Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” said the soldier. “Interrogation will be separate.”

  “Interrogation?” Timika shot back. “About what? We should be getting the damn Medal of Honor or some shit.”

  “You have violated numerous security protocols, you’ve trespassed on government property and leaked classified information. And your friends,” he continued, nodding at Alan and Barry Regis, “have questions to answer about the death of a special agent.”

  “What?” Timika exclaimed. “They didn’t kill anybody. You need to find that Letrange guy. Or Morat, or whatever his name is.”

  She spoke with a certainty which—like her use of “friends” a second ago—made little objective sense but felt absolutely right.

  “Mr. Morat is missing and presumed lost,” said the soldier. “Now if you would get into the vehicle, please. I am authorized to use force if you do not comply.”

  There wasn’t much you could say to that, and before she could frame any kind of quip, Timika’s phone rang. She snatched it up before the soldier could stop her.

  “Timika? It’s Marvin.”

  “Thank God,” she said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “One of those bogus cops showed up at my place so I took off. I went to—”

  “You can tell me later,” she replied. “Right now I need you to get in touch with my lawyer. I’m being held at Area 51 in goddamned Nevada, if you can believe that.”

  “Dude!” said Marvin. “No way.”

  “Way,” said Timika, as the soldier reached for her phone.

  “You need to hang up, ma’am,” he said.

  “Later, Marvin,” she said. “We’ll be in touch. And Marvin?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  She hung up pointedly, staring down the soldier who, unsure of his authority, looked away.

  Timika scanned the surreal landscape, the pink desert sand strobed by the brights of half a dozen vehicles, the waiting helicopter kicking up dust in a wide arc as its rotors thrummed steadily. Her gaze found Jennifer and for a moment the two women’s eyes locked and Timika nodded.

  That was all she needed to do for the Englishwoman to get the message: they’d reconnect, they’d find each other, and they’d make sure the men weren’t tagged with some bogus murder charge. This wasn’t over. They were just getting started.

  83

  ALAN

  Secure Facility, Nevada

  ALAN WAS STILL GROGGY FROM THE CRASH AND FROM whatever medication he’d been given to stabilize him, and he was pretty sure he had slept through most of the helicopter ride. Even if he had been awake, there would have been no way he could have gauged how far they’d traveled in the blacked-out helo. When they landed, he was immediately blindfolded.

  He protested, proclaimed his innocence of Hatcher’s murder, expressed his drug-fogged outrage that a man of his rank and service record should be treated like this by his own government, but he got no response at all. He was bundled into an open-topped vehicle, driven for a few minutes, then forced out. He was marched inside a cool, air-conditioned building that hummed with the white noise speakers he knew from Dreamland.

  But it didn’t feel like he was in Dreamland. He wasn’t sure why he thought that. A smell, perhaps? It just felt different, and though he could merely have been taken to some part of the extensive facility he’d never visited before, he didn’t think so.

  He thought there were three men with him, possibly four. One of them left after they rode an elevator, which smelled of new, institutional carpet. The elevator was smooth. Alan estimated they descended at least five stories, and when they came to a stop, the sound echoed, as if he were in a cave or tunnel, though the surface he walked on was level and hard: concrete, almost certainly.

  A dull whir rose in pitch and volume, wound down, and then they were getting onto some kind of train.

  “We going to see Blofeld?” Alan quipped woozily.

  No response. Maybe not the time for James Bond jokes.

  They spent maybe five minutes on the monorail—or whatever it was—got off, walked for maybe three minutes, took two left turns, then waited as a door was unlocked and he was pushed inside. The door closed and his blindfold was removed.

  There were two guards on the door and a man in a suit sitting at a table with a battered book in front of him. He looked up and nodded Alan into the chair opposite him.

  “You can’t do this,” Alan muttered, trying to sound defiant but conscious of the way his voice sounded ragged and woolly. He tried to sit up straight, but his body was sagging into a weary slouch in spite of his best efforts. His mind, too. He wanted to sleep for a week.

  “Yes, Major Young,” said the man at the desk. “We can.”

  He was small, balding, mid-forties, with watery blue eyes. Nondescript. A man you would pass on the street without noticing. A forgettable man, except that Alan had met him before.

  “Agent Harvey Kenyon,” said Alan. “We met on the plane from Kuwait.”

  The bald man smiled. “You have a good memory, Major,” he said. “Though names are …”

  He gestured vaguely with his hands: unreliable.

  “I saw inside the sphere,” Alan said. He felt a strange exhilaration that was overriding his natural caution. “I saw the pilot. You guys have been experimenting, or genetically engineering some kind of …” his voice tailed off. He couldn’t find the words or the conviction. “Why are you so damned secretive about everything? Why don’t we just tell the world what we have, what we can do? You don’t even tell your own people. I work for you. I have clearance.”

  The small man sat back, smiling cryptically, as if he were both puzzled and amused.

  “You think this is about clearance?” he said. “Not at all. Or not in the sense that you mean it.”

  “So why am I here?” Alan said, managing to dredge up a little defiance. “You know I didn’t kill Hatcher.”

  The man whom he knew as Kenyon nodded thoughtfully, his eyes falling on the book on the table. It was bound with black leather or something like it, worn and cracked, and when he flipped it open, its pages were thin as tissue and marked with a slim gold ribbon.

  “Tell me, Major,” he said absently. “Are you religious?”

  Alan blinked and tried to focus. Maybe he was already dreaming.

  “Not really,” he said at last. “Why? What does any of this have to do with religion?”

  “Oh,” said the bald man, looking up and smiling, a catlike grin that did not reach his eyes. He pushed the book across the table to where Alan could read the two words on its spine. “Absolutely everything,” said the man, tapping the book with his index finger. The lettering on its spine said The Odyssey, by Homer. “Though perhaps myth is a better term than religion. Less loaded. Major Young, did you ever wonder how the Apollo space program got its name?”

  Alan blinked. “Apollo was the god of the sun, right?” he said.

  “And crossed the sky daily in a glittering chariot,” Kenyon agreed.

  “So?”

  “So let’s consider the possibility that that chariot was more than metaphorical.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said Alan. “You’re saying that the craft we’re flying were brought here by aliens which humans took to be the gods of ancient Greece, but they left and now we have their stuff?”

  In response to Alan’s contemptuous tone, Kenyon smiled but, for a moment so long it became uncomfortable he said nothing, just staring unblinkingly at Alan—that odd, knowing smile fixed on his nondescript face. At last he opened his mouth, but the next eight words came out so low that Alan had to strain to hear them.

  “What makes you think that they ever left?”

  TO BE CONTINUED …

  AFTERWORD

  There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

  —Doris Lessing

  WHAT YOU HOLD IN YOUR HANDS IS A PIECE OF A VERY large puzzle. It repres
ents the first installment in one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken in this or any other field. It is a project that involves science and history, politics and religion; fiction and non-fiction. All of these elements are woven together in an effort to express a singular truth. While they each can be appreciated in a standalone way—and who, after reading this thrilling novel, could disagree?—taken together they reveal an aspect of reality that is so astonishing that it only can be understood intuitively, as well as rationally.

  It was Tom DeLonge who conceived of this revolutionary, multi-disciplinary approach that includes books, art, music, and film: all as individual facets of a single polished gemstone of revelation. Some truths—as Nobel Laureate (and science fiction author) Doris Lessing reminds us—can best be expressed in fiction, and this is what A. J. Hartley has accomplished, spectacularly, in this novel. What has been missing in most published accounts of the Phenomenon at the heart of human experience is the narration. There are many books on the subject that are vast accumulations of facts, dates, interviews, personal accounts, and declassified documents. They are necessary, but they cannot convey the whole truth. They cannot convey the emotional impact of the Experience which is, after all, its essential characteristic. That is because we have no vocabulary to define it, categorize it, measure it, box it in. All attempts at doing so swing wildly from the dry statistics of a government report to the wide-eyed fanaticism of mystical revelation. The only solution to this problem is a conscious, deliberate juxtaposition of fact and fiction to arrive at a truth that transcends both, a solution represented by what you have just read.

  I won’t say too much more about this project. Where’s the fun in that? You will have to see it for yourself. Watch it unfold. Gradually, as you read both the fiction and the non-fiction, you will find the facts meshing with the narrative; you will see how the one influences the other and how they both reveal the warm secrets buried beneath the cold snow of official memoranda. Then the art, the music, and the film will expand on the theme and show it from many different angles. In this we are going back to the original form of story-telling, what the anthropologists and the archaeologists and the philosophers have told us is myth and fantasy—with their associated arts, music, and drama—but which we understand to be the honest efforts by honest people to leave an account of the miraculous and the numinous in the only terminology available to them. Oddly, we moderns have not done much better.

  It is time we stopped thinking of the people of the past as ignorant, as superstitious, as stoned temple priests high on alkaloid fumes and druggie daydreams. They fought wars; they built monuments; they left behind their art and their literature and, yes, their science. Their math and their physics, astronomy and medicine, were populated by gods and demons, by angels and jinn, and yet they still were able to build the pyramids and the henges using this crazy calculus of consciousness and desire. We can learn from them. In fact, we must.

  Evil people as well as good have attempted—since time immemorial—to exploit this knowledge, and you have read some of this here already. There was an Operation Paperclip. There were secret weapons under development at the slave labor labs of Nazi Germany. And there was more. Much more. The facts are as astonishing (and as entertaining!) as any fabrication, and we promise to tell all as this Project continues to unfold.

  When you start to read the non-fiction version of these events—which represents my own contribution to this Project—you will remember aspects of this novel and you will begin to realize what we are doing, what an enormous undertaking this represents. You will also sense a challenge in these accumulated pages, a charge to confront this subject in a new way, an active way, an approach that combines scientific inquiry with artistic sensitivity such that it never has been contemplated before (at least, not since the Renaissance).

  More than anything else, though, you will feel the passion and the excitement that we feel. It’s contagious, to be sure. You will start to see what we see, maybe even feel what we feel, and you will never be the same.

  —Peter Levenda, 2016

  Check out other Sekret Machines products, books and more as the multi-media franchise unfolds at tothestars.media

  Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

  Copyright © 2016 by Tom DeLonge

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any fashion, print, facsimile, or electronic, or by any method yet to be developed, without express written permission of the publisher. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events, are unintended and entirely coincidental.

  To The Stars, Inc.

  1051 S. Coast Hwy 101 Suite B, Encinitas, CA 92024

  ToTheStars.Media

  To The Stars… and Sekret Machines is a trademark of To the Stars, Inc.

  Cover Design by Jesse Reed

  Book Design by Lamp Post

  Managing Editor: Kari DeLonge

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-943272-15-0 (Hard Cover trade)

  ISBN 978-1-943272-16-7 (eBook)

  ISBN 978-1-943272-17-4 (Hard Cover Limited Edition)

  Distributed worldwide by Simon & Schuster