The Tesla Legacy

By Mike Befeler

Picture a retired mathematics professor and conspiracy nut with a butt-kicking, surrogate daughter sidekick. Elmore Kranz bombards the police with his predictions of disaster until one of them actually happens, to the point that he’s implicated in the plot. Even with the assistance of his one ally, rookie cop Brittney Chase, people start dying around Elmore as attempts are made on his life. Following up on inventions from eccentric genius, Nikola Tesla, Elmore and Brittney team up to solve a hundred year old puzzle while trying to thwart a secret government agency and an Afghani terrorist group who seek to get their hands on a doomsday weapon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Befeler
• Release date: Dec 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463658482

Mike Befeler

In the May, 2008, issue of the AARP Bulletin Mike Befeler was identified as one of four authors in a new emerging mystery sub-genre. Harlan Coben, president of Mystery Writers of America stated, “We’ve just scratched the surface on geezer-lit. It could be the next frontier in crime fiction.” Mike turned his attention to speaking and fiction writing after a career in high technology marketing. His debut novel, RETIREMENT HOMES ARE MURDER, was published January, 2007. The second novel in his Paul Jacobson Geezer-lit Mystery Series, LIVING WITH YOUR KIDS IS MURDER, appeared April, 2009 and was a finalist for the Lefty Award for the best humorous mystery of 2009. The third book in the series, SENIOR MOMENTS ARE MURDER, was published in August, 2011. The fourth book, CRUISING IN YOUR EIGHTIES, was a finalist for The Lefty Award for the best humorous mystery of 2012. The fifth book, CARE HOMES ARE MURDER, was released in July, 2013 and the sixth book, NURSING HOMES ARE MURDER, in 2014,. He also has two published paranormal mysteries: THE V V AGENCY and THE BACK WING. Other published books include an international thriller, THE TESLA LEGACY, and standalone mysteries UNSTUFF YOUR STUFF, DEATH OF A SCAM ARTIST, COURT TROUBLE, MURDER ON THE SWITZERLAND TRAIL, MYSTERY OF THE DINNER PLAYHOUSE. Mike is past president of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. He is an acclaimed speaker and presents “The Secret of Growing Older Gracefully—Aging and Other Minor Inconveniences” "How to Survive Retirement" and "Rejection Is Not a Four Letter Word" to service organizations and senior groups. He grew up in Honolulu, Hawaii, lived in Boulder, Colorado, and now resides in Lakewood, CA, with his wife, Wendy. http://www.mikebefeler.com

Book preview

Prologue – New York 1898

The tall, dapper man entered his laboratory, closed his eyes and watched the inner flashes shoot through his brain in groups of three — his own internal Morse code — the SOS of three short flashes, three long flashes and three short flashes again. The brilliant bursts gave way to images of what he’d seen three hours earlier when he donned his coat and hat to leave for dinner at the Waldorf Hotel.

He found the meal acceptable once Robert and Katherine Johnson left him in peace to calculate the volume of each serving of soup, lamb and squash placed in front of him. The only distasteful moment occurred when Anne Morgan, wearing earrings and a pearl necklace, had desecrated his coat by placing a hand on his shoulder. Once he shrugged out of her reach, he finished his Baked Alaska and dabbed at his moustache with the last of his eighteen linen napkins.

In his laboratory with his eyes still closed, he scanned his preexisting mental pictures of each section of the lab. To the right, a dozen induction motors ranged in size from six inches to three feet in diameter. In the middle, the dynamos, transformers, controls and coils wound around varying configurations of iron cores. To the left stood the neatly arrayed set of oscillators, one meant for tonight’s special test. His mental images blossomed with shades of gray, black and copper.

He sniffed, smelling the intoxicating aroma of ozone permeating the air from a small coil crackling behind a closed door in the next room. He turned his head to the side to listen to the faint clop of hoofs as the hansom cab he had arrived in departed along Houston Street. He could even hear the snort from the large brown mare.

Flicking on laboratory arc lights of his own design, he hung up his black Prince Albert coat, complete with white silk handkerchief neatly tucked in the pocket and set his derby on the stand.

He compared the actual scene with the images in his mind — first left, then center, then right. One item out of place. Near the second coil in the center, a pencil had been moved. After he closed his eyes for a moment to review the image, he opened them to double-check the current scene. Definitely three inches from its previous location. He constantly warned his assistant not to move anything, but the young man didn’t understand the importance of complete order. The moderately efficient lad probably fell asleep in the other room while watching the sparks from the coil. It soothed people. He also knew sending pulses of electricity through muscles could heal damaged tissue. He would definitely pursue the issue with the medical community one of these days, but he intended to conduct a more important experiment at the moment.

He ran his hand through neatly trimmed dark hair he’d allow no one to touch except his personal barber.

Time to inspect each device. Once he circumnavigated the room, he knew he would need to make two more passes for a perfect three. Deciding he would not proceed to six or nine or eighteen or even twenty-seven laps around the laboratory tonight, he focused on the oscillator of interest.

He had designed this device in his mind and visualized exactly how it would operate. Three months of thought. No need to make blueprints. He hated to draw. Unnecessary. He had viewed the apparatus from every angle in his mind, fine-tuned the design and eliminated the one flaw requiring him to recalculate the size of the main piston. Once perfected in his head, he built it in one week, flawlessly matching the imagined model. Such a simple process. He didn’t understand why all inventors didn’t work his way — visualize, build, demonstrate and later file for patents. His assistants always kept after him to write down his inventions early in the process. He held a predecessor patent covering some aspects of his experiment tonight, and maybe he would file a further patent, but not right now.

On to final preparations. The oscillator could operate by either air pressure or steam, and tonight he would avail himself of his steam engine. He fired it up and waited for the pressure to increase as he connected a hose to the oscillator. Steam took time to build up and time to shut off but would provide the right amount of energy for his demonstration. In the future when he needed to relocate the energy source for an offsite test, he would use the air pressure engine.

He smiled to himself. Thomas Edison would have wasted years with ineffectual attempts at trial-and-error not needed to develop the demonstration tonight. So simple yet elegant and powerful. The energy would propagate from the oscillator through the metal base sunk ten feet into the surrounding rock and earth layers beneath New York City.

A dull, low thump permeated the room as steam began to flow through the line into the oscillator. Good. The exact sound previously heard in his head. As the steam reached a steady level, the oscillator achieved its resonant frequency, and the thumps settled into a steady repetitive hum. Consistency. So much in the world depended on consistency — people keeping their distance from him, machines following his plans, pigeons showing up when he saved bread from dinner.

Unfortunately, many people lacked rationality. They became greedy and fought wars, but he could put an end to wars if the War Department would only listen to him. He had already designed and built a teleautomatic torpedo boat, controlled by remote signals and capable of striking an enemy ship, but it could only take out one enemy craft at a time. He planned to demonstrate this trifle of a weapon at the upcoming Electrical Exposition at Madison Square Garden.

On a grander scale, he envisioned a world-shattering invention to put an end to war. Once he demonstrated its power, no one would dare invade another nation. He had designed a magnifying transmitter capable of sending bursts of energy to remote locations on the globe to destroy enemy installations. Using his lightning producing coils, he designed the prototype using a huge ball atop a tall tower. It could send electricity through the air and ground to communicate with any other location, activate devices around the globe and, in the interest of peace, seek out and destroy enemy war machines.

Tonight, for the first time, he would use the third of his wonderful peacekeeping inventions. One so powerful yet compact it would establish resonance within the earth itself and produce the necessary oscillation tuned to the type of soil under his laboratory. He would shake things up a little, nothing dangerous or life-threatening, but an ample demonstration of the force powerful enough to shatter a city. It could act as a deterrent to war, and he planned to employ the invention for peaceful means in the future to locate underground petroleum.

Every one of his inventions could lead to so many different applications. He anticipated seeing all of them serving mankind, since he came from solid, long-lived, Serbian stock and expected to far exceed a hundred years of life. He held out his arms and turned three complete circles while he surveyed his domain and sensed the vibration coursing through his body. The elixir of alternating current.

The steady thumping continued. He felt the heartbeat of his machine in tune with the pulses surging through him as he loosened the starched collar of his pristine white shirt. A variant of this vibrating device also served as a healing machine. It could calm nerves, rest someone’s mind and provide peaceful sleep, although not necessary for himself since he only needed at most two hours of sleep a night.

He chuckled at the thought of the device’s one drawback. One must use the healing machine in moderation. His friend, Samuel Clemens, tried an earlier version of his vibration therapy but ignored the warning to desist after one minute. The result — a pained expression on Clemens’s face as he dashed for the washroom when his bowels became more relaxed than appropriate.

Tonight, his invention would shake his lab but not reach far beyond its walls. He would find an appropriate remote location for his further exploration. Patent attorney, Leonard Curtis, suggested he relocate his laboratory to the open plains of Colorado. In due time.

The sound of soft rattling interrupted his thoughts. He looked to the shelf where he kept jars of nuts and bolts. Bottles jiggled and the metal contents shook against each other. Good. Progressing according to plan. He looked at the pencil and saw it dance, first tilting toward the eraser end and then toward the writing tip. Excellent. The world around him pulsated to the harmonic of his machine. He now took his position as conductor of the most formidable orchestra in the world. He waved his arms as the brass played their solos, the strings quivered, and percussions punctuated the air. He experienced the exaltation that seized his friend, Ignacy Paderewski, when he performed one of his brilliant piano concerts.

Suddenly, screams from the street interrupted his reverie. He raced to the window and looked out. People ran out of buildings. The grocer’s sign hanging in front of a store across the street swung wildly. A window in the second story of the same building shattered. Men used their canes to steady themselves. Women stumbled. A small girl fell to the ground sobbing.

He closed his eyes and imagined the layers of earth beneath his feet. An image from the day before appeared. He had stopped to watch men digging in the ground as they began the construction of a new building in the vacant lot two blocks away. They removed shovels full of sand, not dirt. Sand. He had tuned his oscillation machine to the resonance of dirt and rock not sand. A completely different situation. The waves would propagate through sand more violently — the explanation why the vibrations destroyed nothing in his lab, but a mere hundred feet away, immense damage resulted.

Policemen in their blue uniforms staggered along the street from the police station two blocks away on Mulberry Street. They pounded on his door knowing the cause of the chaos because of previous encounters after neighbors reported lightning bolts, explosions and flashes of light.

He turned off the steam engine. Unfortunately, the hot boiler would continue producing steam for another two minutes. He couldn’t disconnect the steam line for fear of scalding himself. It pained him to consider it, but only one alternative remained.

He raced to a corner of the room and picked up a sledgehammer. As the police broke in the door, he lifted the heavy tool and gave a deathblow to his wonderful machine, shattering it into pieces and causing the earthquake to cease.

No real loss occurred, because he stored the design in the safest location of all — the mind of Nikola Tesla.

Chapter 1 – September 8, Present Day, Safed Koh Mountains, Afghanistan

An explosion in the distance shook the cave. Karim tilted his head back and roared with a hearty laugh as the dim wavering light reflected off his uneven teeth. He slapped his companion on the back. Quamar, do they think they can intimidate us? Their airplanes, bombs and missiles will prove useless against Al Mawt-jihad. They make many fruitless attempts to find us. Won’t they be surprised by what we have planned for them?

A light bulb hanging from the ceiling of the cave cast a flickering shadow of Karim’s solid, robed frame against the craggy rock surface. His large nose blended with the moustache and thick black beard on an oval face capable of shifting from joviality to ruthlessness within a split second.

What’s happening? Quamar looked up from his laptop and straightened his thick glasses.

Karim’s intense dark eyes bore in on the smaller man. Another random attempt by the incompetent Americans to destroy us. The billions they spend on bombs can do nothing. Here we sit, and they send their expensive weapons to try to destroy us. With all their technology, they can do nothing against caves. I love caves.

Quamar continued to pound on the keyboard. I wouldn’t mind seeing my family again.

Karim slapped the scientist on the back. Think of all the time you have to continue your research here, and we’ll soon see the completion of our hard work. Our upcoming actions will change the world.

A smile crossed Quamar’s thin lips. The idea came from an American inventor of long ago, and Jawid arranged to buy a completed model on the black market. I only wish you’d let me try a large-scale test first.

You performed an effective demonstration. Look what it did to the back of the cave. Karim pointed to a pile of crumbled rock. He thought back to the time Quamar attached the metal box to the batteries. It hummed, vibrated and shook the cave. After two minutes, Karim himself pulled the plug for fear of causing a larger avalanche. That one test sufficed to show us what will happen with the imminent deployment on our primary targets.

Quamar continued to tap away on the keyboard. Still, we don’t know exactly how it will operate in the locations you’ve chosen. It may not destroy as much as we’d like in some of the cities.

Karim adjusted the purple and green keffiyeh on his head. Don’t wallow in pessimism. I like to look on the positive side. Maybe the machines will prove even more powerful than we anticipate. We shall make a statement to the Americans to take care of their own country and not interfere in our part of the world. Do you know why I like caves so much, Quamar?

No, esteemed leader, I do not.

Throughout history, caves gave refuge and played a major role in war. Now they provide the perfect bases to wage battles against the great Satan.

I am not a student of history as you are.

Karim ran his hand over his beard. The reason we will succeed. Your scientific mind and my study of history’s lessons. Caves go back to the first home for some of the European tribes, which, in turn, ultimately spawned the American infidels. Don’t forget the Roman catacombs. Even in the American Civil War, people hid in caves during the siege of Vicksburg.

Quamar blinked.

Karim laughed again. I know. You often wonder what I’m talking about but never question my plans, my little scientist.

I would never show such disrespect.

Karim paced back and forth across the hard dirt surface. Caves as tactical support in times of war interest me. In World War I, twenty-five-thousand British troops assembled in a cave beneath the French town of Arras. They attacked when the Germans least expected it. And, in World War II, the Japanese inflicted tremendous casualties on the invading Americans using the tunnels and caves underneath the island of Iwo Jima. They built an amazing hidden city beneath the island’s surface. During the American interference in Vietnam, tunnels in the Cu Chi district of Ho Chi Minh City provided the necessary cover for the fight to drive the Americans away, as well as the Viengxay limestone caves in Houphanh Province in northeastern Laos being instrumental in hiding freedom fighters from the Americans. All of these caves, like our own, serve to supply troops who fight and bring death to the enemy. We’ve kept the Americans wandering in circles in our mountains for years.

You are right, exalted leader.

And, of course, Muhammad spent time meditating in the Cave of Hira in Jabal Al-nur near Mecca. Caves also can provide a source of peace, solitude and insight and a place to pray to Allah. Karim patted the wall. A cave like this helped found Islam.

Right again.

Karim pointed a craggy finger at Quamar. Now, give up the computer so I can complete my message.

One moment. Let me save my last calculations. After a few keystrokes, Quamar stood and ceded his chair to the taller Karim.

Karim sat, surveyed the array of batteries used to power the lights and equipment in the cave and pulled up the document he wrote earlier. He thought over his discussion with Quamar. The man might know science, but he didn’t appreciate the historical perspective of their glorious battle and the significance of caves, but then again, many of his followers did not share his love of caves, which provided so many uses. Besides supporting the act of war, caves became the repository of treasure throughout the ages, hiding the Dead Sea Scrolls as well as jewels and gold in many parts of the world. You never knew what you could find in a cave.

When they first entered this cave, he had unearthed a coin, right where the computer now stood. He pulled out the silver half rupee and viewed the embossed mosque and two flags. He turned it over and read the name, Amir Habibullah, inscribed with a wreath. The bandit king ruled for nine short months in 1929. Someone probably dropped the coin when fleeing once Nadir Khan made himself king and executed Habibullah.

This cave would serve another purpose. It would launch the next attack, one to confound the American leaders, cause their greedy investors to lose billions of dollars in a stock market crash and show how the infidels remain at the mercy of the jihad. He reread his message, changed several words to put the proper emphasis on the threat to the United States and inserted a flash drive to copy the final version.

The courier is here, came a shout from the front of the cave.

Excellent, Karim responded. What latest news do you bring?

A short man wearing a blue and green chapan with a gray karakul on his head stepped forward and handed Karim a dusty packet tied together with hemp twine. Karim tore it open and removed a letter which he read while the others watched.

How are the preparations proceeding? Quamar asked.

Karim lifted his fist in the air. The thirty teams hold the devices in their hands. No one has detected our deployment agents. All is set for a glorious event. Now we can complete the preparations to send our message. Karim held out the flash drive. Deliver this to Ahsan in Kabul immediately.

The courier took it. Any further instructions?

Ahsan knows what to do. Soon we will receive the reports of our success.

May we obtain more fruit? Quamar asked.

You and your stomach. Karim frowned. At a moment like this as we await a glorious victory, you can only think of your appetite?

Sorry, leader. I just thought —

Silence! Karim turned to face the courier again. No further requests. See that your delivery to Ahsan is completed quickly.

The man bowed and left the cave.

With all their electronic surveillance devices, the Americans still think they can track us down by intercepting our communications. Karim faced Quamar with a glint in his eyes. Since I gave orders to transmit no traceable wireless messages, they can do nothing about our couriers traveling on horseback through miles of mountains. Think how long it took them to find Osama bin Laden. The Americans will never locate us here. Al Mawt-jihad will succeed. Praise to Allah and death to the infidels.

Chapter 2 – September 9, Denver, Colorado

Lieutenant Colgan of the Denver Police Department reached for another donut but remembered the admonishment from his wife. He found it hard to resist the temptation, particularly when the department admin stopped for donuts that morning and bought a dozen glazed. He knew he should start going to the gym again and lay off the fat and grease. One of these days. He ran a hand over the stubble on