When he noticed her, his expression grew even more wary. She turned as if she hadn’t seen him. She’d called him, and he’d said that he would call her back and hung up almost immediately. When he did, she suspected from the background noise that he was using a pay phone. Since he probably had phones in his house, his office, and his pocket, that wasn’t a good sign. Patel was spooked. He’d told her to meet him here, but he hadn’t said why.
She went into Strand, the giant bookstore where he’d suggested they meet. A wave of air conditioning engulfed her, and she ran her hand through her sweaty hair to bring cold air to her scalp. Shelves towered overhead, crammed with books of every shape and color. Rows and rows of shelves. Strand Book Store advertised that it had eighteen miles of books, and she believed it.
A red sign on a white pillar told her that she could browse in the Strand Underground, and it made her think of Tesla. She was sure that he would love this place with its quirky titles, the smell of books, and plain metal ladders stationed everywhere. He’d love it, and he’d likely never see it.
She moved deeper into the store and stopped at a table marked with a sign bearing the silhouette of Venus de Milo and the title Art on the Edge. A clear sightline of the door meant that she’d be able to see Patel and he’d be able to see her as soon as he came in. Given his paranoia level, she didn’t want to approach him. Best to let him approach her.
Patel entered the store. He saw her right away, but he didn’t come to her. Instead, he walked up to a table of new mysteries. Vivian picked up a brightly colored art book, but didn’t even look at the pages as she slowly flipped through them. All her attention was on Patel in her peripheral vision.
He picked up a book with an orange stripe across the middle of the cover, paged slowly through it, and slipped a tiny piece of paper between its pages. Then he put the book down and walked out the front door. So much for having a conversation.
She wanted to run across the room and yank the book off the table immediately, but she strolled toward it slowly, stopping to look at other books, all the while making sure that no one else was interested in the one Patel had handled. Finally, she reached it.
The cover of his book had a woman in a hat at the top, a streetcar at the bottom, and an orange stripe in the middle that displayed the title and author’s name: City of Ghosts by Kelli Stanley. The book looked pretty interesting, but Vivian flipped to the center and took out the paper. Patel had written:
Behind Farm City by Novella Carpenter
She slipped the note into her pants pocket and looked around. Farm City must be a book title, but how was she going to find it in here? Eighteen miles of books were a lot to search, especially since she didn’t know what the book was about and didn’t want to draw attention to it by asking. And why was Patel sending her to a book anyway? He could have written a little more on the damn note.
She pulled out her phone, brought up thestrandbookstore.com and searched for the title. Apparently, Farm City was about farming and raising chickens. She remembered that egg yolk-yellow bow tie that Egger had worn to the funeral. Behind an egg-farming book was the perfect place for Egger to hide a clue. Maybe Patel was sending her to something that Egger had hidden.
After a bit of wandering, she found Agriculture & Farming in the used section. She scanned through titles, eventually ending up standing atop a ladder. According to the Internet, the store had two copies of Farm City, and she found them in the dingiest corner on the highest shelf. She bet that no one ever came here.
As she pulled the books out, she noticed something behind them. After a quick glance to make sure no one was watching, she removed the other books around Farm City. Standing up behind them was a laptop.
Tesla would have a field day. A secret hidden laptop, and he wasn’t allowed to use the computer. She brought down the laptop and stuck it in her purse, then bought both copies of Farm City, just in case. When she left the store and stepped into the solid heat outside, she felt as paranoid as Patel and had to remind herself not to give herself away by looking up and down the street.
Chapter 43
Ash was in his panic room. He’d installed it so he’d have a place where he could be truly alone. None of the servants could penetrate here without the eight-digit access code, and he’d given the numbers to no one. If he died in here, they would be able to retrieve his body only by taking apart the room itself.
He had furnished the room as a gentleman’s library. Unlike the simple, ecologically sound designs that he used to make a statement in the rest of his homes and offices, this one secret place could reflect his heart’s desire.
An antique Persian rug covered golden oak planks. He had rescued them both from a nineteenth century house that was being demolished upstate. That house had also given him a red leather wingback chair that Jules Verne himself could have sat in. He’d had to look for the oversized mahogany desk, but it was worth the effort. Pigeonholes held notes and plans and curious objects he’d gathered over the course of his life.
Right now, the desktop was covered by a giant leather blotter with one item sitting in the center: the Oscillator. The device had rested there for a week. Every night he came in to check on it.
After he’d found Quantum and dealt with him, he’d been forced to wait again because Quantum’s stunt at the airport had prompted scrutiny of the man’s accounts, and Ash wanted to be sure that Quantum’s connections to Spooky, and to Ash, were not revealed. So far, there was no hint that they had been. Quantum hadn’t left any little time bombs for him after all.
That meant that Ash could act now, but first he was going to take the device apart so that he would know how it was made. He picked up his camera and filmed the outside casing, then put the camera down to concentrate on the device.
A few choice curse words and banged knuckles later, he had removed the metal plate that covered the bottom of the device. When he looked inside, he saw gears and pistons and wires meshed together in inexplicable complexity. He was a software guy, not an electrical engineer. Joe Tesla had always tinkered with gadgets, but Ash never had. He regretted that now.
This left him with a dilemma. He could hire someone to disassemble the device and draw up plans for making another one — and be discreet while doing so. Then, after that person built the new device, Ash could have him eliminated so nothing could be traced back to Ash. It would all take time. The alternative was to view this as a one-time event — this Oscillator would destroy one building and that would be the end of it.
He didn’t like either of those options.
Not sure what to do, he picked up the steel plate he’d removed. The outside was painted gray, probably to blend in with its surroundings in the basement, but the inside was bare metal with designs on its surface.
He brought the plate closer to the light to reveal figures etched into the metal’s surface. They were too tiny to read, so he photographed them and zoomed in on the photographs. At a larger magnification, their purpose was clear — the metal was covered with plans that showed how to build the entire device. Nikola Tesla’s secrets were laid bare in front of Ash.
He could hire someone to build ten or a hundred at some remote facility with no Internet connectivity. A plane crash on the way home would solve the traceability problem. It was all possible.