George R. R. Martin Presents Wild Cards: Sleeper Straddle

Part I

Tesla shut the folder. He took the string of the closure between his gray thumb and forefinger—no easy task given his long black nails, invulnerable to clippers as they were. Then he wrapped the string around the circular cardboard retainer, once, twice, three times.

The folders were an affectation, to be sure—as were the physical dossiers they contained, with their notes handwritten in pencil, and black-and-white photographs—but an affectation rooted in Tesla’s deep-seated needs for security and secrecy. He was a great believer in computers and databases for research and surveillance, but a much greater believer in absolutely never storing any data electronically, even on those of his machines connected to nothing but the electrical outlets in the walls of his basement office. He had heard rumors that his erstwhile colleagues at the National Security Agency were making progress on technology that could access computers through the electrical grid.

Tesla was a great believer in rumors as well—at least when it came to the governmental intelligence apparatus that had once employed him, and for which he occasionally did freelance work, if anonymously, through a nested series of false identities and think tanks that existed only as post office boxes.

Satisfied that the thick folder was securely closed, Tesla stood up from his oak desk and took a few short steps to the door of the bank vault dug into one side of his basement. He turned the dial through the sixteen-digit combination, pleased with the complete silence of the tumblers even to his preternaturally sharp ears, then wheeled open the heavy door.

Nothing of his considerable wealth was stored in the vault. At least not of his wealth in various currencies, negotiable instruments, and specie. What it contained instead was a vast wealth of information.

Filing cabinet upon locked file cabinet lined the walls of the vault. Tesla approached one, selected a key from the ring hung around his neck, and, after unlocking the cabinet, pulled open the top drawer. He carefully placed the newly closed file, unlabeled like the cabinets, in the crowded drawer. He narrowed his eyes, making of the random placement of the file in a randomly chosen cabinet a conscious memory. The next time he needed it, he would cast his mind back and watch himself in his imagination: turning the tumblers of the vault’s locking mechanism, taking a certain number of steps to a certain cabinet, tucking the file into a crowded drawer in a certain position, just so.

There were 4,622 folders stored in the vault, none labeled, all randomly filed. With a moment’s thought, Tesla could locate any of them. An intruder would take days to locate a particular folder—and that after successfully cracking the combination of the vault; after successfully locating the hidden basement; after successfully identifying the anonymous house in the anonymous Northern Virginia suburb where Tesla, with a reasonable level of confidence, believed exactly one other person in the world knew he lived.

Of course, even after all that effort, the theoretical intruder would have to break the arcane cipher Tesla used in writing his research notes.

Vault closed, Tesla took his key ring from around his neck and stored it in a separate safe hidden in the basement’s floor. He turned off the overhead light, red-bulbed and so casting light in the wavelength his infinitely adaptable eyes found best for close work, then pulled down the retractable staircase.

It was time to check the mail. Which meant it was time for lunch.

Tesla picked a cellphone from a rack of them on his kitchen counter. He powered it on for the first time, then used his nail tips to dial a number in the Netherlands. The ring that sounded reminded Tesla of an old-fashioned dial phone, which was easily explained by the fact that the number was for precisely that kind of device.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, someone Tesla would never meet picked up the phone’s handset and set it into a cradle. A tone sounded. Tesla dialed a thirty-digit number and patiently waited for the uplink that would send his call up to a satellite that had been launched from a Pacific atoll by no government and by no publicly known private enterprise. The signal bounced off the satellite down to an exchange, this afternoon’s random one in rural Pennsylvania, and a third dial tone sounded. Tesla dialed again.

A woman’s voice, aggressive, aged, and accented, came through the cellphone’s speaker.

“China Star, may I help you?”

“I would like to order some food for delivery, please.”

“Phone number?”

Tesla smiled. “This is Mr. Price.”

“General Tso’s chicken, steamed dumplings, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Cash or charge?”

“Cash.”

“Okay, thirty minutes.”

Tesla pushed the disconnect button. Then he dropped the phone into the industrial trash compactor that stood where a refrigerator would in someone else’s kitchen and set it churning to destructive life.

The one other person in all the world who knew Tesla’s address, the spectacularly well-educated daytime delivery driver for China Star, climbed the three brick steps to the front door. He did not knock. He did not press the button for the doorbell, which in any case was disconnected. Instead, he waved at the cleverly concealed camera above the lintel, set a brown paper bag on the wrought-iron table next to the door, and took a sealed business-sized envelope from inside the mailbox.

The envelope contained two $20 bills, one relatively new but not crisp, one relatively old but not creased.

The driver tapped the envelope once in his palm, moved it briefly near his left ear as if listening to it, then tucked it into a back pocket. With that, he left.

A moment later, the wrought-iron table sank into the porch. A moment after that, it rose up again, empty.

Tesla set his lunch out on the dining room table. As usual, the food was steaming hot. The broccoli in the chicken dish was bright green and he knew it would be perfectly cooked. His only complaint about the food from China Star was that, while they always had excellent vegetables, they never included enough of them.

He used a fork—his nails made him hopeless with chopsticks—to spear a dumpling and popped it in his mouth. His teeth, as sharp and black as his fingernails and as the upturned horns growing from his temples, made quick work of the bite.

He ate quickly for a few minutes, but then slowed and contemplated the fortune cookie sealed in plastic that he had placed to one side of his plate. He ruminated, with his mouth and with his mind.

Then, with quick, precise movements, he picked up the fortune cookie, removed it from its wrapper, and broke it in half. A small rectangle of white paper, printed in red ink, fell onto the table.

Tesla could feel the electrical charge building up between his horns and reflexively fought it down.

One side of the fortune had a series of numbers on it, meant for lottery players. Below the numbers was a sentence, “Knowledge blooms in new turned soil.”

On the other side, there was a series of Chinese characters. Below, in English: “Learn Chinese! What time does the train arrive?”

These things all taken together—numerals, fortune, phrase, and Hanzi logograms—added up to a coded message. “Riverside observation deck. Old Town. Four a.m.”

Tesla sighed. He hated going out. Especially so early in the morning.

Going out, at least at the appointed time and traveling to the appointed location, involved getting out the car. Tesla bought a carefully anonymous upper-mid-range sedan every two years. On average, each of the cars accumulated less than two hundred miles while he owned them, which meant there was some obfuscation involved in getting rid of them. Selling or trading in a car with that little mileage recorded on the odometer was something the other person involved in the transaction would remember. Tesla used various methods of disposing of his old cars, including shipping one overseas to a largely automated salvage yard, sinking one in Lake Ontario, and, once, sending one as an anonymous donation to a Jaycees chapter in Fayetteville, Arkansas, for use as a raffle prize.

He had carefully planned the fifty-five-mile route from his home to the meeting point with plans to arrive exactly ninety-five minutes early. He kept an eye on the screens of the three separate mapping devices he used for navigation as he backed out of his garage and drove out of the subdivision, observing the posted twenty-five-miles-per-hour speed limit carefully, but not too carefully.