Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  Katarina considered her. The noises in the kitchen were getting louder, closer.

  “There is a second-story window at the back of The Hollows, under a copper cupola. And a ladder by the greenhouse, down the side of the house. The window will be open at eleven o’ clock tonight. I will give you thirty minutes.”

  TIMIKA LEFT THE RETIREMENT HOME THE WAY SHE’D COME and drove away from town, stopping to eat at the second exit advertising food and gas. She bought both, then considered her remaining funds. She couldn’t live off the rent money she had withdrawn in New York indefinitely, and daren’t try using her credit cards. Most of her family and friends were in New York. She knew no one around here who might help her out. If she abandoned the idea of returning to New York, her closest family was her cousin Tonya, who worked for a museum in Atlanta. Maybe she would head in that direction and see what she could borrow. Depending, of course, on what—if anything—Katarina offered her tonight.

  As the terror of the chase receded, she found herself almost forgetting that she was still in real danger, and that there was something out there she needed to find. Maybe, she reasoned as she munched on yet another generic burger, it was all over already. Maybe she should get on with her life. But what had her life been, to this point, if it wasn’t chasing after truth amongst the misdirection and clutter, the wishful thinking and the outright lies of the contemporary world? And maybe, just maybe, she was chasing the story of her career. Not for Debunktion, but for Time Magazine or Newsweek. This might be what her professional life—and her bank account—needed, a jumpstart.

  She called Dion but he didn’t pick up. She kept her message short and unspecific. She’d be back soon but didn’t know when. She missed him. After she hung up and turned off her phone, she wondered a little about that last remark. She missed a lot of things about her life in New York, including him, but did she miss him the way lovers were supposed to, like she might miss a part of herself, a constant, burning absence that made her feel somehow incomplete? It had never occurred to her to share what she was doing with him, not because she was being secretive, but because she knew how his eyes would glaze over, how he would tune her out and make noises into the phone while his eyes strayed to the muted basketball game on the TV, or the Call of Duty game he was playing on the Xbox.

  She shook her head. This wasn’t the time to dwell on such things. She considered calling her cousin Tonya, just to take her mind off it all and to prime the pump, as it were, in case she needed to recruit her help, but Atlanta was far away. Surely, it wouldn’t come to that.

  She parked under the scrawny, neglected trees of a strip mall, and sat listening to Motown on an oldies station as the sun started to set. Then she turned the key and set off for The Hollows, humming along to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”

  Seems appropriate, she thought, as the weary Corolla nosed its way into the gathering night.

  She drove past The Hollows’ entry gate, trying to find her way around to the fence she had scaled on her way out. It wasn’t easy in the dark. She couldn’t help thinking that the lack of street lighting around the old house was deliberate. There would be cameras, she imagined. Whether there was night vision or thermal imaging equipment depended on just how protective the government wanted to be about keeping any foxes out of their geriatric hen house. Assuming it was the government. Assuming Katarina hadn’t spun a pack of lies to lure Timika to who knew what …

  Get on with it, she told herself.

  There would be time to agonize over what it all meant later.

  Very existential.

  She shook herself. All this solitude and driving was making her crazy. She checked her watch and parked on the shoulder, tucking one fender into a screen of densely packed cedar. She wondered if she needed a gun, but had no idea how she would have gone about acquiring one here. In New York, she knew exactly where she would have gone. Then again, if she needed to go directly to the cops, she didn’t want a sketchy handgun receipt and a glove box full of ammo complicating the conversation.

  And besides, she thought as she began the slow walk along the dark and narrow road to The Hollows, she didn’t like guns. Dion had one, but she insisted he keep it locked up at all times. It made her nervous. She could always tell when he was carrying it. It gave him a swaggering confidence she didn’t like.

  The black outlines of the trees ahead parted for a second, and she saw the steep gables of The Hollows, set back from the road. Timika checked the position of the crescent moon to get her bearings and pushed along until she found the spot in the fence where she had clambered over from the other side. If a car came by, she would be conspicuous.

  And climbing the fence was easier said than done. She’d gotten out by shinnying up a tree, but there was no such vegetation on this side. She could just about reach the top of the fence when she stood on her tiptoes, but she didn’t have the arm strength to haul herself up and the fence provided no obliging crevices in which she might wedge a shoe for leverage.

  She tried a standing leap but succeeded only in bashing her knees before dropping into a ditch. She was suddenly struck by a memory she hadn’t recalled in years: climbing those damned ropes in high school gym while the teacher, Ms. Keyton, smirked at her and told her she might want to go easy on the cheeseburgers.

  Good thing she didn’t see what I had for dinner, Timika thought, scowling at the fence in the darkness. She cursed under her breath and looked around for an object she might use as a step. Something lay in the ditch, to her left. She picked her way toward it and found a section of sawn-off telephone pole, about three feet long. She tried to pick it up, feeling the wet coldness underneath it when she slid her hands around it. It was surprisingly heavy. She flipped it around and rolled it to where the fence was most accessible, pushing it with her feet and wheezing slightly, muttering with each shove:

  “I. Was. Not. Built. To. Be. A. Spy.”

  She propped it up against the fence, took a moment to get her breath back and then climbed up with one foot, boosting herself up. As she adjusted her weight, the fragment of telephone pole pushed out from under her and rolled into the ditch, but she had her elbows on the top railing and, with a struggle, was able to hoist her way up. With another concerted effort, she climbed up and over.

  It wasn’t a graceful landing, but she did herself no serious injury. She was in.

  You see that, Ms. Keyton, you sanctimonious crone? You owe me a burger.

  The woods were dense. Finally the house rose into view. Even then, it was difficult to make out exactly where she was because there were no lights on. Everyone, it seemed, had turned in for the night.

  Old people, she thought.

  She skulked her way to the edge by the golf course and approached the house from the side, breaking into a low trot as she crossed the open space leading to the greenhouse. The ladder rested on a pair of hooks fastened into the wall. She was relieved to find it was made of lightweight aluminum. One of the old wooden kind would have been impossible to lift. She got it balanced and carried it toward the house, eying the copper cupola Katarina had told her about. The window below it was closed.

  Another wild goose chase?

  Or worse?

  She consulted her watch. Ten fifty-eight. She’d made good time. As she watched, the window was pushed discreetly open an inch and a half. There was no sign of the hand that did it. This was no time for hesitation.

  In for a penny, her grandmother used to say, in for a pound.

  She lifted the end of the ladder, raised it above her head like a weightlifter switching grips, and walked under it, moving down the rungs till the ladder was vertical. With a series of little steps, her gaze up so that the ladder wouldn’t overbalance, she walked it to within a few feet of the wall and lowered the top of the ladder against the house. It made a slight clatter on contact, but that couldn’t be helped. She waited. No one seemed to have heard.

  She began to climb, slowly, carefully, quietly, feeling the ladder shift
and groan slightly under her weight, so that for a second, she stopped, her heart in her throat.

  She heard nothing.

  Timika pressed on, rung by rung and hand over hand, staring fixedly up at her goal, then pulled the window open, slowly, quietly, slid her head under it and pushed it wider with her back and shoulders.

  As with the dismount from the fence, there was no elegant way to finish her entrance, and she wound up half walking on her hands across the carpet until her feet fell in after her.

  “At least I’m not wearing a dress,” she muttered as she got upright and flopped heavily into a wingback armchair.

  Katarina Lundergrass turned on her bedside lamp and pulled the heavy drapes closed. She was wearing a flannel nightgown under a heavy bathrobe, belted with a silk sash, and looked ghostly in the thin light. She was unsmiling, but she was also alone and, as far as Timika could see, unarmed.

  “So,” Timika hissed. “What in God’s name do you have to tell me that makes all of that worth it?”

  “Not to tell,” said the old woman. “To show.”

  She opened a drawer in the cabinet by her bed, reached into the back, and drew out what looked like a cloth package. She unwrapped it carefully, lovingly, revealing a patch of silvery metal, about four inches long and diamond shaped, though the edges were ragged and crumpled. It glowed softly in the lamplight, so that Timika could make out odd symbols etched—or rather polished—into the dull surface.

  “What is that?” asked Timika.

  “Here,” said Katarina, scrunching it up like a candy wrapper. “Feel it.”

  Timika reached out, palm up. Katarina lay the little screw of foil on it, but as soon as she let go, it sprang open again, showing not a single crease or fold. Timika stared at it, caught up in a sudden unexpected sense of strangeness. The metal felt odd, light and pliable but strong. It was also slightly warm. As she held it, she thought the strange symbols glowed faintly, as if catching some distant firelight.

  “See?” said Katarina, reaching out, and sweeping one gnarled finger along the length of the metal. The touch seemed to bring the metal to life in Timika’s hands. It blushed a cool blue color that cast shadows around the room. Timika gasped and almost dropped it, as if it were too hot to hold.

  It wasn’t. But it felt curiously charged, as if it somehow contained something of Katarina’s energy, or her own.

  “What the hell is this?” Timika whispered. “Where did you get it?”

  “My father gave it to me,” Katarina said. “A souvenir.”

  “Of something he built?”

  The old woman shook her head. Her hair, which had been pinned back before, now hung long and white, almost to her waist. In the strange blue glow of the metal, it shone like a halo.

  “He didn’t build it,” she said. “He found it.”

  “When? Where?”

  “I told you he worked in Los Alamos, in New Mexico, in the forties, yes?”

  Timika nodded, barely able to take her eyes off the pulsing scrap of metal.

  “He was called in to examine some materials,” she said, smiling wistfully at the memory. “It was all very hush-hush, and he really shouldn’t have shown it to me, let alone brought a piece of it from the facility, but he knew I would love it. I’ve kept it ever since. My secret. My little piece of the past. Apart from Jerzy, you are the only person I’ve ever shown it to.”

  “And it came from Los Alamos?” Timika pressed, feeling the warmth ripple around the metal fragment as if blood surged within it.

  Like it’s alive.

  “No,” said Katarina. “He was called over from Los Alamos. It was July 8, 1947. I remember him getting the call, and the two of us driving out in the middle of the night. ‘Get dressed, little Katy,’ he said. ‘We have to go out.’”

  She looked suddenly sad, wistful, the memory stirring something complicated that had more to do with her father than with the scrap of metal they were talking about.

  “Where did you go?” asked Timika.

  “What?” said Katarina, coming back to the moment with an effort.

  “The two of you drove out at night and came back with this,” said Timika, patiently, holding the metal fragment up. “Where did you go?”

  Katarina looked up from the metal, her face mildly surprised, unearthly in the shifting blue glow coming from Timika’s hands.

  “Oh, I assumed you knew that,” she said. “It came from Roswell.”

  33

  JERZY

  La Plata, Argentina, October 1946

  IT WAS FOUR DAYS SINCE THE USS KITCHENER HAD ARRIVED in Argentine waters. The Captain had met with the various officials and diplomats, and it was two days since he told me of his dual loyalties to the Navy and to this new “intelligence” service. I had not spoken to him since then, and had said nothing of my conversation with him to anyone else.

  Not that anyone cared. The crew had been given shore leave, released to the bars and dance halls of Buenos Aires, and none of my shipmates were in any great hurry to get back to open water. I stayed onboard, reading a collection of speeches from Shakespeare and enjoying the rare silence of the crew quarters. No one—so far as I knew—had guessed that I was younger than I claimed to be, but at times like this, with the rest of the crew hankering after liquor and women, I felt like a child.

  My English was much improved now, but old books—Dickens, say—still gave me difficulties from time to time, and the Shakespeare was especially hard, since many of the words were not in the dictionary I kept at hand. When I heard movement on the gangway, my first impulse was to ask a question without even looking up from the pages in my hand.

  “What does interred mean?” I called out. “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

  “Buried,” said the Captain’s voice.

  I swung down from my bunk and stood at attention.

  “At ease, Seaman,” said Captain Jennings. He considered the empty berths. “Just you?”

  “Everyone went to town,” I said.

  “Not you though?” he said.

  I raised the book in explanation and he smiled.

  “Julius Caesar, eh?” he said, peering at the text.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Treachery and ambition,” he summarized. “Don’t you get enough of that onboard?”

  “No one has been stabbed to death,” I said. “Though if they weren’t able to get ashore …”

  “Indeed,” said Jennings. “Which is what I wanted to speak to you about.”

  “Sir?”

  “I wonder if you would go inland for me. Let’s call it ‘recon.’”

  “Of what?”

  “Not what,” he qualified. “Who.”

  “The SS officer,” I said. “Kammler?”

  “I want to know where they went,” he replied. “Our diplomatic friends had some leads, but Perón and his government aren’t saying anything. You’re going to have to poke around a bit.”

  “I don’t speak Spanish.”

  “You won’t be alone. One of the diplomats from the meeting the other day—Hartsfeld, the translator—will be with you, and I’m going to assign another crewman, Petty Officer Belasco. Hartsfeld will supply a local driver, so language won’t be a problem.”

  “A driver? Are we going far?” I asked.

  “Frankly, yes. If our information is correct, Kammler and some others, probably Nazis, some of whom were part of the crew of the Graf Spee who spent most of the war here—we think they went inland and north, close to Paraguay. It’s a good four hundred miles on difficult roads, which is why you need to make a start as soon as possible. It looks like we’ll be tied up in red tape for a week or more here, but once we get our orders, we’ll have to ship out right away. I want you and the others off at first light and, if possible, back here in four days.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Jerzy,” he added. “Keep your wits about you.”

  Something in his manner got my
attention.

  “Who don’t you trust?” I asked.

  “The Nazis have not just had help inside Perón’s regime. Someone has been covering for them diplomatically too. Someone we consider one of ours.”

  “You think it could be Hartsfeld.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But as I say, keep your wits about you.”

  I DIDN’T LIKE BELASCO. HE WAS MEXICAN BY HERITAGE, but while some of the other Hispanics aboard were shy, unsure of themselves among the largely white crew, he was a meaty, swaggering brute, a bully with a crude sense of humor who’d taken my copy of Bleak House and thrown it over the side during our first week at sea.

  “Books?” he had scoffed. “What are you, a girl?”

  His buddies had laughed and made pouty lips and kissy noises at me, but he hadn’t done it to amuse them, and that somehow made it worse. I avoided him for the bulk of the voyage and had watched him push down the gangplank toward the dance halls of Buenos Aires with something like relief. The prospect of traveling four hundred miles in the back of a jeep with him settled in my gut like nausea and kept me awake much of the night.

  I hid my nervousness as best I could when meeting with the Captain before we embarked, but he spotted it and gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

  “Remember that for some of the men you are looking for,” he said, “the war is not over. Never will be. I just want a good sense of where they are. That’s all. Do not engage or make any attempt to capture or communicate.”

  “Yes, sir,” we answered in unison.

  “Mark Hartsfeld is to be treated as mission commander,” he added. “You will treat his word as if it is mine.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He caught my eye but didn’t hold it. Whatever concerns he might have about Hartsfeld were clearly not to be shared.

  “And be on your guard in the jungle,” he said. “There are more than Nazis to worry about.”

  It was supposed to be a joke, but it didn’t quite come across that way. I wanted to ask about how to deal with Belasco but didn’t know how to frame the question. He was older—in his late twenties—more experienced and more confident than I, and as a Petty Officer, he outranked me. In my heart, I thought him less intelligent, but even then, I knew that stupidity wasn’t necessarily a hindrance to command, and in fact, it made some things a lot easier. I was, I’d decided with a teenager’s hubris, more like Hamlet, deeper and more reflective, paralyzed by my own complexity.