She coughed for a few minutes and fell silent.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
“Do you ever watch the news?”
“I’m not allowed to watch TV or use the computer or read,” he said. “They’d probably tell me I can’t listen to the radio if I had one.”
“I bet you turn on the computer the second your keepers leave the room.”
He laughed. “Maybe sometimes.”
“Maybe every chance you get. But you used to use it for fun things, like flipping me off, or the time you hacked the billboards in Times Square to show me seagulls.”
“Actually, I hacked the cell phones of the people wandering around Times Square and used those to hack the billboards. That’s different,” he said. “Tell me more about the news.”
“They had a segment about the High Line. You’ve heard of it? It’s a set of old elevated train tracks that have been converted into a park.”
One more New York landmark he’d never be able to visit. “Yep.”
“They have one section that’s not open yet. The plants are still growing on it or something. Anyway, it was due to open soon, but it collapsed. The news called it a freak earthquake combined with metal fatigue.”
His head throbbed once, as if trying to tell him to pay attention. His father’s newspaper clipping flashed across his mind. Metal fatigue. “That could be the Oscillator!”
“Now, don’t take that information and go off on some cockamamie quest to save the world. Call in the men with guns and helmets.”
“I’m feeling weak. I need to go rest.”
“Rest, as in immediately go online and start researching, quite against doctor’s orders and my advice?” she asked.
“Something like that.”
He disconnected a few minutes later. Leandro took his phone back, made small talk, and left.
As soon as he was alone, Joe wrote up another email, this time to Mr. Rossi. He explained about the laptop, Egger’s identity and suspicious death, and his potential connection to Spooky and Quantum. Then he detailed everything he knew about Michael Pham, included his picture, and added that he thought that he was Quantum. He asked Mr. Rossi to send someone to pick up the laptop and forward it anonymously to the authorities. Then he made a copy of the hard drive because he suspected he’d never see the laptop again once it left his house.
Due diligence done, he started digging around online. It took longer than he expected to find the records for the seismographs that monitored Manhattan. In California, a state with a lot of earthquake awareness, he could have pulled them off the USGS website in seconds. Here he had to trawl through the USGS site, and Google like crazy, before he ended up at the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismographic Network. Clearly, earthquakes weren’t viewed as high-priority on the East Coast.
Eventually, he found the raw seismographic data. Now he had to pinpoint the time that the train tracks had collapsed and work backward from there looking for a pattern. And finding patterns was what he did.
His headache disappeared while he studied the colored seismograph readings. Numbers and colors had never disappointed him in the past, and they didn’t now. An unusual wave pattern had appeared on the seismograph for about an hour before the earthquake, increasing in intensity, but always at a very low level. After about an hour, it abruptly slowed down and then stopped, as if someone had flipped a switch. After that, the wave had dissipated, and the readings went back to normal.
He had a strong sense that the Oscillator had caused those readings. That meant that it generated a clear and recognizable seismic fingerprint. He also had a strong hunch that the High Line was a test, and whoever had the Oscillator intended to use it again. If someone were to put the device into action, how could he track it?
New York didn’t have a lot of seismographic stations. He wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the event with enough accuracy to be useful in time. He might be able to tell if the Oscillator was being used to knock something down, but the search area was so big that he’d never be able to find it and stop it in time.
His eyes chanced upon his cell phone, plugged in next to his bed. It was outside of its Faraday pouch, like it usually was when he was home, so it was transmitting its location. Cell phones always do that, because they are constantly connected to the network. He tapped the phone with his finger. Cell phones always know where they are, and they also know their orientation relative to their surroundings — upside down or right-side up or sideways — because of their accelerometers. Millions of tiny sensors were being carried all around Manhattan, sensors that could read vibrations. They were so finely tuned to vibrations around them that it was possible for a mobile phone to use its accelerometer to determine exactly what was being typed on a nearby keyboard.
And he could hack those phones, download their accelerometer data, and monitor it.
He signed into a hacker website and pulled up a list of hackable phones in Manhattan. He’d used them before when he’d played the prank of broadcasting pictures of seagulls flying on all the billboards in Times Square. If he were going to prevent an attack, he’d need to hack all the phones, because the owners would be moving around the city, and he had no idea where the attack might come from. The more phones, the more data, and the more likely he’d be able to pinpoint the Oscillator’s location before real damage was done.
He paused. Was he any better than the NSA? He was hacking innocent people’s phones without their permission so he could use them as listening devices. He had no right to do that. But thousands of people might die if he didn’t. That was the choice the NSA said they faced every day, too, so how could he fault them without being a hypocrite?
His head pounded, and he wanted to go to sleep, but that wasn’t an option. He had to do something. He had to set up his system, and he had to take information from these phones to save lives. It wasn’t private data, like pictures, emails, and phone calls, but it was still wrong.
And he was going to do it anyway.
Decision made, he returned to practical considerations. First, he would have to set up each phone so that it would broadcast its accelerometer data back to him. That was fairly straightforward. Then, he needed to convert that data to waves in order to match the anomalous seismograph output recorded from the hour before the collapse of the High Line tracks. Finally, he would have to set up an engine to compare each phone’s data to the suspect wave pattern and alert him when it was detected. He could reuse his old pattern-matching code from Pellucid.
He wished that he had a group like Spooky — a place where he could outsource some of this work to get it done more quickly. But he didn’t. He just had himself.
He hoped that his mother and Dr. Stauss left him alone long enough to do what he needed. And that his brain would hold up long enough for him to finish.
Chapter 45
Ash stood in front of the Empire State Building, holding his briefcase. The Oscillator was tucked inside the expensive leather case. Today was Sunday, and he was ready. After he made the decision, waiting the last few days had been difficult, but he’d distracted himself with work and Mariella and fighting with Rosa.
The building’s stone walls soared above him. A pair of tourists was shooting selfies from a block away to get the spire in the background, and a long line waited to buy tickets to the observation platform in spite of the fog that would keep them from seeing far. Everyone wanted to experience the building, and whatever scraps of view they could.
It was a gorgeous icon, he couldn’t deny it, and it didn’t just represent New York. It represented corporate greed and man’s constant striving to overwhelm nature, as best exemplified by the Breakers and their shortsighted efforts. Those things deserved destruction. From the rubble of the building, great things would rise.