“While all this was happening, the women, who had for centuries stayed at home while the men went off to war, had been focusing their energies inward with the help of the Droza, into their own minds and souls, and they began to develop an ability that we now call being a psychic, working on the vril.
“The women saw a path out through the mind. Most of the men would have none of it. They were warriors and believed in the power of the body, of the sword. Except they swore they would never fight for anyone else ever again, but rather, would make others fight for them.
“This time the Roma fragmented and the parting was bitter. Most of the men, with some women, left to go to the west and gain power in the real world. Most of the women, with a few men among them, went even further into the Himalayas to dwell there, to perfect the path of the mind.
“A small segment, eschewing either path, scattered, determined never again to place down roots in land, but to preserve their sense of self in the group, not in the country they happened to be living in. This last group, the ones my mother drew her lineage from, are what you call the Gypsies.”
“And the other two groups?” Dalton asked. “What happened to them?”
“That, Sergeant Major, is a very good question. I think it might be possible that the one group that stayed in the high mountains of the Himalayas might still exist, might still be living in Shambhala, or Shangri-la, and it might be their spirits that we sense on the virtual plane at times. Or-” Jackson paused.
“Go on,” Dalton prompted.
“Or maybe we are sensing the Droza. If they ever did exist, then they still might. Maybe not all of them intermingled with the Roma. And the pure vril‘they have is the power to be on the virtual plane.”
Dalton checked the faces of the others who had listened to Jackson ’s story. Barnes was shaking his head, seemingly having none of it. Hammond looked thoughtful, which surprised him.
“If there are others on the virtual plane,” Jackson said, “they seem to mean us no harm.”
“As far as we know,” Dalton said. “And let’s remember that what we know is far outweighed by what we don’t know. Here’s the deal. We’ve been lied to, and we’re being used. I tend to look at those things in a negative light. Regardless of what’s out there in the virtual plane, we have a real problem here in the real world, right here in Bright Gate. Add in the fact that someone has planted a bug in Sybyl and has been monitoring the computer and I would say we have to be very careful. I think we need to make a plan to cover our butts in case something goes wrong.”
“What kind of plan?” Hammond asked.
“One of the first things we do in Special Forces when we plan a mission is make up an E & E plan,” Dalton said.
“ ‘E & E’?” Jackson asked.
“Escape and evasion,” Dalton said. “There’s an official one that we turn in to the commander taking our mission briefing just before we go, but we also make up a team-member-only plan that we have just in case we get abandoned.”
“A little paranoid, don’t you think?” Hammond said.
“I think we need to be getting paranoid,” Dalton said. “Don’t you? Or are you going to go with Kirtley? Do you trust him? You didn’t tell him about Barnes breaking off from the mission or what you learned from checking Sybyl, so I have a feeling you don’t feel very comfortable with Kirtley.”
“I don’t think Kirtley feels very safe either.” Hammond rubbed her face with her hands. “He told me he has a contingency to take care of me if his team is cut off on the virtual plane. Why would he be worried about me doing that?”
“I don’t think it’s you he’s worried about,” Dalton said.
Hammond sighed. “I just wanted to make this work, to do what no one had done before. To make it better.”
“You’ve done that,” Dalton said. “But you’re not indispensable. Jenkins wasn’t, the first team-the first team we know about,” he corrected himself, “wasn’t, my team wasn’t, and we’re not.”
“But…” Hammond was shaking her head. “What can we do? Kirtley runs everything now. He’s in charge here.”
Dalton had been thinking about that. “Didn’t you tell me there was a backup for Sybyl?”
“The computer here is technically Sybyl IV,” Hammond said. “Fourth generation. Sybyl I and II were prototypes. Sybyl III was the first one that worked projecting avatars into the real plane.”
“Where is it now?” Jackson asked.
“Off-line and in storage. All of the first couple of generations of equipment are here.”
“Show us,” Dalton said.
Hammond led the three of them to a double-wide door on the side of the control room. “This is the freight elevator that accesses all levels.” She entered a code on the keypad. The door silently slid open, revealing a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot elevator with a twelve-foot ceiling. They followed her on board.
“The storeroom is on the lowest level, where the generators are.” She punched the button and they descended for fifteen seconds, before coming to a halt. The doors opened, revealing a large open space. The hum of generators producing power echoed through the cavern. A half dozen large tanks supplied fuel to the generators.
“There’s Sybyl III.” Hammond was pointing at a large crate.
“When is Kirtley’s team doing their first orientation mission in the tubes?” Dalton asked Hammond.
“This evening. Eighteen hundred hours. Why?”
“We’re going to set up an E & E plan and execute the first preparatory phase then.” Dalton turned and got back on the elevator. “I have some calls to make.”
Publicly the Pentagon was listed to have five floors, only one of them below ground. In reality, there was a subbasement below that basement which connected with access tunnels leading in various directions, including one that ran to the Capitol and White House. The entire system was designed for emergency use only and had been sealed since construction, with only one access point from the building above. The entrance was occasionally used by maintenance personnel. The floor plan for the subbasement was the exact same as that for the basement, with the five main corridors with rooms branching off on either side. The center, which was a large courtyard on the surface, was made up of strengthened concrete twenty feet thick. Under it, two hundred feet below the subbasement, was the War Room, which was the nerve center of the United States military. One could not access the War Room from the subbasement, only through a single large elevator on the main level of the Pentagon, thus further isolating the subbasement.
Except for a few selected individuals and maintenance personnel, knowledge of and access to the subbasement was forbidden. Roger Killean was one of the select few and he’d been ordered by Mentor to go to the Nexus Pentagon command post to tap into the War Room traffic and begin preparing contingencies for scrapping the shuttle launch with CS-MILSTAR. With the death of Mrs. Callahan and the disappearance of their agent who had picked her up at Andrews Air Force Base, Killean was the sole surviving member of Nexus in Washington.
Killean was a high-level member of the State Department, and the Pentagon was not his assigned province, but with the death of Eichen there was no choice. He had the proper clearance to get into the Pentagon. The elevator entrance to the subbasement was located behind a locked door with a Custodian sign hanging on it. He waited until no one else was nearby and then boarded the designated elevator and put his key in the slot below the buttons.
There was no designation for the sublevel-because it didn’t exist for the majority of the people in the building-but the key automatically took the elevator down, below the basement. The doors slid open and he removed the key and walked out.
The corridor before him was bare concrete. The subbasement was unfinished, a relic from the original plans during the hasty construction during World War II. The contract for the Pentagon had been awarded on August 11, 1941, and construction begun a month later. The building was finished in January 1943, a blistering pace for such a large job.