Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  If Edward’s Quinn’s office had been his inner sanctum, this was his secret treasure trove, the one place he never discussed with his business colleagues, his hideout, where he could indulge all he was not in daily life. In here, he had been, she imagined, a boy again.

  It contained one thing only, vast and glorious though it was: a model railway, painstakingly built, remodeled and maintained for decades. It was where he had gone when everyone was in bed and he needed to escape his work. It was, she supposed, where they’d had their last truly intimate connections. Here, she had sat in silence, painting minuscule cows and gluing bits of lichen to trees while he soldered points and fiddled with signal gantries.

  Quality time, they would call it now. She hated the glibness of the words, the easy way they pigeonholed and made ordinary what had once been special.

  It was all still here, as she knew it would be. She snapped the switch beside the outlet and turned on the transformer, as if she’d done it yesterday and the day before, though it had in fact been—what?—fifteen years?

  Something like that.

  She turned the dial, familiar as her own hand, and heard a train stir. On the far side, in a siding beside the village she had childishly christened “Christmas,” because that portion of the layout was laid out in snow around a frozen pond, the Flying Scotsman—always her favorite—emerged with its tender and a pair of passenger coaches. She gave it a little more speed to get it up the incline, and, as it hit the great outer loop, watched with an old and poignant delight that brought tears to her eyes.

  For five minutes, she just let it run, absorbing the familiar sound of the wheels on the track, and then she moved to the carefully molded hill, with the model mine and its beautifully crafted elevator tower and hopper loaders. It looked perfect, meticulously executed, like a real place seen from a great height.

  She reached across the track to where a tunnel bore into the side of the hill, its rocky escarpments cunningly made of plaster and cork bark, took hold of the escarpment with her hand spread wide, and tested it. It shifted slightly and, with a little pressure from side to side, lifted free. The hill was hollow.

  The idea had first been to give access to the track inside the tunnel in case carriages derailed or faults developed on the line, but it had quickly become their secret hiding place, the spot he would leave cream eggs and other forbidden goodies for her to find.

  She reached inside, feeling around with the care of someone accustomed to dealing with delicate parts and tiny electronics, but felt nothing but plywood, papier mâché, and dust. She was withdrawing her hand when something small and hard dislodged and skittered away. Fingers spread, she tried again, slower this time, and came out clutching …

  A thumb drive.

  22

  TIMIKA

  Pottsville, PA

  THE MAN IN THE SUIT WAS COMING FOR HER ACROSS The Hollows’ golf course. She did not think. She rolled up onto her feet and broke into a run back into the woods. Somewhere, there would be a wrought iron fence, and beyond it, a road. If her estimation of her position was right, she wouldn’t have to go far to reach Dion’s car.

  Unless they’d already found it.

  Unless they caught her first.

  Unless the fence was too high to climb, or the gate keeper was waiting for her on the other side …

  She had no choice. She ran.

  The ground was uneven, strewn with branches and rotting leaves, so that every step was ragged, and every jump risked a fall. She checked over her shoulder. The man was moving faster now and had already reached the cart path. He was also reaching under his jacket.

  Wide-eyed, she ran, plunging up through the woods, desperation driving her forward. She could see nothing but trees ahead. He was gaining on her, and now he had his pistol drawn.

  God.

  She wove her way through the trees in case he started shooting. Yet though she heard him shouting as he ran, there was no gunfire.

  She thought wildly about the man who had chased her through the streets of Manhattan, dressed as a cop. He had fired at her, even with crowds of people around, people who could have been hit, people who could have been witnesses. So why hadn’t this guy started shooting yet?

  And then, looming ahead of her was a wrought iron fence. The perimeter of The Hollows estate. It was perhaps ten feet high, with no handholds. She felt her pace flag as something like despair threatened to overcome her, but she ran on, looking for a tree she could climb, a limb that might get her over the fence.

  There was one. It was a ragged, blackened spindly thing, leafless and blasted, as if it had been struck by lightning. Timika made for it, vaulting and scrabbling as soon as she reached it, dragging herself awkwardly up and out, going just high enough to inch out over the fence, each railing tipped with a fleur-de-lis spear point.

  Her pursuer had nearly caught her, his shouts now directed at her.

  “Stop where you are!” he called.

  But even now, he did not shoot. Timika was suddenly sure he was quite different from the man calling himself Cook who’d pursued her in New York. She kept moving. Just as he reached the foot of the tree, she dropped over the fence into a ditch.

  The road was there. She ran until she saw her car parked where she had left it. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She glanced in the rear view mirror as she sped away.

  SHE CHECKED INTO A MOTEL WHERE THE DESK CLERK, thankfully, didn’t ask a lot of questions, and took a long hot shower, watching the detritus of mud and leaves she rinsed from her hair go slowly down the drain. She was not very hungry, and decided she would rather not risk being out and about, only a few miles from The Hollows, so she curled up on the uneven mattress and read from Jerzy Stern’s journal.

  It made strange reading. She began to wonder if she had been crazy to put so much stock in the old man and his poignant but insane ramblings. But then, the people who had come after her were more than serious.

  Could it all be true? And if so, what did it finally mean?

  She took a pair of nail scissors from her purse and used them to slit the lining of the Navy Officer’s coat just to the side of the vent in the back, then slipped the journal inside. It wouldn’t stand up to a thorough search, but if someone was in a rush and just checked the pockets or gave her a pat down, she might get away with it. She put the coat on, feeling the weight of the book in the back as she considered herself in the mirror.

  Not bad, all things considered.

  She thought again about the difference between the feel of the two chases she’d gone through. The fake cops who had come after her in Manhattan had wanted her dead. There was no doubt about that. At The Hollows, the pursuit had felt somehow more restrained, even law-abiding. Despite her attempts to conceal herself in the caterer’s van, she was pretty sure the gate guard had spotted her, but he’d let her through.

  Why?

  He’d called for backup. They’d hoped to corner her in the house. It meant they’d wanted to catch her. Even when she’d gotten away from them, they hadn’t opened fire.

  So. Two different groups were after her. One wanted her dead, the other—at least for a while—alive. One was reckless and had no concern for the law. The other … She wasn’t sure. Those suits and earpieces seemed authentic in ways the fake cops hadn’t, and that meant …

  Government?

  She frowned and thought back to Katarina’s evasion when she’d been asked what line of work she’d been in. What had she said, that strange phrase that so unsettled Timika?

  Paper people. Hidden away in a drawer where no one can read us …

  At the time, it had reminded her of something, but she wasn’t sure what. Like there was another word, just beyond her memory’s reach, an ordinary word, but somehow loaded with meaning.

  Paper people.

  She thought of Jerzy’s journal, and something struck her. She flipped through her notebook and found the list of names the caterer had given her.

  Horace Ev
ers.

  Stephen Albitz.

  Katarina Lundergrass.

  Albert Billen.

  Frederick Kaas.

  Karl Jurgens.

  Max Stiegler.

  She looked at them again and realized that most of them—perhaps even all of them—sounded German. Coincidence? She doubted it.

  Paper people …

  Suddenly her memory chimed once more, and this time, she had the word she had been groping for.

  She called Marvin.

  He answered on the first ring, babbling inquiries about her health and welfare.

  “I’m fine,” she answered. “How are things there?”

  “Quiet,” he said. “Audrey called in sick so it’s just me.”

  “Question,” she said. “What do you know about Operation Paperclip?”

  She could almost hear his mind focus, like the mechanism of a microscope adjusting, creating sharpness and clarity where there had been a blurry nothingness. Marvin was a computer whiz kid, but that was only half his value to Debunktion. He was also a fount of wisdom on conspiracy theories, and an expert at sifting through the hype, the mysticism and the drama, for kernels of truth.

  He pulled up some pertinent data as he talked, but in spite of his technological gifts, Marvin was very much a book guy when it came to hard data.

  “Books aren’t slippery like websites,” he liked to say. “You know where they come from and what they’re worth. No one vets what you post online.”

  But he didn’t need either to recall Operation Paperclip.

  “There’s still some stuff we don’t know about the scale of the program and exactly who was in it,” he said, “but there’s also a lot we do know.”

  “Know or guess?” Timika prompted.

  “Know,” said Marvin, with none of his usual stoner vagueness. “It’s a matter of historical record. There may be conspiracies attached to it, but the core has been public and verified for decades.”

  “Give me the gist.”

  “At the end of World War II, the Nazis were frantically developing high-tech weapons to turn the tide. Jet planes. Ballistic missiles. Stuff like that. In many ways, they were well ahead of the allies. They didn’t have an A bomb, but a lot of people in the States—including Einstein—thought they were close, and that scared the crap out of everyone. When it looked like Germany would fall, everyone started looking at Russia. It was already clear they were going to be the next enemy. Some top brass thought that war with them would follow, pretty much right after beating the Nazis. It was also clear that the Russians would reach Berlin first and would take whatever tech the Germans had built, and the people who built them.”

  Timika sat very still, holding the phone. This was it. She could just feel it.

  “The short version?” Marvin continued. “We wanted to get what we could and keep it out of Russian hands. That included people: the scientists, technical assistants, lab staff who had been working for the Nazis, not just in weapons development but research and experimentation, some of it seriously illegal. And I’m talking war crimes illegal. Like, the Nazis had been building these jet- and rocket-powered aircraft, right? They were traveling faster and faster. So they wanted to know what that kind of velocity and pressure would do to a pilot. They built ways to test that stuff, using animals or—at first—the scientists themselves, but that was slow and cautious, as you’d imagine. Why experiment on yourself when you had millions of people who you’d decided weren’t really people at all?”

  “The concentration camps,” said Timika with a kind of numb horror.

  “Exactly,” said Marvin. “Seriously heavy shit. We don’t even know how many people died in the process. A lot. And then the war ended. We liberated the camps, rounded up the people who had been doing all this stuff, whisked them away before they could be tried at Nüremberg, wiped their records clean, gave them made-up bios and made them US citizens. When Truman set the program up, it was called Operation Overcast, but it was renamed Paperclip later. We took their data, their research, their ideas, their technology, and we slotted them right into our own weapons and aerospace programs. When everyone started freaking out about Sputnik and the Soviet space program, guess who led NASA’s charge to put men on the moon? The Operation Paperclip boys. Werner Von Braun, who designed the Saturn V rockets for the Apollo missions, had spent the war building V2 missiles for the Nazis. He went from devastating London to being hailed as a US national hero practically overnight. He wasn’t the only one. Debus. Rudolph. Strughold. All these guys had been high on the allies’ wanted lists because they were integral to the Nazi war effort. Then they were working for us, and everyone conveniently forgot how they’d been using their talents before. Some worked for NASA, some went to White Sands in New Mexico to work on missile systems, some went to the rocket fuel lab in Louisiana, or Missouri. A whole bunch of engineers went into combat aircraft development …”

  “But we don’t have complete lists of all the people we brought over?” Timika asked. “What are we talking? Ten? Twenty?”

  Marvin laughed.

  “Last estimates I saw said something in the region of fifteen hundred.”

  Timika gasped. “And this is real, right, Marvin? It’s not the tinfoil-hat crowd stuff?”

  “Absolutely real. The authorities—though they are still pretty stingy with specifics—came clean on this long ago. Truman said they shouldn’t include known Nazis—I mean, people affiliated with the SS, or actual Nazi party members—just Germans who worked for their country’s war effort, but the Pentagon ignored him. To cover their tracks, a lot of records got lost or buried.”

  “Are any of these people still alive?” Timika asked, picturing the lounge at The Hollows and its dozing geriatrics.

  “I doubt it,” said Marvin. “They would’ve had to have been in their twenties or thirties at the earliest during the war, so they’d be like a hundred now. So it’s possible, I guess, but it’s unlikely.”

  “Any women?”

  “Not that I’ve ever seen,” said Marvin. “Like I said, the records are incomplete, but there are pictures. I’ve never heard of any women being involved. Why?”

  “Just wondering,” said Timika. “Anything new on Katarina Lundergrass or any of the others?”

  “Not yet. I’ve got someone poking around in military archives though. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”

  “Just remember …”

  “Yeah, yeah. Discretion. My middle name.”

  “One more thing,” said Timika. “If Paperclip is public knowledge, why would anyone want to hide away people connected to the program?”

  “Today? No reason. Plus, as you say, they’re all dead now. Sounds like you’re dealing with something else.”

  “Yeah,” Timika agreed vaguely. “I guess so. Thanks, Marvin.”

  She hung up and lay for a long time, staring at the stained ceiling, her mind turning over everything she’d learned so far. She felt like an archaeologist, trying to reassemble a pot, piece by fractured piece. Nothing made sense. She turned out the light and missed Dion’s presence beside her for the first time since she’d left New York. She wondered if she was still in the same world as she’d been in only yesterday, when she’d been confidently giving interviews and writing copy about the idiocy and credulity of others. Was this what it was like, the special madness of the conspiracy theorist, surrounded by fragments of something you can’t quite see and which might only exist in your own mind? Well, tomorrow, she thought, remembering Katarina Lundergrass’ plan to meet her in the church at Locust Lake, she would find out.

  23

  JERZY

  Poland, 1945

  THE RUSSIANS SLAPPED ME ON THE BACK AND CALLED ME geroy malchika, which I took to mean child hero or something similar. I did not feel heroic. When Mrs. Habernicht battled her way through the throng, all of them drinking and singing, I buried my face in her apron and would not look at anyone. She had a few words of Russian, and one of the soldiers spoke a litt
le Polish, and she answered what questions she could. She called herself Bronikowski now, her name before she married, she whispered to me.

  “Easier that way,” she said.

  I nodded. I asked her about the resistance fighters, but she winced at the memory, and shook her head.

  “All of them?” I gasped, tears starting to my eyes once more, though I had spent no more than a few minutes with them. I thought of the one who had called herself Maxine, and though I tried to tell myself that they would not have minded dying fighting the Germans, I could not believe it.

  The Russians impounded everything they could find, including the remaining cargo plane. The German crew and soldiers who had survived the firefight with the Soviet troops had been rounded up and were being kept in paddocks at the end of the airstrip, under heavy guard. Many Germans had been killed, their bodies heaped for mass burial. I saw no sign of Ungerleider, the man who had ordered my brother’s death. Either he got away on the first plane, or died at my hands on the second. The thought left me numb, feeling nothing, as if some part of me had been shot away in the fight and I would never be of any use again. Mrs. Habernicht—now Bronikowski—told me that the war, our war, was finally over. One of the soldiers gave me a glass of vodka to celebrate, but I neither smiled nor sang as the others danced drunkenly around. I kept staring at my hands, as if they might have belonged to someone else, wanting only to forget the last hours, the last years, even my past before the war.

  I was afraid of the Russians. It was clear that they were here to stay, and that Poland, as I had known it before the war, was gone. With nothing to hold me there, I resolved to escape to France or England and start over. But even as I prepared my final escape, I was still haunted by the memories of my family and by the possibility that some of them may have survived. I needed to be sure, and that meant going East.

  I told Mrs. Bronikowski/Habernicht of my plan, and though I had expected her to try to talk me out of it, she just nodded sadly and told me she would get together some food and clothes for my journey. When it came time to part, she pressed a piece of paper with her address printed carefully on it, so that I could send word of what she called “my adventures,” and kissed me once on the cheek. She wept for both of us and then, when she went to the shop to buy soap, I slipped away, leaving a note that contained the thanks I could not speak.