Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  29

  ALAN

  Dreamland, Nevada

  IT WAS TWO DAYS BEFORE ALAN SET FOOT IN THE LOCUST again. No explanation was offered for the delay. He found that for all his existential angst about the nature of the craft, he wanted nothing more than to be in it again, to explore its strange capabilities, and to test his own. He worried that the powers that be were having serious doubts about his continuation in the program.

  That was his new greatest fear. That he’d flunk out. That he’d never be allowed up there again.

  Forty-eight hours after his beer with Morat at the Little A’Le Inn, there was a knock at the door of his room. An orderly he didn’t recognize saluted, a flight suit folded in his arms.

  “Time to suit up, Major,” he said without preamble. “I’ll wait.”

  Alan closed the door and dressed, splashing water on his face and staring hard at himself in the bathroom mirror. He looked pale in spite of his spell in the desert. Too much time indoors. He looked tired too, and there had been a slight quiver in his fingers when he zipped up the suit. That would not do. Alan had been shown the future the last time he’d stepped into that strange black triangle. He’d seen it in all its dazzling glory and wonder, and he’d flinched, at least at first. Morat and Hatcher had seen it, that mental twitch that said I don’t think I’m ready for this. He would not do that again.

  The decision hardened his blue-green eyes.

  He splashed a little more of the cool tap water on his face, toweled himself dry and left his room, nodding curtly to the orderly as if he were being given a ride to the airport.

  He rode alone in the blacked-out bus during the twenty-minute ride to Papoose Lake. The ride took longer than he thought, and he couldn’t help worrying. Was he not going to fly tonight? Was he to be quizzed or reprimanded first? Surely if he was being thrown out, disciplined, or even just subjected to more of those maddening tests, they wouldn’t have made him suit up first.

  The bus stopped and Alan got out. They were close to the cliffs. He inhaled the early evening air and gazed off over the dry lakebed, his flight helmet dangling from his right hand. It would be another clear Nevada night. Cloudless. A good night for flying … The back of his neck prickled with the thrill of hope.

  He turned towards the outcrop concealing the door into the cliff face, but the orderly said, “This way, Major,” and walked along the cliff face itself towards, as far as Alan could see, nothing. Alan went with him, the two men silent as the daylight faded in the west and the rocks cast their long shadows across the desert floor. They walked a hundred and fifty yards, and then the orderly stopped and pointed back to the mountain ridge they had just driven around on the bus.

  “Do you see that peak right there, sir?” said the orderly. “The highest one?”

  “Yes,” said Alan, thinking that this was an odd time for a lesson on local geology.

  “I respectfully invite you to fix your eyes on it.”

  “What?” Alan said, half turning to face the man.

  “Please?”

  Alan did so. In his peripheral vision, he saw the orderly reach to the cliff wall. There was a click, a hum, and a long, drawn-out hiss.

  “You may look,” said the orderly.

  Alan turned back to him, irritated at being treated this way. His annoyance instantly vanished. Where the cliff wall had been, there was an open hangar, lit with the flat greenish light of florescent strips hung from a high ceiling and the harder, blue-white spotlights angled from above the hangar door into the great space in the cliff side. The floor was clean smooth concrete, the walls immaculately white, and the concealed room was perhaps two hundred feet across and fifty feet deep. Doors at either end suggested that there were perhaps similar chambers on either side of it.

  Four Locusts sat on the polished concrete, balanced on tall, spindly landing gear ending in little wheels. Morat, dressed in his flight suit and cradling his helmet in the crook of one arm, stood beside one of them, talking to three men in dark blue overalls and a man in a suit with a narrow, old-fashioned black tie and horn-rimmed glasses. One of the men in overalls glanced over his shoulder, considered Alan for a second, then looked away. No one spoke to him until Morat turned.

  “Major,” he said, nodding. “Ready?”

  “When you are,” said Alan, trying to sound casual. One of the engineers turned and gave him a slightly quizzical look as if he had said something funny, or weird, or … something, then turned away. The man in the suit was considering a clipboard as if Alan wasn’t there, then he nodded, and one of the Locusts was hitched to an electric cart for towing outside.

  “I have to warn you, Major,” Morat said. “What we are about to do may test your nerves.”

  “I’m sure I can handle it,” he said, sounding more confident than he felt. It was difficult to imagine what would be more unsettling, more alarming, more thrilling than last time.

  He found out soon enough. They went through the same preflight checklist and guided the Locust out and into a steady, silent hover over Groom Lake as the sun went down.

  “Now,” said Morat, “let’s get some miles under your belt.”

  “Where to?” said Alan, excitement crackling within him like electricity.

  “East,” Morat answered. “We want to stay in the dark. Watch this gauge here for indications of the sun’s position in your current location and any destination coordinates you program in. This map screen will home in on any location in the world. Once input, this dialog box here will let you know your flight route, any necessary changes to cabin pressure, and any potential interferences or risks.”

  “Including passing through foreign air space?”

  “We’re off the grid up here, Alan. If we can get there, the high ground is ours. There’s not a conventional fighter flying for any nation in the world that can catch us. Most of them don’t have the equipment required to even see us if we don’t want them to.”

  “Okay,” said Alan, registering the word conventional and trying not to give away the kid-in-a-candy-store exhilaration he was feeling. “What do you think? Boston? New York?”

  “We can come back that way. But the UK won’t see sunrise for another half-hour or so. Let’s check it out.”

  Alan’s hesitation was only momentary. He tapped London on the world map, leaving the altitude, speed and other navigational concerns at their default settings.

  He gave Morat a look, and the other man nodded. They were both still wearing the visors of their helmets up. Alan assumed that the cockpit had automatically pressurized, though in ways more efficient and unobtrusive than on any aircraft he had ever been on.

  He began moving the Locust manually, guiding it with the toggle controls on his arm rest, increasing the speed to 600 knots, then 850, turning into the craft’s new direction as it sped across the dark sky. He saw their movement on the consoles and the windows, but it felt like they were sitting in someone’s oddly decorated living room, albeit one that throbbed slightly, like they were over a laundry room.

  After a couple of minutes, he tried the preset coordinates, hitting the auto-guidance engagement under Morat’s watchful eye. The ship seemed to shimmer slightly, and for a moment the speed gauge registered an astonishing speed: 1200 knots, then 2,000, then 4,000. The sensors indicating the view below winked out, and the stars Alan could see through the cockpit canopy seemed to move. He checked the map, and saw their breathtaking trajectory, arrowing out over the Virginia shore and the featureless waters of the Atlantic.

  Alan stared at the readouts around him. According to the speed gauge they were doing something in the vicinity of Mach 7, which—even without the complete lack of G- force trying to peel the skin and muscle from his face—was impossible. Nothing could go that fast.

  Morat watched him, reading his eyes. Alan decided to shift focus.

  “What’s this display?” he said.

  “Weapons systems. I thought you’d studied them.”

  “In a classroom,”
said Alan. “Lasers. Kind of different up here in the Millennium Falcon.”

  “The what?” asked Morat.

  “Seriously?” said Alan. “Star Wars?”

  “Oh,” said Morat. “Don’t think I ever saw it.”

  “Them.”

  “There’s more than one?”

  “You need to get out more,” said Alan.

  “Speaking of which,” said Morat, “mind if we give London a miss? The pubs will be closed, and it’s too early for the great British breakfast.”

  “Sure,” said Alan. “What had you in mind?”

  “Wiltshire,” said Morat, tapping a point on his map some ways west of the capital.

  Alan had never heard of it.

  “What’s there?” he asked.

  “Quiet,” said Morat, and for a second Alan wasn’t sure if the word was a demand or an answer to his question.

  They had been traveling, according to the internal chronometers and readouts—assuming they could be trusted—for forty-seven minutes, when the craft suddenly slowed to a drifting, hovering halt.

  “Bring her below the cloud deck,” said Morat.

  Alan did so, dropping the Locust to a thousand feet, finding the canopy overhead spotted and streaked with rain.

  “England,” said Morat. “Typically cold and miserable.”

  It could be just a hose or showerhead, thought Alan madly. Maybe we never left the hangar …

  “Check this out,” said Morat, nodding to one of the lower windows. Alan looked. Through the misty, rain-streaked darkness, he saw what he took to be hills rolling out below them, gray in the darkness save where a single pale shape seemed to leap across the turf. It looked like it had been sketched from above by a confident painter, a few disconnected flicks of his brush capturing—what? A deer? No. A horse.

  “What the hell?” said Alan, staring.

  “The Uffington White Horse,” said Morat. “Cut into the chalk hillside a few thousand years ago. Like a sign post.”

  “To what?” asked Alan, all his skepticism momentarily forgotten.

  Morat shrugged.

  “Stonehenge is that way,” he said, gesturing vaguely. “But I don’t like to go there. Too many gawkers at all hours.”

  “Stonehenge?” said Alan. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Morat started to shake his head, but he saw the seriousness in Alan’s face and knew that this was about more than sightseeing.

  “Suit yourself,” said Morat, frowning. “It’s less than forty miles. You can drive.”

  Alan ignored the deliberate incongruity of that last word, and maneuvered the Locust north, tracking their location on the scrolling map as he did so, using a ribbon of road—marked on the map as the A346—to guide them at an easy 120 knots per hour. As they got close, Morat shifted in his seat.

  “Turn the lights off,” he said. “This is farm country. Even without sky-watching tourists, people are up at all hours.”

  Alan did so, slowing the craft, and dropping it to two hundred feet.

  “Where can we set down?” he asked.

  “We’re not landing!” said Morat. For the first time since Alan had met him, he looked out of his element, anxious.

  “Sure we are,” said Alan, his gaze fixed on the map screen which he had toggled to show what the ship’s sensors actually saw: a video feed marked with spots of glowing color overlaid with heat-sensors not unlike weapons targeting systems Alan had used many times. “This part of the field looks pretty level.”

  “If anyone sees us here …”

  “There’s no one around,” said Alan, gazing out over the circle of standing stones. “Look for yourself.”

  “There’s a perimeter rail around the walkway,” said Morat. He sounded petulant as well as uncertain.

  “Then I’ll land inside it,” said Alan. He wouldn’t really. But he felt in control for the first time in weeks and was taking a vindictive delight in watching Morat squirm. “Don’t worry. I won’t scratch the paintwork.”

  “Or destroy a world heritage site.”

  “That either,” said Alan. “If I can land a Harrier on a carrier, I think I can do this.”

  “I don’t think that’s the issue,” said Morat. “Come on, Alan. Don’t make me override your controls.”

  The radio came to life.

  “Come in, Phoenix, this is flight control. Over.”

  “There goes our shore leave,” said Alan with a sigh. The relief on Morat’s face was unmistakable. “Phoenix here, flight control. What can I do for you?”

  “Location and altitude looking strange to us, Phoenix. Time to return to base.”

  “Roger that, flight control,” said Alan, punching the controls and shooting Morat a grin. “Be right there.”

  30

  JENNIFER

  London

  JENNIFER’S EYES MOVED FROM THE INTERPOL ID TO Letrange’s—or Chevalier’s—handsome face and back.

  “So when you accused me of being all cloak and dagger …” she began.

  “Touché,” he said. The word changed him, made him sound French in ways he hadn’t before. Jennifer found that she did not know what to say. She’d barely known the man who had called himself Letrange, but she knew the man in front of her—the agent—even less.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” she said at last.

  “This couldn’t have come at a worse time,” he said. “Maynard has been under police scrutiny for years: insider trading, smuggling, money laundering, financing hostile groups …”

  “Terrorists?”

  “Indirectly,” said Chevalier.

  “Why?”

  “That’s what we’ve been trying to find out. I was assigned to the task force three years ago and got a seat on the board a year after that.”

  “How?”

  “Contacts, most of them spurious. Payoffs. And the ability to be useful. An international police force can open a lot of doors, get things done.”

  She didn’t know what that meant, and when she looked at him, he shrugged and looked away, not proud of himself, even if he was one of the good guys.

  “They were wary of me,” he said, “as you so shrewdly observed. I haven’t been admitted to every hall of the inner sanctum yet.”

  “And you’re thinking that with my father’s data, you might not need to?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “I’m thinking that if anyone hears you have access to that data, your life won’t be worth the price of a pint. I’m trying to verify the scale of the threat. You are sure no one knows you have seen these files?”

  “Only you.”

  He nodded and then, apparently on impulse, said, “Why me?”

  “What do you mean?” Jennifer replied, coloring slightly.

  “I mean that if you had chosen any of the other men from that boardroom to confide in, you would almost certainly be dead soon after. So why did you choose me?”

  Jennifer looked out on Earls Court Road, watching a woman with a pushchair and plastic bags of groceries cautiously crossing the street.

  “Something my father said,” she replied absently. “And you were kind to me at the meeting.”

  Under the circumstances, given the risk she had taken, it sounded absurd, but he smiled, apparently pleased, and gave a Gallic shrug of acceptance. It wasn’t a great explanation, said the shrug, but it would do.

  “So what do you know about SWEEP?” asked Jennifer, keen to push past the moment.

  “Not much, to be honest. It’s a very specific network of funding streams tied to various aerospace concerns dotted all over the globe, mainly R&D, but also, we think, operation.”

  “Operation of what?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Me?” Jennifer exclaimed. “Why would I know anything about it? I just found out it existed.”

  “You were around your father a lot growing up, Miss Quinn. Did you never see or hear anything t
hat might connect him to this kind of thing?”

  “What kind of thing? Aerospace? You mean rockets and stuff? No.”

  “Anything of that sort. Aircraft development, perhaps.”

  She shook her head, but even as she did so something tugged at the edge of her memory, something old and indistinct from a long time ago. She was quite small. It was night and she was standing outside her father’s office, cold in her nightdress, looking through the crack of the door. She didn’t want to bother him when he was busy.

  “What?” asked Chevalier. “You looked miles away.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “Nothing.” The half memory had unsettled her for reasons she couldn’t recall and she wanted to change the subject. “What do we do now?”

  “I talk to my superiors and we get you somewhere safe,” said Chevalier. “If these men find out you are about to expose them, you’d have no more than an hour. Their resources are as limitless as their ruthlessness. Give me a moment.”

  She blinked again. The situation felt surreal, like something out of a movie.

  “Okay,” she said.

  MINUTES LATER, JENNIFER WAS IN THE PASSENGER SEAT OF Chevalier’s black BMW, speeding out of central London westbound on the M4, Taylor Swift playing on the stereo. The Interpol agent had said very little since shepherding her to the car, his manner now all business. As they left the pub, he’d taken her arm, guiding her step by step, his eyes flashing around the street, alert and watchful as a president’s security detail. It should have made her feel safe, but it didn’t. She felt like a target.

  First time I’ve been alone with a man close to my age in weeks and he’s my bodyguard.

  “Was my father involved?” she asked him as they drove past Chiswick and left the river behind. “In the money laundering and the rest of it, I mean?”

  Chevalier gave her a swift sidelong glance then returned his eyes to the road. “He may not have known the extent of it until recently,” he said. “And I think he decided he wanted no further part of it. One of our operatives approached him, but he was … suspicious, I guess.”