“All right,” Michaels said. “So now I know about brain frequencies.”
Jay nodded. “Over the years, various agencies of various governments have tried broadcasting certain extremely low-frequency radio waves in an effort to alter human consciousness. In the fifties, the Russians had something called Lida, a machine that supposedly rendered people susceptible to hypnosis. The North Koreans had variations of this during the Korean War, used on American POWs. They didn’t work very well, but that was not for want of trying.
“For years, back in the old Soviet Union, the Russians beamed microwaves at the American Embassy in Moscow, centered on the ambassador’s office. The CIA discovered this in 1962, and some effects on various ambassadors were speculated upon, including a leukemia-like illness, and a couple of deaths from cancer. Nothing proven.
“In 1976, ham radio operators around the world noticed a peculiar signal originating in the Soviet Union that came to be known as the ‘Russian Woodpecker,’ from the staccato way it interfered with their radios. This signal was thought to come from big Tesla transmitters, and was thought by the CIA to be designed to depress or irritate the recipient.”
“Tesla? Like the Tesla coil?”
Jay grinned. “Let me tell you about Nikola Tesla. There are some who believe the Tunguska Event — an explosion estimated in the 10-to-15-megaton range that blew down half a million acres of pine forest in Siberia in 1908—was either a test — or a malfunction — of one of Tesla’s giant transmitters.”
“I thought it was a comet,” Michaels said.
“You probably think Oswald shot JFK, too, Boss. Merely a cover story, according to the conspiracy theorists. Some say it was an alien spaceship, others a runaway black hole, others a speck of antimatter, but, hey, my money is on Tesla. He was a certified genius. Aside from being the guy who came up with and patented the idea of alternating current, thus helping George Westinghouse to become filthy rich, he created working fluorescent lights long before Edison’s uncredited lab monkey made the less efficient incandescent bulb. Tesla patented all kinds of stuff. His work was the basis for the X-ray machine. He sued Marconi — and won — for swiping his work to create radio. Tesla came up the ideas that would later become radar and tomography.
“Listen, in 1904, in Colorado Springs, he built a big power generator for his wireless power transmission experiments. Using what he called ‘terrestrial stationary waves,’ he lit two hundred lightbulbs twenty-five miles away by pumping juice into the ground, no wires. He could generate artificial lightning bolts of a couple to three hundred thousand watts that were more than a hundred and thirty-five feet long; you could hear the thunder fifteen miles away in town. He was waaay ahead of his time, so he certainly had the smarts and gear to knock down a few trees. It would have been the last in a long line of tests that — some say — included sinking the French ship Iena by electrical bolts generated miles away.”
“Apparently Tesla didn’t much care for the French,” Alex said, smiling.
“He didn’t care much for anybody,” Jay said. “Anyway, in 1906, J. P. Morgan financed Tesla, and he built a bigger generator than the one in Colorado, this was on Long Island. Eighteen stories tall, topped with a huge metal globe that weighed more than fifty-five tons. Eventually he and Morgan had a falling out, and he made a couple of bad choices, so he ran out of money before he proved it could work. According to his theory, you could focus the power just right, and turn it into what would essentially be a death ray with the power of a small nuke, and send it anywhere on the planet by bouncing it off the ionosphere.”
“Fascinating, Jay. Are we getting to the point any time today?”
“There’s a great story about Tesla going to a bridge with a hammer and a stopwatch, tapping the metal at precise intervals, and damn near taking the bridge down with the Galloping Gertie effect. I’m telling you, Tesla was head and shoulders above everybody else of his time.”
“Jay. Hello. Earth to Jay?”
“It’s the same technology, Boss, pumping juice into the air without wires! The HAARP people aren’t doing anything Tesla didn’t think of a hundred years ago.”
“All right, I’m impressed. He was a genius. Get to the point.”
“Well, according to my mole in the CIA — and that’s for the benefit of any CIA ops listening to our conversation, good luck on finding him — even after the demise of the evil empire, the Russians continued their experiments with ELF radiation, using devices that Tesla would have recognized as his own. Ivan hasn’t found the magic combination yet, that we know of. Aside from HAARP, which is the biggest, there are other ‘atmospheric heaters’ like it all over the world, at least a dozen, not counting any somebody might be hiding in the woods somewhere. And using the ionosphere to bounce off of — like playing pool, you can bank the shot — any one of them could be driving the Chinese bonkers — if they’ve figured out the correct frequency to do it. And given what we know, it seems as if somebody might have figured it out.”
“Sounds like science fiction to me.”
“No, that is the point, Boss — it’s old tech, the root stuff. Anybody with some wire and a lot of time on his hands can produce it. It’s the frequency stuff they need, not the hardware. It’s like plug-’n’-play; you don’t need to be a whiz to get it to work. Tesla did the basics a century ago. Certainly a theory we ought to check out.”
“And how do you propose we check it out?”
“Hey, that’s the fun part. We go into the wonderful world of VR and hunt it down on the net. I bet that somewhere, sometime, somebody has put something about this into the ether, and even if they hid it, I’ll find it.”
Michaels nodded. Mind control. A scary thought.
“What about Morrison? Are we checking him out?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m paying his files a visit this afternoon. I’ll get anything anybody knows about Dr. Morrison or my name’s not Lightnin’ Jay Gridley.”
Michaels just shook his head again.
17
John Howard watched his son watch the boomerang throwers. The contest was going full steam, several events at once, and the air was full of bright plastic bits spinning in all kinds of flight patterns. Outside of computers, this was the first thing that had ever seemed to really attract Tyrone. Well, not counting that little girl who had broken the boy’s heart a few months back. What was her name? Belladonna? It had to happen eventually, of course, and maybe sooner was better than later, but it had been a wrenching experience. And your first heartbreak never went away, not altogether. Howard could remember his own with a clarity he wouldn’t have thought possible more than twenty-five years after it had happened. He’d even told Tyrone about it, trying to ease his son’s heart-sickness. Maybe it had helped. He liked to think that it had, a little.
Ah, yes, beautiful Lizbeth Toland, who had betrayed him at sixteen with his best friend, costing him both of them. It was a lifetime ago, and in the grand scheme of life, it didn’t mean much, a tiny bump in the road, but not something that ever quite went away. Even after all the years, he could still summon up the sadness he’d felt, though it had lost the painful sting it had once had.
Ah, well, it was the path not taken, and he didn’t have any regrets about the one he had gone down instead. If he’d wound up with Lizbeth, then he’d never have met Nadine, never fathered Tyrone, and he would have missed entirely the life he enjoyed. It was possible that other life could have been better, but he couldn’t see how. He wouldn’t trade Nadine and their son for all the money, fame, and power in the world.