“What about weapons research?”
“There is talk that later in his life he wanted to build a direct-energy ‘peace beam,’ but it is mostly known as the death ray. His treatise on the subject, The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media, is in the Tesla museum in Belgrade. I’ve read it and it’s pure drivel. His theories are interesting, but the device would never work. He spent time trying to develop an aircraft that flew by ionizing the air under it. Perhaps that is what you’re looking for.”
As he dug, Juan couldn’t see a fit between an ion-powered plane and George Westinghouse’s boat ending up in Uzbekistan. “He and Westinghouse were friends?”
“Oh yes,” Tennyson nodded vigorously. “Though he was already a wealthy man, Westinghouse added to his vast fortune on their collaborations.”
“Can you think of any experiment that Tesla would have performed aboard Westinghouse’s yacht, the Lady Marguerite?”
“No,” Tennyson said quickly.
Too quickly, to Cabrillo’s trained ear. “Something on or about August first, 1902?”
“Nikola was working on the Wardenclyffe Tower in 1902, out on Long Island. It was intended to transmit electricity wirelessly.”
“Funding for that project was pulled a month earlier,” Cabrillo shot back, silently thanking Murph and Stone for the briefing paper they’d prepared for him. “Please, Professor Tennyson, this is important. I found the Lady Margueriteburied in a desert that used to be the Aral Sea just a few days ago.”
Tennyson went ashen, and he laid a hand on his chest, taking a couple of steps back. “My God.”
“What happened that night?” Juan pressed. “What were they working on?”
Tennyson moved to an Adirondack chair and lowered his bulk into it. “It was only a secondhand account. That’s why I never put it in my book.”
“What was he trying to do?” Juan laid the shovel aside to give Tennyson his full attention.
“It was an experiment they were going to show the U.S. Navy, had it worked. The idea was to use magnetism to bend light around a ship in such a fashion that anyone looking at it would not see light reflecting off of its hull. Their field of vision would pass over the ship and on to the other side.”
“Optical camouflage?”
“Exactly. They rigged the system to the Margueriteand sailed out from Philadelphia, where the work had been carried out in a dockside warehouse Tesla owned. Another ship went with them, for the observers. It was from a story handed down from one of the observers, a Captain Paine from the War Department, that I know any of this.”
“What happened?”
“No one was really sure. They were still steaming out past the shipping lanes when the Margueritesuddenly lit up the night sky with a strange blue aura. It lasted for about thirty minutes and then winked out. When they went to investigate, the yacht was gone. They assumed she had sunk.”
“Did they report any anomalies on their ship? Anything to do with magnetic fields?”
“You’re referring to the story of the Mohican?”
Cabrillo nodded.
“Of course I investigated that tale as best I could. Nothing like what that crew experienced happened on the observers’ boat, but, in full disclosure, I must say they were in a wooden-hulled sloop. The Aral Sea, you say?”
“Yes. What do you think happened?”
Tennyson went quiet. His eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses had gone vacant as he stared into the middle distance.
“What is it, Professor? What are you thinking?”
“I’m not sure,” Tennyson finally admitted. “The Lady Margueritevanished that night. Of that, there is no doubt. And you say you found her in Kazakhstan.”
“The Uzbek side of the Aral,” Juan corrected.
His gaze still fixed on an object only he could see, Tennyson said, “Nikola died in January of 1943. There was a rumor of a story that came out of Philadelphia later that same year — October, to be precise. It involved another Navy project using the ship the USS Eldridge.”
Cabrillo knew enough of the subject, thanks to Mark Murphy’s rantings, to say, “You’re not talking about the Philadelphia Experiment, are you? That was completely debunked.”
Tennyson turned his gaze on Cabrillo, his eyes fierce. “Debunked? You just found the Lady Margueritein Uzbekistan and you’re willing to discount the story of a Navy ship vanishing from Philadelphia and reappearing in Richmond, Virginia? The tale goes on that the ship then returned to her home port with some of the crew fused to the deck in grotesque tableaux while others were driven mad by their experience.” He paused to get a grip on his emotions. “I’m sorry, John. This is all so overwhelming. There was so much more to Nikola than I could ever write about. He was a genius in the way Einstein was a genius except history has completely forgotten him because so much of what he accomplished has been dismissed as speculation and rumor.”
“So what happened in Philadelphia?” Juan said softly to prompt the professor along.
“Right… Philadelphia. Not long after Nikola’s death, the FBI took control of part of his estate under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover himself. They raided the hotel room he lived in in Manhattan and also seized property he owned on the Philadelphia waterfront. The story of the USS Eldridgeis bull. But it remains the basis of what they discovered in that waterside warehouse. What happened to the Eldridgewasn’t the story. What they found in Nikola’s warehouse was.”
Without a doubt, Tennyson had Cabrillo’s full attention. “What did they find?”
“Another ship. One that had been modified. It was an old Navy mine tender that Tesla had purchased with the help of Westinghouse. He had claimed that he had a new concept to make his optical camouflage work this time. But he never had enough money to complete the project, so the ship languished in the harbor for years until the FBI raided the facility.
“They took every scrap of paper they could find, but they left the ship behind. Nikola died owing a great deal in taxes, so the ship was turned over to the War Department as scrap in order to pay off his debt.”
“How do you know all this and why haven’t I read about it before?”
Tennyson smiled. “Because of a little-known pact made during World War Two between the U.S. government and the Mafia.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me right. You see, the mob controlled the port facilities in the Northeast, from Boston down to Wilmington, Delaware. In order for the docks to run smoothly for the war effort, certain concessions were made to organized-crime figures, including Lucky Luciano, who was paroled from prison after the war for his cooperation.”
“And how does this pertain to Tesla’s boat?”
“Dockworkers first tried to fire up the ship’s boilers to move it to a wrecking facility on the Delaware River. They succeeded, and one worker inadvertently powered up the equipment Tesla had left wired to the ship’s hull. Two men were in the room when the machine went live. One of them was cut in half by an unknown force and his lower extremities vaporized. This is where the rumor of men fused to the deck of the Eldridgeoriginates. It’s said the dead man’s torso was found erect and propped up on his hands as though he was lifting himself out of the deck.
“The second man looked perfectly fine, but he too was dead, his skin turned as white as a sheet. It was later determined that the iron in his blood had been ripped free of its binding protein, and toxic shock killed him. These two men happened to be pretty well connected with the local mob boss — I can’t recall his name at the moment — but, needless to say, the workers were spooked and refused to work on the ship. They discussed a general dockwide strike until the Navy agreed to tow the ship out into the Atlantic and sink it.”