A man in silk pajamas appeared in the doorway she’d just vacated. He brandished a baseball bat.
“I saw the guy who kicked your car,” she said. “Do you want me to stay so you can file a police report?”
His eyes flicked to the dent she’d made in his fender. She felt a pang of guilt, but better his insurance company covered the damage than that she had to shoot the guy she’d been following.
“Did you get a good look at him?” he asked.
“Better than you did.” She called a cab while he thought that over. At least he’d lowered the bat.
She gave him a quick description of the guy. Maybe she’d get lucky and the cops would pull him in for damaging the car. Yeah, and maybe Santa Claus would give her a ride home in his sleigh.
She took the cab.
Chapter 22
At three a.m. (red), Joe gathered up the automaton and took the elegant elevator up to the concourse. He hoped the guy who had been following him hadn’t somehow managed to evade Grand Central security and was still inside. Joe had kept an eye on the surveillance cameras while watching TV, and he’d seen only the regular nightly cleaning crew moving about the terminal.
A few minutes later he and Edison were alone in the vast room. Illuminated stars on the ceiling glowed softly. He had read that the LEDs installed in 2010 were equipped with special light-blocking filters so that each star glowed with the same relative brightness as its counterpart out in space. He liked that.
He carried Tik-Tok over to the corner under the constellation for Cancer the crab. Nikola Tesla was born on July 10 (cyan, black), which meant his astrological sign was Cancer. If Alan was right, and Nikola had spent nights here, walking the concourse alone, maybe Cancer would have special meaning for him, and maybe Joe’s father would have known that. Edison’s claws clicked against the marble as he walked, a sound Joe never heard during the noise and bustle of the day.
With a clink, he set the metal man on the polished floor and lined him up with Beta Cancri, the brightest star in the constellation. He wound him up, each click loud in the empty room. Tik-Tok raised his arm. Joe had changed the simple red bulb on the end to a laser pointer. He hoped the little man’s arm might point to the Oscillator.
But it didn’t.
He moved the man to various locations around the terminal, trying all the stars of Cancer, then Hercules, and then each constellation in turn. He even climbed the information booth and positioned the man atop the clock, trying not to think about the fact that each face of the clock was made of high-grade polished opal and that Sotheby’s had put a replacement value on each face of between two and a half and five million dollars. He’d also heard that the clock faces were made of opalescent glass, which would make them significantly cheaper. He hoped the second explanation was true.
Roger, the older gentleman who washed the floors, raised an eyebrow when he saw Joe crawling around with a doll, but he didn’t say anything. Joe officially had the run of the place, so he was allowed to be there, and he was considered eccentric enough that nobody questioned him. Perks of being a crazy rich guy.
By the time 5:30 a.m. (brown: red, black) rolled around, his knees hurt from kneeling on the cold Tennessee marble, his fingers were sore from winding up the little man, and Edison was sleeping on the bottom stair of the East Staircase.
The station would open to travelers soon, and he’d accomplished nothing. He felt as if he’d betrayed his father’s memory by not being smart enough to solve the puzzle left for him. More was expected of him, even if he wasn’t a Tesla after all.
Chapter 23
Joe woke up late and grouchy. He fed Edison and put on a cup of coffee. His coffee maker was a work of modern-day wonder, even if it didn’t match the décor. Some compromises he was willing to make.
He switched on the flames in the parlor and stared into them until he had enough caffeine in his system to think about his email. Regular work stuff, more surveillance matches from what had to be the most massive government surveillance program ever, and a few private emails.
One from Alan Wright inviting him to play tennis later in the week. Did Alan even play tennis? Maybe he was reaching out because Joe’s father had died, but that didn’t mean Joe had to play tennis with him, did it? Plus, Alan didn’t strike him as a reacher-outer. He must want something. But what?
One from Vivian saying she’d followed a man matching the description that Joe had given her to the Chrysler Building, where he seemed to work, but had lost him afterward. She must not have gone to bed. She didn’t ask any questions about why he wanted to have the man followed, which was good given that his best answer was a bunch of paranoid worries about a box of papers from Nikola Tesla that only had instructions for how to build a windup toy.
The toy stood on the mantel next to a human skull and a black statue of the Egyptian cat-headed goddess Bastet. It looked right at home among the other Victorian-era collectibles.
Joe admired the toy’s clever design, then took a long sip of coffee and braved the surveillance folder. More requests. Hundreds of thousands from computers that he’d traced to the National Security Agency. Someone was fishing, and they’d scooped up all the fish they could find.
What could he, Joe Tesla, do about it? The National Security Agency had enough lawyers on its payroll that he’d never be able to prove the volume of requests was illegal. He could leak the results to a whistle-blower website like WikiLeaks, but that wouldn’t do more than spark a month of outraged navel-gazing.
Doing nothing wasn’t an option either.
He took a shower and got dressed, but when he returned to the parlor, his laptop was still there with its millions of facial recognition match requests next to the stubborn little automaton. Neither was showing him the way forward.
With a sigh, he sat down and stared into the flames again. Edison inched closer to him, brown eyes watching his every move. That helped Joe make his decision. It was no good to have your every move watched unless you knew the watcher and loved him.
So, he would have to deal with the NSA. First, he’d have to remove any traces that he’d logged its activities. The government agency shouldn’t know that he had been watching it watch everyone else. That took only a few minutes. He’d written the underlying code, after all, and he knew what to tweak.
His next actions were straightforward, but the consequences were profound. If caught, he’d go to jail — probably some nasty federal jail where they’d arrange for him to be housed in a glass cell staring out at nature on all sides. Sweat filmed his palms just thinking about it.
Even worse, he would have to break his greatest creation. He would have to sabotage the facial recognition engine that underpinned everything Pellucid did. And it wouldn’t be enough to just break it. If the software stopped working, they’d roll back to an earlier version. He had to create an algorithm that would slowly decrease the number of possible matches across time. It would have to be so gradual that no one would be able to pinpoint when it started, and so subtle that it would look like a scalability bug that crept in when the system was stressed beyond its original design parameters. And it had to be so pernicious that it could never be fixed.
He had to create a digital version of Celeste’s ALS — barely recognizable symptoms at first, then incurable creeping paralysis. The system had been his life for years now — the last thing he thought of before he went to bed and the first thing he thought of when he woke up. He dreamed the numbers and colors that made it run. And now he had to turn all the colors to black.