Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  “Figured I’d find you here,” he said.

  Regis gave him a nod, but he met Alan’s eyes first, and there was a change in the atmosphere, as if a kind of veil had been pulled across the FAC’s face.

  “Any news?” asked Alan.

  “Nothing good,” said Morat leaning forward and speaking in a whisper. “Outside.”

  Regis set his beer down and frowned at Alan.

  “Didn’t we just do this dance?” he muttered, as they followed Morat outside.

  This time they went only far enough from the bar that they wouldn’t be overheard, loitering in the thickening shadow of the pickup truck with the model flying saucer hanging from its mini-crane.

  “Well?” said Regis, looking over his shoulder.

  “LOTS OF SHOUTING,” SAID MORAT. “TOP BRASS WANTING to know what the hell is going on. Eyewitnesses on the news talking about lights in the sky all over the country. Civil liberties types moaning about confiscation of cameras by a recovery team north of Reno. Questions being asked in DC.” He frowned and his tone lowered in register, no hint of further flippancy. “The casualty list hasn’t changed. Five dead. One critically injured. The surviving triangle is going to be in the shop for weeks, maybe months.”

  “Leaving us with how many?” asked Alan.

  Morat gave Regis a wary look.

  “He’s head of base security,” Alan snapped. “I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s guarding.”

  “Three operational Locusts,” said Morat grudgingly. “One more in dry dock which needs a few days’ work. Couple of weeks on one more.”

  “And the prototype,” said Regis. “The sport model.”

  The other two just looked at him, Alan remembering the glimpse he had got of the silvery disk-like craft in the hangar he’d glimpsed before being forced to look away.

  “You know what I’m talking about,” said Regis. “This isn’t the time to pretend you don’t.”

  “I’ve only seen it once,” Alan said. “Never been in it. Certainly never flown it.”

  “No one has,” said Morat. “The engineers are still working on it. So if whoever hit us comes back …”

  “We’re fucked,” said Alan.

  “There’s more,” said Morat. “Still bad.”

  “What?” Regis prompted.

  “I said we had three Locusts operational. There should have been four,” said Morat. “There were an hour ago. Now one of them’s gone. So is Hatcher.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why I came for you,” said Morat. “I called but …” he eyed Alan’s phone critically. “We need you back on base and ready to go. Command structure is being revised. It looks calm because everyone is doing their jobs right now, but if anything happens … it will be chaos.”

  “You think something’s going to happen?” asked Alan.

  Morat gave him a level look and said, “Don’t you?”

  “Anything else?” asked Alan.

  Morat managed a bleak smile. “Not enough for you? Okay, well there was a chemical spill in locker room C2, so you’ll have to stay out of there, but I don’t think that’s a massive priority right now, do you?”

  Regis blew out a long breath, then nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let me pay for the beer I never got to drink and we’ll go.”

  50

  TIMIKA

  Central Nevada

  IT WAS WARM. HOT, COMPARED TO WHEREVER SHE’D BEEN before. She couldn’t remember where that had been or how she’d gotten here. In fact, she realized as she struggled to make sense of things, she couldn’t remember much of anything.

  Drugged?

  The idea touched a chord, like there was something she should remember, but it wouldn’t come. But she sure as hell hadn’t been … wherever she was now, that much was certain.

  She was outside in what looked like a desert. It was night, but she could feel the dryness all around her, under her shoes, in the air. She shrugged out of her coat and instinctively felt for something at the back, something that wasn’t there, though the lining of the stylish black coat had been slit open.

  She felt a swell of failure and sadness, but could not recall why. She had lost something, but she didn’t know what. Her fingers spread open over the indentation in the back of the coat where the fabric had stretched slightly.

  A book.

  That was what was gone. Old. Handwritten.

  Memories moved like animals in the dark: just enough to show they were hidden.

  She had come from …

  She looked up, but saw only the vast emptiness of the desert sky, pin pricked with a thousand stars. The action made her woozy, and she sat heavily on a fire blackened tree stump, her posture sloppy, as if she had been drinking heavily. She waited for her head to stop swimming. She was suddenly parched with thirst. She should, she supposed, be frightened, but none of it felt quite real. She had the drunk’s sense of invulnerability, even if she knew it was an illusion.

  Shit.

  She kept very still and focused on her breathing, trying to process the landscape she saw in the darkness. She wasn’t in New York, which was, she recalled, where she lived. Her name was Timika Mars, and she lived in New York. She ran a website.

  This was good. It was coming back. Though the memory of the website brought a rush of despair which, for a second, she could not explain. Then it came to her.

  Debunktion. Ruined, she thought, along with her professional reputation. Marvin’s missing …

  “Oh yeah,” she said aloud to the night. “This remembering stuff is just awesome.”

  She looked up, conscious of some presence that had not been there before, and there was a white woman, about her own age, cute in a no nonsense kind of way, but covered in dust and muck, about twenty yards off but walking toward her, her eyes full of uncertainty.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Timika, lowering her eyes again when the strain of looking up became too much. “No,” she added. “Strike that. I don’t really care. Where am I?”

  The white woman’s uncertainty seemed to increase.

  “Nevada,” she said. Her voice was weird. Fancy.

  “Nevada?” Timika shot back. Her voice sounded slurred. “What the hell am I doing in Nevada?”

  “I was going to ask you the same question,” said the woman who Timika realized was English.

  “Why? Is this your property?”

  “No.”

  “Huh,” said Timika. “You got something to drink? My head …”

  “Sorry,” said the woman, shaking her head. She had long chestnut hair gathered into a ponytail. “But I can take you somewhere you can get something.”

  “Yeah?” Timika said, looking up again. The woman was cautious, and watchful, but the offer seemed genuine.

  “Can you walk?” asked the woman. “I don’t think we should stay here. But my car is a couple of miles away.”

  “A couple of miles?” Timika echoed. “Damn, lady—you need to work on your rescuing.”

  “Is that what I’m doing?”

  “Hell if I know,” said Timika, getting laboriously to her feet. She waited for a second to steady herself, then said, “Okay. Which way?”

  “Do you know what just happened to you?” asked the woman. “I mean, how you came here?”

  “Not sure,” said Timika, hedging. “You got any theories?”

  The woman seemed to hesitate, as if coming to a decision, then said, “I saw it.”

  Timika met her eyes and saw the truth and the concern in them. And the questions. That was okay. Timika had questions too. She held out her hand.

  “Timika Mars,” she said. “I’ve spent my life saying a bunch of stuff isn’t real, and it has come back to bite me in the ass. You?”

  “Jennifer Quinn,” said the woman. “I seem to have stumbled onto a financial conspiracy that involved my murdered father, centering on the development of what the late Senator Tom Powers called ‘unexplained aerial phenomena.’ And as a result, some
very powerful people want me dead.”

  “Yeah?” said Timika, more memories snapping into place. “Me too. I had a book. A journal, written by an old man, but … I lost it. Or it was taken.”

  Once more the stab of failure and sadness. Timika would have said more, but the other woman—Jennifer—had become very still, gazing off along the valley floor.

  “Do you hear that?” she asked.

  Distantly, but getting louder by the second, was the unmistakable rumble of a car coming over difficult ground. Two cars.

  “Yeah,” said Timika, who still felt a little dazed. “Not good?”

  “I’m thinking that whoever is coming is supposed to be your welcoming committee,” said Jennifer, threading a supportive arm round Timika’s shoulders.

  “So why don’t I feel like they’ll be all that welcoming?”

  “Because you’re smart,” said Jennifer. She looked towards the crest of a long, rocky ridge. “That way. We need to get out of sight. Quick as you can.”

  They crossed the rock-strewn desert in a loping, ungainly trot, and were soon scrambling up the ridge, sometimes using their hands to pull themselves up. Jennifer urged Timika over the top and down the other side, pausing just long enough to look back to where headlights splashed the desert sands. Memories of her pursuit through the streets of New York, her encounter with soldiers in what she believed had been Russia, eased back into focus, as if the peril were sharpening her mind as part of some ancient survival instinct. By the time they surmounted the third ridge, she was dusty and her legs were trembling from the exertion, but she felt like herself again.

  They clambered over a fence, and then the land was flat and open, so they ran as best they could, in case the cars should come barreling up behind them, painting them with their high beams. Timika wasn’t in as good shape as Jennifer, and she was starting to gasp and wheeze as she jogged along, conscious that she was holding the other woman back, but she was damned if she was going to stop. She didn’t know who was in those cars, but she had had enough of being pushed around.

  For an awful moment, as they cleared the last fence, a single strand of barbed wire snagged on her pants, and Timika thought Jennifer was lost. She saw the panic rising in the woman’s face, the desperate way she looked left and right as she walked, but then they reached an empty road and, thirty yards from where they had rejoined it, sat a dusty Chevy Impala, half obscured by a rocky outcrop. She got in and the car pulled silently away, moving slowly, headlights off until they had gone a half mile or so.

  “I need a drink,” said Timika. “And I mean a drink drink.”

  “I know a place,” said Jennifer. “Let’s hope they’re still open.”

  Timika said nothing, sitting back and waiting for her heart rate and breathing to return to something like normal.

  Normal.

  She didn’t know what the word meant anymore, not here with this strange woman in this even stranger place, after everything that had happened. She considered the English woman as she drove. It had not occurred to her to distrust her. She’d been cautious at first, as had Jennifer, but as they drove, united in strangeness, she could feel the barriers between them lowering. She was not surprised when the Englishwoman slowly broke down the details of her own experience in a matter-of-fact tone. When she was finished, Timika did the same, as much as she could remember, with edited highlights but nothing deliberately kept back.

  The mutual trust between them was as strange as everything else and grew, Timika suspected, out of a mutual desperation born of weary anxiety. Neither of them had spoken to another person, face to face like this, for what felt like a long time. Both had spent the previous days skulking, prying, teasing at problems, and running for their lives. Their backgrounds could hardly be more different, but being out here after all that had happened was common ground.

  They drove through the night, seeing little until the roadside bar hove into view. Timika took in the alien on the sign outside and gave Jennifer a look.

  “Seriously?”

  “Not a big bar scene in Rachel, Nevada,” said the Englishwoman.

  “I’m getting that.”

  The strangeness they both felt slipped for a second, became absurdity, and suddenly they were both laughing with relief. It took a good thirty seconds to stop, and Timika had to wipe her eyes before she got out of the car.

  “Lord,” she exclaimed. “I needed that almost as much as I need a drink.”

  “Me too,” said Jennifer, grinning at her as if she had known her for years. “The laugh and the drink. And water won’t do.”

  “Give me a minute to rehydrate,” said Timika, “and I’ll be right there with you.” They were still sitting in the car, the engine off. Timika considered the Little A’le Inn. “You think this place is safe? Whoever was in those cars were looking for me. Expecting me, maybe. You think it was those bogus EPA guys?”

  Jennifer nodded solemnly. “That would be my guess,” she said. “Unless the guys who came after you in New York are here too.”

  “Two different groups trying to kill us, you mean?” said Timika. “Awesome.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jennifer. “The men in black made no attempt to harm me. Just freaked me out. So either their strategy has changed since Letrange—or whatever his name is—tried to finish me off, or they’re two different groups.”

  “One of them government?”

  “Maybe. But whoever was looking for you in the desert never saw us,” said Jennifer. “I’m pretty sure of that. Did you get a look at the types of cars?”

  “Not really,” said Timika. “Not military and I don’t think they had roof lights, so probably not law enforcement either. Sedans, I think. One paler than the other. Maybe white.”

  Jennifer shrugged, looking impressed.

  “None of these, anyway,” said Timika, nodding at the cars parked alongside the Little A’le Inn. “Let’s get that drink,” she said, opening her door.

  She was walking to the bar’s entrance when she realized that Jennifer was hanging back. Timika turned, mouth open to ask what the problem was, but stopped at the terror etched into Jennifer’s face. She was staring through the window into the well-lit interior of the diner where three men stood at the bar, apparently paying their tab, one white, one black, and one who might have been Spanish or even middle eastern.

  “It’s him,” Jennifer gasped. “Letrange. He’s here.”

  51

  MORAT

  Safid Kuh, September 2014

  JEAN-CHRISTOPHE MORAT LOOKED UP AT THE SOUND of feet coming down the hallway to his cell. The tunnels were long and narrow—part concrete, part rock—and sound carried a long way, so he always knew when they were coming. They usually came in pairs, one with a food tray, the other to watch over him, AK-47 at the ready. Sometimes they came with questions, but he had not been tortured, which was unexpected, and he had been well treated.

  Which was worrying.

  The whole situation felt off, somehow. His captors were Afghans. He was certain of that, but there were others among them who weren’t: pale men, their skin easily pinked by the sun, men who kept to themselves and spoke only in whispers. Russians, he was fairly sure, though what they were doing here, he couldn’t begin to guess. They’d stayed away from him, which was also strange. He detected no sign of his Afghan captors doing or saying anything to suggest Moscow was pulling the strings.

  He’d been here a week, though it felt longer. He still wasn’t sure how they had found him in the first place. Morat knew this country as well as he did his own, and was expert at blending into it. He spoke flawless Pashto and Dari, the latter with an immaculate Tajik accent, and could tell you the history of his village going back three generations, though he could also pass as Uzbek if needed. Most of the guards seemed to think he was local, an informant, perhaps, though it was far from clear who they thought the enemy was. If it weren’t for Dubchek, Morat felt there would have been a decent chance that he could talk his way out of th
is prison.

  Dubchek was the fly in the yogurt. Or rather the spider.

  He’d appeared on the third day, accompanied by other men Morat took to be Russian. It was immediately clear that the local mountain men deferred to him, though he did not swagger or threaten. He was quiet, soft-spoken and mild-mannered to the point of an old world politeness that was both dignified and ominous, as if it masked a great and dangerous passion. His ethnicity was unreadable. He was dark skinned—though that might have been the sun—and black eyed, with black hair to match. He wore it swept back and shoulder length, and might have passed for a sultan or a tsar, and he had a dense beard without a wisp of gray. Though Morat had heard him speak a few words of Russian—making a casual joke suggesting deep knowledge of the language—he didn’t think the man came from Russia, in spite of his name. He spoke Pashto as well as Morat, but instead talked to his prisoner—Morat was under no doubt that he had somehow become his prisoner—in immaculate English. Morat spent almost an hour with him on the third day, trying to detect any regional accent, but it was curiously neutral, and when he did show flashes of something—an Irish lilt, or a flat American Midwestern vowel—the man would then say something that gave a completely different impression.

  Learned, then. Studied. It was his feet Morat heard echoing in the hallway. Morat had grown used to the sound, the precision of those well-made boots—and not a mountain man’s boots either. These were built not just for tarmac and concrete but also for the polished wood floors of formal dining rooms, where people sipped champagne under crystal chandeliers. Morat listened. One pair of feet only.

  He rose from the wooden cot where he’d been sleeping and licked his lips. If Dubchek were alone, that meant … what? He would come clean, share how he was going to get Morat out? Or something else?

  Morat thought of Dubchek’s strange, impenetrable smile, the twinkle in his dark eyes as he spoke, the chill amusement underlying his affable and urbane composure, and estimated he was no ally, poised to spring him to freedom.

  Dubchek didn’t bother to test the little window before unlocking the door, even though he was alone. He was confident that, should Morat try to force his way out, he was more than up to the challenge of stopping him. Morat sat again on the edge of the bed and sipped from the glass of apple tea the guard had left him. Dubchek wasn’t the only one who could show composure.