“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.
The subbasement had never been designed as office space, but as a buffer between the main building and the wasteland, swamps, and dumps that the land had been before construction began. Over forty thousand concrete piles had been driven to support the subbasement. The ceiling was low, about six and a half feet, and the corridor was crisscrossed with pipes, cables, and phone lines. Widely spaced fluorescent bulbs provided only dim light.
Killean turned right and walked down the long corridor. There were seventeen and a half miles of corridor in the upper five floors of the Pentagon and he estimated another three miles or so down here. He didn’t think anybody knew the entire layout. He’d been down here with Eichen on several occasions, and he knew the way to the Nexus Command Post that had been established during the last year of Eisenhower’s administration. After several hundred feet, he stopped in front of a steel door. His key fit in the slot and the door slowly swung inward. As he stepped in, he turned to the left for the light switch.
He felt the slightest of breezes on the back of his neck and reached up with his left hand, saving his life as the garrote came over his head. It caught on his hand, jamming it against his throat, the wire slicing deep into the skin, but saving his jugular from being severed.
Killean pivoted, feeling the garrote cut deeper into his left hand, while he slammed with his right elbow into the chest of the man behind him. The pressure on the wire lessened and Killean dropped to a knee, freeing himself, pulling his left hand back, feeling skin peel away with the metal wire. He dove into the corridor, got to his feet, and prepared to sprint back the way he had come.
A bullet creased his cheek, a burning line of pain. He spun about and dashed in the opposite direction, into the labyrinth of the subbasement. As he ran, his mind kept going back to an experiment he’d conducted many years ago in college as part of a physiological psychology course. Rats in a maze. Now he knew how the rats had felt. He could feel wetness on his cheek and he knew it was blood. The pain from his hand was a steady scream. He could hear running footsteps behind him and he picked up the pace.
He came to an angle turn to the corridor and paused, peeking around to see if anyone was waiting. For a thousand feet the dimly lit corridor was empty. He turned the corner and began running again, hearing his shoes slap against the unfinished concrete floor and the sound of his heavy breathing loud in his ears.
Killean thought of the twenty-three thousand people who were working in the building above him, yet he knew that he-and those hunting him-were the only ones on this floor. He’d started carrying a pistol when he heard about Eichen, but he’d left it in his car in order to pass through the metal detectors to get into the Pentagon. Obviously his hunters had been able to circumvent the security of the building with their weapons.
The bullet hit his left thigh a split second before he heard the shot. The impact sent him spinning about before he went down.
He was surprised there was no pain when he looked down and saw the blood pulsing out of the wound. His hand actually hurt much worse. But from the squirts of blood coming out, he knew the artery had been hit.