certain, I had even seen a line or two in English from Shakespeare. The entire thing was bizarre. Until I got to the last page. That’s when I recognized one of the technical drawings. It was a drawing of a wooden-framed tower with a sphere on top. It was a well-known drawing, at least in technical circles. A sketch of a famous installation. It was then that I reconsidered what my father was trying to tell me with his message:
TelD CaNtIVE OON SHEPs
He wasn’t saying that he was “HELD CAPTIVE ON SHIP.” He was too precise, too careful for that. I should have known that right away. That meaning was a decoy. He was actually saying something else. I saw it as clear as day. If the letters were rearranged, the lowercase spelled “tesla” and the uppercase spelled “DEVICE.” If the unused letters were rearranged only slightly they spelled “NOT ON SHP.”
He was trying to spell out:
tesla DEVICE NOT ON SHP
True, there was a single letter missing—“I,” and I had no idea how he had been able to compose it, but the message made sense. And I knew that I was right beyond a shadow of a doubt, because the technical drawing on the last page of the journal was a representation of Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe tower.
N IKOLA T ESLA WAS a Serbian-born, American scientist responsible for more patents and inventions and downright breakthroughs in the field of electricity than anybody before him. In the early twentieth century, he was considered the Einstein of his day. Edison got the credit, but it was Tesla who walked the walk. His inventions were too numerous to list but they included: alternating current, radio, the electric generator, the spark plug, and a fancy energy beam that sat atop a wooden-framed structure on Long Island, New York called Wardenclyffe Tower.
That I knew any of this, was a result of the work I’d done interning at the archaic technology lab during my time in college. The mission of the lab was to combine the best of archaic technologies with modern ones with sometimes surprising results. The notion was that a lot of old technology still revolved around a good core idea—an idea that could be leveraged if it could be adequately integrated with modern systems. We worked with all kinds of old stuff, from steam engines to vinyl record players, with the guiding notion that some part of the preceding technology could be saved and played to its strength, even if the entire system was no longer viable.
Tesla was much more than the namesake of a fancy electric car. He was a man whose technologies had transformed the world and might well continue to do so. I knew I had found something big, but I needed to regroup. I had killed a man in my unit, and I didn’t know whom I could trust, if anyone. I pocketed the journal and shouldered my backpack, returning to the door of the ironworks. Then I stopped, because I was staring at exactly the person I didn’t want to see.
“Hey, Mike.”
“Crust,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“You know, just checking in.”
Crust stepped over the high sill and into the alley. He stood on my right, not more than a few feet away, a big friendly smile on his face. But my radar was all the way up.
“Keeping tabs on me, are we?”
“They don’t equip us with GPS devices just because they like the flashing lights.”
Backup beacon. I had been a fool. I had crushed the primary, but the boys at the CIA had equipped me with more than one tracking device. Under the circumstances, I should have ditched my gear, all of it, immediately. But that’s what happens when you get discombobulated. You make mistakes. And now I had to pay the piper. Crust turned to close the door, securing it with the rusty barrel bolt. I had no quandary about what I had to do next. I silently reached into my pocket and pulled out the gleaming yatagan with my right hand.
Chapter 12
Y ATAGAN IN HAND , I swung around with my left arm, ready to put Crust in a quick headlock. But it
TelD CaNtIVE OON SHEPs
He wasn’t saying that he was “HELD CAPTIVE ON SHIP.” He was too precise, too careful for that. I should have known that right away. That meaning was a decoy. He was actually saying something else. I saw it as clear as day. If the letters were rearranged, the lowercase spelled “tesla” and the uppercase spelled “DEVICE.” If the unused letters were rearranged only slightly they spelled “NOT ON SHP.”
He was trying to spell out:
tesla DEVICE NOT ON SHP
True, there was a single letter missing—“I,” and I had no idea how he had been able to compose it, but the message made sense. And I knew that I was right beyond a shadow of a doubt, because the technical drawing on the last page of the journal was a representation of Nikola Tesla’s Wardenclyffe tower.
N IKOLA T ESLA WAS a Serbian-born, American scientist responsible for more patents and inventions and downright breakthroughs in the field of electricity than anybody before him. In the early twentieth century, he was considered the Einstein of his day. Edison got the credit, but it was Tesla who walked the walk. His inventions were too numerous to list but they included: alternating current, radio, the electric generator, the spark plug, and a fancy energy beam that sat atop a wooden-framed structure on Long Island, New York called Wardenclyffe Tower.
That I knew any of this, was a result of the work I’d done interning at the archaic technology lab during my time in college. The mission of the lab was to combine the best of archaic technologies with modern ones with sometimes surprising results. The notion was that a lot of old technology still revolved around a good core idea—an idea that could be leveraged if it could be adequately integrated with modern systems. We worked with all kinds of old stuff, from steam engines to vinyl record players, with the guiding notion that some part of the preceding technology could be saved and played to its strength, even if the entire system was no longer viable.
Tesla was much more than the namesake of a fancy electric car. He was a man whose technologies had transformed the world and might well continue to do so. I knew I had found something big, but I needed to regroup. I had killed a man in my unit, and I didn’t know whom I could trust, if anyone. I pocketed the journal and shouldered my backpack, returning to the door of the ironworks. Then I stopped, because I was staring at exactly the person I didn’t want to see.
“Hey, Mike.”
“Crust,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“You know, just checking in.”
Crust stepped over the high sill and into the alley. He stood on my right, not more than a few feet away, a big friendly smile on his face. But my radar was all the way up.
“Keeping tabs on me, are we?”
“They don’t equip us with GPS devices just because they like the flashing lights.”
Backup beacon. I had been a fool. I had crushed the primary, but the boys at the CIA had equipped me with more than one tracking device. Under the circumstances, I should have ditched my gear, all of it, immediately. But that’s what happens when you get discombobulated. You make mistakes. And now I had to pay the piper. Crust turned to close the door, securing it with the rusty barrel bolt. I had no quandary about what I had to do next. I silently reached into my pocket and pulled out the gleaming yatagan with my right hand.
Chapter 12
Y ATAGAN IN HAND , I swung around with my left arm, ready to put Crust in a quick headlock. But it
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