Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  Powers sagged visibly, and the hand he raised to his face was momentarily unsteady. He shut his eyes and massaged his brow for a second, and the weary, haggard aura she had first noticed seemed to intensify.

  “All right,” he said. “But not here. Meet me …” he checked his watch, “at ten-thirty this evening on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. It will be quiet then. We can walk somewhere from there.”

  SHE ATE IN WHAT CALLED ITSELF A PUB, SURROUNDED BY young people in suits who, she supposed, had government jobs. They had the brash confidence of people sure of their futures. Jennifer had taken the quietest corner she could find and spoke to no one. She was pretty sure she had not been followed, and while the Mall surely deployed all kinds of covert surveillance, she saw no sign of anyone paying particular attention to her.

  Powers was right. Once the sun set, the crowds on the National Mall thinned to a trickle and the Jefferson Memorial, set back as it was away from the other monuments, was almost deserted. The Jefferson Memorial sat atop a series of broad steps, looking across the Tidal Basin to the Washington monument and, distantly visible through the trees, the White House, all lit up with a blue-white light that made it seem spectral and unearthly. The Memorial itself was eerily quiet, apart from a lone policeman in shorts and on a bicycle but wearing a sidearm, who gave her a respectful nod as she gazed up through the imposing pillars to the statue of the man himself. But the bronze figure was less compelling than the words inscribed on the walls. One panel, less familiar to her than the others, particularly stood out. It read:

  I AM NOT AN ADVOCATE FOR FREQUENT CHANGES IN LAWS AND CONSTITUTIONS, BUT LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS MUST GO HAND IN HAND WITH THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN MIND. AS THAT BECOMES MORE DEVELOPED, MORE ENLIGHTENED, AS NEW DISCOVERIES ARE MADE, NEW TRUTHS DISCOVERED AND MANNERS AND OPINIONS CHANGE, WITH THE CHANGE OF CIRCUMSTANCES, INSTITUTIONS MUST ADVANCE ALSO TO KEEP PACE WITH THE TIMES. WE MIGHT AS WELL REQUIRE A MAN TO WEAR STILL THE COAT WHICH FITTED HIM WHEN A BOY AS CIVILIZED SOCIETY TO REMAIN EVER UNDER THE REGIMEN OF THEIR BARBAROUS ANCESTORS.

  She read it twice, lingering over the penultimate sentence and marveling at the foresightedness and humility that could devise laws designed to change as civilization evolved. Coupled with the other panels’ words on freedom and equality, it made a powerful statement, so that the statue of the man himself seemed to her almost an afterthought. This was a monument to an idea, something the likes of which she could not recall in England, for all its ancient palaces and monuments.

  Powers arrived seven minutes late. He seemed tired and distracted, and instead of leading her away to some quiet late night café or discreet bench, he eased himself slowly onto the hard steps on the side of the monument itself, and breathed out a long, slow sigh.

  “Well, Miss Quinn, you have disrupted my day.”

  He said it without malice, looking from her to the vista across the waters of the Potomac, which glittered black under the lights of the mall.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jennifer.

  “No you’re not,” he said. “Nor should you be. Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, taking in the monuments around him, the broad, sparsely trafficked walkway and the vista of muted splendor. “It deserves better. We all do.”

  “Is that the conclusion my father came to?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps. So. What do you know, Miss Quinn, about unidentified aerial phenomena?”

  Jennifer gave him a baffled look. “What?”

  “I’m talking about UFOs.”

  The bafflement lasted only a moment, and with it came a fragmentary memory too dark to see, something about being a child in her father’s study … It wouldn’t come into the light and she was suddenly angry.

  “Seriously?” she said. “This is what you thought would fob off on me? I’ve been killing hours, waiting for you, and you give me little green men in flying saucers? What happened to we all deserve better? Come on, Senator, you can do better than that.”

  “I didn’t say anything about little green men or flying saucers.”

  “Aliens then. Whatever.”

  “Not them either.”

  “Can you just tell me what you are saying so that we can get this sham over?”

  “There’s not much I can tell you.”

  “Figures,” snapped Jennifer, who was already resigned to her trip being wasted.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, and now he turned to look at her, and his eyes were alive with a young man’s fire. “This isn’t about money—or not merely. It’s about things I am forbidden to discuss.”

  “Forbidden by whom?”

  “By my allegiance to the American people and the oaths I swore to serve them.”

  “Which means what exactly?”

  “Do you understand the concept of black budgets?”

  Jennifer felt like they had been driving along a straight road when the car had swung off onto a track she hadn’t known was there, traveling in a completely different direction.

  “You mean …?”

  “I mean taxpayer money, earmarked for projects so secret they cannot be publicly discussed. While all budgets are subjected to congressional oversight there are special provisos for sensitive military projects. Title 10 section 119 of the US Code states—and yes, I can quote it from memory—The Secretary of Defense may waive any requirement under subsection (a), (b), or (c) that certain information be included in a report under that subsection if the Secretary determines that inclusion of that information in the report would adversely affect the national security. Any such waiver shall be made on a case-by-case basis. And that, Miss Quinn, is the Pentagon’s get-out-of-jail-free card, though it is not, believe me, free in any sense for the rest of us.”

  “Why is this relevant? The Maynard money wasn’t government money. It was private funding, originating outside the United States.”

  “Exactly so.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “When projects are black, and they cannot be discussed in any public forum, they can slip through the cracks of all government monitoring. Sometimes public interest has to rely on private funding.”

  “Maynard was paying you to give them classified information?”

  “Absolutely not!” said the Senator, and his tone was—for the first time—loaded with self-righteousness. “I am no traitor, Miss Quinn. I am a loyal patriot determined to serve my country, its people, and its laws …”

  “So what did they get for their money?”

  The Senator hesitated, and the hauteur faded.

  “A line of communication—not from me or my office,” he added quickly, recovering a little of his defiance.

  “From whom and about what?”

  “The rancher I mentioned before, Nate Hapsel, owns a great deal of land. Some of it is very close to facilities in my senatorial district, which utilize those classified budgets we were just discussing. The money I received enabled me to have parts of Hapsel’s land included in an environmental survey that identified a number of endangered species native to the area, some fish—the Ash Meadows Speckled Dace and the charmingly named Devils Hole pupfish—along with the Southwestern willow flycatcher and, for good measure, that old favorite, the gray wolf.”

  “None of which are actually there.”

  “I can’t say that for sure. But their appearance on the endangered species record means that the Hapsel land is effectively protected wilderness, a no-go zone for everyone, including the government. Anyone—including the army—needs a permit to go onto those lands, and the screening process is set up to flag my office.”

  “So what is really going on there?”

  Powers smiled ruefully. “Just a little private monitoring of public expenditure, all quite legal. A little interdepartmental monitoring is good for the body politic.”

  Jennifer gave him a long appraising look. “You think this is about rival government agencies?” she said.

  “I shouldn’t be talking about it,” he said. “And I only agre
ed to meet with you because I had a lot of respect for your old man. But I’ll tell you what any person with a half a brain would tell you after looking at a map of Hapsel’s land in Nevada. The government owns a lot of territory down there. For years they denied it, but they eventually came clean. Area 51, Miss Quinn. A flight development and test center run, I suspect, by the CIA, possibly partnered with the Air Force, the NSA and DARPA and God knows what other alphabet soup government organizations. SWEEP is just another, a government watchdog, if you like, designed to keep black budgets in check.”

  “No,” said Jennifer. “It’s not and I can prove it. It’s a network of private interests, and if I was in your shoes I’d be wanting to know why the people in charge of those interests feel the need to be so close to a top secret government installation. You’ve been manipulated, Senator, and not by private US citizens.”

  For the first time since they had begun speaking he looked genuinely unsettled.

  “SWEEP has never requested anything that would bend even the most liberal definition of propriety,” he said. “I’m sure this is all a simple misunderstanding.”

  “If it’s not, Senator, you have a serious problem,” said Jennifer. “We all do.”

  36

  TIMIKA

  Pottsville, PA

  SHE WROTE IT ALL DOWN, THE FRAGMENT OF PECULIAR metal, the story of a nine-year-old girl whose father was called to Roswell to investigate a crash site, a government program to protect and silence the girl and others like her, the children of Operation Paperclip scientists. All of it. She sat in her car in the parking lot of a 24-hour Dunkin’ Donuts, working by the thin blue light of her laptop’s screen, driven by a fierce need to share all she had discovered. It would be a story unlike anything ever posted on Debunktion, not an exposé of hoaxes and the stupidity of conspiracy theorists, relayed in teeth-rattling sarcasm, but something quite different, something with weight and seriousness and a genuine—if uncertain—curiosity. The site was all about exposing false truths, but that only meant it stood for the genuine truth, she told herself as she formatted the document and hit “post.” This was no different, even though it might involve a degree of retraction of earlier stories, and that would certainly come as something of a surprise to their readership.

  It was after two in the morning by the time she finished. As the adrenaline faded, she found she was very tired. Sleeping in the car was not an appealing prospect. Driving around looking for somewhere safe to stay, risking getting pulled over for a DWB or worse, was even less attractive. Suddenly, and for the first time since she’d left the city, she wanted to be back in her own apartment, in her own bed. Maybe it was time to go there. Maybe her post would blow the lid off whatever the guys who had come after her wanted to keep quiet. Maybe now the game was up for them. Maybe this was where she got on the highway to normality.

  There was one thing to do first. She finished reading Jerzy’s journal, turning the pages with feverish curiosity and mounting amazement. A week ago, she would have laughed it all off, but now …?

  She stared at the final page in baffled excitement and then, with the distinct air of violation, tore the page out. Bending the book cover as far as it would go, she located the slit in the fabric and the hard shape beneath it.

  A key.

  Small and brass. She wrapped it up in the page she had torn out, and tucked it into her bra, replacing the book in the lining of her swanky new coat.

  She remembered that she had turned off her phone before going back to The Hollows, and switched it back on. There were three texts from Audrey.

  “Site hacked totes,” said the first one. “Office ransacked.”

  She caught her breath and read the second one.

  “Dion called. Your apartment raided last night. He’s fine but you must NOT go home. He’s leaving town. Won’t say where.”

  Her hands were unsteady now. She scrolled to the bottom to see the third text.

  “Don’t call. Don’t post to the site. They are watching. Marvin missing.”

  Timika stared at the glowing phone. Somewhere in the distance, a police siren wailed.

  Marvin missing.

  This was on her. If anything had happened to him because of her …

  She waited only long enough to pull up the Debunktion site. Her story—which should have been front and center on the home page—was nowhere to be seen. In its place was a crappy photoshopped image of a flying saucer that looked like a lampshade. The headline read, “Roswell’s Aliens Found!” She stared, momentarily captivated, trying to decide if the story was supposed to be funny, but the more she read, the more straight-faced it seemed. The words popped off the screen: UFO, alien autopsy, government cover-up. It was all presented as serious and was all ludicrously fake, without even the self-awareness to be a good hoax. Beneath it was a story from yesterday, demonstrating how crop circles could only be created by a complex pattern of lasers from a thousand feet above the ground, and another terrible picture of what looked like a plastic dinosaur model emerging from a pool of water and captioned “Hard evidence for Nessie at last!”

  What the hell?

  The comment section was full of mocking outrage from their regular subscribers. What had happened to Debunktion’s snarky objectivity? How could they go from taking crappy conspiracy theories to pieces to endorsing it all, without so much as an announcement? One commenting troll, even as he vowed never to visit the site again, charged them with pandering to the basest instincts of the Internet for advertising dollars. Saddest of all were the commentators praising them for abandoning their former skepticism and embracing the truth of unexplained phenomena.

  Timika stared, speechless, tears welling in her eyes. Her life’s work had been dismantled and made a mockery of. Just like that.

  She took a long, shuddering breath, wiped her eyes and gripped the steering wheel.

  “Okay,” she said aloud. “Okay.”

  Don’t post to the site …

  She had. Could that give them a lock on her position? She’d been using the Dunkin’ Donuts Wi-Fi signal, logged in as herself …

  Stupid.

  She thought the siren was getting closer. She snapped the ignition key twice, listening to the groan of the engine.

  “Come on,” she muttered.

  She tried a third time, and the car rumbled into reluctant life. It lurched out of the parking lot, settling into its familiar rhythms as it warmed up. She was cruising comfortably by the time she turned onto route 209 and headed southwest toward Tremont. Her plans were unclear. Hell, she thought, they weren’t plans at all. They were instincts, panicky, irrational and uncertain. She looked at the road map from her glove compartment. She would take Interstate 81 southbound, to where it joined 78, then head west to Harrisburg. That would give her time to think, to make some decisions. She could stay on the interstate all the way to Roanoke or Knoxville, or maybe drop further south and make for Atlanta and her cousin Tonya, praying that the Corolla lasted that long. Then what? New Mexico, to sniff around for clues to one of the world’s most familiar mysteries?

  Not that she had ever thought it a mystery. Roswell was the UFO conspiracy theorists’ Shangri-La, but all the official evidence said it was merely the site of a high-tech balloon crash, and she had never seen anything to make her think otherwise. It was all nonsense, and had in fact been central to what had driven Debunktion from the start.

  Now this. An old woman and a twisted fragment of strange metal.

  It proved nothing. Timika would keep looking. She was, as ever, a skeptic. But people were looking for her, trashing her office, destroying everything she’d built, discrediting her, painting her as a fraud and a crank and endangering the people who worked with her. Maybe worse.

  Every car behind her might be a cop, or worse. There was a car a couple of hundred yards back that had been there since she left Pottsville. She could see nothing but headlights, so she had no idea if the car was marked in some way, or even what color it was, but it linge
red in her rear-view mirror like a threat. She tried accelerating, and then slowing down again, just to see what the other driver would do, but the car maintained its distance, and with each half mile, Timika’s unease mounted.

  Before reaching Tremont, she turned left towards the interstate on a secondary road shaded by forest and signposted to Echo Valley. There were no streetlights, and she had to stay focused on the road ahead, but she was pretty sure the car behind had not followed her.

  Unless the driver turned off its headlamps.

  That would be bad.

  She swallowed and concentrated on driving. The road was narrow, lined by trees with pale bark that flashed in the glare of her high beams. At this time of night, the road was utterly empty. She wouldn’t be able to evade drones or helicopters, but there was no point worrying about such things. Somehow, she doubted the men who’d come after her in New York had that kind of organizational reach. If they came for her, it would be a couple of guys in a car with a shotgun in the trunk, their headlights turned off so they could get nice and close before running her off the road and into the woods. Not as a drone, operated out of some Nevada control center.

  The thought didn’t make her feel better.

  The country road had been a mistake. It wasn’t going to save her time, and it was doing nothing for her nerves. The darkness was absolute, the forest on either side of the road impenetrable, and it occurred to her that if the Corolla died on her, this might not be the best place to be a single black female. And there might be bears in the woods. The sooner she got back to civilization, the better.

  The thought had just registered when the Corolla’s engine stopped. It didn’t groan or fight or idle. It just turned off, as if she’d turned off the ignition. The car went silent, the power vanished, and she was just rolling on inertia. She pushed the gas pedal and waggled the steering wheel, but it made no difference. She had no brakes and no power steering. A hundred yards later, the Corolla rounded a curve and came to a halt on the shoulder.