Ben Mezrich new book The Mistress and the Key, chapter one

Living the dream.

Jeff Pokowski, forty-six and built like a fire hydrant, cursed to himself as he furiously dabbed at the coffee stain spreading across the middle of his flannel shirt while simultaneously navigating his oversized pickup truck down a mostly desolate stretch of the Schuylkill Expressway. The coffee wasn’t his fault; the damn night-shift kid at the twenty-four-hour gas station near his house in Glenside— the sort of working-class suburb that lately felt more working than class— was either perpetually stoned or stupid, more likely a combination of both. He’d overfilled Pokowski’s order again, taxing the structural integrity of the disposable cup and its plastic cover, which had obviously been designed by someone equally stoned or equally stupid. Then again, Pokowski had a growing suspicion that most people he met, worked with, or was related to were incompetent. In most lines of work, that didn’t matter much: A keyboard warrior at some accounting company screws up, someone’s paycheck is late; a kid at a gas station overfills a coffee cup, maybe he ruins someone’s morning. But in Pokowski’s profession— construction— lack of attention had a tendency to domino. Measure a beam wrong or put a few screws out of place, ten moves later, you got a building collapsing on the nightly news.

Which was why it wasn’t completely unusual for him to be spiriting his truck down the Schuylkill at four thirty a.m. on a Tuesday. He was the head site manager— what they used to call a foreman— on Apex Development’s newest project, a twenty-six story mixed-use office tower and retail monolith squatting near City Hall. As such, he’d enjoyed plenty of face‑to‑face time with the pimply teenager working the midnight‑to‑five at the Citgo station by the ramp to the expressway.

Still, today’s call had been more annoying than most. As Pokowski continued attacking the coffee stain, which was now roughly the shape of Texas and still spreading, he tossed a glance at his phone on the passenger seat.

Six automated calls, actually, beginning around two a.m., from the worksite’s security panel. Not quite a misplaced beam or an errant screw but, according to the calls, at least one of the proximity alarms at the site had been going off for nearly three hours now.

Neither of the two overnight security guards had called in from location or reset the password. Worse, neither of the bozos— Ted Passatore, a sliver of a kid who’d busted out of cop school six months ago, and Lucas Balloux, a Canadian working his way through some sort of grad school at the city college— had answered their cells when Pokowski had tried them. He’d finally given up and crawled out of bed, nearly overturning Annie, his wife, in the process. She had a habit of sleeping with one of her legs draped over the lower half of Pokowski’s body, which had seemed sexy for the first seven years of their marriage, but now felt more albatross than swan. Thirteen years in, she’d barely stirred as he’d gotten dressed in the dark. Pokowski hadn’t been overly concerned; no doubt, the two security guards had wandered off their posts for an unregistered break. For Teddy, it would be par for the course; the kid had been kicked out of cop school for a laundry list of minor indiscretions, and he was a frequent visitor to many of Philadelphia’s after-hours bars. If the job market hadn’t gotten so tight in the previous couple of years, Pokowski never would have hired him. But Teddy had come with a license to carry and a promise that he would do his best to reform. Pokowski had always been a sucker for screwups begging for a second chance.

Lucas was more of a surprise; the guy spoke four languages and brought philosophy textbooks with him to his shift. But Pokowski knew how boring it could get on a worksite during those hours after midnight, when the streets went dead save for the late-night bar hoppers, the odd and ambling flocks of homeless, and the ever present scurry of oversize sidewalk rats.

Whatever the reason for the lack of response, Pokowski had had no choice but to drag his ass down to Center City. Ten minutes more and his Ford was now slithering through narrow streets, a densely packed span of modern and old, lined on either side by gentrified rental apartments and ritzy retail stores with glass facades and imposing front steps. These were not the eighteenth-century row houses he’d have passed in Old City, or the colorful awnings, diverse eateries, and dive bars he’d find in South Philly. Here, the cars parked on the curbs were mostly black, fancy, and foreign.

He made his final turn onto Seventh Street and immediately saw a familiar gap in the urban sprawl—a high chain-link fence, running the length of a football field, that outlined his worksite.

His heart beat a little harder as he parked his truck alongside the fence. There was something thrilling about a site at this stage in the development phase. Even though an office building wasn’t exactly the Taj Mahal, the idea that soon something huge and permanent would rise out of the scar of dirt on the other side of the fence, changing the landscape of the city for perhaps centuries to come, was a heady thing to contemplate.

But the feeling was short-lived. As he stepped out of his truck and onto the sidewalk it was hard not to notice that behind the fence there was a palpable lack of dinosaurs— no diggers or excavators or dump trucks, just a long stretch of churned‑up dirt lit by various lanterns hanging from orange extension cords.

The dinosaurs had been pulled off the job four days ago—barely a week into the initial foundation dig— and Pokowski couldn’t even hazard a guess as to when they would be back.

He grimaced as he moved along the sidewalk toward the entrance gate a dozen yards down the fence. Of course, he’d had worksites shuttered many times before; no matter how much preparation went in before groundbreaking, issues could always pop up.

Sewer problems, electrical complications, even the rare sinkhole that somehow eluded the geological surveys and sonar flyovers, which could translate to weeks of overtime as the teams of engineers figured out a workaround— but there was almost always a workaround. Once, on a project just south of Center City, Pokowski had been on a site that had ground to a stop when a shovel team had uncovered a dead body; that had been a headache and a half, once Philly PD had gotten involved and turned the whole damn place into a crime scene. Pokowski could imagine that plenty of champagne flowed around Apex Development’s head offices when the ME determined the man had OD’d on fentanyl, negating the need for a homicide investigation or a lengthy trial, and the police tape had come down almost as quickly as it had gone up.

But Pokowski knew this situation wasn’t going to be anywhere near as simple to solve. This particular stoppage had nothing to do with sinkholes or dead junkies. Hell, this headache was the sort of thing that could only happen in a handful of places, a rarified list of geographical locations. Center City, Philadelphia, just happened to be one of them.

He reached the gate and drew a key from his belt, but then he realized the lock was already open. Damn— not only had the two idiots left their posts, they hadn’t secured the site on their way out. Anyone could have wandered in. With Pokowski’s luck, a herd of homeless might have already set up a camp by the port‑a‑potties, and he’d need a court order before he’d get any help from the local PD to get them rousted. He shook his head in anger as he pushed through the gate, and into the wide-open dirt field of his worksite. A glance toward the village of blue portable lavatories, in the nearest corner of the wide, rectangular field, set his mind a little at ease. But it wasn’t really the port‑a‑potties that captured his attention as he let the gate shut behind him; his thoughts instinctively followed the makeshift path that ran down the center of the vast site, lit by a string of lanterns hanging from fence posts that had been driven into the thick, upturned dirt.

Thirty feet in, the dimly lit path ended in what looked to be a dark indentation in the dirt; he’d been there the morning that the shovel crew had dug through the four feet of topsoil— and had seen the looks on their faces when the lower ridge of their excavator’s scoop had clanged against something that damn well wasn’t supposed to be there.

He made short work of the dimly lit path, his workboots thudding against the packed dirt as he went. He slowed as he reached the lip of the decline, then lowered himself to the top rung of the short ladder his crew had set up when they’d first realized what they’d found. The sound his boots made when they hit the flattened-out ground beneath the ladder was decidedly different; even though there was still a thin layer of topsoil, it was obvious that beneath the dirt was something hard, a layer of stone. At first, his crew had assumed it was natural, a bit of limestone that the geological survey had missed or an underground boulder that was angled just right to have confused the sonar. But then Pokowski had given his guys the go‑ahead to start scraping away the dirt— and he’d seen, along with the rest of them, that there was nothing natural about what they had found.

The surface beneath this area of their dig site was indeed stone, but not a single, sheer layer, like he would have expected. It was made up of what appeared to be small, polished individual stones, that had been cobbled together with some sort of mortar he was not familiar with. Breaking protocol, Pokowski had been curious enough to turn one of his drill teams loose on a section of the mortared stones; when they’d suddenly broken through to some sort of underground cavern, Pokowski had realized they’d found something well beyond his pay grade.

Then again, a cobbled‑up cavern that wasn’t supposed to be there, on its own, probably wouldn’t have been enough to shut down a worksite that was conservatively costing Apex three hundred thousand dollars a day. But then Pokowski’s geological engineers had climbed down through the hole his drill team had cut into the stones, then come back up with wide eyes and gaping jaws— and Pokowski knew his life was about to get complicated.

Eight hours later, an entire battalion of PhDs from the city’s Historical Heritage Foundation had been trampling through his worksite, sporting notebooks and digital cameras, looking like kids on Christmas morning.

Now, standing at the edge of the cobblestones, Pokowski peered through the darkened opening, which his crew had carved into a shape resembling a manhole and outfitted with a steel-runged ladder. He shook his head again. Twenty years on the job, he’d never had a stoppage caused by an archeological find. Although he himself hadn’t been down into the hole— the Heritage wonks had made it exceedingly clear that nobody was to set foot in what was now the property of the City of Philadelphia— he’d been told that it was going to make national news when the HHF finally released their findings, and photos, to the media.

As he stood there, in the dim light of the lanterns, and looked at that inviting, gaping manhole— Pokowski had to admit he was a little curious. He wondered if Teddy and Lucas had maybe gotten a little curious themselves. Had a few drinks at one of the afterhours places then stumbled back, setting off the proximity alarms, and climbed down to take a look.

Pokowski leaned his head down toward the opening and listened. He didn’t hear anyone mucking about down there, but that didn’t really mean anything. From the amount of time the HHF folks had spent down the bottom of that ladder, he was pretty sure whatever was there was more extensive than a single cobblestone cavern. He rubbed his jaw, then decided he might as well check it out. He was, after all, head site manager. A mouthful like that had to come with some level of discretion, didn’t it?

He heaved himself over the edge and started down the ladder. It wasn’t until Pokowski stepped off the last rung that he realized the floor of the cavern was made of the same cobblestone as the ceiling, now a good eight feet above his head. It took him a moment to find the switch for the string of electric torches his engineers had strung in random twists along the walls. As the dim orange light flickered through the space, Pokowski saw immediately that whoever had constructed the cavern had been skilled, careful, and precise. The walls had been mortared together with very few gaps, and the handful of wooden beams and cross boarded rafters that held the ceiling up had been lacquered in some sort of preservative. Even after being sealed up for an incredible length of time, they had barely warped, certainly not enough to have given the structural engineers who had first climbed down here any real concerns about the place caving in.

It was a strange feeling, stepping forward into a place that had been sealed up for what the HHF wonks figured were more than two and a half centuries. When someone had last strolled across these stones, names like Washington and Jefferson weren’t simply embedded on street signs or splashed through the pages of history books. This place was history. Even in Philadelphia, finding a perfectly preserved structure from the Revolutionary War era was nearly unheard of. The last thing the HHF could compare the discovery to was when a demolition of a bank building on Fifty-Third Street had revealed a vault dating back to the turn of the twentieth century, still containing three saddle bags filled with banknotes. One step forward into the cavern, and Pokowski could tell that the HHF had stumbled onto something much more exciting than a money-filled vault.

The walls on either side of him were lined with wooden shelves, the wood held together by the same shiny preservative that coated the main beams. The lowest shelves were mainly taken up by books— thick volumes, many with gilded covers that might have been lined with silver and gold. He couldn’t quite make out the titles in the dim lighting, but he wasn’t interested enough in the reading material of the time to take a closer look. More interesting were the items on the higher shelves. Glass jars, beakers, and test tubes, interspersed with devices that looked like old-fashioned scales, oil lamps, and mechanical objects he couldn’t begin to identify. He recognized gears and hand cranks, but could not imagine what the various machines were used for, or what they were doing in this underground cavern— His thoughts paused as he heard a noise from directly ahead— some sort of shuffling sound, perhaps workboots against the cobbled floor. He peered forward and saw that the cavern he was in curved to the right, into what appeared to be a narrow hallway.

“Lucas? Teddy? You morons down here?”

Maybe he was being a little harsh, but he knew how much trouble he himself would get into if the HHF figured out that he had been poking around in their sandbox. Lucas and Teddy were looking at a quick firing, possibly even a citation for trespassing.

To Pokowski’s surprise, there was no answer from up ahead. He took a breath, tasting musty air, and started forward. Four steps, and he’d crossed the cavern and entered the hallway, which ran several more yards, then turned a sharp corner into what looked like an open space, maybe twice as big as the one he had just come from. As he reached the threshold, he noticed that the room was significantly darker than the one he had just moved through. Though the electric torches continued along the walls on either side, it appeared that a number of the bulbs toward the far end of the room had either blown out or been unscrewed.

As he crossed into the large space, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust. There were more shelves on either side, piled high with more devices, and he got the immediate feeling that this was some sort of laboratory. He hadn’t been a great student in middle school and he didn’t know much about Revolutionary times. Muskets and cannons and crap like that; did they even have scientists yet? Wasn’t it an era still dominated by things like witchcraft and astrology? He took another step forward, searching ahead for the two security guards. Beyond the shelves, he began to see more objects he couldn’t identify: more mechanical-looking machines, some quite large, with gears and levers and sporting hand cranks and foot pedals. But his attention quickly shifted from the devices to three much more recognizable objects at the very far end of the room. Three heavy wooden chairs, facing him. One more step deeper into the darkened space— then he realized the chairs on the ends were occupied.

He immediately recognized Lucas, on the chair to the far left. The young grad student turned security guard was sitting straight up against the wood, his wide shoulders back and his arms resting on the chair’s thick armrests. He was in his uniform, which looked starched and clean, and the badge on his shirt glinted in the sparse light. But above his collar, his face looked— wrong. His blue eyes were open, wide, as was his mouth. But even from a distance, Pokowski could see that his skin was abnormally pale. Almost white, like porcelain.

Pokowski’s gaze shifted to the other occupied chair. Even with the uniform, it took Pokowski an extra second to recognize Teddy. The kid was also upright against the wood, arms against the armrests. But where Lucas’s face was abnormally white, Teddy’s face was—

“Christ,” Pokowski gasped, stumbling backward. Before he could turn and run, something moved toward him incredibly fast. He felt an arm twist around his neck and then he lost his footing. The arm tightened around his throat, cutting off his blood supply, and for a moment the room darkened. He felt himself being dragged forward, his 180-pound frame nothing more than a bag of feathers. A moment later, he was shoved backward into the empty seat between the two security guards. His arms were yanked behind his back, twisted at an odd and excruciating angle, then bound together at the wrists by something that felt like wire. He struggled, but he was pinned to the chair by his arms, and even the most minor motion caused the wires to dig into his skin.

The figure came around in front of him. It was a man, indeterminate age, thin, angular, with high, bony cheekbones. The man’s skin was almost translucent, and his blond hair was thinning and perfectly cut; it appeared the effort of dragging Pokowski across the underground chamber hadn’t displaced a single strand. The man straightened the sleeves of his impeccably cut, skyblue suit, then cocked his head to one side. “Mr. Pokowski?”

Pokowski looked at the man, bewildered. His arms were killing him, and his chest was heaving against the coffee stain painting the plaid of his shirt.

“Your colleagues were kind enough to inform me that you’d be stopping by, when they were unable to check in.”

Pokowski swallowed, feeling the bruises rising around his throat from the man’s obviously practiced chokehold. “Who are you?”

“Not really relevant. It’s much more important who you are. You see, your colleagues were unable to provide me with the information that I need. Not for lack of trying— they were quite agreeable chaps— after a fashion.”

Pokowski glanced toward Lucas, to his right. The Canadian wasn’t moving, and his skin seemed even more glassy and pale up close. Pokowski shifted to his left, toward Teddy— but stopped himself before his gaze settled on the poor kid’s face.

“Stay with me,” the thin man in the suit continued. “As I said, I need information. It’s really quite simple. Two days ago, an engraving made its way to a pawnshop not three blocks from your worksite. This engraving was very intriguing to my employers.”

The man reached into his suit jacket and removed a photograph. Pokowski squinted to get a better look. It was black-and-white, a picture of a picture— the engraving, he assumed. It showed two men in some sort of workshop. On a table between the men were two objects; even in a photograph of an engraving, the objects were easily recognizable.

A kite. And a key.

At least one of the men in the photo was also familiar, maybe both. But Pokowski was finding it hard to concentrate on something he might have learned about in seventh grade, while tied to a chair between two dead bodies.

“I don’t know anything about that,” he finally murmured.

“No, I wouldn’t expect you would.”

The man put the photograph back into his jacket.

“I spent some quality time with the owner of the pawnshop, but unfortunately the man wasn’t helpful at all. Not entirely his fault; an octogenarian, half-blind. He couldn’t give me much to go on as to the identity of the individual who had sold him the engraving. But he had confirmed that the seller had in his possession a number of remarkable items that might be of similar appeal to my benefactors.”

The man turned, casting a gaze over the shelves loaded with artifacts behind him.

“A minor bit of detective work brought me here, to this . . . place. A mid-eighteenth-century laboratory accidentally unearthed by your excavators, just a few miles from the old man and his pawnshop. Seemed like a likely place to start, don’t you think?”

The man’s eyes settled on an odd, rather large piece of equipment standing next to the shelf; it was some sort of machine, made mostly of wood, about four feet high. The base was an oversized pedestal, on top of which sat a round glass ball, the size and shape of a fishbowl. The ball sat on a cushion of what appeared to be rough felt; above it, a complex system of gears connected to a pair of pulleys, which ran all the way down to the ground, where Pokowski noticed an oversized foot pedal. Next to the pedal, a pair of what appeared to be long metal needles ran from the machine to a series of glass panels, which were hanging by strings from a strange copper rack. On the other side of the panels was another long needle, attached to a length of thin copper wire.

“It’s quite an exquisite piece, don’t you think? According to my employers, who were intrigued by the photos I forwarded them before you arrived, it’s an electrostatic generator, attached to a series of modified Leyden jars. Circa 1750. It was a marvel of the time period.”

The man stepped toward the machine and returned holding the long needle. The copper wire snaked out behind him as he approached Pokowski’s chair. Pokowski noticed that the base of the needle where the man gripped it tightly was covered in some sort of dark rubber.

“Though it seems rudimentary today, this device represented a groundbreaking advancement in man’s mastery of his environment. Static electricity was generated, and then captured, through conduction into glass batteries. You wouldn’t think so from looking at it, but this device is capable of generating ten times the voltage of your average commercial electrical socket.”

He held the needle in front of him, turning it in his hand.

“At the time, it was used mostly for parlor tricks. ‘Electrical fire,’ they called it, scientific advancement in the form of a magician’s act. In the court of Louis XIV, a hundred and eighty soldiers standing in a line, holding hands, were made to jump into the air from a single, small charge. Game birds were regularly killed and cooked, for audiences in the dozens. Giant sparks lit up darkened theaters, to grandiose applause.”

The man seemed to smirk, as he turned the tip of the needle toward Pokowski. “Trivial applications of such a powerful invention, in my opinion. But it’s not the brush that creates great art; it’s the hand that holds it.”

Pokowski stared at that needle, hanging just a few feet in front of where he was pinned to the chair. He felt his throat constricting.

“What do you want from me?” he pleaded. “I don’t know anything about any pawnshop.”

“But you do know who might have had access to this place. You could give me a list of names, likely threads to follow. Access to employee files, current addresses.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want,” Pokowski blurted, still staring at that needle.

The man paused. But the smirk remained, as he lifted a foot and placed it on the pedal at the base of the electrostatic device. He gave it a single pump, and Pokowski’s gaze shot to the glass ball, which had begun to spin.

There was a sizzling sound, and Pokowski felt the hair on his arms rise. Suddenly the man was moving forward, the needle shifting toward Pokowski’s face.

“Wait,” Pokowski said. “I said I’ll tell you everything!”

“I’m sure you will,” the man said, but the needle kept moving closer. Pokowski squirmed against the chair. His arms fought against the wire, which dug into his wrists. He arched back, but the needle was now only inches from his face. He turned his head to the side. Despite himself, he was looking right at Teddy, and now he couldn’t avoid seeing the poor kid’s face. Unlike Lucas’s, the kid’s skin was bright red, a color that reminded Pokowski of a boiled lobster, or maybe the way the sun might look, in an hour or two, when the first flecks of dawn woke the city above this damn cavern, or laboratory, or tomb. Bright red, even more so than the kid’s rigid, open mouth. But Teddy’s skin wasn’t the worst part. The worst part— his eyes.

Teddy’s eyes were no longer in their sockets. They were hanging, lifeless, down against his cheeks, from the burned, tangled cords of his optic nerves.

Pokowski started to scream, but the needle was already arcing toward his chin. A second later, his entire world went white.

Excerpted from THE MISTRESS AND THE KEY by Ben Mezrich. Copyright © 2024 by Ben Mezrich. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.