Tesla - Jason Walker (readict books txt) 📗

After giving some details to the police officer, he was told to go home, but the officer requested that if Peter thought of anything else, to please call him, passing him his card. Peter wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, so he walked around the block and found a place where he could sit and have a drink to calm his nerves.

Meanwhile, back at the New Yorker, the night shift had begun, and Rick Warner, the manager, was hanging his coat and jacket up in the coat room when the assistant manager popped his head around the corner.

“Mr Warner, there’s an FBI agent out in the lobby asking if he can have a word with you about something.”

“The FBI?” Warner asked curiously.

“Yes, the FBI. They want to speak to you about Mr Tesla.”

“I’ve never spoken to anyone in the FBI before,” said Warner nervously. He closed the safe after receiving the daytime cash box from the assistant manager, who had finished tallying the sales receipts. After he was done with their routine procedure for transitioning between shifts, he went to speak with the FBI agent.

The agent was a big dark-haired man with a crumpled suit jacket, showing stain-glazed hints of something rubbed into his left lapel from lunch. He asked, “Are you the Manager?”

Warner answered gingerly, “Yes sir. I’m the night manager, though it seems to be an unfortunate title to have today.”

The agent chuckled. “I won’t keep you too long. I’m here to collect any more materials that may have belonged to Nikola Tesla. I was told he had several things stored in your basement based on what his diary said. We found out after we collected his belongings in his room.”

“Oh! Well, I hope you’ve brought a truck because we have a lot of Mr Tesla’s belongings downstairs being stored for him. I’ve never met a man with so many belongings. He has them scattered all about in sea trunks. Why, there must be at least twelve of them down there.”

“Really? That many? I’ll need to see what he’s left behind for national security reasons.”

“National Security? Okay. I’ll show you. There’s nothing left in the safe, though. I think one of your men already took what was there shortly after Mr Tesla passed away. I can’t be certain, though, until I check the log book of what went in the safe and what went out,” said Warner.

The FBI agent shook his head and said, “Not worried about what was in the safe. I know that was already cleaned it out. But our team didn’t realize that Tesla had stuff downstairs that had been stored away as well. I’d like to see what he had down there in the basement, please, if you’ve got time to show me?”

The night manager grabbed some keys and put on his blazer. “Certainly, sir, if you’ll follow me then.”

Several stories underground, Warner slid open a metal door and walked inside. He reached over to the wall near the door and turned on the light. The room they entered was large and poorly lit, with a multitude of boxes and safes lining the walls. Warner realized that he should make inquiries about these belongings of Mr Tesla’s, so he attempted to ask the agent about where the items were going to be taken. “I know that you’re with the FBI, sir, but shouldn’t these items be given to his next of kin?”

The FBI agent explained shortly. “We’re taking all of Tesla’s belongings for reasons of national security. I’ve already told you that. He was a man that conceived of and invented many advanced technologies. We’re just making sure nothing falls into the wrong hands. There’s a war going on.” The agent scoffed. “We have to protect our national interests, right?”

“Of course, sir,” the night manager replied. That still didn’t sit right with him, but he wasn’t willing to argue with an FBI agent and risk his job—not while he had a wife and two kids to feed. Warner pointed to the sea trunks that belonged to Mr Tesla. They walked to the back of the room to a makeshift locker that had the number 108 on it. Warner took out his heavy set of keys and found the one for the padlock—only one locker, of many lockers containing the archives of Mr Tesla’s life strewn all across the dark gallows of New York City.

There were twelve sea trunks, stacked four high and three deep against the wall of locker 108. As Warner slid the creaky chain-link door open to Tesla’s personal items, he said to the agent, “These all belonged to Mr Tesla.”

“I’m not going to be able to get through all of this on my own,” muttered the agent in astonishment. “I’ll need to get help with this. If I call a few more agents, will you show them where I am, please?”

“Certainly, sir, but I don’t mind giving you a hand. You might need a hand truck to take them to the elevator?” stated Warner. Acknowledging that a hand truck would certainly lighten the task, the agent agreed to the manager’s offer.

It was late evening before the agent, Todd Barker, left the hotel with several other agents that had come with an unmarked, standard-issue, white moving truck. They quickly removed the trunks one by one, using the hand truck borrowed to them by the night manager, after backing down the alley service ramps of the hotel. They took the last load of Tesla’s sea trunks across town to an unknown location where they could take a better look at each one under better light.

When Agent Barker was finished securing his new “national treasures” in a nondescript warehouse near the port, he went to his car and got in. After lighting a smoke, he reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a business card to confirm the street address that he needed to find per his next set of instructions. As he drove out of the city, he headed to an area that he hadn’t been to in quite some time—not since he’d come to an agreement with the homeowner about “certain matters” and what “they” might cost if he were to make “things happen” using his powers of influence.

After an hour of driving out of the city, he reached his destination. As he pulled up to an iron gate in a posh suburb in upstate New York, he saw a guard in a small hut turn his head towards the jet black Studebaker. Barker waved at him and put his car into park as he pulled in front of the guard.

The guard on duty watched the car stop, then promptly stepped out of his tiny hut. He bent over to speak into the partly-rolled-down window, politely asking for Barker’s ID. Barker reached into his front jacket pocket pulled out his ID and passed it to the guard with a smirk. The guard returned to his hut to check Barker’s credentials—checking to see if he had, in fact, been granted access from his commander in the big house. The guard returned to the side of the vehicle. “Agent Barker, unfortunately, I don’t have you on the list.”

“I’m expected,” said the man in the car. “You’d better call him. He wants to hear what I have to say.”

“Please wait in your car, and I’ll phone to announce you. I’ll see if I can approve your access, Mr Barker,” the guard stated professionally, as he walked back into his guard shack and picked up the direct house line to his boss. In only a minute, the gate, adorned with what looked like an ancient family crest with two symmetrically opposed black eagles upon it, opened. The guard waved Agent Barker on to the house of George Scherff Senior.

Scherff Senior was a tall well-groomed man, dressed in a navy velvet smoking jacket and a pair of navy silk pyjama pants. He was gently gyrating a fine American bourbon on the rocks in a short crystal glass in his right hand when Agent Barker was escorted into his study by the butler. The butler closed the door behind him, leaving their presence to complete his chores cleaning-up Scherff’s private quarters. A place no one dare go or speak of unless they were “initiated.”

The first thing gruffly spat out of Scherff’s mouth, barely concealing his faint Hessian dialect, was, “Did you get the job done?”

“Of course I did,” said the FBI agent. “The plan worked perfectly.”

“Good,” Scherff Senior grunted as he abruptly finished with Barker. He picked up the phone and made a call to his office landlord—Mr Frank Rockefeller. Scherff spoke into the phone when he heard someone answer curtly on the other end. “Hello, sir. I’m going to need to see you tomorrow morning. Can you fit me in? The job’s done,” Scherff Senior stated as he spoke over the phone for another minute.

After he hung up, he looked over at Agent Barker. “Did you get all the stuff he was working on?”

Barker nodded his head as he lit a cigar from a match struck on his shoe bottom. “I found quite a number of sea trunks in the basement of the hotel and others around the city, sir.”

“What about his ideas for teleportation and flying saucers and all that?” Scherff Senior dug in.

“That man was a pack rat. He’s got so much shit in those sea trunks that I haven’t had the opportunity to go through them thoroughly. And to be honest with you, I wouldn’t know what to look for. There are literally volumes and volumes of notebooks in those trunks, and it’s going to take a while to actually work through it all. That part is going to be tricky. I figure, as soon as I start spending time there, at the warehouse people are going to get suspicious.”

“Not to worry,” said Scherff. “I’ll find somebody at MIT to do it. You’ve done well for me so far, Agent Barker. Now go home and take a few days off. I’ll make some calls and get back to you shortly.”

“Okay. Glad this is over. You know where to reach me,” Agent Barker said over his shoulder as he walked out of the room and was escorted out of the house by a body guard, who had stood sentinel by the front entrance to the study. As he left the main house, he wondered who would get the unlucky job of reading through all of Tesla’s notes. He would find out soon enough, but he was glad that it wouldn’t be him.

Back in the house, Scherff Senior reached under his desk for an opening connected to a panel that was on the wall. It was only an inch-wide opening, but it was connected to a thin cable line with a small loop on the end of it. He pulled the line and opened a secret door in the wall.

He walked inside and looked at several pictures that were framed and placed in rigid alignment on the back wall. They reminded him of a time when he hadn’t lived in the United States. Some of the faces were now gone, but there were others who were still alive. Many had been sent abroad to do work for the Fuhrer.

“I’ve completed my mission. Ohne Betrug Kein Sieg. No victory without deception,” he said as he reached for a bottle that he had on the floor behind a chair. He took a small glass and put it on