Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

He pulled the Locust’s front point up, spiraled the body of the ship around and pushed it as hard as it would go back towards the pursuing ship. He passed it, no more than thirty yards below his right wing tip, and its bright metal body filled his window as the arrowhead tried to pivot into a chase. Alan slammed the heel of his hand on the all stop, and in the micro second following, hit the homing button.

  The Locust seemed to hang motionless for a second, and then was tearing away, sliding out of the world and becoming not plane or bird but the air itself. Alan felt a drag in his guts as the craft leapt away, faster than anything should ever move. Even so, even in that tiny fraction of a second, he saw the pop of console lights, the sudden bangs and screams of something impossible tearing through his hull and knew, in the flare of fire light at his side, the shriek of pain in his face and hand, that he had been hit.

  40

  JENNIFER

  Washington, DC

  IT TOOK JENNIFER A LONG TIME TO GET TO SLEEP. SHE woke late in her DC hotel, her head brimming with the follow-up questions she wanted to take to Senator Powers. She brewed coffee in her room while she took a blisteringly hot shower, and now sat sipping the coffee unenthusiastically as she clicked through her e-mail. Nothing. She flipped on the muted TV while she dressed. A local news station was detailing some personal tragedy and showing footage of police cars, their flashers rolling blue and red, intercut with an image of a young, professional-looking woman and an older man in a suit. A familiar man.

  Powers.

  She stared. Then turned on the sound.

  “… the sixty-eight-year-old senator from Nevada was found in the rented townhouse by his cleaning lady at nine o’clock this morning. Though police have refused to comment on the case at this stage, the apparent suicide seems motivated by a pending story in the Washington Post detailing Senator Powers’ affair with a junior aide. His family could not be reached for comment, but several members of his staff have expressed their shock and grief at this morning’s developments.”

  Jennifer was frozen in the act of buttoning up her blouse, hands stuck as if her fingers had forgotten what to do. Her mouth and eyes were dry. She blinked deliberately and something of the spell broke, allowing her to sit on the foot of the bed as the images from the television washed over her.

  There was, as she supposed there always was, a barely suppressed predatory glee about the reporters, like jackals stumbling on an unattended leopard kill. This only intensified when it was revealed that the Washington Post, which had supposedly been about to reveal the Senator’s affair, had only gotten wind of the story, from an anonymous source, an hour before the alleged suicide had taken place. A spokesman from the paper, perhaps trying to mitigate his own responsibility, said he thought it unlikely that the Senator’s alleged suicide stemmed from any upcoming negative publicity, and that the newspaper had not even begun to verify the accusations made by the anonymous caller.

  “We get a dozen of these every week,” said the reporter. “There’s no reason to assume the story was going anywhere, at least in the short term.”

  So the story developed a tang of intrigue as well. She could imagine the newsroom’s delight as national interest focused on the story.

  Jennifer felt a kind of numb disbelief and, trailing it, a gnawing sense of responsibility for the death of the man she had met the night before. Could his conversation with her, there on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, shrine to all that America was supposed to stand for, have left him with such a profound sense of failure that he’d taken his own life, only hours later?

  But then, the official reports of her own father’s death, a man who’d been the Senator’s friend, said that he had also taken his own life, and she didn’t believe that for a minute. If the two deaths were related, caused by the same people, it wasn’t so great a leap to think her visit somehow precipitated the Senator’s demise.

  She shuddered at the thought, her anxiety undercut by a pang of sadness originating in her father’s death, but somehow made fresh by this new tragedy. The two men had been similar in age, in temperament, even in their politics. For a moment, it was like she had lost her father again.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Housekeeping,” said a woman’s voice.

  Jennifer stiffened.

  If her presence had in any way hastened Senator Powers’ death, they—Maynard or whoever—would know where she was staying, even though she had signed in with a fake name. It was absurd to hope otherwise.

  “Can you come back later, please?” she said, still taut and watchful.

  “No problem,” said the voice. It had a lilt that might have been Hispanic. Jennifer listened for the sound of feet in the hallway but heard nothing. She pressed her eye to the view-hole and saw, through the distorting fish-eye lens, the back of a middle-aged woman pushing a cart loaded with towels and cleaning products, her head bound demurely with a scarf.

  Safe.

  For now.

  She snatched up the few things she’d brought with her and stuffed them into her bag. Twenty minutes later, Jennifer had checked out and was aboard the shuttle back to the airport. This time, she knew where she should be flying, but what she would find there when she arrived, she couldn’t begin to guess.

  IT WAS HOT IN LAS VEGAS. SHE’D ASSUMED IT WOULD BE, but it was still only spring and this was Africa hot, a searing, stifling heat, like standing beside a fire close enough to feel your skin cooking whenever you stopped moving. She rented a car from the Alamo stand in the airport, remembering, only a second before the bored attendant asked for it, that she did not have a US license. Fortunately, her International Driver’s License, which she’d obtained before going to Swaziland, was still folded up with her passport. The attendant—barely college age and ill at ease in a jacket and tie—peered at it dubiously but didn’t care enough to make trouble. He pushed the keys to a Chevy Impala across the counter to her and sighed pointedly when, as an afterthought, she requested a GPS system. She had an address, but it wasn’t like she knew where she was going, though she had studied a Google map on the plane and had a fair idea of where the government protected wilderness land was supposed to be.

  Nate Hapsel’s ranch bordered Nevada State Route 375 west of Crystal Springs, but it wasn’t until she started driving and the GPS calculated the route that she got a sense of just how big America was. The flight from Washington made the point in one way, and she’d amused herself speculating where a flight of comparable length would have taken her from London—Russia? Turkey? Algeria? But it was only sitting in the driver’s seat of the rented Impala, watching the miles go by, that the full scale of the place registered. The map she’d studied on her laptop had made it look like Las Vegas was right next to Crystal Springs, but even traveling nearly double the speed limit of all but the fastest UK roads, it took two hours to get there, crossing an unforgiving barren beige landscape of basin and range desert as forbidding as anything she’d seen in Africa.

  She worried about being followed. It seemed unlikely. Frequent rear-view mirror checks showed nothing unusual, but if her intuition was correct, the people looking for her had access to serious resources. If some drone lazily circling a couple of thousand feet above her was tracking her car’s every mile across the desert, she had no way of knowing.

  And if that drone is carrying a missile like the ones they use to take out terrorists in Iraq?

  Well, there was no point thinking about that.

  She thought of the words inscribed on the wall of the Jefferson Memorial, those high ideals about freedom and equality expanding as society evolved …

  Surely things couldn’t be so far gone that a civilized and democratically elected government would target a visitor like her for elimination because she had asked a few questions?

  It should have been a rhetorical question, but she thought of Senator Tom Powers, whose sudden suicide, according the NPR report she had just heard, was being met with incredulity and suspicion from those who had wo
rked with him. But then it didn’t need to be a government pulling the strings of deceit, surveillance and murder, did it? She had seen how much money the Maynard Consortium moved around. They could buy and sell most countries. However much people griped about governments and politicians, the power of corporate money had always scared her more. Nations turned on each other, fought bloody and devastating wars, but corporations somehow remained. Her father had taught her that. The Nazis had driven through the war in BMWs, Mercedes and Daimlers. Porsche had designed their tiger tanks. Fiat had done something similar for Mussolini’s Italians. Mitsubishi, who built the pleasant, sporty looking passenger sedan that just passed her, had spent the war years building the Japanese its most infamous fighter, the Zero. Corporations were society’s cockroaches: they always survived.

  She would have forgotten these examples years ago if they had not become part of her anti-capitalist litany, rehearsed in many a university bar and charity work camp over the years. She suspected she was living that corporate reality now, and while she was used to the idea making her angry, its full terrifying potential was just beginning to register.

  It was like a breakaway civilization, she thought, a powerful, moneyed organization that owed no allegiance to geography or the other outmoded trappings of the nation state, an entity that lived in the Internet, in anonymous boardrooms, in the interconnected invisible spaghetti of revenue streams and offshore accounts, unnoticed and impossibly powerful, a force moving beneath global affairs for its own ends. She knew the social media graphics about how the world’s wealth was distributed, the less than one-percent who controlled over half the world’s resources, and she knew how corporate interests had long shaped the most violent shifts in human history. We still think in terms of nations, ethnicities and elected governments when we think of foreign policy and war, she mused, but what if that’s all a blind? What if the driving interest is solely economic? That would be no great surprise. Middle Eastern oil, Russian gas pipelines: these things were clearly at the heart of recent conflicts.

  She thought of the Maynard group’s jowly chairman, and of Herman Saltzburg, the cadaver who had haunted the dreams of her childhood, and the man who had called himself Letrange. All those men sitting around tables, amassing their fortunes and changing the world to suit their whims with the stroke of a pen, the click of a mouse, the plummy “aye” of a vote only the dozen people in that room even knew was happening.

  She shifted in the seat. The hot plastic interior of the car was starting to smell. She turned the AC up higher and wondered how anyone would choose to live in the desert, but then, choice wasn’t something most people had, was it? They chose which brand of sneakers to buy, or where to take their vacation, but other people controlled whether the places they worked stayed open, where they got their food from, or how much it would cost them to get on a plane. Real choice, choice in the ways the Maynard Consortium understood the term—the power to control your own destiny—that was denied most people.

  She scowled. These were familiar ideas. There was something pompous about replaying them in her head, pompous and self-protective. She didn’t want to think about what had happened to Tom Powers in DC, or what had happened to her back in the shed, a stone’s throw from Heathrow airport, or what had happened to her own father. And she certainly didn’t want to think about that peculiar phrase Powers had left dangling on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial.

  Unidentified aerial phenomena.

  What the hell was that supposed to mean? Money and politics, however appalling, she could understand, but if there was anything to that tantalizing, ridiculous three-word phrase, or if it had anything to do with what had happened to Powers, or her father, or her, it was beyond her ken.

  UFOs? The badge of crazy people. The insignia of the lunatic fringe. No, she would not go there.

  Choice, she thought bleakly. She’d chosen to be here, to chase down what she could find, like a mongoose going after a rat. Her money—her father’s money—had allowed her to do that. She might be on the side of the ordinary people—she knew the term was condescending—but she wasn’t one of them. She turned the radio on and found a country music station. The sounds were almost as alien to her as the landscape she was driving through. She left it on, figuring it was good to be reminded of just how far outside her comfort zone she was.

  The Hapsel place was set back from the main road along a long dusty track marked with a battered rural mailbox: she drove past twice before finding it, slowing the rental car to a rolling stop. This was no African jeep, and she didn’t want a fight with the Alamo people over the state of the chassis when she took it back. There was fencing on either side of the road, strands of barbed wire strung and rusting from wooden posts. It didn’t look like it would keep anything in or out, but then there was no livestock she could see, just barren range. If anything grew here, this was clearly not its season. There were no signs designating that the land was in any way protected, nothing saying it was home to any endangered species. Two slow miles from the highway, she came to a metal gate, its white paint flaking and stained with pinkish clay. She got out, swung the gate open, drove through and dutifully closed it beside her, as if she were out for a ramble across green English farms.

  The house—or rather homestead, a word which popped into her mind the moment she saw the place—was a two-story clapboard, painted white but a very long time ago, no better maintained than the rest of the place, with a wooden porch where an elderly couple sat in matching rocking chairs, as if they had been waiting to have their picture taken for Life magazine sixty years ago. The man was grizzled, wearing sweat-stained overalls. The woman was grandmotherly, wearing a dress that would have not been considered attractive even in the days when these territories were first settled by whites. There was a pitcher of lemonade, the glass sweating in the heat. For a moment, Jennifer wanted a drink from it more than anything else in the world.

  “Afternoon,” said the old man, not getting up but smiling. “Help you with something?”

  “Well,” said Jennifer, who realized she should have spent less time in the car thinking about global inequality and more about planning her rhetorical strategy, “I was hoping to find Mr. Nate Hapsel.”

  “Then you found him,” said the old man, his smile widening. “Nate Hapsel, guilty as charged. What can I do you for?”

  “Nate Hapsel,” his wife scolded, “are you going to keep a young lady standing out there in the heat on a day like this?”

  “Well, no,” said the old man. “I was just getting through the pleasantries there.”

  “I think they’d be a good deal more pleasant sitting up here in the shade with a cold glass of lemonade, wouldn’t you say, dear?” said the old woman, turning to Jennifer.

  “Well,” said Jennifer. “It has been a long drive. Thank you. That would be lovely.”

  “You sound funny,” Hapsel teased as Jennifer climbed onto the porch. “Where you from? Australia?”

  “England,” said Jennifer.

  “She’s from England,” Hapsel to his wife.

  “I heard,” the old woman replied. “Welcome to Nevada,” she said to Jennifer, her smile touched with amazement. “I saw England once. Some of my people came from there. I’ll get you a glass.”

  Jennifer settled into a rocker—a third, set out as if they had been expecting her—feeling a little dazed by her unexpected welcome.

  “All the way from England to see me?” said Hapsel. “What’s on your mind?”

  He didn’t add, little lady, but it wouldn’t have been unexpected. Jennifer looked at the sun-bleached porch, the hot, dusty land and the massive expanse of blue sky overhead. It was like she’d wandered onto the set of some old-time Western.

  “Well, I assume you know a Mr. Tom Powers, the Senator?” she said.

  Hapsel frowned. “Can’t say that I do,” he said.

  “Yes, you do!” called his wife from inside. “The senator. The one who visited the high school, seven years ago. Wa
nted to know if we would vote for him. You remember? Nate Hapsel, you don’t have the memory of a housefly.”

  “She may be right,” said Hapsel, still smiling genially. “So what about this senator?”

  “Well, you heard he died?”

  “Is that right? Ella?” Hapsel called back. “The senator died.”

  “You knew that!” his wife returned. “It was on O’Reilly. Senator Tom Powers. He died in Washington, DC.”

  Hapsel nodded thoughtfully.

  “Guess I did hear that,” he said.

  Jennifer blinked. This was not how she’d expected things to go. A long silence passed. She eyed the pitcher on the table and looked for Mrs. Hapsel, who was still in the back.

  “Okay,” she said at last. “Well, the Senator was responsible—partly, at least, for securing a preservation order for parts of your ranch, on the grounds of its ecological sensitivity. That it was the home to some endangered species. He told me you made a sizable contribution to his election campaign.”

  The old man’s smile did not falter.

  “I don’t know how it is in England,” he said, “but here, what a man does with his money is his own business.”

  “Absolutely,” said Jennifer, back pedaling. “It just seems odd that you didn’t remember who he was, after giving him thirty thousand dollars.”

  “You heard the wife,” said Hapsel, still grinning. “I don’t remember nothing.”

  “And the protected environment?” Jennifer tried. “I didn’t see any signs.”

  “Oh, that’s up a ways,” said Hapsel. “Two miles or more.”

  “Could I see it?”

  “Not much to see. Buncha fences and signs. It’s not like you can go in. That’s kinda the point. Protected, right?”

  “Right,” said Jennifer. The pitcher of lemonade was continuing to bead with condensation and she still had no glass. “What sort of ranch is this, Mr. Hapsel?”

  “Why?”

  “I just didn’t see any livestock.”