“Did they report any anomalies on their ship? Anything to do with magnetic fields?”

“You’re referring to the story of the Mohican?”

Cabrillo nodded.

“Of course I investigated that tale as best I could. Nothing like what that crew experienced happened on the observers’ boat, but, in full disclosure, I must say they were in a wooden-hulled sloop. The Aral Sea, you say?”

“Yes. What do you think happened?”

Tennyson went quiet. His eyes behind the tortoiseshell glasses had gone vacant as he stared into the middle distance.

“What is it, Professor? What are you thinking?”

“I’m not sure,” Tennyson finally admitted. “The Lady Marguerite vanished that night. Of that, there is no doubt. And you say you found her in Kazakhstan.”

“The Uzbek side of the Aral,” Juan corrected.

His gaze still fixed on an object only he could see, Tennyson said, “Nikola died in January of 1943. There was a rumor of a story that came out of Philadelphia later that same year—October, to be precise. It involved another Navy project using the ship the USS Eldridge.”

Cabrillo knew enough of the subject, thanks to Mark Murphy’s rantings, to say, “You’re not talking about the Philadelphia Experiment, are you? That was completely debunked.”

Tennyson turned his gaze on Cabrillo, his eyes fierce. “Debunked? You just found the Lady Marguerite in Uzbekistan and you’re willing to discount the story of a Navy ship vanishing from Philadelphia and reappearing in Richmond, Virginia? The tale goes on that the ship then returned to her home port with some of the crew fused to the deck in grotesque tableaux while others were driven mad by their experience.” He paused to get a grip on his emotions. “I’m sorry, John. This is all so overwhelming. There was so much more to Nikola than I could ever write about. He was a genius in the way Einstein was a genius except history has completely forgotten him because so much of what he accomplished has been dismissed as speculation and rumor.”

“So what happened in Philadelphia?” Juan said softly to prompt the professor along.

“Right . . . Philadelphia. Not long after Nikola’s death, the FBI took control of part of his estate under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover himself. They raided the hotel room he lived in in Manhattan and also seized property he owned on the Philadelphia waterfront. The story of the USS Eldridge is bull. But it remains the basis of what they discovered in that waterside warehouse. What happened to the Eldridge wasn’t the story. What they found in Nikola’s warehouse was.”

Without a doubt, Tennyson had Cabrillo’s full attention. “What did they find?”