Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

“Certainly,” he said. “Who else have you told?”

  Jennifer hesitated for only a second. “No one,” she said.

  “Not even Deacon?”

  She shook her head, but the question tripped some vague alarm. Was it obvious that she might confide in her dead father’s manservant? Would anyone make that guess, or did it suggest Letrange knew more than he’d let on?

  “I need to make a phone call,” he said.

  “Who to?”

  She was wary now, suddenly and inexplicably doubtful that she had done the right thing. She hadn’t meant to confide this much, and some part of her worried that it had been a mistake to do so. He seemed to see something in her face and, as if in response, squeezed his eyes shut in furious thought for a moment.

  “My name is not Letrange,” he said.

  Of all the things he might have said, this was something she’d been unprepared for. She blinked but said nothing.

  He reached under the table to his attaché case, opened it and drew out a wallet, which he flipped open. The blue card inside showed his picture, but the name below it read Robert Chevalier. It was followed by an agent number. The card bore a crest featuring a globe with a sword behind it. The white capital letters across the top read “Interpol.”

  26

  TIMIKA

  Pottsville, PA

  THE MOTEL OFFERED NO COMPLIMENTARY BREAKFAST, so Timika loaded up the car and stopped off at a Dunkin’ Donuts, three blocks from the Yuengling Brewery, in downtown Pottsville, before heading north on Route 61 towards the wooded hills of Locust Lake State Park. She found the little Presbyterian church, set back from the road, surrounded by pine trees. It was white clapboard with a tower for a single bell, and the sign out front advertised a bake sale and a children’s Sunday service. It looked like the kind of rural church that would be featured on Hallmark Christmas cards, surrounded by snow and an artfully positioned minister. A white church, Timika thought, in both senses of the word. She felt conspicuous, trying the door and pushing her way inside.

  It was dimly lit, bathed in the glow from tall, narrow stained-glass windows. It smelled of furniture oils and brass polish, and its pews were straight and regular, equipped with ancient hymnals, all exactly as the exterior promised, simple and plain. There was no one there. The silence felt heavy, like accumulated dust, or the memory of something long finished. The only sign that this was still an active house of worship, and not some recreated “living museum” like Old Sturbridge, was the string of paper dolls looped between the half-columns molded into the walls, and trailing along the benches. They’d been cut out of white cardstock, the way people used to make holiday trimmings, the paper folded many times so that each scissor snip made cuts that echoed through the stack. As a kid, she’d always been delighted and amazed when she did it right and opened up the folded mass to reveal the streamer of repeated shapes. She assumed they had been made for the children’s service advertised outside, strings of paper children holding hands. It was a cheap old-fashioned display, in keeping with the rest of the chapel, but it touched something in her and made her thoughtful.

  She sat at the back in a corner pew and waited, but the hour came and went without any sign of Katarina or anyone else from The Hollows. She waited fifty minutes before deciding the old woman wasn’t coming. As she waited, the paper dolls acquired an altogether different aspect, their skeletal whiteness in the empty church standing in for all the people who weren’t there, a ghostly echo chilling by virtue of its childishness. Timika closed the church door behind her and stepped out into the cool air with something like relief.

  She considered driving out to the lake, but there was no reason to believe Katarina had been telling the truth about the outing. The appointment at the church had probably been a ruse to get rid of her. Whatever kind of strange, luxurious prison The Hollows was, the old woman wanted no help from Timika in escaping it. For a moment, she considered driving back there, but the guards would surely be watching for her, and she wouldn’t be as lucky today as she’d been yesterday.

  She got into her car and called Marvin, but he didn’t pick up, and she could think of nothing to say in a message. Having no idea of where to go, she read from Jerzy’s journal for a half hour. She kept one eye open for the van that might still bring Katarina Lundergrass to her meeting, but the two or three cars she saw in the next ten minutes did not slow.

  The phone rang. Marvin.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Nothing much to report,” he said. “But I have the address of that other old folks’ home for you, The Silver Birches. Want it?”

  She had forgotten that the caterer had revealed one of the other locations he delivered to. It might be nothing, but since she had no other leads, it was worth a look.

  She drove back towards Pottsville, following Marvin’s directions. She missed one turn as she swung into the west side of town, but doubled back easily and found herself face-to face with The Silver Birches. It was a more modern building, in the Swiss chalet style, and the gardens looked younger, the trees showing something of the nursery’s evenness, arranged with military regularity, like little green nutcrackers. A sign by the drive advertised the assisted living facility’s pool, and another said that there was now a vacancy, which suggested—Timika thought bleakly—that someone had recently died. It felt quite different from The Hollows, but there was another of those Checkpoint Charlie-style gates, with a friendly looking uniformed officer complete with radio and sidearm. Timika drove past without making eye contact.

  At The Hollows, she’d talked her way in and improvised her way out over the wall, but that wouldn’t work this time. If there was a connection between the two residencies, they would be watching for her. In the absence of any better ideas, she opted to simply reverse the process.

  Over the wall in, talk your way out.

  So she drove, keeping the brick perimeter on her right in her peripheral vision, slowing when the brick wall became the stone blocks of a different neighboring facility. A hundred yards further down was another gate, broad and unguarded, its driveway leading to what was advertised as a private tennis club and spa.

  Good enough.

  She drove in, parked in the lot, then walked not towards the glass and chrome gym—where she would probably need a pass—but into the trees that lined the wall separating the spa from The Silver Birches.

  This is becoming a habit, she thought, as she checked over her shoulder, then shinnied up a tree, breathing heavily, and hopped the wall. Still, better to do it when you’re not being chased by armed guards …

  As soon as she dropped into the grounds of The Silver Birches, she could smell the tang of charcoal smoke and something sweet that made her mouth water: grilling meat. In spite of the chill, someone was determined to treat spring as spring.

  There were no wooded landscapes, as there had been at The Hollows, just the trimly regimented trees mulched and spaced to give them room to grow. The garden wouldn’t look its best for another five years. It meant she had no cover. She made for the house, taking in the numerous cars and vans parked outside. Perhaps the barbecue—informal, outdoors, mingly—would be the perfect way to slip in. She followed her nose down the side of the house, past the obligatory conservatory and round to an extensive rear patio with potted plants and a fire pit.

  And people. Seven of them. Six men and one …

  Katarina Lundergrass.

  Timika turned on her heel before she was observed and tried the closest door into the house, thinking furiously.

  She was in the conservatory, and she was not alone. It looked a lot like the common room at The Hollows: lots of indoor greenery and old people chatting, drinking coffee, and playing cards. She moved with her back to the windows, slipping around a healthy ficus, and sat down next to an old white man. They were all old and white. She could forget about being inconspicuous.

  “Hello,” she said.

  To her surprise, the man beamed at her, his smile peeling off a good fif
teen years.

  “Hello, my dear,” he said. “And what’s your name?”

  “I’m Ashley,” said Timika reflexively, “I’m from social services. Routine inspection.”

  “Social services? Here?” he said. “Well, I suppose you have to make sure they aren’t poisoning us for our estates. Not that there’s much left to inherit, once all this has been paid for.”

  Timika nodded and smiled.

  “So you’re happy with your care, Mr …?”

  “Sanderson,” he answered. “Call me Chuck.”

  He took her hand and, to her amazement, raised it quickly to his lips.

  “Enchanté,” he said. “What lovely skin you have.”

  If that was his way of signaling that he wasn’t a racist, Timika thought, it was clumsy. But nicer than most. She found herself smiling.

  “Not joining the barbecue, Chuck?” she asked, turning so that she could shoot a furtive look at Katarina through the window.

  “Private party,” said Chuck with a shrug. “Not invited. Never.”

  “Never?” said Timika with mock amazement.

  “Fred’s buddies,” said Chuck.

  Timika thought.

  “Frederick Kaas?” she asked.

  “That’s the fella. Traveling salesman, or so he says.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  “Once told me he sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door,” he said. “Now, my old man worked for Sears. As a kid, I knew more about vacuum cleaners than was good for a boy, so I start firing model names and numbers at old Fred there, and I’d swear on my old man’s grave he never heard of any of ’em.”

  “So what do you think he did?”

  Chuck Sanderson shrugged expansively. “He used to have a pal who visited him every few days. Funny fella by the name of Siegfried something. Mahr? Maier? Something like that. Engineer. Bit of a drinker, just between us. You could smell it on him. He’d come couple of times a week, and they’d huddle up in the corner and mutter to each other. One time, he came when Fred was sick in his room, and sat around down here by himself instead. Got talking to a couple of the other residents. Told them all kinds of nonsense, about how he used to work on special aircraft or something. Barking mad. Nobody believed a word of it. But then, a couple days later, these others fellas came, young guys in suits. Talked to everyone who had been there, wanted to know what this Siegfried character had been saying. Very bizarre. We never saw him again. Poof. Just like that. Gone.”

  Timika looked suitably shocked.

  “What did Fred say about it?”

  “Said they’d had a falling out,” said Chuck, skeptically. “Weird. He doesn’t get visitors anymore. Just this crowd who come over for a barbecue once a month. Rain or shine. Like the damn postal service. What do they say? Neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night will stay these couriers of … something or other? Well, that’s what these guys are like. Nothing stops their precious barbecue. And the rest of us have to sit inside, just to avoid the smell. But then someone opens the window and. … Well, you can imagine. Steak. I could murder a steak.”

  “This man who disappeared,” Timika said, trying to redirect the conversation. “Maier?”

  “Maher, maybe. Something like that.”

  “You said he worked on special aircraft?”

  “That’s what he said. I didn’t say jack.”

  “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “Something about how they performed, how they flew, I guess. But he never said he flew them. He was an engineer. I said that, right? Built the materials the planes were made of. Bragged about it, you might say, though I try not to judge.”

  “How they flew?”

  “I don’t know. He told this one story about how these R&D guys brought him a blue tile, made of some weird material. Said you couldn’t tell if it was metal or plastic or ceramic. They told him to figure out what it was and build some more. He asked where they had got it from, and they told him that didn’t matter. He was all ‘How am I gonna figure out what the stuff is if you won’t tell me anything about where it came from?’ And they said, ‘That’s why you make the big bucks.’ He liked telling everyone he made a mint, like we’d be impressed.”

  “Did he say where he thought the tile came from?”

  “Russia. Maybe China,” said Chuck. “Somewhere secret, from people who didn’t want us to have it. Like it was recovered in some James Bond mission and he couldn’t really talk about it. Except that he did. Thought it made him cool. Jackass. Now he’s off the barbecue list. Not so cool now, huh?”

  Timika nodded thoughtfully and looked out to where Katarina and the others were huddled round the grill in their coats.

  “You know where he went?”

  “Never heard from him again.”

  “And no one saw him arguing with your friend, Fred?”

  “There was no argument that I saw. And a falling out doesn’t explain those other guys who showed up asking questions.”

  “Who did you think they were?”

  “No clue. Corporate security or government types, I’d say. Engineering is a high dollar line of work. Someone wanted their secrets protected.”

  Unbidden, the thought of the paper dolls trailing across the empty church came to mind. Children. German names. The protected secrets of scientists imported from the ashes of Berlin.

  And the last piece of the puzzle slotted into place.

  German children.

  The offspring of all those Operation Paperclip researchers and engineers who perhaps saw or heard things deemed classified long ago. Was that possible?

  Timika stood up abruptly, the idea clear and sharp in her head, and turned to the window and the exclusive barbecue beyond.

  Katarina, half in and half out of a group who were talking and laughing, was looking directly at her.

  27

  JERZY

  Guantanamo, Cuba, July 1946

  I STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT PART CAPTAIN JENNINGS PLAYED in fast-tracking my sudden commitment to the navy, but within weeks of our arrival in New York I was in basic training at the Great Lakes facility north of Chicago. Early the next year I was in Guantanamo, Cuba, for further training while the USS Kitchener was being refitted, and spent my leisure time on deck drinking Coke. It was, of course, no accident that I would continue my career under Captain Jennings’ command, though he kept his distance to avoid the appearance of favoritism. For all the hardships of training, life among the palm trees and haciendas where the sailors cracked open green, freshly harvested coconuts filled with sweet milk on the beaches of the base’s Windward Point was like being on another planet. There’s lots to say about life on a destroyer, but it’s not relevant to my larger story so, at least for now, I’m going to skip over it.

  We left port at the beginning of September 1946, heading south between Haiti and Jamaica, then down the east coast of Venezuela and Guyana. In the vast openness of the South Atlantic, we lost sight of land entirely, and went many days at a time without glimpsing another vessel as we skirted the great coastline of Brazil, finally pulling west again in time to spy the coastal buildings of Montevideo looming off our starboard bow. I was told by a shipmate about the scuttling of the German pocket battleship, Graf Spee, in the first year of the war, and we peered over the side, hoping to see the shadowy outline of its wreckage as we sailed over it, but there was nothing.

  We entered Argentine waters and came to a full stop less than a mile from La Plata’s shipyards, where the two German submarines were moored. We were met by a patrol boat flying the Argentine triband of pale blue and white, the escort for a pair of US officials, one of whom, I was told, was an ambassador or consul.

  The ship was tense. There were, including officers, a little over three hundred of us aboard, and we had been at sea for weeks. On deck, it was hot, and below deck it was hotter, unventilated and saturated with the stench of unwashed bodies. We slept on deck, where it was cooler, if we could, or in bunks four high, seeing the
same faces, doing the same chores. We were waiting for something—anything—to happen, and, more importantly, waiting to get off the damn ship. We’d come all this way, and now we were sitting in the harbor, waiting for some goddamned diplomats to say we could get on with our job or—better still—go ashore for a while.

  But we waited that first day, and one hour turned into two, and there was no sign of progress. When a hatch opened, it was only Billy Ray, the mess steward, a burly black man who ran the galley with an impatient efficiency that terrified me.

  “Stern!” he bellowed, glaring at me. “Get your ass up here.”

  I stared at him. He had never spoken to me directly before. Even the fact that he knew who I was thrilled me, though I felt something between pride and panic.

  “Me?” I said, getting hesitantly to my feet.

  “You,” he said. “Why, God only knows.”

  “What …?”

  “Captain requested you by name,” he said, moving back to the galley and not bothering to see if I was following. “There’s a tray of coffee. Take it to the state room.”

  “Coffee?” I muttered, stupidly.

  “Yeah, you know what coffee is, don’t you?” Billy Ray shot back, turning to give me the kind of level glower that would freeze a charging bear. “They grow it right here. In fact, offering our dried crap to these Argy diplomats is like bringing the Governor of Maine aboard and serving him canned lobster. But what the hell do I know? I’m just the damn cook. That tray there. You see it?”

  “Yes sir,” I said, staring at the tray with its cups and polished brass coffee pot.

  “So take it,” he said. “And don’t call me sir, boy. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” I stammered.

  Billy Ray held the hatch open and watched me unblinkingly as I took the laden tray gingerly and stepped over the threshold.

  “And don’t spill it,” he said, adding as I moved unsteadily away, “Boy don’t have the brain God gave a lemon.”

  I was used to following orders without question, but the fact that I should have been singled out for this particular job was odd. When I reached the Captain’s state room—having just about managed to tip the contents of the tray all over myself as I made it up the metal gangway and got the door open—he showed no sign of recognizing me.