Paul replayed his first meeting with Fessenden in Indiana.
“Of course he didn’t,” said Morgan. “Your next question is going to be about why Fessenden sent you in the direction of what’s his name, Tesla. Because Edison thought it would be a waste of your time. Fessenden had to appear to be helpful, while telling you something that wouldn’t actually help at all. And so we figured we’d make use of that loony Serbian nut. Thomas got a copy of his engineering society lecture long before he delivered it; told me it was ridiculous. Which gave me the idea of sending you after him in the first place. That you managed to actually get some use out of that man—that was unexpected. It didn’t make Thomas happy, I can tell you.”
Paul felt suddenly naked, his thoughts and plans and seemingly clever moves over the past years now revealed to be but a pathetic sham. Edison had been outplaying them from the very start.
“You believed you were hiring an apostate. What you were actually hiring was a Trojan horse. Fessenden took the job with your client specifically so that he could gain access to the latest Westinghouse technology. Bit of an irony, really, since Westinghouse thought he was getting access to Edison’s.”
“But,” Paul countered, “Edison never made use of alternating current. If Fessenden has been leaking Westinghouse’s designs—and you already had Tesla’s lecture—Edison must have seen that it was superior to his own direct-current work. If what you’re telling me is true, then how is it that Edison never created an A/C device?”
“Ah,” said Morgan. “That’s just the thing: Edison disagreed with your supposition. He saw the full reports. I did too, for that matter, not that I paid much mind to the technical gibberish. Edison thought he knew better. His advocacy of direct current—perhaps a mistaken one, as it turns out—did not come from a place of subterfuge. He genuinely believed, after surveying all of his own research and all of yours as well, that his system was the better one.”
“He wasn’t dishonest, but instead merely incompetent?”
“I would more charitably suggest that he simply followed the available evidence to a different conclusion. Scientists. You ask one hundred of them a simple question, you get one hundred different answers. They’re a necessary annoyance in the industrial business, I suppose.”
“This was all your idea,” said Paul. “Fessenden. Tesla. The whole ruse.”
“Of course it was. Thomas isn’t nearly devious enough to come up with something like this on his own.”
“This past autumn, when you were blocking our attempts to find new investors—this is how you knew who we were going to before we got there. This is how you were able to contact them first.”
Morgan looked pleased. “I’d been wondering if you’d figured that out.”
Paul had been in over his head from the moment he’d taken on the Westinghouse case. He’d been drowning in water even deeper than he’d known.
Paul was clever. Tesla, Edison, and Westinghouse were geniuses. What was Morgan? Paul felt himself in the presence of something else entirely.
“Is this the part where you pretend to be so much more noble than I am?” asked Morgan. “I’d rather not bother, if it’s all the same to you.”
“I didn’t illegally place a spy in your company, Mr. Morgan.”
Morgan spent a long moment looking Paul up and down. “Do you know what awaits you at the end of this, Mr. Cravath? I have a notion that you’re going to gain all of the riches that you desire. Congratulations, in advance. But have you considered what you might have to give up in return?”
“What’s that?”
“The illusion that you ever deserved it.”
Morgan gazed thoughtfully at a bronze statue. It depicted a warrior, spear in hand, galloping on horseback into a great and long-forgotten war.
“Poor people all think they deserve to be rich,” he continued. “Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.”
Morgan spoke as if they were the same class of men. As if Morgan were Paul’s own reflection in a darkened mirror.
“Westinghouse is likely with Fessenden at this very moment,” said Paul.
“I’m sure.”
“I must speak with him. If he tells Fessenden about our plan…”
Paul prepared to run off to the nearest Western Union office, before he had a better idea.
“Mr. Morgan,” said Paul as he turned to face him. “I’ll ask you for one more favor.”
“Yes.”
“Could you find me a telephone?”
The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.
—NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON
AS IT HAPPENED, Luigi di Cesnola kept a telephone in his private office on the museum’s third floor. As the device had been a gift from Morgan, Cesnola was more than happy to let the banker’s young friend make use of it while he and Morgan smoked in the corridor outside. Paul listened nervously to the odd ringing noises emanating from the black earpiece he held up to his ear.
A laboratory assistant finally picked up on the other end of the line. Paul demanded to speak urgently to George Westinghouse.
“Paul?” came the scratchy but recognizable voice of George Westinghouse through the earpiece. It felt more like he was speaking with a ghost than with another human being. There was Westinghouse’s incorporeal voice, right there, pressed against Paul’s right ear. The personhood of Westinghouse had been reduced to a voice in the ether.
“Are you completely alone?” said Paul.
“Did you meet with Morgan? Did he go for it?”
“Is anyone with you in the laboratory at the moment? Next to you, while we’re speaking? That assistant I just spoke with?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Please. Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
Paul could tell even this far away that Westinghouse was dismayed at the tenor of this conversation. But it couldn’t be helped.
“Then listen close.”
Paul explained as plainly as he could what Morgan had told him. Westinghouse was shocked at first and then incredulous. The lead engineer on all of his electrical projects had been working in secret for their enemy? Was Paul suggesting that he was some sort of fool?
“I’ll have the police here within the hour,” said Westinghouse. His disbelief and embarrassment had given way to a righteous anger. “False representation, intellectual theft, broken employment contracts, simple fraud—I will see him shackled before sundown.”
“That was my initial reaction as well,” said Paul calmly into the receiver. “Then I thought better of it.”
“Why?”
“Where is Fessenden now?”
“The lab, I should assume. Gathering up every detail of my work on—”
“Can you keep him there? And keep him out of the meetings you’ll need to have in the coming days concerning Edison?”
“Why would I do that? He should be arrested.”
“Think it through, sir. If you arrest Fessenden, what happens?”
There was silence on the line as Westinghouse went through the same series of thoughts that Paul had run through only a few minutes before.
“…Edison will know that we discovered his spy,” said Westinghouse.
“Yes.”
“He’ll assume that one of his own people ratted him out.”
“Yes.”
“And then he’ll go looking for a rotten apple inside his own barrel.”
“Which,” said Paul, “is exactly what we do not want him doing.”
“So what else would you propose?”
“Can you give Fessenden a task? Some sort of project—it can be a waste of time, I don’t care what it is—to keep him busy?”
“I’m sure I can come up with something,” said Westinghouse.
“Do that. Meanwhile, we might be able to get some real use out of Fessenden yet.”
“How?”
“Anything we tell him will leak back to Edison.”
“Yes.”
“Whether or not it’s true.”
Westinghouse could not see the grin on Paul’s face as these last words were spoken. And yet as Paul listened patiently to the quiet clicks and hisses of the telephone wire, he hoped that far away, in an oak-lined office in the countryside near Pittsburgh, Westinghouse was grinning too.
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.