14 (38 page)

“That’s what it said on my wall. ‘They have found us.’” He nodded as he considered the words. “‘They’ were the cult. It was his blood.”

“Oh, shit,” she said.

Tim’s chin went up and down. “That fits,” he said. “But if they were chasing him here you’d think they’d’ve found all this.”

“That’s the big trick, though, isn’t it?” said Xela. “If they were looking for a machine, they’d search the building. But it probably wouldn’t occur to them the machine
was
the building.”

Nate nodded. “What was it Mandy said? If you want to hide a tree, you hide it in a forest. It’s the best camouflage you could have.”

Tim snapped his fingers. “Which is why they rent it out. A building that stands empty poses questions, but a building with a bunch of unconnected tenants is just another building.”

“And why they screen us,” said Veek. “They don’t want comfortable people. They want tenants with something to lose, ones who won’t ask questions or complain about some of the weirdness they come across.”

“Well, I’ve got more on the building, too, sort of,” Debbie said. A new card switched to the front. “Once I had Koturovic I could do some cross-referencing and found out a bit more about this plot of land.”

“What?” said Veek. “You found more?”

Her face shifted. “I’m sorry. It’s just the research bug, y’know? Once I find something I just keep going.”

“I should’ve had you helping me a year ago,” sighed Veek.

Nate waved Debbie on. “So, what’ve you got?”

“Okay, she said, “the land the Kavach Building is on was bought in October of 1890 by a group called the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company. Like you were saying the other day,” she said to Nate, “it was out in the middle of nowhere. A few months later, they filed permits to start construction.”

She switched cards again. “Now, about a year after this the company started work on a dam out in Idaho, on a branch of the Snake River called the Bruneau. The story was that this dam was going to replace one they’d built a few years earlier which had collapsed.”

“What were they really doing?” asked Tim.

Debbie smiled. “This is where it gets clever. They
were
building a dam. They’d been planning to for about four years. The president of the company was some kind of early entrepreneur-land baron. He wanted to build a town on a lake, so he needed to make a lake.”

“But...?” asked Nate.

“But,” she said, “there’s no actual evidence of the company building the first dam. The one they said they were replacing. There are stories about its collapse and a few news articles about the replacement. Even some photos of it. But it’s all kind of thin and there’s nothing dated before 1890.”

Roger frowned. “Somebody run off with the money?”

“I think we’re living in the money,” said Veek. “It all went here.”

Debbie nodded. “I can’t find anything certain, but reading between the lines it sure seems like the first dam was just a story they made up so they could funnel a ton of money out here to make the Kavach Building.”

“Just like Locke Management,” said Nate. “They didn’t want anyone to know they were connected to this place.”

“Who owned the company?” asked Tim.

Debbie shuffled back through her notes. “The president of the Owyhee Land and Irrigation Company was Whipple Phillips.”

“Whipple?” chuckled Xela.

“Yep.”

“Don’t name ‘em like that anymore,” said Roger.

“He traveled all over Europe in the 1870s and 1880s, so it’s not hard to guess he could’ve met Koturovic on one of his trips, heard all his theories, and gotten recruited to help save the world.” Debbie stopped to straighten her cards. “The ironic thing is their dam—the real dam—collapsed about ten years later, in 1904. It bankrupted the company. Phillips died at about the same time.”

Tim straightened up. “So the...the company, whatever they were called, they don’t exist anymore.”

“Nope.”

“They didn’t change their name?”

Debbie shook her head. “They changed it and reorganized a few times back then, but they were gone by 1910.”

“So who the hell is Locke Management, then?”

“Wait a minute,” said Veek. Her eyes were wide behind her glasses. “We’re idiots.”

They all looked at her. She turned around and tapped the computer in Xela’s lap. “Pull up a picture of the cornerstone,” she said.

Xela’s fingers swiped back and forth on the mousepad. She spun the computer around and the picture filled the screen. Everyone leaned in to see.

“
Right there,” Veek said. She pointed at the screen. “This was gnawing at me the other day and I couldn’t get it. It isn’t two monograms, it’s three sets of initials. There’s Aleksander Koturovic. There’s Whippy Phillips.”

“So we’ve got the idea guy and the money guy,” said Nate. “So maybe NT is the guy who built it for them.”

“What, like the foreman or something?”

Nate shook his head. “He got big letters. Probably more like the architect. Koturovic had all the theories, the raw math, but he needed someone who knew how to put them into practice.” He looked at Debbie. “You said he was here in Los Angeles with his co-workers, right? Who were they?”

Debbie flipped back through the cards. “Neville Orange and Adam Taylor.”

“Makes sense,” muttered Roger.

“Ummmm...” Xela looked at Nate. “This sounds silly but aren’t
you
NT?”

“What?”

“Nate Tucker,” she said. “NT is you.”

They looked at him.

“Bro,” said Roger. “You’re a time traveler.”

“No, I’m not,” said Nate.

“Not yet, but maybe in the future.”

“It’s not me. You really think I built this place?”

“What if you’re the one who tells him about the monsters?” suggested Xela, “That’s why they just come out of nowhere. He couldn’t tell anybody a time traveler from the future told him about them.”

“Right,” said Tim, “because involving a time traveler makes the idea of giant monsters from another dimension seem foolish.”

“I agree with Nathan,” said Mrs. Knight. “The initials probably just belong to someone else with a name like...” She rolled her cane on her knees for a moment. “...Norman Terry or Noah Truman or something.”

“Nancy Truman,” said Veek. “Could be a woman.”

“Nigel Tufnel,” said Roger with a bad English accent.

“Nelson Tuntz,” added Xela.

“Nicholas Ticklebee,” giggled Debbie. Then her jaw dropped. “Oh my God.”

Nate looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

“Serbian scientists and Westinghouse generators,” she said. She pointed at the picture of the cornerstone. “It’s Nikola Tesla.”

“No way,” said Xela.

“Tesla’s the electricity guy, right?” asked Roger. “The one in
The Prestige?”

“Now this is just silly,” Mrs. Knight said.

“No, it all makes sense,” said Debbie. Her eyes were huge. She bounced on her toes and squeezed the index cards. “Veek, you said Kavach was Indian, right?”

“Marathi, yeah, but it’s—”

Debbie bounced again. “Is that the same as Sanskrit? This was on the tip of my brain the other day. Tesla liked to give his projects Sanskrit names. What does it mean?”

“Ummm...I think it means ‘armor,’ or maybe ‘shield.’ It depends on...context.” Her eyes went wide behind her glasses.

“It’s silly,” said Mrs. Knight again. “Tesla’s a public figure. He couldn’t have just snuck off to work on a secret project no one ever knew about.”

“But he did,” said Nate. “Didn’t he move out to Colorado because Thomas Edison burned down his lab or something?”

“
Maybe it wasn’t Edison,” said Tim. “It might’ve been the Family trying to get him. He went to Colorado to get away from them.”

“Getting away from Edison was just a bonus,” grinned Xela.

“So now we know the names on the cornerstone,” said Veek. “And we know what the machine’s supposed to do.”

“More or less,” said Tim.

“So,” Nate said, “I guess that just leaves one last thing.”

* * *

“Excuse me, Mr. Rommell?”

Oskar turned from the gate. “Yes, Mrs. Knight. What can I do for you?”

She stood at the top of the stairs. She wore a bright red cardigan despite the summer heat and leaned on her cane. Her eyes were hidden from the afternoon light by a wide pair of sunglasses. “Are you heading to the store?”

“I am,” he said. “May I pick something up for you?”

Mrs. Knight nodded. “I was wondering if you could get some white tea for me? I’d go myself but my hip is killing me today.” She held up a ten dollar bill and a small box, folded flat. “This is the brand I like.”

Oskar took the box and his brows shifted. “They haff this at the corner store?”

Mrs. Knight’s face dropped. “Oh,” she said. “I thought you were going to the real store. The Vons over on Vermont.”

“I had not planned to,” he said.

“Ahhhh,” said Mrs. Knight. She held out her hand for the box. “Well, never mind, then. I’m sure I’ll be fine tomorrow and—”

Oskar shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “It is a nice day for a walk, and the Vons will haff better prices. Besides,” he winked and patted his broad stomach, “I can always use the exercise.”

“You’re too kind,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

“You are very welcome,” he said. “I will be back in an hour or so with your tea.” He gave her a little bow of his head and headed out the gate.

Mrs. Knight headed inside. Nate, Veek, and Debbie watched from the second floor window as Oskar headed down the street. “He’s such a gentleman,” said Debbie. “I feel kind of bad tricking him like this.”

“He’s the one keeping secrets,” said Veek.

“Y’know,” said Nate, “I’m not even sure he knows.”

Debbie looked over her shoulder at him. “Really?”

Nate shrugged. “Think about it. He’s a middle-management guy. He’s just doing the job he was hired to do. They tell him to keep people from snooping around and causing problems. It doesn’t mean he knows why. Like a security guard at CIA headquarters or something.”

“I don’t know,” Veek said. “He always seems like he’s hiding a lot to me.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Knight from the stairwell. “He hasn’t told us our building is an earthquake-causing-apocalypse-prevention machine. That definitely makes him the bad guy.”

Nate and Veek headed down the hall to join everyone else at apartment 14. Tim looked up from the padlocks. “I can have them all off in five minutes,” he said. “The older ones are a different system. Haven’t tried something like that in years.”

Veek tilted her head. “The old ones are going to take longer than the new ones?”

He slid out his picks. “They will if you don’t want it obvious they were opened.”

“Let’s do it,” said Nate. “Time’s a-wasting.”

“Just waiting on you, boss,” said Tim. A few quick movements and the top lock popped off.

“You’d think the modern ones would be harder,” Nate said.

“Nah.” Tim hooked the open loop of the lock through his belt. “The core of most modern padlocks are pretty much all the same even though they dress them up with big steel casings.” His tools slid into the bottom lock and the pick did its dance. The second lock snapped open and he hung it on the opposite hip.

Xela marched down the hall with a gallon bucket hanging from her hand. A paint-streaked backpack was slung over her other shoulder. “We lucked out,” she said. “This one’s almost full.”

Clive pushed open his door so she could hide her supplies inside his apartment. He looked at the bucket. “You’re sure you can fix all this when we’re done?”

“It’s just paint,” Xela said. “Paint’s my thing. A little bit of texturing and I can make it pass. Thirty minutes, tops. Maybe a little less if we run some extension cords and I get a hair dryer or two on it.”