Tesla, Jason Walker [reading cloud ebooks TXT] 📗

Anna showed up on the base a few days later. When she saw Darren, she asked him to come down to the room, where she sat him down and started to tell him why she’d been away for so long. As she sat down in front of him, she touched his hand and smiled. Darren smiled back at her. He wanted to know what had happened, though, and maintained good eye contact.

“Where have you been?” Darren asked.

She looked at him as she sat down. “We had an international incident that several of us had to clean up, remember? It went all the way up to the president,” she replied.

“Holy shit!” Darren said as he sat back in his chair and listened to what she had to say.

Anna let out a heavy sigh, then looked at his gorgeous eyes. “We had to pay the Iranians off, but Bush saw that we had recovered some ancient scrolls that were incredible. They’re being deciphered now, but there were a lot of schematics in what we took out of Iraq. A lot of it was written in secret code, though, which means it’ll be a while before they figure them all out. They’re sending a recovery team to recover the robots you saw,” Anna told him.

Darren’s interest grew after she’d said that. “Is my team being sent back there?”

Anna shook her head. “No. There’s another assignment for you. You’re going stateside.”

Darren looked down at the floor for a second as he remembered how scary things had been on the vessel that had been hit by the EMP. “Did the ship get rescued?” he asked curiously.

Anna nodded her head. “They towed it back to a safe place but not before a second Iranian ship was destroyed. We had to answer for the US Navy pilot’s death. That didn’t go down so well and took some time to clean up, but war is a business, as you already know. If we go in to take other people’s ancient history, we’re always going to need enforcement. And sometimes that enforcement of ours gets killed. Let’s change subjects and talk about you now, okay?” Anna said.

Darren didn’t press her for more information. He could see that she was mentally exhausted from the whole ordeal.

After being shuttled away from Diego Garcia that very day, Darren was sent to a temporary holding spot in Avondale, Arizona. At this point in his career, he knew better than to ask too many questions, so he went to the place he’d been told to find.

Either way, Darren was grateful to get a chance to go to the United States. While he was waiting to meet his contact, he decided to go to a nightclub to see a band play after he checked into his motel for the night. The music was good, and the beer was enjoyable too.

When he went back to his motel, it was dark and it seemed like the city block had changed from being a decent spot during the day to a more negative area at night. The vibe he got was that it didn’t seem like it was a very nice inn. For starters, there were three hookers standing on a corner just a block away from it, and the place let people rent there for a month at a time. That attracted the lowlifes, but it was a small no-name joint—the kind that didn’t ask any questions. When he went inside, he shut the door and took his shoes off. He then tossed his bag onto the bed and undid the main compartment. There were some fresh clothes inside that he would slip into after a shower.

When he turned on the water, it stank of sulphur. It was better than the birdbath he’d taken the last few days, though, so he supposed that complaining too much wouldn’t get him anywhere.

Having dried off, Darren set about rooting through his stuff, looking for a clean shirt and underwear. He happened to find the pocket watch that he’d discovered next to the burnt-out barracks building back on the Diego Garcia base. He took a closer look at it and sat down beside the table so he could fidget with it. “Huh. I’d forgotten all about you.”

Darren held the watch up to the light, trying to get a better look at it. Outside in the parking lot, someone’s car alarm went off. The sudden blaring made Darren jump. The watch slipped out of his grip and fell to the floor, causing the lens to pop off of it.

Darren swore.

He picked it up along with the lens, then walked over to his bed and sat on the edge of it. While he was fiddling with it, he realized that there was a crack in the facing of the watch. It looked like it might open.

Grabbing his pocket knife, Darren pried open the inside of the watch face. Several small metal flat pads were inside of it. When he pressed one of them, it gave off a low, shrill beep.

The sound was familiar.

Darren’s head snapped around like he thought someone might have come into the room. He got up and double-checked the lock on the door before shuffling back over to the bed where he’d left the watch. He knew what this thing was. It was meant for spying!

For the next hour, Darren twisted the watch about, picking at every little crevice, pouring over every detail. The make of the watch was designed to look shoddy on purpose. Really though, there was a micro USB slot on the back of the back face of the metal watch.

Instantly, Darren knew that he was going to have to come up with a way to look at whatever was stored on that internal drive. Would it pertain to the Orange Corporation? Something secret from Diego Garcia? Or one of the other hidden groups that made a habit of lurking about? He had no idea.

There was the possibility that it contained information that would help the Orange Corporation in its research . . . but even as Darren had that thought, he knew it wouldn’t be possible. Someone had gone to great lengths to make sure that this spying device stayed hidden. Darren could only imagine that he would be in the worst sort of trouble if he told anyone that he had gone snooping instead of just turning it in.

But turning it in would put the spotlight on Anna as well as himself, and he didn’t want that for either of them. This would have to be a covert affair. For now, at least.

The first chance that Darren had, he stepped outside. Avondale was a bustling city. It wasn’t hard to figure out a plan of action, and it was even easier to put it into motion.

Rather than risk his own personal computer, Darren walked about downtown Avondale until he was able to find a young man sitting on the edge of a street corner. The busker was clearly homeless; he looked dirty and scruffy, although the guitar he was playing looked to be in decent enough condition. The guitar case next to him was nearly empty.

Darren walked over to him. He listened to the man play for a few minutes and then dropped a fifty into the guitar case.

Instantly, the man’s eyes were on him. “Thank you, sir!”

“Your playing deserves it,” said Darren. “Say, mate, how would you like to make another hundred to go with that?”

The man’s mouth went pinched. “I don’t do that sort of work.”

“That sort—no, no, God, no.” Darren quickly shook his hand. “No, I need someone to do some research for me. At the library.”

The man narrowed his eyes. “Sounds sketchy.”

“Too sketchy for an easy hundred?”

The man thought it over. “Suppose not,” he finally said. He carefully retrieved the money from the guitar case, packed his instrument away, and nodded. “They call me Dusty.”

“All right, Dusty. Why don’t you show me where the library is?” He didn’t offer a name, and Dusty didn’t insist on getting one. The library was two blocks north and another block to the east. It was late afternoon by the time they got there.

Dusty gestured at the building. “Just exactly what is it you want me to do in there, eh?”

“Mate, I want you to go inside, and plug this into one of the computers.” Darren passed over the USB drive. “Then you’re going to use this—” He handed over a pay-by-the-minute phone, as well. “—to call me and tell me when the drive’s been put in. My number’s already in the phone. You can keep it when we’re done.”

Dusty looked at the two objects suspiciously. It was easy to tell that something funny was going on. Thankfully for Darren, the man was far more interested in getting the cash and the phone. Dusty nodded, said, “All right” and went into the library.

It was only ten minutes later when Darren got the call. He nodded at Dusty as the man left the library. Darren took over the computer chair himself, scanning the screen intently.

It was a seemingly endless amount of files. Darren swore under his breath. The librarian at the counter gave him a disapproving look.

Darren smiled at her apologetically before turning back to the computer.

There were files about World War II. There were at least a dozen Operation Paperclip folders with pictures of Germans in uniform and names beneath them. There were folders that had Nikola Tesla’s name on them. There were others with code numbers instead of names. There were folders with code names. There was a lot of stuff on that drive. Darren’s memory called out to him, and a conversation with Bill Jenkins came back to him. Bill was an archaeologist and engineer Darren had befriended when they both started working for the Orange Corporation. They had both been assigned to an Orange Corp excavation of an underground civilization that had existed on Melville Island up in Canada. That had been where Bill had saved Darren’s life, though that wasn’t the memory filling Darren’s thoughts right now.

Bill had said something about Tesla back then—how the United States government undervalued the inventor during his life but they had taken everything he had written or drawn up after his death. Something about the country needing to catch up to Russia and Germany, which had known the true value of Tesla’s work. But then Bill had mentioned that the Order of the Black Sun would have all of that knowledge by now because they secretly ran the United States following the physical conclusion of World War II. The Germans had secretly shifted from a physical conflict to one that would control the economies of the world and thereby enslave every person on the planet through things like credit cards like Visa and MasterCard and prescription medicine—not to mention the givens of fuel costs and banking fees. That revelation had really set Darren back on his ass when he realized what Bill had been trying to tell him. The amount of control and power over society by this organization that had its origins in the Third Reich was absolute. It was scary