Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  “Did he know about you?”

  “I don’t think so, but he knew something was going on. I think he was willing to turn. In another few weeks, we would have known for sure.”

  “But someone got to him first.”

  “So far as we know, he killed himself. We assumed he wanted out, but didn’t dare try to take the rest of them down.”

  “He didn’t kill himself.”

  “You have evidence for that?”

  “Nothing that would stand up in court,” said Jennifer sadly, “but I’m sure of it.”

  Chevalier said nothing. He seemed to be checking his mirrors a lot, and he was certainly the fastest car on the road. He was very calm in the driver’s seat, weaving around other vehicles with little more a twist of his wrists. It made him seem efficient, professional. It made her feel the opposite: clumsy, amateurish. Vulnerable.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Somewhere safe. Do you have the files with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t copy them?”

  “Not yet. Should I have?”

  “We can make a safety copy,” he said.

  A pause.

  “So this safe place,” she began. “Where is it?”

  “Near Heathrow,” he said. “There’s someone I want you to talk to. One of my colleagues, who can look after you. You can’t stay with me without blowing my cover. You may have to go to ground for a little while. You can send Deacon a text saying you’ve been called back to Africa. That will explain your absence. And why no one can reach you.”

  “How long?”

  “Weeks? Months? I’m not sure. But it will be somewhere nice.”

  That last was added because he sensed her resistance.

  Months?

  They turned south at a roundabout and headed towards the airport, then left the main road. The area was built up in a desultory, suburban way. There were hedgerows lining the highway, playing fields, a school, and then, as he slowed, across the road to her left, the silos, gantries, and hoppers of a cement works. They turned in and circled around, past industrial trucks, across a paved parking lot, and then down a dusty road that led alongside the works to a sudden opening, where she saw a clutter of silent shacks of weathered scrap wood and corrugated iron. Gravel roared under the tires. The car slowed and stopped, and suddenly, the world was very quiet.

  “We are to wait in there,” said Chevalier, nodding to one of the storage sheds, as he unsnapped his seat belt. The rusted shed door hung half open. He reached into the back seat for his attaché case, then got out of the car, closing the door behind him with a soft thunk.

  Jennifer climbed out slowly, thinking hard. The cement works, several hundred yards away, was a snarling, clanking cacophony of sound. The great open space she’d seen flashing in front of them as they drove in was a flooded quarry, steep-sided, the water black, thick, and still.

  Suddenly, she didn’t like the situation she found herself in.

  It was no more than that, a feeling, an impulse, but it hit her hard, and suddenly everything felt wrong. She checked the ignition, but he’d taken the keys. Of course he had. Why wouldn’t he? She studied the shed he’d gone into, its turquoise paint stained orange with rust, and she wondered why he hadn’t waited for her. He’d been so attentive in the city, but here, it was like he’d wanted to reach the shed before her.

  To make sure it was safe?

  Or something else. She thought back to the pub, the way he’d feigned bewilderment when she first mentioned SWEEP. “Is that a thing, or some kind of practice?” A good dodge. A practiced liar …

  And then he had produced his Interpol card, and she decided to trust him, which is what she’d wanted to do. Had he guessed as much?

  She looked over to the shed.

  He hadn’t asked her to bring her purse, the handbag that now held the flash drive, tucked into a zippered pouch to the shed. That was odd, wasn’t it? If they were meeting someone and the data was vital, wouldn’t he want to be sure she had it with her?

  But he had asked if she had the files with her, so maybe he just assumed she wasn’t an idiot.

  Maybe.

  She took a step toward the hut, conscious of how alone they were. A plane soared overhead, its engines a thundering bellow that drowned out the steady growl of the cement works.

  “Jennifer!”

  He called to her from inside the shed. He didn’t come to the door and look out. He stayed inside, deep in the shadowy recesses and called to her. It was the first time he had used her first name.

  And then she knew.

  She knew before she saw him, before the gun with its long suppressor screwed into its barrel came up, and before the muzzle flashed. She knew and she ran.

  The silencer didn’t do the job she expected it to do. There was no discreet phut like in the movies. It was a bang. Anywhere else, it would have drawn attention. He fired again.

  She was moving, first instinctively back toward the car, then changing her mind and dashing around the side of the hut so that he would have to come after her if he was to keep shooting.

  He did. She knew he would. She broke hard to the right, through a gateway and across another road of baked mud. Behind her, he fired again, and this time she heard the bullet, a thrumming streak through the air, inches from her head. It was followed by a muffled curse.

  She was still running, big staggering strides. The road curved up toward the motorway, but the land around it was open and would provide no cover. She risked a look back but could not see him. Then she heard the BMW’s engine turn over and the car screech into reverse.

  She was already breathless, heart banging against her ribs, though that had more to do with panic than fitness. But even if she could get a hold of herself mentally, her runner’s legs couldn’t beat out the BMW. She thought wildly about throwing herself in the turgid waters of the quarry and swimming to the other side, but that was stupid. It would just give him time to pick his shot. She ducked where a large field was screened from the cement works by a dense hedge of Hawthorne brambles and low, ancient trees. The thicket was only a few feet deep, though it stretched all around the field. If he saw her before she made it into cover, she was dead.

  She leapt the boggy ditch on the other side of the thicket and clawed her way through stinging nettles into the shade of a stunted beech tree, then pressed south through the densest part of the skinny strip of woods, back the way they had driven. Above her, a jet roared. Ignoring the hammering of her heart and the shriek of blood that rang in her ears, she forced herself to think of the purse, thrown ragged and flapping over her shoulder.

  Yes, she thought, as the car tore up the gravel road towards the motorway. Her passport would still be inside.

  He would soon realize he’d lost her and turn back. If she could keep moving, and stay hidden when he came hunting for her, she might make it to the airport.

  It was clear that Chevalier, or Letrange, or whatever the hell his real name was, was no Interpol agent. It was also clear that she wasn’t safe where she was. She wasn’t safe anywhere in England. Surprisingly, the thought calmed her. She hadn’t been comfortable in Chevalier’s “protection,” but then she hadn’t been comfortable in the Maynard boardroom, or even in her father’s house. At least now she knew she could trust no one but herself. The idea was comforting.

  The BMW came roaring back. She had made it no more than a couple of hundred yards before he’d realized he was on the wrong trail. The narrow copse was as dense as before, the light dim and patchy, and she was as sure as she could be that he couldn’t see her from the road unless she moved. She threw herself face down in the bracken, feeling a prickly vine lash her face, knowing she would get up nettled and bruised.

  She didn’t move.

  The car barreled past in a flurry of dust and chippings, then braked hard. For a moment, it idled in the road, and she could almost hear his fury. She stayed exactly where she was, breathing shallowly out
of the corner of her mouth, hands tucked in, the red purse concealed beneath her. Then the car was rolling slowly backwards, a soft panther creep that took it twenty or thirty yards past her. Then it stopped.

  She waited, her heart rate mounting again as she heard the clunk of the car door. He’d gotten out.

  She listened.

  She could hear the grumble of the cement works in the distance, and the flat cawing of rooks in the field, but if he was walking toward her, stalking her, looking in her direction, she couldn’t say.

  Was this how her father had died? Some strange, absurd game of cat and mouse that led to him plummeting from his office balcony? Had he been forced off by a man with a gun? This man?

  She closed her eyes and balled her fists.

  She heard footsteps on the road, then the car door, and then the BMW executed a rough and hurried three-point turn, ramming its front end into the hawthorn that overhung the ditch. Then he was racing north again, and she was moving south.

  After five full minutes, timed on her watch, with no sign of the car, she allowed herself to venture into the field proper so that her progress would be faster. In another four, she’d crossed a road and was running hard across open country toward a far line of hedges. Ten more minutes and she was pushing through a perimeter fence into a nursery, surrounded by ornamental cypresses and Japanese maples in oversized pots. Then there were houses, cut-price generic hotels, and a taxi rank. Ten minutes later, she was walking purposefully through the ticketing area of Heathrow airport, looking for a restroom where she could clean up, and scanning the departure boards for a suitable destination.

  Doesn’t really matter, she thought. So long as it’s away from here.

  31

  HERMAN SALTZBURG

  London

  IN A WARM, EXPENSIVELY-PANELED OFFICE IN MAYFAIR, Herman Saltzburg extended his long legs under his desk and smiled a wide, slightly ghoulish smile. For a big man, he carried almost no body fat and gave the impression of being all sinew and bone, which was why the daughter of the late Edward Quinn had dubbed him “The Skeleton Man.” He hadn’t minded, though he’d thought the child impertinent. He’d always liked the idea of scaring her. The skin of his face, sallow and close to the bone, stretched improbably so that the grin looked like the death’s head motif SS officers had once worn on their peaked caps. He didn’t mind that either.

  But little Jennifer Quinn had become more than impertinent of late and things had come to a head.

  “Tell me again,” he purred into the phone, his eyes resting on the man sitting silently and patiently across the desk from him.

  “There’s nothing more to say,” said Letrange, made defiant by failure. “She got away.”

  “That, Daniel,” said Saltzburg in his most unctuous voice, “is the part I don’t seem to be comprehending. That she escaped from you is regrettable, to say the least, given what she apparently suspects, but the fact that you seem to have no notion of where she might have gone is unacceptable.”

  He said it quietly, without rancor. He didn’t need to do more.

  “Yes, sir,” said Letrange. “If she made it to the airport, I’ll be able to find where she went.”

  “A consummation devoutly to be wished,” said Saltzburg. “I suggest you do so. Immediately. Call me back.”

  He hung up without another word and smiled at his companion, before continuing their interrupted conversation in measured German.

  “Wird es ein probleme sein?” asked Herr Manning, one of Maynard’s other board members.

  “No, it won’t be a problem,” said Saltzburg. “You’ve seen Miss Quinn’s tenacity, first hand, but you’ve also seen her blundering cluelessness. This is not her world. We are not. She will scurry about, turning over the wrong stones, until we stub her out like a spent cigar. Though I doubt she will unearth anything particularly sensitive, it remains unclear how much she knows. Or remembers.”

  “That was very long ago, surely,” said Manning. “You can’t think she recalls that?”

  “I had a hobby-horse when I was four,” said Saltzburg. “It was white with blue glass eyes and an improbably orange mane. I rode it everywhere, though I had no recollection of it until some workmen stumbled upon it while clearing out a lumber room a few years ago. As soon as I saw it, I was transported back to a very particular day when I saw my father beating my mother for something involving the gardener. My mother was, I knew even then, not someone to be trusted. But the incident came back to me with extraordinary clarity. Which cane he used. The sprinkle of blood on the hearth where she fell. It was really quite remarkable.”

  He said this with the same eerie and unflinching smile, so that even Manning, who was used to him, looked momentarily unnerved.

  “The mind is a curious thing,” Saltzburg concluded. “You never know what discarded details might float to the surface.”

  His phone rang. Letrange again.

  “Well?” Saltzburg demanded.

  “Washington, DC,” said Letrange. “She tried to throw us off track by buying a ticket to Jamaica on her credit card, but then paying cash to change the destination. Fortunately our people got into the passenger manifest.”

  “Ah,” said Saltzburg, satisfied. “Then all may be dealt with expeditiously. We have some good people in the United States, and they are already alerted because of the so-called web journalist, Timika Mars.”

  “You need me to go after her?” asked Letrange. “I have, as you know, other duties.”

  “Indeed,” Saltzburg replied. “And I only hope that you perform those with greater professionalism. But no. Leave her alone for now. Other operatives will tidy up your mess. But … wait one moment.”

  He pressed the phone to his breast pocket and said to the man opposite him,

  “Herr Manning, how would you feel about a journey across the Atlantic?”

  Manning shrugged and nodded.

  “Excellent,” said Saltzburg. He spoke into the phone. “You are in luck, Daniel. Herr Manning and myself will be following in Miss Quinn’s blundering wake.”

  Letrange’s half-suppressed gasp of surprise amused Saltzburg, whose skeletal grin spread wider than ever.

  “You? You are going yourselves?” said Letrange.

  “Things are moving rather more swiftly than I had anticipated,” he said. “We would need to go, sooner or later. It may as well be sooner. I would hate not to be on hand to see it all in person.”

  “Right,” said Letrange. “Okay.”

  “Oh, and Daniel?” said Saltzburg, still beaming at Manning.

  “Yes?”

  “No more mistakes, yes?” he said. “And do not allow yourself, even for the briefest of moments, to forget where your loyalties lie. That would be most unwise.”

  The momentary hesitation at the end of the phone before Letrange’s babbled “Of course” spoke volumes about the operative’s sudden terror. Saltzburg’s smile grew even wider.

  32

  TIMIKA

  Pottsville, PA

  KATARINA LUNDERGRASS HAD CORNERED TIMIKA IN THE hallway as the younger woman tried to slip out of the retirement home unnoticed.

  “You don’t give up, do you?” she said, the firmness of her voice and steadiness of her gaze completely belying her age.

  “Did you want me to?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You sent me to a church full of paper children,” said Timika. “I remembered what you said when I first asked you about the people at The Hollows. Paper people, you said.”

  Katarina smiled a little sadly.

  “Stupid of me,” she said. “An old weakness of mine. I can’t resist giving hints just oblique enough to keep me on the windy side of the law.”

  “Your father was an Operation Paperclip scientist,” said Timika.

  “Yes,” said the old woman simply. “A low-ranking rocket propulsion technician at Kummersdorf. He wasn’t a Nazi. Ever. He worked briefly at the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory and a few other places
.”

  “And this is why you are here, all of you? Why? That work is a matter of public record.”

  “It is,” she said. “As the policemen would say, nothing to see here.”

  “Are you prisoners here?”

  She smiled again at that, wide but slightly rueful. “Jerzy came to think so, but no, not really. We are … looked after. The government considers it a debt they owe to our fathers.”

  “It can’t be that simple,” said Timika, her voice low, her eyes on the end of the hallway where someone less friendly might appear at any moment. “There’s too much secrecy.”

  “Look,” said Katarina with a shrug, “some of what our fathers worked on was classified. Some of it is still considered sensitive. My father worked on rockets. Some of that helped put men into space, but it was also tied to missile systems. He consulted at Los Alamos in the late forties. People don’t want to be reminded that the US had German specialists working on their nuclear weapons right after the war. It’s …” she searched for the word. “Ungehörig. Unseemly.”

  “But everyone already knows that,” Timika persisted. “There’s got to be more to it. Ms. Lundergrass, I think you liked Jerzy a lot. Maybe you were in love with him. He wanted to tell me about his past, and someone killed him for it. There must be something you can tell me, something that would help me figure out where to look next. For his sake.”

  For a long moment the old woman just looked at her. Then someone called her name from the kitchen.

  “Be right there!” she sang back, her eyes never leaving Timika’s.

  “Please,” said Timika. “Someone came after me, shot at me. Probably the same person who killed Jerzy.”

  “Finding out why won’t save you,” said Katarina.

  “It might,” said Timika. “And if it doesn’t, at least I’ll die knowing what I got involved in.”

  Katarina’s eyes narrowed. “You think that will be a consolation?” she said. “Knowing something no one wants you to know? It won’t. Trust me. It really won’t.”

  Timika frowned.

  “I’d like to make that decision for myself,” she said.