THIRTY-FIVE

October 12, 1888, Kokin Brod, Serbia

I’d seen plenty of dungeons in movies. The real thing was nothing like either Hollywood or I imagined. Nothing.

The dungeon was small, a single chamber undivided into individual cells. The irregular floor, a slab of unworked bedrock, sloped toward the back wall. The walls themselves were crooked, uneven, some the same natural stone as the floor, some limestone blocks and boulders of uneven size and shape.

Iron rings hung from hooks hammered into the back wall, and they trailed heavy, rusted chains ending in shackles. The wall and floor below it were stained dark brown and black—from rust, I hoped, but I suspected otherwise.

The guards did not speak. They took our shoes, my jacket and shirt, but perhaps in a nod to Victorian modesty left Gabrielle the rags of her blouse. I shouted in surprise and pain when one of them took a small, sharp knife and cut a thin slice of flesh from my left shoulder, put it in a glass tube, and sealed it. Hot blood ran down my arm, dripped from my fingers onto the floor. They attached one shackle to my right wrist and another to my left ankle, then did the same to Gabrielle.

I saw no sign of sleeping pallets, no remnants of food, no provision for human waste, and their absence was a whispered, chilling threat—you will not need these things.

Of elaborate and imaginative machines of torture there were none. That surprised me. After the clockwork spiders, I expected some baroque, complicated torture contraptions. Their presence would have been comforting, in a macabre way, evidence of imagination and sophistication, no matter how twisted. But this . . .

There was nothing sophisticated about this dark, cramped, low-ceilinged hole. Everything about it was crude, primitive, and hard. This was not where they broke someone’s will, made them reveal, confess, or inform. This was where they chained them to a wall and beat them to death with iron rods.

After they chained us, the guards departed, climbing the steep, winding stone stairway, taking the one lantern with them. They left us shivering in darkness so absolute it made the dungeon the smallest place in the world, and the largest.

“I’m sorry, Gabi,” I croaked.

“You should have left me.”

“Not an option,” I answered.

“You should have left me,” she repeated. “They would have stopped looking when they found me, and you would have escaped.”

“And then what happens to you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, and then she said, “I would have been all right.”

Sure. Tesla doesn’t harm women. Gabrielle was chained in the same shitty hellhole I was, which I thought brought that proposition into some doubt, but I didn’t say so. What was the point? To scare her more than she already was?

For a long time we did not speak. The only sounds were the occasional rattle of our chains when we shifted position, and the slow, steady drip of water in a far corner of the dungeon.

Plop . . . plop . . . plop.

Deep underground, and with the doorway at the top of the stairs closed, there was no ambient light, nothing for my eyes to adjust to, so we both remained blind, isolated. Minutes passed, or an hour, or longer. It was hard to tell.

“Which is the real man?” she said, her voice strangely disembodied in the impenetrable darkness, and loud after so much silence.

“What?”

“You know what I ask. You were the warrior, then suddenly you became the scholar. Why?”

I shivered, perhaps from the cold and damp.

“My wife died. Someone needed to raise our daughter.”

“Why did your wife kill herself?”

I took a deep breath. The dungeon smelled of mildew and stone and air no one else had breathed for a long time. It smelled like a tomb—our tomb. Gabrielle was right; I owed her this answer.

“We had a second child, a little boy. Jack Junior. I spent time at home, was there for the baby’s delivery. Joanne had trouble with Sarah’s delivery, but Jack Junior’s went fine. My guys back in Afghanistan needed me, too. I thought she was okay, so I went back to my unit.

“We exchanged some words over that, harsh words. There had been a lot of harsh words. You get used to that after a while, if you aren’t careful. Suck it up and do your job.”

“There’s this thing called post-partum depression. I guess I’d heard of it, but it was something other people suffer from, people you read about. One night, when I was halfway around the world, Joanne sent Sarah to stay with her cousins. Then she took a whole bottle of pills, went to sleep and never woke up.”

I paused, and I heard her chains clatter softly as she changed position.

“There is more,” she said after a moment.

Yes.

“I remember my commanding officer calling me into his tent, sitting me down, telling me. I remember that instant as if it were ten minutes ago, not ten years. There was this second, just a second, when way down inside of me, in a deep, deep corner of my soul . . . I was relieved. All the arguments, the recriminations, the long silences that measured her growing frustration and disappointment—all that was over, and I was glad. I was glad she was dead.

“Then my commander told me . . . before Joanne killed herself, she’d smothered little Jack.”

I remembered that moment again, as if it had just happened, remembered the bright morning sunlight through the partly open tent flap, how it had fallen on my hand but strangely had not warmed it. I remembered the sound of someone working the bolt on a fifty-caliber machine gun, cycling it twice, getting ready for the morning supply run over to Zareh Sharan as if nothing had changed. I felt the crushing certainty that this additional death was the inevitable punishment for my moment of terrible, unforgivable gladness.

We didn’t say anything for a long time, just listened to the sound of the water dripping.

“So your daughter is all the family you have left, oui?” she said eventually. “Still, it is strange you change your life so completely for your daughter alone. Do not the other people in the army raise children?”

She said it thoughtfully, intrigued by the mental problem this presented but untouched by the enormous tragedy I had just revealed, unaffected by the admission of my terrible sin. Something about her detachment made it easier for me to talk about it as well, as if she saw the event from a different angle, a different dimension, and hearing her voice let me step, just for a moment, into that dimension where the death of my wife and child was just a thing, a thing different from other things, but still just a thing.

“Yes,” I said. “People in the army raised children. Some were single parents. It was hard for them.”

“I do not think hard things frighten you. Ah!” she said, as if she finally understood a great mystery. “You believe in ghosts.”

“No. I don’t believe in ghosts. What are you talking about?”

“You believe you killed your wife by your actions, and so you killed yourself, your old self, the self which made these actions, to make it up to her. But unless she is a ghost, she cannot see this thing, cannot accept your act of atonement. So you must believe in ghosts.

“And the old Jack Fargo, the one you killed, he does not remain dead, does he? Another ghost.”

Ghosts! What did she know? She had Asperger’s. She had a giant hole in her mind where other people had empathy, where other people understood what went on in the heads of the people around them. What did she know about me or about ghosts?

“Family,” she said at last, and there was a distant, thoughtful sound to her voice, as if she talked to herself. “Always it comes back to family.”

An hour, or two, or five later, the door at the head of the stairs creaked and scraped open. Light flooded down the stairs and illuminated every corner of our tiny world, or at least it seemed so, as dilated as my pupils were. Men clumped down the steps and brought lanterns of blinding brilliance with them, forcing my eyes closed until they adjusted to this new reality.

“So, again I meet the man from the future,” a familiar voice with an Eastern European accent said in English.

“So, again I meet the king of the shitheads,” I answered.

He didn’t say anything right away, but then responded, “Can we dispense with verbal sparring? There is a great deal I would like to discuss with you about your time.”

“My time? How about yours? You know, Thomson thinks you’re going to destroy the world with your gizmo, which will have some pretty serious ramifications on my own time, don’t you think? We’re all pretty attached to having a world to live on.”

“Of course he thinks that,” he answered, and I heard laughter in his voice. “The Earth will fall closer to the sun, temperatures will skyrocket—am I right?”

“Something like that.”

“Despite your words, you do not seem overly concerned, Professor Fargo. Tell me, do you believe I am going to destroy the Earth by melting its icecaps?”

I opened my eyelids a slit. The light burned, but I could see.

“No, you’re too smart for that. You’re going to destroy it by altering its magnetic field.”

I could see him well enough to know that took him by surprise. He leaned back, and his eyes widened for an instant, then narrowed in suspicion.

“Thomson says this? Thomson thinks he understands magnetic fields, but no one alive understands them as I do.”

“Except for me,” I said.

“You? You teach history. What do you know of electromagnetism?”

“Not much by the standards of my day, but I took high school physics in 1998, so at least I know what makes the Earth’s magnetic field work, which is more than either you or Thomson do.”

Anger struggled with curiosity for control of his face. Curiosity won.

“Tell me your theory,” he said.

“Well, it’s been a while, but as I remember, an astrophysical body generates a magnetic field with kinetic energy from planetary rotation acting on an electrically conductive fluid, in our case molten iron in the Earth’s core. What you end up with is a gigantic electromagnetic dynamo. And you’re slowing it, aren’t you?”

He paced slowly back and forth in the confines of the dungeon, frowning in thought and occasionally glancing at me, as if gauging my honesty.

“Did Thomson fill you up with this story?”

“No. I didn’t figure it all out myself until today. I had a lot of time to think about stuff down here. But Thomson may put it together himself. He’s a pretty smart cookie.”

Tesla shrugged at that, dismissing it.

“He was, until my men shot him down, along with that Captain Gordon and the others. Jovo Radojica, the voivoda, as well. Ah, I see that surprises you. Yes, all of them, gone, hunted down on the slopes of the mountain and shot like dogs. But what does it matter? Even alive, Thomson posed no real threat to me. Most of the men who might have are already dead.”

Thomson dead? Gordon dead? Maybe Durson and the others as well, or at best scattered fugitives, hiding in the rocks and brush of the mountains. I never really thought Tesla would deliberately kill them. That came from being too many years away from the life of violence, from getting used to the idea that a unique personality could somehow protect you from the worst of life’s reversals. It came from the notion that if you had an interesting enough story to tell, you would get to finish telling it. But you don’t always.

My stomach twisted, and suddenly I vomited. There wasn’t much to come up, other than stomach acid, but I brought it up and then gagged again. Gabrielle and I were alone, chained in a dungeon, with no one left to rely on but each other.

I licked my lips and tasted bile. Now what?

What had Jovo said at the end? Singe the Old Man’s beard. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had left.

“Tesla, the problem really smart loners like you always have is they underestimate the power of collective thought. The British are assembling a committee to look into this and they’ll put the pieces together.”

He scowled.

“A committee! Look into what?”

“Look into why Big Ben is running fast. I read about it in the Times. They’re trying to figure out why they had to slow the pendulum by four tenths of a second a day. I didn’t think anything of it when I read it, but now I understand. Big Ben isn’t running fast; the Earth’s running slow. Your Forever Engine gizmo is not slowing the Earth’s orbital speed, is it? You’re not repeating the Martian mistake. It’s slowing the rotation of the earth, bleeding off rotational momentum and turning it into electricity, a great big turbine. But it won’t take long for the British observatories to figure out the rotation has slowed slightly, because the night stars are going to rise and set at the wrong times. Put that together with the survey work of the Royal Navy—”

“What survey work?” he demanded.

“The magnetic mapping surveys they’ve been doing for decades. They’ve measured a slight decrease in the Earth’s magnetic field in the past year. They don’t know what it means—yet. But they’ll put it all together, because you didn’t count on the reduction in rotational speed reducing the magnetic field.”

He stared at me for a long moment, then shook his head.

“How can I believe you were able to reason this through with such limited information? You are not a scientist. You teach history.”

“I’m smarter than I look,” I said.

“I must think about this,” he said abruptly and turned to go.

“Wait!” Gabrielle called out, the first words she had spoken in hours. “There is something I must show you.”

“Ah, the French spy,” Tesla said, turning back to us. A guard shifted his lantern to illuminate her, and she squinted in the light. I noticed Gabrielle and I had both become monochromatic, and not simply from the harsh lighting. Now that we were dry, our hair, skin, and clothing had all turned the gray of the streambed.

“I warn you,” he said, “I am immune to your charms, even if they were more . . . presentable, but especially now”

“I would never attempt to seduce you. It would be highly inappropriate,” she answered.

“An interesting choice of words. What is it you want?”

Gabrielle’s blouse hung open almost to her waist, showing her upper undergarment. She reached in and drew out a locket.

“To show you this.”

I’d noticed she wore a locket but hadn’t thought anything of it. Now I realized it was the only jewelry she ever wore. I suppose I subconsciously put that down to proletarian austerity, the whole Garde Rouge thing. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

Tesla stood motionless for a moment.

“Is this a trick?” he said.

“Non. Have one of your men open it if you like. It is simply a locket with an image inside.”

“Why would I care about that?”

“That is for you to say,” she said.

He hesitated for perhaps half a minute, then reached forward and swept the locket from her hand, opened it with his eyes on her face, searching for a reaction in advance, then held the locket up close to a lantern and looked.

He said nothing at first, did not react at all, until the seconds rolled on and his lack of movement itself became a reaction.

“Where did you get this?” he asked without looking up, his voice strained.

“It was my mother’s.”

“Why did she have it?”

“It was an image of her lover, the man who was my father but whom I never met.”

“They put you up to this. They concocted this story for you. Admit it!”

“Non. My mother traveled in the Balkans as a young woman, was seduced by a married man, returned to France carrying me, and died without ever telling me who was my father. All I have of hers is the locket. When I grew older, I came to work for Le Direction Centrale des Renseignements Généraux, the DCRG. I did many things, but last year my superiors assigned me to research you. I am the very meticulous researcher. I sought out everything about the subject. When I did, I found an image of your father—our father.

“I told no one, but I made certain that when an expedition was sent to find you, to it I would be indispensable.”

Tesla lowered the locket and took a step closer to Gabrielle, leaned forward to examine her more closely.

“And France?” he asked. “Do you feel no loyalty to your country?”

“I try,” she answered. “I try, but a country is not real. The people, the cities and towns, the rivers, these things are real. But the country itself lives only on maps, and in the imagination of people. It is hard to be loyal to an imaginary thing.”

He nodded in understanding.

“A person must be loyal to something,” he said, “a principle, an ideal, some great goal.”

“Oui,” she agreed. “And I have searched for such a thing all my life. What is worthy of loyalty? This is what I found: people are loyal to the family. For soldiers, the regiment is the family. Many people imagine their family encompasses an occupation, a political movement, even an entire nation, but their loyalty to it is strong only so long as they believe it is still their family, n’est-cepas? Always it comes back to family.”

Always it comes back to family.

Of course it did. Gabrielle never stopped asking me questions about Sarah and Joanne, about my family, the things which happened to us, how we felt about each other and why. Had this whole trip really been engineered by Gabrielle just to meet her half-brother, her only surviving family?

She said it would be “highly inappropriate” to seduce Tesla. Boy, talk about understatement! As I sat there and watched them in profile, her looking up, him looking down, any doubt I had as to their common ancestry vanished—both brilliant, both eccentric, both socially . . . odd. Tesla probably had a leg up in the brains department, and Gabrielle was a lot more concerned with finding her heart in all this, but here were two branches from the same tree.

When I had rattled off the famous and brilliant people who were likely Asperger’s candidates, I had left out Tesla, even though he was near the top of the list. I’d done so because I thought that revelation might horrify rather than comfort Gabrielle. Now I remembered something else about Asperger’s: it was usually transmitted through the male line.

Tesla gave an order in Serbian to the guards. One of them unlocked Gabrielle’s fetters, and Tesla helped her to her feet.

“I am not yet sure what to do about you,” he said to her. “But we have a great deal to talk about before either of us can make an intelligent decision.”

“Yes,” she said. “I believe that is so.”

She glanced at me, then turned back to Tesla.

“Jack Fargo will not be hurt? He has been very good to me.”

“I may have need of him. I will explain all that in due time. For now I have to leave him here. I think I will win him over, but I cannot afford to let him escape before I do so.”

“Oui,” she agreed. “He is very dangerous.”

They started to leave, Gabrielle limping and Tesla supporting her weight, but Gabrielle paused at the foot of the stairs and turned to me again. She looked at me intently, frowning in concentration the way she always did when trying to solve a puzzle.

“I told you to leave me, Jack. I told you I would be all right.”