The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) (9 page)

Chapter 11

November 28, 6:09 a.m.

Grand Central Hyatt

Vivian marched up the stone stairs to the lobby, looking for trouble. She didn’t find any. She recognized the short concierge from her last visit. The freckled teenage girl working Starbucks didn’t look like a killer. The lobby was otherwise empty, except for her employer, Daniel Rossi, and the man he was talking to. She could see only the back of his head, then he turned slightly, and she recognized him. Joe Tesla.

She checked out the second floor, or at least as much of it as was visible through the atrium. No one stood along the glass dividers that overlooked the first floor. It was too early to see much activity here. She’d been woken from a sound sleep just a few minutes before, swiped deodorant under her arms, jumped into her clothes, and caught a cab straight here. Mr. Rossi had said that it was urgent.

Mr. Rossi resembled an older George Clooney, and usually traded on it, but this morning his perfect salt-and-pepper hair was disheveled. Tesla, on the other hand, looked flat-out terrible. He’d been pale last time she saw him, but now he was practically ghostly. It made sense, since he didn’t go outside, but it looked creepy, almost supernatural.

To make matters worse, he didn’t just look like a ghost, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. His eyes were wide, he was jiggling his knee, and he petted the dog at his side over and over with little jerky movements. He was very different from the confident man she’d followed six months before.

She moved into Mr. Rossi’s line of sight, but where Tesla couldn’t see her. She’d wait there until Mr. Rossi gave her a signal to approach. In the meantime, she scanned the lobby again. A freshly shaved businessman in a blue suit exited the elevators and headed to the escalator. He held a gleaming black briefcase in one hand, carelessly, as if the contents weren’t that important. Otherwise, no movement.

Mr. Rossi nodded to her, and she walked over to be introduced.

Tesla had a firm handshake, and he paused for a second when he met her eyes. He scrutinized her face for a second longer than usual, as if he recognized her. Did he? He’d been pretty messed up when she’d met him, barely able to walk.

“I’m assigning you Ms. Torres,” Mr. Rossi said. “For close protection.”

Tesla’s eyes narrowed. “You think that I need a bodyguard?”

“I think one would not come amiss,” Mr. Rossi answered. “And I’d advise you to move back into a room at the Hyatt for a few days while this matter is resolved.”

What matter? She’d only heard that she was to meet Mr. Rossi here and provide security for a client. She hadn’t known who it would be until she saw Mr. Tesla, and she still didn’t know why, just that it was urgent.

“I appreciate your concern, but I’m not moving back up here,” Tesla said.

Mr. Rossi smiled his lawyer smile that gave nothing away. “Very well. But do please let Ms. Torres accompany you, at least for the next twenty-four hours.”

Tesla looked as if he wanted to argue, but he nodded. “Let’s get breakfast.”

Mr. Rossi begged off, and she and Tesla and the dog headed out for Grand Central Terminal—a tough place to provide protection.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather eat here?” she asked. “Or somewhere more secluded?”

“No,” Tesla said shortly.

They ended up in the food court at the Tri Tip Grill for breakfast, where Tesla didn’t bat an eyelash when she ordered steak and eggs. Lots of men acted surprised to see a woman eat. Tesla ordered steak and eggs, too, and a double steak, rare, for the dog. Privileges of being a millionaire’s pet.

She kept her eyes moving around the crowded room. Unless an attacker came toward them in slow motion, she’d have trouble spotting him until he was right on top of Tesla. Still, she searched for people who looked at them too long, people with suspicious bulges under their arms that might be guns, men who moved like they had military or law enforcement training.

Vivian was no good at small talk, but she figured she’d better give it a try. “Mr. Rossi says you’re related to Nikola Tesla.”

“On my father’s side. A couple of generations back.” His mouth pursed as if he didn’t want to talk about it.

The plates arrived—no more small talk necessary. The waiter seemed to know the dog and put his plate straight on the floor.

“I didn’t know that they served dogs here,” she said.

“He’s not a regular dog,” Tesla said. “He’s a psychiatric service animal.”

A bad conversational trail to go down. “I hear your company makes facial-recognition software. How does that work?”

His shoulders relaxed fractionally. At last, a safe topic of conversation. “We compare pictures in databases to pictures out in the world to match them up.”

“Surveillance camera pictures are usually pretty unclear,” she said. “How can you recognize a face in them enough to make a match?”

“We use many different factors.” He ran his knife across the egg yolk. “First, we measure the distance between your features—how far apart your eyes are, how deep your eye sockets are, how long your jaw is, in millimeters, stuff like that—and we use the information to create a faceprint.”

“Are those numbers unique?” She touched her jaw.

“Yes,” he said. “If we get a good 3-D image, a faceprint is as unique as a fingerprint. But good 3-D images are hard to come by, so we can’t rely on having them. After we get the measurements, we map the surface and texture of your skin. With that data, and algorithms I developed for rotating faces if the subject isn’t looking into the camera at the right angle, we can tell you apart from your identical twin. Every time.”

Vivian took a long sip of coffee. “So much for all those twin movies.”

He smiled. “That’s a big market for us, identifying twins in movies.”

“I bet.”

She concentrated on her steak for a while before speaking again. “So, you reduce the human face to numbers?”

“If you break it down far enough, everything is numbers.”

“And you’re good with numbers?”

“I see them in my head, as colors, and I can move them around.” His eyes shifted past hers, as if he didn’t want to admit it. “It’s called synesthesia.”

“Cool!” She’d never heard of it.

He gave her the kind of shy smile she hadn’t expected to see from a millionaire.

“What’s it like?” she asked.

“It’s just different,” he said. “My brain has always been different from everybody else’s.”

She nodded.

“It used to be a good thing,” he said. “It got me out of the circus and into the world of technology.”

He didn’t seem coordinated enough to be in an actual circus. Maybe it was a metaphor. “That doesn’t seem too bad.”

He shrugged. “Now that my mind is keeping me trapped inside, being different isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

What could she say to that?

After their conversation, the day went better. They wandered the shops at Grand Central Terminal for a bit, and then he said he wanted to go down to his underground house. She’d heard about the house from Mr. Rossi that morning. It seemed too far-fetched to be real, but so did The Campbell Apartment, also in Grand Central, which had belonged to a 1920s tycoon before eventually being remodeled into a bar, so she supposed there was precedent.

Anyway, getting him someplace less crowded would be a good thing. She didn’t know why he needed protection, but clearly something had happened to him that had scared him enough for him to call Mr. Rossi at six in the morning. Personally, she couldn’t think of a single situation where she would call Mr. Rossi that early. Including nuclear Armageddon.

She let him enter the concourse a little ahead of her, scanning the area. The pillars would give cover to an army, but there was nothing she could do about that.

Straight ahead, people darted back and forth, most arriving for their workdays in the city. Too many to count. Too many to watch. But none raised a red flag.

Tesla made for the center of the concourse and the information booth into which he’d disappeared all those months before. Her niece, Abby, said that the round booth reminded her of a layer cake—waist-high marble, glass windows, glass roof, and the famous clock perched on top like a candle. She remembered watching the movie Madagascar with Abby. The little girl had laughed herself silly when the giraffe got his head stuck inside that clock.

Tesla tapped on the information booth’s door, and a chubby black woman with the name tag “Evaline” opened the door. This must be the entrance to his underground house. Who had he been visiting down there when he disappeared all those months before?

“I have a guest today, Miss Evaline,” Tesla said. “A Miss Vivian Torres.”

Evaline folded her arms across her ample bosom. “Unless she’s on the authorized list, you know I can’t let her go down there.”

Vivian braced herself for a struggle. She wasn’t going to let Tesla out of her sight, even if it meant that she had to throw him to the ground and hog-tie him. Her orders were clear—keep constant visual contact until notified by Mr. Rossi himself.

“I think she might be on the list,” Tesla said. “She works for Rossi and Rossi.”

Evaline raised one skeptical eyebrow, but typed into a small gray box.

Vivian waited.

“You are authorized, Ms. Torres.” Evaline moved aside. “Come on in.”

Tesla thanked her and opened a nearly invisible door on the edge of the pillar. Vivian had only ever seen it open once before, on the night when she’d been hired to watch him and had lost him right here.

She followed, surprised that it was so easy. Inside, dingy white paint covered the walls. Like most things, the inside was a lot less glamorous than the outside. She’d expected something grander, but this was ordinary.

Tesla motioned her to stand by the wall and lifted a hatch on the floor. Underneath the hatch a set of wrought iron stairs spiraled down. She went first, judging that an attack from behind was less likely than someone hiding beneath the stairs.

Tesla and Edison waited at the top of the stairs. Tesla looked annoyed.

“Clear,” she called up.

They trotted down the stairs, and Tesla pressed the elevator button. Modern steel doors slid aside on an old-fashioned elevator of filigreed wrought iron. Tesla gestured for her to go first and pushed a lever inside to make the elevator go. Was the elevator as old as Grand Central itself—a century? Cool.

Tesla stared up at the ceiling. Machinery was creaking up there, and it clearly didn’t make him happy. Luckily, it didn’t take too long before they reached the bottom.

She exited first, senses alert. A walkway curved to the side, letting her see a hundred feet ahead. Nothing there. To the right stretched a large empty room, lit by a long string of yellow bulbs. Empty.

“There’s a steel door at both ends of this tunnel,” Tesla said. “It’s operated by an antique key.” He held it up. “And an electronic keypad with an eight-digit code. Anyone who wants to come in here needs both. Or they have to get by Evaline to get to the elevator.”

With the cops and surveillance cameras in the concourse, no one would get past Evaline without calling down a lot of attention on themselves. “Those are the only entrances to your house?”

His blue eyes darted to the side before he answered. “Yes.”

He was lying.

She kept one hand near her gun and walked right down, a short tunnel to a thick steel door. A green light blinked steadily from the keypad. Tesla walked left, and she went ahead of him and checked that door, too. Also clear. Three surveillance cameras—one at each end of the tunnel and one by the elevator. Nobody was going to sneak up on Joe Tesla.

Finally, she turned her attention to the Victorian house. A porch light shone near the front door, but the windows were otherwise dark. Four windows on the ground floor, six on the second.

Tesla started up the stairs, but she stopped him. “Let me go in first, sir, and clear the house. You wait out here with Edison.”

Tesla rolled his eyes.

“It’s my job,” she said. “Just let me do it.”

He backed up. She drew her gun and went inside, flicking on lights as she went. The switches were odd, but she got used to them. First, there was a tiny vestibule with a coatrack and an umbrella stand. That led to a hall. Clear. A room on the right with a fireplace and wingback chairs. Nowadays it would be called a living room, but she suspected that the original term was parlor. She cleared it, a library on the other side, then a dining room and kitchen behind those with a tiny bathroom tucked in the corner.

Up the stairs and she walked quickly through three bedrooms, a master bathroom with a claw-foot tub and floor tiles made of tiny pieces of marble, another library, and a room with a giant TV that felt jarring after the impeccably maintained period details. The place was huge, especially when you considered that it was set in solid rock. Unbelievable what people did with their money. But, she had to concede, it was also very cool.

She let Tesla and the dog in, and they went to the parlor to do who knew what. She spent the rest of the day patrolling the house and the tunnel out front. And wondering about the entrance he’d lied about.