where Tesla had stored a prototype working model of the death ray machine.’
The train was clattering fast along the tracks, shaking them softly in their seats. Paris was just a few minutes away. Ben had slumped down low with his feet on the seat opposite, and was gazing out of the window as he sat absorbing what she was saying. The story of the theft of the death ray machine didn’t seem to have moved him in the least.
‘What’s the matt
er, don’t you believe me?’ she asked, seeing the doubtful look that was spreading over his face.
‘After tonight’s episode, I’ll believe that Jesus Christ and the Apostles sold cheeseburgers on the Temple Mount,’ he said. ‘That’s not the problem.’
‘So what’s the problem?’
‘Seriously? You’re making a case that secret government agents murdered Claudine over her research.’
Roberta looked at him earnestly. ‘Wouldn’t that make sense, Ben? It would’ve been so easy for them to pin it on some maniac serial killer, just by copying his M.O. They do this kind of thing all the time. I mean, look at what’s happening to us here. Who could track me to some tiny village in the asshole of England? Who could find us again in Paris, and stick a homing device on our car? Who’s got those kinds of resources?’
‘I agree, it seems to make sense in a lot of ways,’ Ben said. ‘But here’s the problem. All right, let’s say for argument’s sake that the conspiracy buffs are right on the money, and that this is all true and that back in 1943 the FBI and the other government spooks were all desperate to get their hands on some loony weapon that can shoot beams at the moon, turn entire nations to stone, or whatever. We’re talking about things that were dreamed up decades and decades before you and I were born. Even if these devices worked exactly as Tesla claimed they could, do you have any idea how wildly obsolete they’d be in the modern age? We have ICBMs now; we have drone warfare, battlefield robotics and depleted uranium warheads and weaponized anthrax and a whole list of horrible things designed to kill and maim, that make Tesla’s creations sound like something out of an old black and white Flash Gordon matinée movie.’
‘Fine. What are you trying to say?’
‘Simply, that I don’t buy that a modern-day researcher poking their nose into this stuff could get into trouble over it. Not after all these years. There’s got to be some other angle.’
Roberta shrugged. ‘Okay, then. Maybe Claudine discovered something new, something nobody’s ever come up with before. Maybe that’s what they’re after.’
‘In which case, why would they just bury it under tons of rubble? Why not make any attempt to acquire it?’
They pondered the issue, throwing questions back and forth and getting nowhere, until the train finally lumbered into the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris. By now it was well into the small hours of the morning and the place was as quiet as any of Paris’ main stations could ever get, with just a few strings of late-night travellers hanging about the platforms. The drunks piled rowdily out of the train first, then Ben and Roberta quietly disembarked and made their way through the complex of old and modern architecture to leave the station via the east entrance on Rue Saint-Lazare. A smattering of traffic was zipping around the square in front. Ben looked about for a cab and spotted a single beige Mercedes cab was sitting parked at a taxi rank thirty yards away. The safehouse was only a couple of short miles across the city. They could be back there inside five minutes.
As they approached the taxi rank, Roberta noticed the man who was loitering alone at the foot of the ugly modern clock sculpture near the station’s entrance. He was dressed in jeans and a casual hooded top, smoking and apparently watching them from a distance. He suddenly flicked away his cigarette and started walking towards them, his pace quickening with every step.
Before Ben and Roberta reached the taxi rank, another group of people appeared around the corner: three women accompanied by two men, all dressed in evening wear. From the noise they were making, they must have had a good time that night. They got to the Mercedes first and spilled into it. The doors slammed shut with a last peal of laughter and then the car took off down Rue Saint-Lazare.
‘Looks like the subway for us,’ Ben said.
Roberta was still anxiously glancing back over her shoulder at the man in the hoodie top. There was no mistaking that he was making right for them. His head was inclined downwards and his hands were bunched up in his pockets.
‘Ben? That guy over there – I think he’s following us.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ben had already noticed him. The guy’s body language had set off his own alarm bells the moment they’d emerged from the station exit. ‘Keep walking, don’t look back,’ he said, taking Roberta’s arm, and guided her across the street towards the nearest Metro station at the corner of Rue Saint Lazare and Place du Havre. Out of the corner of his eye he was watching the man closely, more and more certain he didn’t like what he was seeing. At any moment a weapon was liable to appear from one of those hoodie pockets. Ben’s pulse began to quicken with apprehension and rage. How had these people picked up their trail again so fast?
And if he was one of them, chances were he wasn’t working alone. More of them could appear at any moment.
Down the steps into the bright Metro station; the man still followed. There was hardly anyone else around. Ben and Roberta headed briskly into the winding tunnels.
The man saw his targets disappear around a corner and pressed on quickly to catch up. Inside his pocket, the fingers of his right hand clenched around the handle of the knife. He rounded the corner after them, then halted and glanced about, perplexed. Nobody. His targets had vanished.
Suddenly the breath was driven out of him by a hard impact out of nowhere and he was slammed against the curved tiles of the tunnel wall.
Ben delivered two hard, fast strikes to force him quickly into submission. The man slumped down the wall. His right hand pulled feebly at his pocket. Ben saw the blade before it had moved three inches towards him. The man let out a screech that echoed up the tunnel as the weapon was twisted violently from his fingers. Before he knew what was happening, the edge of the blade was pressed hard up against his throat.
‘Who are you?’ Ben said in English. ‘Talk.’
The man was powerless in Ben’s grip. His eyes and mouth were distended with terror. ‘Quoi?’ he managed to blurt out.
‘I asked you who you are,’ Ben repeated in French. ‘You’ve got three seconds to spill it. Don’t think I won’t cut your throat. I’ve done it to better men than you.’
Everything about Ben’s tone and expression was enough to convince the man very quickly that he wasn’t joking. ‘My name’s Jules! Jules Leclercq!’
‘Who do you work for, Jules?’
‘Nobody! I don’t work for anyone, I swear! I don’t even have a job!’
Ben kept him pinned down and pressed the knife edge harder against his neck. But even as he did it, he could see the signs. The blade was dull and cheap, mail-order trash. Jules smelled of sweat and stale alcohol and his clothes were grimy. He began to whimper pitifully. A wet patch appeared in the crotch of his jeans and a puddle of urine began to spread under him.
There were slick, efficient professional killers who posed as down-and-outs, and then there were poor stupid opportunist lowlifes who thought they could harvest the odd wallet at knifepoint in a lonely subway station. It wasn’t hard to see which one Jules was. Ben slackened his grip. He turned round to where Roberta was hovering in the background, and shook his head.
‘Don’t kill me!’ Jules sobbed. ‘Please God don’t kill me! I just needed some cash … I’ll never do it again, I swear.’
‘I’m not going to kill you,’ Ben said. ‘Which means today’s your lucky day. Remember, the next person you try it on with might not be so kind to you. Now get out of here.’ He dragged Jules roughly to his feet and shoved him back up the tunnel.
Jules Leclercq was gone in seconds.
Ben sighed. ‘I’m getting jumpy,’ he confessed to Roberta.
It was 2.30 a.m. by the time they got back to the safehouse and locked the armoured door securely behind them. Ben and Roberta both knew that at some point they were going to have to get some sleep, but they were each too keyed-up and anxious to investigate what they’d recovered from the tomb to even think about rest.
After they’d quickly cleaned themselves up, Ben brewed a pot of very strong black coffee, li
t a Gauloise from the gas stove and then dug out the notebook computer that had been stored away unused for a long time. ‘It isn’t quite state-of-the-art, but it’ll do us.’
As he set the notebook up on the bare desk and pulled up two chairs, Roberta retrieved the hard drive from his bag. ‘All right, let’s check out what’s on this thing.’
‘Assuming its innards didn’t get frazzled in the fire,’ he said, plugging the drive into the computer. Roberta sat down at the keyboard. ‘Don’t say that, Ben. It’s got to work or we’ve got basically nothing. We’ll be right back where we started.’
After a few moments’ tense wait, the machine recognised the hardware and they were in.
‘This is it,’ Roberta said with relief. ‘Claudine’s Tesla research. I hope to hell it tells us something.’
One thing was for sure – they weren’t short of material to trawl through. ‘This is going to take the rest of the night,’ Roberta said, running her eye down the endless list of data files that had filled the screen.
Ben sipped the scalding black coffee. ‘I’ve nothing else planned, have you?’
‘Let’s get into it. Where to even start, though?’ She peered closely at the screen. ‘All right, looks like we’ve got a lot of technical stuff here in these PDF documents.’ As she opened up one after another, they came across what appeared to be scans of original blueprints for a weird and wonderful array of technological devices from the early twentieth century. ‘These are all Tesla designs, as far as I can see. Christ knows where Claudine even got this stuff.’
Dispensing with the blueprints, Roberta opened another file that contained the drawings for Claudine’s updated electro-mechanical Tesla oscillator, together with her own reports and images documenting the stages of building and testing it.
‘We’re going to need more than technical drawings to make sense of this,’ Ben said, using the tip of his dying cigarette to light another.