Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  The bus driver looked them over as if inspecting them, then drove them to a carpool near the main gate where Morat signed for the keys to a tan Lincoln Town Car. The driver started to offer directions but Morat cut him off.

  “I know the way.”

  They could hardly get lost. Once through a series of security check points, they drove northwest on Highway 375 for a couple of miles, twice navigating around black steers that watched them curiously, until they came to what had to be the smallest town Alan had ever seen.

  “Say hello to Rachel,” said Morat. “Population 50, give or take. There’s no point trying not to stand out, because you’re gonna, whatever you do. But let’s not advertise what we do, okay?”

  Alan nodded.

  As to where they would get the promised beer, their choice was not so much limited as nonexistent. There was a single-story white building, surrounded by mobile homes, which Alan took to be guest rooms, set on a piece of barren land by the service road, the main building flying a US flag. It proclaimed itself the “Little A’Le Inn: Restaurant, Bar, Motel.” A classic big-eyed alien-head logo, painted roughly beneath, said “Earthlings welcome.” A couple of big rig tractor trailers were parked out front and across the road there was a pickup truck with a small crane in the bed, from which a model flying saucer was suspended.

  “Seriously?” said Alan.

  “Welcome to the Extraterrestrial Highway,” said Morat, with a sideways grin and an eye roll. “Don’t tell anyone what you were doing this morning, or the entire place will have a heart attack.”

  Alan would have preferred something big and loud, where he could hole up in a corner with frosty mug, regularly refilled, and not think about what he’d seen today, but the inn looked homey and welcoming enough. The place was a theme park of alien paraphernalia and kitsch, and its menu matched. The kitchens were about to close for the night so Alan ordered an alien burger with macaroni salad, which was good, but not as good as the fries Morat got. The beer was standard domestic—which was fine by Alan, though Morat sneered—but it was ice cold. Alan ordered two more, as soon as the first ones arrived.

  They talked about nothing: baseball and Bruce Springsteen, cars, and whether the first Alien film was better than the second. Conversation was pleasant enough, even if Morat knew surprisingly little about what Alan thought was common knowledge (how did anyone not know that the Jets were football and the Rangers were hockey?), but it was also intentionally empty and guarded. They were careful to say nothing about where they worked or what they did, which meant that—at least from Alan’s perspective—the conversation had no weight, no substance. His gaze flicked away and landed on the windowpane, where a pale banded gecko clung to the glass with the ridges of its padded toes.

  “How those burgers working out for you, hon?” the waitress chirped.

  “Great,” said Morat. “Perfect.”

  Alan managed a nod and a smile, but as soon as she sauntered away, he went back to watching the gecko.

  What had Hatcher said?

  “Get your beer like a regular person. Just remember that you aren’t one. Not anymore.”

  That was about the size of it.

  They finished their beers in silence, and though Alan ordered another, the two men did not speak again until they were ready to drive back to the base, nicknamed, Alan recalled—both ironically and aptly—Dreamland.

  25

  JENNIFER

  Hampshire, England

  BACK IN HER ROOM, JENNIFER INSERTED THE FLASH drive she’d found concealed in her father’s model railway landscape into her laptop and tried to make sense of what she saw. There were no letters to her, no narratives of any kind, just spreadsheets of names and dates and account numbers, none of it familiar to her, according to what she had seen on her father’s laptop. She knew the numbers represented money. Lots of it. Billions of pounds, moved around by the Maynard Consortium across nation states and through corporations whose names she did not know. Most of it seemed to funnel, eventually, into an entity called, simply, SWEEP. Nothing in the documents gave any sign as to what SWEEP was, what it made or sold, where it was, or who ran it. It was just a name, possibly an acronym. She looked the company up, but there was nothing online, no trace of it at all.

  She had assumed the flash drive would answer all her questions, but it had only raised others, and given her larger mysteries to work with. Some of the names in the files were not companies. They were people, individuals in a variety of professions and places, which simple online searches quickly revealed: English lawyers, German financiers, Russian industrialists, even one US Senator who she remembered visiting Steadings when she was an adolescent. A “friend of her fathers.” They probably all had ties—of some sort—to SWEEP, whatever that was, and none of it had shown up in any of the Maynard group’s records or files or—for that matter—their boardroom discussions.

  It smelled wrong.

  But smell, she thought, as she sipped the last of her father’s Lagavulin, wasn’t nearly enough to go on. She was going to have to do some exploring, but where to start? In this utterly unfamiliar world, she couldn’t imagine. She doubted Deacon would have any more insights than she had, unless he knew more about her father’s dealings than he’d let on. She was about to close the drive when she saw a notepad app. She clicked on it, and it opened, revealing a single three-word message.

  “Talk to Letrange.”

  The handsome face of the young man at the Maynard group came to mind. Letrange. He’d asked her to call him Dan. She reread those three loaded words. Was it her father making a note to himself, a plan? A decision? Was it a message to her from beyond the grave, a place to start getting answers? Or was it none of these, a fraction of a memo that had accidentally been included among all this secret data.

  No, she thought. The flash drive had been stowed in a hurry, a desperate act designed for no one but her. And her father was a careful man. The message was intended for her. It had to be. Did that make the dark-eyed man merely a source of information, or was he someone her father had trusted? Someone she should trust?

  No, she thought again. He had been nicer to her than the other board members, felt different from them, but that was just his relative youth and manner. It was no reason to take him into her confidence.

  But someone in that room had wanted her to poke around. She felt sure of it. And, with the half message from her father still glowing on the screen in front of her, it seemed more likely Letrange than any of the other ten. What had Deacon said about making leaps of faith as the beginning of trust? She reached for the suit jacket she’d thrown over the back of a chair, fished in the pocket for Letrange’s business card, picked up her mobile and dialed the number before she could change her mind.

  He answered immediately, but there was wariness in his voice as he gave his name.

  “This is Jennifer Quinn,” she said. “I was wondering if we might meet.”

  SHE DIDN’T TELL DEACON, NOT BECAUSE SHE DIDN’T TRUST him, but because she knew he would caution her against doing anything rash. She felt like being rash. Needed it. She had spent the last few days in what felt like a fog, feeling her way cautiously, led by other people who assumed she had no place even being there. She had to take decisive action.

  But she was not an idiot. The meeting was to test the waters, nothing more. She would not tell Letrange—Dan—about the data her father had squirreled away for her and her alone, no matter how charming he was.

  She spent the morning poring over the files on the flash drive, tracking Maynard’s investments, going all the way back to the year it was founded in the late forties, a quarter of a century before her father got involved, its finance emerging from Swiss accounts. Records from those days were only partial, but even then, the primary recipients of the Consortium’s funding seemed to have been shadow corporations that had left no trace on the Internet. The companies and their assets were always global, scattered across the world but seemingly unconnected, and they tended
to melt away after a few years. Until SWEEP appeared in 1964. It looked like it grew out of a conglomeration of previous corporations, though the historical record was so tangled at this point that she couldn’t be sure. It seemed to quietly swallow up the other companies, until it was moving hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds, euros and other currencies through the Caymans and Seychelles, through Liechtenstein, Vanuatu, Belize, and Singapore. There was no record of it in any public documentation, though its various activities must clearly have put an invisible hand on various world markets and stock exchanges. That was more than strange. It was either all nonsense, or it was criminal.

  Dad, she thought, the fact of it settling in her gut like a stone. What did you do?

  She let Letrange choose the place, a pub close to the Earls Court tube station called—bafflingly—the Prince of Teck. He offered no explanation for his choice except to say that he would be “in the area,” and though its ordinariness surprised her, she was glad she was meeting him in a place where she didn’t feel like she had to behave like some under-accessorized Sloane Ranger. She ordered a glass of Glenmorangie Signet at the bar, took a stool at a plain wooden table by the window and watched the traffic on Earls Court Road. Letrange, when he arrived, was casual chic in a close fitting dark suit without a tie, but if he was a regular in the pub, no one greeted him as such. He carried an attaché case, which he slid under the table.

  “You came,” he said.

  “We made the plan only a few hours ago,” Jennifer answered, slightly defensive. “Of course I came.”

  He smiled at that, then took a step closer to the bar and, with a single word—“pint”—and a nod at one of the pumps, ordered. It was an easy confident gesture, the action of a man accustomed to being in charge. Jennifer decided to be unimpressed.

  “I hadn’t expected your call,” he said, sipping his beer. “To be honest, I thought I’d pissed you off.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “Partly, I was just in a bad mood,” she conceded.

  “Understandable,” he answered.

  “But also,” she said, recovering her steel, “well, you know, the company you keep.”

  He smiled. “It’s a not a crime to be rich, Miss Quinn. I thought you would understand that.”

  “Because I am, you mean? I don’t think that follows. Inheriting my father’s money just means I know more than most people do about how it was acquired. What it does and doesn’t do, and who it supports, and who it keeps in their place. It’s not a pretty picture.”

  “I think you’re the richest socialist I know,” he answered.

  “Because I have a conscience and resources, that’s supposed to be a contradiction?”

  Her words were clipped, but she could feel the heat in her face. This wasn’t the way she’d intended the meeting to go.

  “I just think,” he said, “that when you champion the underclasses from a position of privilege, you wind up pleasing neither those you are trying to help—who resent you as a noblesse oblige do-gooder who goes home to a palace at the end of the day—nor your own people, who think you’re a class traitor. Must make for a pretty miserable and lonely existence.”

  “If by my own people, you mean the kinds I went to school with, the ones who spend their time shopping or watching horse shows, I was never one of them. And for all his other faults, my father knew it.”

  “And accepted it?”

  “Eventually.”

  “And yet here you are,” he said. He wasn’t smiling now and the air was sharp with tension.

  “Here I am,” she said. “Because he’s dead, and he wanted me to take over for him. And maybe bring my socialist sensibility to his work, and undo some of the things he’d been complicit in.”

  “You can’t know that,” said Letrange.

  “You just don’t want to think he had second thoughts about the kinds of business you did with him.”

  “Oh, please,” snapped Letrange. “Don’t canonize him, now that he’s not around to disappoint you.”

  If she had been holding her glass as he said it, she would have thrown it in his face. As it was, she had to reach for it, and that split second gave her the moment she needed to restrain herself. She gripped the glass and held it deliberately in place, but the speed of her action had already spoken volumes.

  “I’m sorry,” said Letrange. “That was out of line. Perhaps I should leave you to finish your drink in peace.”

  She considered the offer seriously, but the heat was already draining, as if his apology had released the pressure, and she was suddenly herself again. She shook her head wearily.

  “I’m sorry too,” she said. “I have not been myself lately, and this is all very stressful. I hope I haven’t disrupted your day too much. This was clearly a mistake.”

  She rose to leave, but his hand was suddenly on hers, gentle, tentative.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “This was entirely my fault. I’m afraid I’m not used to having the ethics of my profession called into question. You touched a nerve. But that’s my problem, not yours. And since you obviously didn’t call me so that you could bask in my charming personality, why don’t you tell me why you wanted to see me?”

  For a moment she hesitated, feeling the creeping exhaustion of the last few days, and then she sat, staring at her half-empty glass to avoid his eyes. He sat too, giving her a moment to collect herself.

  “What do you know about SWEEP?” she asked, only looking at him as she uttered the final word.

  She hadn’t intended to mention the name. She knew it would reveal that she had access to information someone had tried to keep from her, but she didn’t know how else to proceed.

  And she was curious. She wanted to see how he reacted.

  SWEEP. Possibly an acronym, possibly a front, but certainly the recipient of a lot of Maynard Corporation money. She watched his face.

  For a moment he did not react at all, as if he were waiting for more information, then he frowned and shook his head.

  “Sweep?” he repeated. “I don’t understand. Is that a thing, or some kind of practice?”

  “A thing,” she answered. If he was lying, he was good at it. “A company. It’s where a lot of Maynard’s money has been going.”

  His frown deepened, and there was something else in his eyes now: doubt, incredulity.

  “Since when?” he said.

  “The name first appears in the mid-sixties, but I think it existed before then, under other names.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” he said. “You must have something wrong. If Maynard had serious investments in this SWEEP—whatever it is …”

  “Not just serious investments,” she cut in. “Massive.”

  “If that were the case, I’d know.”

  “You’re what, thirty-five, thirty-eight? A good fifteen years younger than anyone else on the board.”

  “Until you showed up. So?”

  “And you’ve been a member for …”

  “Two years. You’re saying that I’m not senior enough to know what’s going on?”

  He sounded stung.

  “Sometimes there are inner circles within organizations,” said Jennifer. “They don’t always share the most important material with the more junior …”

  “Thanks.” He glared at her. “You know, a better solution to all this—frankly, rather rude—skepticism about my position on the board, and your implication of cloak and dagger funding, which would almost certainly be in violation of all manner of international laws, is that you have bad data. Where did you get this SWEEP nonsense?”

  “I found it among my father’s things.”

  “In what form? A note? A letter? Maybe you misinterpreted …”

  “Files detailing thousands of money transfers,” she said. “Names, places, account details. The lot. Hidden away where he knew only I would find it.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he knew he was in danger and didn’t trust anyone else,” she said. The idea
hadn’t registered with quite that much hard-edged clarity before, but she saw it now, and it touched something in her heart, so that her voice quavered on the last word. “Whatever this SWEEP is, Dad was murdered for it.”

  Letrange stared at her, but when he spoke, it was with a kind of resignation.

  “His suicide was … unexpected,” he said. “I don’t think I really believed it. You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure,” she said. “I wasn’t before, because I didn’t know why someone might want him dead, but now … And he said I should talk to you.”

  This time, the surprise really did register in Letrange’s face, though it was quickly doused, such that she couldn’t tell how he felt about the revelation. At last, he smiled mirthlessly, acknowledging that she had indeed thrown him a bone.

  “Which is why you’re here,” he said.

  “Yes,” she answered. “My father thought you knew something that would help. And perhaps he thought you were not in as deep as the others. He thought I could trust you.”

  She said it stiffly, conceding nothing, and at last he nodded.

  “SWEEP,” he said. His voice was still musing, baffled, but he took a swallow of his beer and came up with something like resolution in his eyes. “What do you want me to do? I could speak to the board …”

  “No,” she said. “That wouldn’t achieve anything. It might even be dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?” he echoed, his black eyes wide and alarmed. “You don’t really think …?”

  “The first thing to do,” she said, ignoring the question, “is make sure we know what we’re dealing with. I can’t make sense out of all the data, but maybe if you took a look at the files …?”