Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  “Perhaps you and I could discuss it in private?” Morat concluded, his tone conversational now.

  “Not tonight,” Alan said. “Another time.”

  He looked at Sgt. Regis one more time, nodded a farewell, and turned on his heel.

  BACK IN HIS QUARTERS, ALAN LAY ON HIS BED, HIS MEAGER personal effects racked up on shelves and plastic crates beside him, and stared at the ceiling of the prefabricated hut. He had just gotten comfortable when there was a knock at the door. For a moment, his eyes flashed to the 9mm Beretta on the nightstand.

  It was Hatcher, the CIA man who had taken charge of his case. His life.

  He had let himself in before Alan was off the bed.

  “Please, Major,” he said, almost casually. “Don’t get up. I thought we might have a little chat, off the Marine Corps Records. Okay with you?”

  Alan sat up and swung his feet down to the floor as Hatcher sat in the folding chair.

  “Does it make a difference what I think?” he asked.

  “Of course,” said Hatcher, drawing the resignation letter from his pocket and laying it carefully on the foot of the bed as if it were fragile. “Though I think you should sign this before I leave.”

  “Last chance?” asked Alan with a bleak smile.

  “Something like that,” said Hatcher. “I’ll be on the first transport out of here in the morning, and I’d like you sitting beside me.”

  Alan blinked. “Are you offering me a job?” he asked, incredulous.

  “More than that,” Hatcher replied, “but if it helps to think in those terms, yes, I’m offering you a job. One you can’t take without resigning your commission.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Special Agent, but I don’t think I’m interested,” said Alan. “I’m a Marine pilot.”

  “Not anymore. You know that. You can go out honorably and move into a … stimulating new career, or you can crash and burn. Go down as a failure, in disgrace, possibly even a traitor.”

  “You know I’m not,” said Alan, suddenly sure it was true.

  “Your commanders don’t. All they know is that you failed to fire on enemy helicopters, jeopardizing the lives of your comrades on the ground. And that your excuse is some malarkey about UFOs.”

  “I never used that word,” Alan cut in.

  “No, you didn’t,” said Hatcher. “Which is interesting, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not really. I don’t believe in stuff like that.”

  “You didn’t,” said Hatcher. “Not until a couple of nights ago. Now, you’re not so sure, and that terrifies you. But it’s all right, Major. I bring tidings of great joy. That thing you saw—it wasn’t a flare. It wasn’t marsh gas, or a weather balloon, but it wasn’t flown by little green men either.”

  Alan’s mouth was dry, and he felt like the room was spinning, like when he’d drunk too much in college and couldn’t get to sleep. He said nothing. Hatcher continued.

  “You said it was like a ball of light, yes?” he said.

  Alan licked his lips.

  “I don’t recall precisely.”

  “Ah, the Reagan strategy,” said Hatcher. “Very original. And I’m guessing you don’t recall the flight characteristics of the vessel in question, either?”

  Alan listened to the wind on the tent roof, and then the words came out.

  “It was unlike anything I’d ever seen,” he said. “Like nothing on earth.”

  Hatcher nodded, smiling less with encouragement than with satisfaction that Alan had conceded a point.

  “I understand,” Hatcher said. “But you’re wrong. Pilots have been recording encounters like the one you had for a long time. Did you know that, Major? Bomber crews in World War II called them Foo Fighters—like the band. A corruption of the French word feu, meaning ‘fire.’ They appeared as burning spheres, moving contrary to any known flight dynamics, shooting off at impossible speeds and angles. You’ve heard of this, right?”

  Alan gave a grudging nod.

  “They aren’t actually spherical. That’s an illusion created by their energy signature.”

  Alan gaped at him, trying to make sense of what he was being told.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

  “They are remarkable things,” Hatcher concluded, and for a moment there was something else in his voice, something like wonder. His eyes seemed to glaze, as if he were picturing things on the very edge of imagination. He came back to himself with a smile, picked up the letter and thrust it towards Alan’s chest.

  “Sign this,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

  12

  JENNIFER

  Steadings, Hampshire

  SHE’D EXPECTED TO GET SOMETHING. SHE HAD NOT expected to get everything. The stunned silence, which had greeted the announcement that Jennifer would be taking over all her father’s business interests, lasted no more than a second. It collapsed into gasps of astonishment and the kind of plummy-voiced outrage that recalled a particularly bitter parliamentary session, in which Deacon and the lawyers played the roles of both the besieged Prime Minister and Black Rod, the sergeant-at-arms, responsible for keeping order. Her father’s business cronies were aghast that “some bit of a girl,” was now involved in matters she could not possibly understand. It was too much for her reeling mind to process.

  She got up and moved towards the door, avoiding the hostile stares of the elderly men around her. Only one met her gaze with something like understanding: the young man with the raven black hair. He looked sympathetic, and his fractional nod toward her was understanding, even encouraging.

  She fled to her room and locked the door.

  Alone, surrounded by the remnants of her childhood and adolescence, the resentment she’d long felt towards her father’s high handedness returned tenfold. What the hell did he think he was doing, dropping her into his world like this, a world he knew she despised? It was so utterly typical. And outrageous. She had neither interest nor competence in high finance. The idea that she could sit at a conference table with all those ancient, suited men her father did business with was absurd.

  Well, she wouldn’t do it. It was as simple as that. She would not let him bully her from the grave.

  Jennifer sank onto the bed she had slept in for the first eighteen years of her life, absently clutching Mrs. Winterburn, a plush rabbit, now so patched and worn that the stuffing poked out around the throat. The toy had been her constant companion, and when she got too old for stuffed animals, she hid it from visiting friends and from her father, lest they think her childish. She considered it now, its dull glass eyes, its lumpy, shapeless body, and then she set it carefully down beside her half-unpacked luggage. It was time for her to leave Steadings for good. She would turn aside her father’s final attempt to transform her into him, and that meant walking away from all he had been.

  Jennifer drew in a long, shuddering breath, blinking back tears of exhaustion and loss. But she was certain of her decision. She glanced around the room, suddenly wanting a picture of her father, so that she could talk to him as if he were there. She needed to explain, and defy, but there were no photographs of him among the childish knickknacks and posters of The Cure and Depeche Mode. She had to go to his study.

  Her father’s study—his inner sanctum, to which she had rarely been admitted—was on the top floor overlooking the grounds at the front of the house, as if he’d wanted to survey the world he’d built as he worked.

  She closed the door quietly behind her and moved through the hallways to the staircase. She hesitated at his study door, and it took an effort of will to open it without knocking.

  The room was big, for an office, decorated in a slightly fussy Victorian style, in over-stuffed chairs, dark wood paneling, smoky landscapes in heavy frames, and a desk the size of a battleship. She stepped inside, moving slowly, her feet silent on the familiar Persian rug, and set her luggage down. She’d stood there quietly many times before, waiting for him to look up from his book or—in later years�
�his computer, tasting the tang of his pipe smoke in the gunmetal air. There was an old carriage clock on the mantelpiece, and its ticking filled the room like memory.

  This is why you have to leave, she told herself. All this. It’s just too much.

  She remembered once coming here as a child, disturbing him when he was working on … something, she couldn’t recall what. But he had been furious, and she’d fled, weeping.

  Something about the half-memory bothered her, a nagging sense that she was missing a vital detail that gave the whole thing meaning, but it wouldn’t come. She pushed the thought aside. She hadn’t come to think about the past.

  There was a photograph of her father on the wall behind the desk. He was smiling, wearing academic robes and a ridiculous tam. It had been taken at some awards ceremony where he’d received an honorary degree from the London School of Economics for services to British industry, or something like that. She thought Prince Charles might have been involved, and then remembered that her father had been angry with her for not showing up in support. The thought confounded her for a moment, and the speech she’d been mentally rehearsing as she’d walked through the empty house stalled on her lips.

  She looked back to the desk and the leather wing chair, in which he would never again sit, and she saw the wooden lion. It was facing the door she had come through. Instinctively, she reached for it, but her hand froze in midair and she frowned.

  This was where he had died, Deacon had told her. Through those windows and down, holding a picture of his dead wife and estranged daughter. Jennifer stepped around the desk and looked out to the damp grounds below.

  Not so very far below, but enough, apparently, to kill him—but only just, which was, she thought, curious. It was hardly a sure-fire way to commit suicide. He might have escaped with some bad breaks, spending his remaining years in a chair, perhaps, paralyzed …

  Not Dad’s style.

  She’d forced herself to think of him as “her father” rather than “Dad” because that made it easier to rage at him in life, but now that she entertained the more familiar word, the strangeness of it all landed. Deacon had expressed surprise that he had taken his own life, and said no one could offer any explanation. No one had glimpsed any change in his recent mood, though something seemed to have been weighing on his mind.

  Edward Quinn had been a man who made definitive choices and stuck to them, a man—at least in business terms—of action. He had been strong, deliberate, frequently ruthless and dispassionate. Jennifer could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d ever seen him sad. Self-pity was beyond him, and if he’d been prone to depression or even despair, she knew nothing of it, or what, in this instance, might have precipitated such a mood.

  Was this a man who would kill himself?

  Jennifer sat in the leather wing chair for the first time in her life, surveying the desk as her father would have done, and as her gaze fell back on the little wooden lion, she felt a rising tide of doubt.

  She was still sitting there when Deacon came in, half an hour later, curling her chestnut hair absently round her finger. He stopped short upon seeing her.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I did not know you were here.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “Are they gone?”

  “Most of them,” said Deacon. “A few are still poring over the relevant documents.”

  “Looking for an escape clause?”

  Deacon framed a wry smile. “They do seem to be paying a good deal of attention to details which would normally be considered formalities,” he conceded.

  “Who are they more pissed off at? Him or me?”

  Deacon coughed politely. “Opinion seems divided,” he said, his gaze taking in her luggage. She was fleeing the scene, as she had so many times as an adolescent after screaming at her intractable father.

  “This is where he died,” she said after a moment. “Through these windows.”

  Deacon hesitated, as if unsure whether he was being asked a question, then nodded.

  “You were home at the time?” she asked.

  “Yes. Mr. Quinn was scheduled to take a helicopter into the city for a meeting.”

  “And he gave you no indication that his plans …” she faltered. “That he wouldn’t be going?”

  “None whatsoever,” Deacon said. “Is there something on your mind, Miss Jennifer?”

  She shook her head, but she could not say it.

  “You found him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he had just … it was right after he jumped?”

  “It could not have been more than ten minutes,” said Deacon, carefully. “When he didn’t go down to the helipad, I came looking for him and found the windows open. I saw his … I saw him, from up here, then went downstairs and outside, but it was too late.”

  “Did you tidy up in here at all?” Jennifer asked.

  Deacon cocked his head slightly.

  “Miss?”

  “Did you rearrange any of his things? On the desk, for example.”

  Deacon frowned and shook his head. “No, Miss. I did not return to this room until the police came, and I touched nothing. Your father was very particular about the state of his desk. I have not been in again since. Is something missing?”

  Jenifer’s eyes fell on the wooden lion. Deacon took a step closer to the desk.

  “Did you move this?” he asked.

  “Haven’t touched it,” she said. “The police?”

  “I do not believe so. But …” He paused. “Mr. Quinn always faced the lion towards him. Your lion, he called it. A gift from when …” Deacon caught himself and stopped, flushing.

  “You can say it,” said Jennifer.

  “From when you loved him,” he said. “I’m sorry. It was what he said. He kept it close to him and facing him always.”

  “Why would he turn it away from him before going out of those windows?” Jennifer asked.

  “So that he wouldn’t feel you looking at him?” Deacon tried.

  “But he took the photograph. The one of mum and me, that sat right there,” said Jennifer nodding to the space on the desk. “He was holding it when he jumped, you said.”

  Deacon nodded. “It’s downstairs,” he said. “The frame needs mending.”

  Jennifer’s eyes wandered back to the photograph of her father at the event she’d missed, all those years ago.

  “Do you think,” she said, not taking her eyes off the face in the picture, “that my father was the type of man who would commit suicide?”

  For a long moment, Deacon said nothing. She turned to look at him, and found him standing rigid, his hands up to his face, fingers steepled against the bridge of his nose.

  “No,” he said at last. “I didn’t believe it until the police said there was no other explanation. A part of me still doesn’t believe it.”

  Jennifer stared at the wooden lion again, imagined her father’s pale fingers turning it carefully, deliberately to face the door.

  “I think,” she said, “that my father was in trouble. Though what could scare a man like him, I really can’t imagine. He called me back. He made that absurd will, designed to drop me in the middle of it. And then …” she stopped, reached for the wooden lion, turned it to face her and considered its clumsily childish paint job. “I don’t know,” she concluded, lamely. “Something happened.”

  Deacon seemed to wait for her to say more, but when she didn’t, his eyes fell once more on the luggage at her feet.

  “Should I call you a car, Miss?” he asked.

  Jennifer thought, doubt hardening into resolve like setting concrete.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll take them back to my room.”

  “You’re staying?” Deacon asked, and there was an unmistakable twinkle of pleasure or amusement in his eyes.

  “Seems that way,” she said.

  “And following through on your father’s wishes, will you be taking his seats on the various boards, managing his
interests and so forth?”

  “You don’t think I can do it?” she said, giving him a frank look.

  “I think, as your father also thought, that you can do anything to which you put your mind,” he replied.

  Jennifer smiled. “I doubt his business associates will agree,” she said.

  “No, Miss,” Deacon agreed. “I think they will find the next few days most stimulating.”

  13

  TIMIKA

  New York

  SHE TRIED TO FIND THE BUSIEST STREETS, BUT THE unseasonable cold was keeping everyone inside. She zigzagged her way south to Eighth Street, but the man who called himself Cook kept her in sight the whole way. In fact, he was gaining on her. She couldn’t outrun him. She couldn’t outfight him. That meant she was going to have to outthink him if she was going to survive.

  How hard could that be? That bomb scare ruse had been seriously lame …

  He hadn’t made his move or taken a shot, which meant he was biding his time, tracking her. He was dressed as a cop, which meant that no one would give her the benefit of the doubt if she got into any kind of altercation with him. Furthermore, he wasn’t alone, and they, whoever they were, had already showed they were ready to shoot her in broad daylight. They weren’t worried about witnesses looking out of their windows. Even so, she needed to stay where people could see her. If a van pulled over and two men, dressed as cops, bundled her inside, it was possible no one would raise a finger to help her, but it was also possible someone might at least take out their phone and shoot a video of it.

  She needed a plan, and quickly. Something bold and simple. Something that played to her strengths.

  Which were what, exactly?

  The Huff Po lady thought I was fun, she thought, bleakly. Maybe I could just sass and smile my way out of being killed for a book I didn’t ask for and haven’t read …

  But from inside the snark, an idea emerged. Sass and fun might actually help. Both were enshrined in her bold scarlet coat and that ridiculous glossy and ringleted wig. Cook, or whatever his real name was, had never seen her without them …