Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  “As it turns out,” said Mavis, enjoying herself, “not so much.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  Mavis’ smile widened until she looked like one of the crocodiles sunning on the riverbank not half a mile from where they now sat. She fished a note pad from her drawer and made a point of consulting it.

  “Your father has terminated all fiscal support for this project,” she said. “I spoke to him personally, warning him that this might jeopardize your position here since it has been, as I am sure you are aware, somewhat vexed.”

  “And?” Jennifer prompted again, keen to get this over.

  “Apparently,” said Mavis, “and believe me when I say that I really can’t imagine why, he wants you to come home.”

  JENNIFER MARCHED AWAY FROM THE THATCHED HUT AND stopped, breathless, under a devil thorn in the gathering dusk, and released the tie around her chestnut ponytail so that it broke in a ragged wave around her shoulders. She was wearing khaki shorts that left her long, tanned legs bare from thigh to calf, her feet encased in sturdy boots. She thumbed open another button of her sky blue safari shirt and wafted the fabric, sweat running down her chest. Overhead, a flight of royal ibises rehearsed their raucous calls, and somewhere, she heard, first, the roar of an automobile engine, and then the call of a hippo. Further down the road, she could see the children in their uniforms making their way home after school, chattering in Siswati, some of them laughing and jumping about with the kind of childish delight she rarely saw in England these days. Her rage faltered, and she was struck with a sudden sadness that felt like failure. She snatched her cell phone from her pocket, then remembered she would have no signal out here. She would have to drive to Mbabane, just to talk to her meddling father. The thought of the drive on narrow, uneven roads in twilight, pausing for cattle and warthogs in the road, and then his smooth, patronizing tones when she finally reached him, made her anger spike anew.

  This is so like him …

  She cursed loudly, a stream of furious invective that made some of the kids down the road strain to hear what the funny white woman was shouting about. When she felt suitably chastened, she took a long breath, restored the ponytail to keep her hair out of her face, and climbed into the Jeep.

  3

  EDWARD

  Hampshire, England, Present Day

  EDWARD QUINN PLACED THE PHONE ON THE EDGE OF his polished mahogany desk and considered it. She wouldn’t call. Not yet, at least. Possibly not at all. He rubbed his face, feeling the jowly flesh move. He had put on weight over the years. He didn’t know when exactly. It had just happened, like a slow poisoning, all those years sitting in boardrooms, eating foie gras and drinking port. He avoided mirrors now, not so much disgusted by his own swelling bulk as disappointed with the loss of who he once was.

  That was why Jennifer wouldn’t call back. She could pontificate about the evils of capitalism, but he sensed in her, lately, less moral outrage and more of something simpler, a disappointment in him for not being the father she had once believed in. It used to make him angry, but now, slowing with age and afflicted by all the persistent little ailments that came with it, he felt only loss. And sadness.

  It was time to do something about it.

  She had no right to be indignant, he reminded himself, lighting a cigar. She had been raised wanting for nothing and had been sent to the best possible schools, where she had flourished. He had given her everything. Too much, perhaps. It had all come so easily for her, and now, almost a decade clear of her Oxford graduation, she was still drifting from one save-the-world project to another, without focus or any larger sense of purpose. Certainly she was smart, and strong, and clever. She worked tirelessly. He couldn’t deny her that, pouring every ounce of her heart and soul into whatever she was doing, as if nothing on the planet was more important, but then she would read about a new endangered species, or a virulent disease, something that needed saving or preventing, and she would walk out and get on the next plane to South America or Africa. She could do so because he made sure she could, providing her with a constant stream of funds from the various businesses he owned, money she so despised. He had never thought her a hypocrite, but he would be lying if he didn’t say that there were times when he thought that she had also disappointed him. She had so much talent. So much energy and resourcefulness. Scattered like crumbs before pigeons.

  But dwelling on it would avail him nothing.

  Quinn turned to his desktop computer and accessed his protected files with a series of complex passcodes. “Protected,” the hackers he had hired to break in had remarked. That was an understatement. He had employed a deep encryption system based on lattice reduction and other forms of asymmetrical algorithms, linked in chains and separately coded by independent operators, none of whom knew what the rest were doing. It was, he was confident, more secure than the Bank of England, the British government and MI-5 combined, which was just as well, because leaking the contents of his hard drive to the press would bring all three down at a stroke.

  He scanned his accounts: hundreds of millions of pounds, billions. His investments were solid, like continents, great sprawling rafts of money spreading from one side of the earth to the other, sustaining much of what lived on the surface. But from time to time the entire mass would buckle in a great tectonic shift, erupting and reforming in ways that changed the world.

  Today would be one of those days.

  Continents moved at their own pace, according to their own rules. Money, for all its chaotic energy, could, with a firm hand, be made to do what you told it.

  Edward Quinn had such a hand and could, with a few keystrokes, alter the fate of the entire planet.

  This had been true for a long time. He had known what his money was capable of doing for twenty years or more without it unsettling him unduly. But then Anne—his wife, his one true love, his confidante in all he could safely share—had started losing weight and suffering from inexplicable fevers. Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, the doctors had told him. He hadn’t known what the words meant, a fact that shocked him almost as badly as the diagnosis itself. So he had learned everything there was to learn about non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, because that was how Edward Quinn met adversity: with knowledge, and expertise, and, of course, with money. He’d learned to speak fluently about B-cells and to nod with understanding when his consultants used words like “immunoblastic” or “lymphoplasmacytic,” and he’d written checks that would have paid off the national debt of small nations.

  None of it helped. After a struggle lasting two years, the girl he had first met half a century ago collecting shells on Brighton Beach, his sweet, beautiful, perfect Annie, was gone. Edward was left with a rambling mansion full of servants whose names he didn’t know and a daughter who never called, except to ask for money for some new cause. There was more, of course. More stuff. More things. More money. None of it seemed to matter much.

  There was his work, of course. Not the corporations on whose boards he sat, the companies who listed him on their mastheads. His real work. But lately, even that had started to trouble him. He lay awake most nights now, thinking, remembering, regretting.

  Something had to change. The Board wouldn’t like it, and it was going to be the hardest battle he had ever fought—which was saying more than most people would ever know—but it had to be done. It was time.

  Jennifer would help. Maybe not consciously or deliberately. He might not be able to tell her everything until the worst of it was over, but her presence at his side would make all the difference. That, too, would be a battle, but if Edward Quinn couldn’t wrangle his own daughter, it really was time for him to … what did the Americans say? Hang it up? Something like that.

  She would understand, eventually. He was almost sure of that. After all, the work had been good once. They had lost control of it, allowed it to turn into other things, but it had been good at the start. He still believed that. Sometimes it was the only thing keeping him going.

  There had
been that one day, when she was small, when she had come into this very room and found him studying what he thought of simply as “The Project.” There had been a chart on the wall that she should not have seen. She had stood in the doorway, a little girl of nine or ten, staring, her head cocked to one side, trying to make sense of what she was looking at before he whisked it away. He wondered if she remembered. Perhaps. It was time to show her the rest.

  The intercom buzzed.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Your helicopter is approaching, sir,” said Deacon, Quinn’s private secretary-cum-butler. Quinn checked his Roger Dubuis watch—a spectacularly expensive piece he liked because he could see all the inner workings through its silicon casing—and sighed. It was a thirty-seven minute flight to the office in central London.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said.

  He looked at the framed photograph of Annie and Jennifer on the corner of the desk, the two of them in shorts and T-shirts after some mother/daughter 10K, both holding their medals and beaming. He had only put it there last week, after a lifetime keeping work and home as far apart as was possible. Too late, perhaps. Certainly for Annie, though he felt in his bones that she would approve of what he was about to do.

  Quinn logged off and shut down his computer. He had just shut his briefcase when he heard the door snap closed behind him. He hadn’t heard it open. Quinn was surprised when he turned.

  The figure in the doorway was pointing a long-barreled pistol at him. “You?” he gasped.

  “Hello, Edward.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “I’m good at getting into places people don’t want me to. You ought to know that.”

  “And you like to keep things between friends,” said Quinn. “Though the gun doesn’t look especially friendly.”

  “I wasn’t planning to use it.”

  “Then why do you have it?” said Quinn.

  “If it becomes necessary, I’ll use it, but I thought you jumping out the window would be more poetic.”

  Quinn glanced to where the smoked, bulletproof French windows opened onto the balcony. It was only a four-story drop, but it would achieve the results his visitor seemed to want.

  “And what makes you think I would do that?” he asked.

  The visitor moved to the desk and, eyes still on Quinn, turned the pistol onto the photograph of Jennifer and Anne.

  Quinn’s composure evaporated. He was dead, he knew, but he would not give up his daughter.

  “If you touch Jennifer …” he began.

  “You’ll what?” asked the visitor.

  “Why would you hurt her?” Quinn asked, hating the crack of desperation that snuck into his voice. “This has nothing to do with her.”

  “Exactly. And I’d like to keep it that way. And if you sign this little note I have prepared for you, and then step off your very fine balcony, that’s how things will stay.”

  The visitor placed a single sheet of paper, a suicide note written in flowing blue-black ink. Quinn glanced at it, admiring how it was meticulously forged, with what looked like his own Cartier fountain pen, in his own hand. They were always so careful.

  “What assurance do I have that if I do as you say, you won’t kill her anyway?”

  “Why would I? As you say, this has nothing to do with her. She’s merely a bargaining chip. Something that gives me an edge in negotiating. You, of all people, should respect that.”

  Quinn let go of the attaché case and considered the window. In the same moment, the intercom came back to life.

  “The helicopter is here, sir,” said Deacon.

  The visitor raised the pistol to shoulder height and was sighting down the barrel into Quinn’s face. Edward gave a fractional nod.

  “I’ll be right down,” he said.

  He signed the letter. As he sat back again, he knocked over the little wooden lion Jennifer had given him for Christmas when she was ten. He considered it for a moment, then put it carefully down. Pausing only to pick up the photograph of his wife and daughter, which he clutched to his heart with a surge of sadness, he stepped toward the window.

  He opened the French windows and stepped out into the English air, damp and cool, gazing down at the mansion’s gravel forecourt below, wreathed in a mist that was almost rain. He did not look back toward the visitor with the pistol, or down to where his broken body would soon be found by a shrieking maid, but instead gazed out into the gray air, seeing nothing. His hands gripped the photograph, and as he stepped up onto the ornamental balustrade, he whispered to them.

  “Sorry. I tried. Too late, I’m afraid. But I tried.”

  4

  TIMIKA

  New York, Present Day

  IT WAS TYPICAL. OF COURSE TRAFFIC WOULD BE BUMPER to bumper on a morning when she had a Skype interview from the office, first thing. Timika eyed her fuel gauge uneasily.

  “Don’t give up on me now,” she warned Dion’s moldering Corolla. The car had taken to burning oil at twice the usual rate, blowing out great clouds of blue, acrid smoke behind her.

  “You’ve gotta get that POS fixed,” she had told Dion the night before. “It’s gonna die and leave me freezing by the curb.”

  “If it’s such a piece of shit car,” Dion shot back, “why not take the subway like everybody else?”

  “Yeah, God forbid you should break out your wallet for anything you can’t stick in your PlayStation,” Timika had shot back, staring her boyfriend down until he wilted and his eyes slid back to the TV. “That’s what I figured.”

  They were supposed to be going to Atlantic City for the weekend. Her idea. She’d pick him up after work and they’d be on the road by six, assuming that the car survived the day. If it didn’t, or something else happened to screw up their trip, and if she got the message that Dion was relieved, things were gonna go down hill in their Mt. Kisco apartment faster than the crappy little car was ever likely to manage.

  The Corolla sputtered, stalling. She gave it a little more gas, watching in the rear view mirror as another cloud of black smog plumed out behind her.

  “Jesus, lady,” said the cab driver who was sitting alongside through his window. “What are you burning in there—napalm?”

  “That’s hilarious,” she spat back. “You should be on stage.”

  He made a face, and Timika urged the Corolla forward a few feet so she wouldn’t have to look at him. On the west side of Union Square, she saw blue lights flashing. In front of a café, the sidewalk had been partly cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. A pair of uniformed police officers were standing around doing nothing, as far as she could see. The traffic slowed to a crawl so that drivers could rubberneck, but there was nothing to see.

  She leaned across to the passenger side, brandishing the ID in her wallet.

  “What’s going on here?” she called to the closest cop as she crawled by.

  He stooped to look into the car and rolled his eyes.

  “Figured it would be you, Mars,” he said. “At the precinct, they call you the Question Girl. I can’t think why.”

  “Well, thinking never was your strong suit,” she replied.

  His name was Officer James Brown, and boy hadn’t she given him a hard time for that in high school. His phone number was still on her contact list from when she’d organized their tenth reunion.

  Hey Jimmy boy, you feel good? Like you knew you would?

  Still funny.

  “Old guy got mugged,” said Brown. “Your crackpot website got a crime beat now?”

  “Just a concerned citizen,” she said. “He okay?”

  “You’ll have to ask St. Peter,” said the cop. Another comedian.

  “Here? At this time of day?”

  “Another beautiful day in the Big Apple. You wanna move up? You’re holding up traffic.”

  “Yeah, I’m the one holding up traffic,” Timika returned. “You wanna get these cars moving? Some of us have to get to work.”

  The cop just rolled his e
yes and shrugged. What am I supposed to do about it?

  “Yeah,” Timika growled back. “That’s what I figured.”

  She drove to the parking garage on East Sixteenth Street and swung by an ATM to pick up the five hundred bucks that was her share of the rent. Five minutes later, she was tearing up the stairs to her office, shedding her jacket as she ran up the stairs. The office was a couple of tiny rooms above a vegetarian restaurant, next to the classical façade of the New York Film Academy on Seventeenth Street. It was cheap and functional, an address that hinted at prosperity, seriousness and class. It also meant that she was able to include, on her website, a shot of the Union Square subway entrance, with a shallow dome and hat-brim ring that made it look like a classic flying saucer.

  Timika bypassed the coffee pot with an effort of will and settled in front of the computer monitor in the one corner of the office that looked like an office, as opposed to one of those crazy lady apartments where no one throws anything away and the cops only go in when the corpse smell alerts the neighbors. It was the professional corner. The Skype corner.

  She checked her appearance on her webcam—she was wearing her brassiest wig for maximum effect, a mop of glossy ringlets flecked preposterously with gold.

  Her business card read “Timika Mars—Freelance Investigative Journalist and Blogger.” She was also the host of Debunktion.com, a podcast and website dedicated to exposing (and ridiculing) urban myths, pseudo-science, conspiracy theories of all kinds, and what Timika grouped together as “mainstream superstition.” She had pages on everything from the Loch Ness monster and the JFK assassination to miraculous statues of the Virgin Mary in Mexico. Though she wasn’t getting rich off it, the site was one of the most visited of its kind, and the advertising revenue was steady. The Huffington Post interview she was about to do would surely boost her visibility. Her staff was a part-time tech support guy called Marvin whose brilliance with computers was matched only by the amount of weed he smoked, and Audrey Stanhope, who Timika likened to both a bloodhound and a pit bull when it came to sniffing out and chasing down stories. The metaphor worked, Timika thought, because she could also be a royal bitch when it came to negotiating with advertisers.