“My computer.” Joe had already pulled it into his lap. “Send in Vivian.”
“You are not supposed to be—”
“Life or death. I need Vivian.”
She looked at him carefully for a moment, then nodded. “I see.”
She hurried down the stairs and toward the front of the house. His mother never needed extraneous explanations when things were serious. Even when he was a small boy, she had trusted him.
He pulled open the Lamont-Doherty seismograph. The wave pattern was identical to the pattern he had seen from just before the High Line park tracks went down. Something was going on in New York, but this device couldn’t give him any more information. He needed something closer to the point of origin.
A few clicks brought up his network of hacked cell phones. The people carrying them moved around the city. All the phones felt the vibrations, but some more than others. He started comparing results by area. The vibrations were stronger south of Central Park. High Line was south of the park. Was it happening there again? Maybe the damage was caused by a freak localized earthquake after all.
“Sir?” Vivian was at his bedside. His mother stood behind her.
“The Oscillator has been switched on. I’ll be able to give you a building name in a minute. I need to go there and shut it off.”
“If we don’t?” He liked that she didn’t ask a lot of questions either.
“Whatever it’s attached to will collapse. It’s got about an hour, depending on size.” Or at least that’s how long it had taken to bring down the High Line tracks. He flipped through the phones as fast as he could, eyes focusing for a fraction of a second on each one as he judged the relative intensity of the vibrations.
Vivian stood quietly. That helped. No time for talking yet.
“The Oscillator?” his mother asked. “It is a true thing, then?”
“Yup.” He didn’t explain more, attention riveted to each passing phone until he got a match.
“Manhattan,” he said. “South of the park, north of twenty-third.” (blue, red)
“I see, sir.”
Was it at Grand Central? His heart clenched at the thought. “Close to here.”
He pulled up all the phones within a one-mile radius of Grand Central. That left him only a handful. A few in the terminal itself, others in Rockefeller Center, Bryant Park, and near the Empire State Building. The hair on the back of his neck stood up when he realized which phones were getting the strongest signals.
“It’s the Empire State Building,” he said.
His mother sucked in her breath audibly.
“You’re sure, sir?” Vivian had pulled out her cell phone.
“As sure as I can be.” That wasn’t as sure as he’d like to be, but it was better to take extra precautions and look like a fool than it was to let people die.
“I’ll call it in,” she said. “Tell Dirk it’s a kind of sonic bomb and get him to persuade the cops to evacuate the building.”
“The vibration might knock down adjoining buildings, too.” He wasn’t really sure what it would do. But, whatever it did, it would be his fault. If he hadn’t put together the automaton and gone looking for trouble, this wouldn’t have happened. Egger would be enjoying his golden years. Michael Pham would be continuing his life of hacking, and thousands of people wouldn’t be in danger.
He hadn’t shown the wisdom that his father had hoped for. By honoring his father’s wish so carelessly, he had indirectly brought death to Geezer and Quantum. Again, tears threatened to swamp him.
He climbed out of bed, ignoring the dizziness, and walked unsteadily to his closet.
Vivian was already punching numbers into her phone, but she looked over at him. “What are you doing?”
“The Empire State Building has steam heat. I’m going in through the steam access tunnels. I’m the only one who knows how to pinpoint the device’s location and shut it off.”
Vivian paused with her finger in midair. “Put on a hat.”
He touched the back of his head. His fingers touched stubble where his head had been shaved, and spiky plastic stitches. She had a point.
While she talked on the phone, his mother helped him into a wool suit, black dress shoes, and the fedora Celeste had bought him that he’d never had the heart to throw away. Turned out, she was right. It was perfect for certain occasions — like when your head was half-shaved and you needed to go out in public without scaring anyone.
His grown-up clothes weren’t what he usually wore in the subway tunnels, but with luck he’d look like any other businessman if he got caught in the Empire State Building. Instead of like Frankenstein’s monster in a suit.
He tucked his phone into his suit pocket. As long as he had Internet, he could track the vibrations his phone was sensing through the online app he’d used to track everyone else’s phones. Hopefully, he could use the phone to tell him exactly where to look for the device once he got to the building.
He was in the front hall before he noticed that Vivian and his mother were right behind him. “Vivian?”
“I’m coming with you. You’re not getting hurt again on my watch.” She gave him one of her thousand-yard stares.
He’d have to take her down to stop her from following him. Even well, he wasn’t sure that he could do that, and certainly not in his current condition. “Glad to have you on the team.”
Edison bounded in from the parlor and licked his fingers.
His mother looked at him.
“You can’t,” he said. “You have to stay here to explain. If something happens to me, no one else knows the whole story but you.”
Her eyes narrowed, and he was afraid she was going to refuse, but she sighed and stepped back. “I bear the blame for starting this.”
“You don’t,” he said. “Dad does.”
“I passed his words along to you, because I thought they were not true, that they might help you understand his unreal patterns of thinking.”
Joe pulled her into a hug. “All of us Teslas have unreal patterns of thinking.”
She smiled at him, but her eyes shone with tears. “I will see this through to the end, but you must come back so that I don’t have to. You cannot do such a thing to your mother.”
“I don’t intend to,” he said.
He picked up two flashlights and his tool set from the parlor. He might have to take the thing apart when he found it.
Vivian had already opened the front door for him, and resettled her holster. She wasn’t going to pass for a business executive working weekends.
He hurried through and led the way to the tunnel in front of his house. He quickly disabled his security alarm, and both stepped into the semidarkness of the wider tunnel system. Edison ranged a few steps ahead. Joe’s head throbbed, but he ignored it.
“We’ll take the tunnel for the 7 East,” he said. “The steam entrance leads off from there.”
He’d passed the steam tunnel for the Empire State Building many times, but had always wondered about the legality of his keys and figured that security in a building like that had to be tight, so he’d never entered. This time, with the evacuation, security would be even tighter, but he didn’t have a choice.
Edison stuck close to him. The dog didn’t seem nervous, just determined. They’d barely been out in the tunnels together since Joe got beaned, and he was glad to see Edison was calm. Of course, Edison was always calm. So was Vivian.
The weak link in this particular chain was Joe himself.
His head throbbed with each step, nausea came and went in waves, and he was having trouble focusing. But he didn’t have the luxury of tucking himself into bed and waiting until this passed. He had to find the device.
They reached the door to the Empire State Building’s steam tunnel without incident, and only one train had passed. More than that might have caused his head to actually explode, Joe had decided.