Project Aura (6 page)

"You just said you were going to use it against Eichen," McFairn noted.

"To protect it for a little while longer."

"How about telling me who your real enemy is if you find Nexus only a nuisance?"

"For now, all you need to know is that the Ring is the face of my enemy but not the controlling entity." Boreas changed the subject. "We need to regain control of Psychic Warrior. I want a team. Destroying Aura might not be the best solution if Souris has made improvements over what I have here at HAARP. I want to at least get an idea what she's done, and Psychic Warrior would be the most efficient way to do that. Get your friends south of the Potomac to reconstitute another Psychic Warrior team."

"Do you mean the Pentagon or the CIA?" McFairn didn't wait for an answer. "I think both are a bit leery of Bright Gate, given each one's respective team was decimated." She leaned forward, palms flat on the desktop. "I was prepared for this possibility. I have a better option closer to home, constituting a team from within the ranks of my own Agency. But it will take time to train another Psychic Warrior team," she noted.

"Pick someone opportunistic to lead the team," Boreas said. "Someone like you, who understands the nuances of loyalty when weighed with self-advancement"

McFairn didn't respond to the barb.

"What forces does the Department of Defense have in Colombia?" Boreas asked.

"Task Force Six," McFairn said. "The covert counter-drug team."

"All right. Use them to draw out Aura. The more we make the Ring use it, the closer we can get to the transmitter and Souris."

McFairn pressed her hands against her temples, trying to keep the pain she felt from building. "I'll contact the Pentagon and get things moving. I’ll let you know the schedule."

She hit the Off button. She called the Pentagon and passed on the speculation about the attack on the Coast Guard cutter originating from the Ring.

Then she checked her Fort Meade directory and found the name she was looking for. She made that call, getting the personnel she wanted moving. After hanging up the phone, she went to the wall to the right of her desk. Pressing the proper code in a keypad caused a panel to slide up, revealing a steel door and a retina scan. She leaned forward, placing her right eye against rubber.

The safe door opened with a click. McFairn removed a thick three-ring binder with
Top Secret
stamped on the cover and carried it back to her desk. Taking a pad of paper, she wrote down a summary of the conversation she’d just had with Boreas. She three-hole-punched it and placed it in the rear of the binder, the most recent addition.

She paused before taking the binder back to the safe. She flipped through the hundreds of pages until she was back at the cover page. Two words stood out against the white paper:

The Priory

She turned that page and looked at the first entry, which she had made over twenty-five years ago when she had first been contacted by someone representing that group. Despite the thickness of the book and the years between, she knew little more about the shadowy organization than she had in the beginning.

What she did know could be summed up succinctly: It was powerful. It was international. It had existed for a very, very long time. And now for some strange reason, it wanted HAARP operational worldwide.

She'd made a deal with the devil and now it was collecting.

There was a second binder in the safe. It was much thinner than the first one. It too had a cover page:
The Priory's Enemy

Opening that binder, the most recent entry was labeled The Ring. She knew something about the consortium of drug cartels that had been formed in Bogota over twenty years ago. It had been the focus of much attention from the various American intelligence agencies through the years, although little had been discovered about it.

The problem was, she knew that the Ring was just a front for the Priory's enemy, just as she, and her agency, were working for the Priory. The fact that the Priory's enemy used drug dealers made her feel somewhat better about her alliance with the Priory. The enemy of her ally was indeed her enemy.

That the Ring was developing a weapon along the lines of HAARP was very disturbing, but they'd known that would be a problem when Dr. Souris disappeared from the program two years ago and was rumored to be working for the Ring. McFairn didn't think it was a coincidence. She had a feeling whoever was pulling the strings behind the Ring had suborned Souris just as she herself had been suborned by Boreas and the Priory.

She controlled the most powerful intelligence-gathering organization on the face of the planet and in the past three decades she had been able to even come up with just a rumored name for this group that opposed the Priory: Mithrans.

At 14,005 feet in altitude, the Mount of the Holy Cross joined, by just sixty inches, the fifty-four peaks in Colorado known as fourteeners. South of Vail and Interstate 70, it was in the center of the White River National Forest and far removed from the nearest paved road. The mountain had gained its name from the cross-shaped snowfield on its north side, away from the sun, that was present year round.

It was an impressive peak and Sergeant Major Dalton's new home. Two thirds of the way up the rocky east face, a camouflaged door was sliding up, revealing a metal grate that slowly extended outward fifteen meters from the side of the mountain. The pilots of the Blackhawk helicopter edged their craft perilously close to the rock face, blades less than a foot from striking, and did a perfect three-point landing on the grate.

Dalton slid open the door and handed out several crates and boxes to the administrative crew who were there to greet the chopper. This was the only way in or out of Bright Gate, and every flight had to carry resupply.

He threw the last box over his shoulder and headed into the dark cavern as the helicopter departed, going back to Fort Carson. The grate began to move into the mountain, causing him to almost lose balance for a second, and the door came down, cutting off the light from the outside.

"Sergeant Major."

Dalton nodded a greeting. "Lieutenant Jackson."

She was standing next to the vault door that led to the interior of the mountain and Bright Gate. She wore a dull green one-piece flight suit. She was a tall, slender woman in her mid-twenties, and her blond hair was cut shorter than required by military regulations, a matter of practicality when operating as a Psychic Warrior in the isolation tanks that were their home during a mission.

"Are you all right?"

Dalton considered the question, knowing that it was more than just a pleasantry. Honesty dictated a long, involved answer, practicality a shorter, more direct one. "I'm functional."

A look crossed Jackson's face, something he couldn't make out, and he didn't get a chance to see it again as she turned to the door and punched a code into the keypad on the side. The circular door was eighteen feet in diameter with rings of black metal on the polished steel surface. The rings were part of the psychic fence guarding Bright Gate and extended on either side of the door, and through the bottom floor and top ceiling, completely surrounding the facility.

The door rolled sideways into a recessed port, revealing a corridor lit with dim red lights. It was cut out of solid rock and descended slightly. The admin personnel entered, carrying their loads. Once Dalton was through, Jackson used the keypad on the other side to shut the door. The psychic fence was engaged once more.

"You can dump that here," Jackson told Dalton as they paused next to a cross corridor the admin personnel had turned onto. "We just received a call. Raisor's replacement is due in shortly."

"'Raisor's replacement’?" Dalton repeated. "Is Raisor really gone?"

Jackson didn't answer, leading the way toward the team quarters.

Dalton stopped her. "I want to see my team."

Jackson nodded and changed direction. The door she stopped at also had a keypad next to it. She punched in a code and it opened with a click. Dalton walked in slowly, taking in the bodies suspended in the tubes. Two teams of Psychic Warriors: twenty people.

"They're alive," Jackson said. "Hammond ran CAT scans and there is brain activity. Very low level and not normal, but since we're dealing with abnormal from the very start she doesn't know what it means. It might just be a reaction from the autonomic nervous system in response to the isolation tubes keeping the bodies alive."

Dalton walked among the tubes, seeing the members of his Special Forces unit who had been "killed" on the psychic plane by Chyort/Feteror, the Russian avatar. And beyond them, the tubes holding the first Psychic Warrior team, the one he hadn't been told about when first recruited to the PW program. He stopped in front of one of them containing a woman. He could see the resemblance to Raisor, whose body floated six tubes further down. The nameplate on the front of the glass read Eileen Raisor. Where Jonathan Raisor had gone on the last mission, when he broke off from Dalton's team, was a mystery, and since General Eichen's visit the previous evening, something Dalton saw in a different light. The fact that Eileen Raisor had been recruited by Nexus and ended up being betrayed was something Dalton planned on keeping foremost in his mind to keep from suffering the same fate.

"Does the first team have the same CAT scan signs?" he asked

"No. They're flat."

Dalton shook his head. He left the room, heading for the control center.

Dr. Hammond was at her normal place, behind the main console, surrounded by computer terminals that gave her access to Sybyl, the master computer that controlled the entire facility and the Psychic Warrior program.

"Sergeant Major." She nodded in greeting.

"Doctor." He grabbed a seat and rolled it over next to her as Jackson did the same on the other side. "Anything on our people?"

"Nothing. We're keeping the bodies alive, but their psyches..." Hammond trailed off.

"Let me ask you something," Dalton said. "Sybyl tracks us when we go over to the virtual plane, right?"

"Track isn't the right word," Hammond said. "Sybyl has to supply your avatar with both power and form, so it’s always in contact with you, but the computer can't tell
exactly
where you are. We don't know what space and distance is on the virtual plane."

"Does the computer track where we come out in the real world?"

"Somewhat."

"Is there any sort of record of our trips when we go over to the virtual?" Dalton asked.

"Sybyl records all data on the link, both reported and requested," Hammond said.

"Could you pull up the data for the first team?" he asked.

Hammond turned to the computer and typed in a rapid series of commands. "Here it is."

Dalton looked over her shoulder but could make little sense of the words. "What does that mean?"

Hammond pointed. "Real time is recorded here. This is power data. This is communication's linkage. The first team was over for, let's see...” She scrolled down. "Forty-two minutes in real time before the linkage was cut."

Dalton saw something on the right side of the screen. "What does this mean?"

Hammond read what he was pointing at. "One of the team members, Eileen Raisor, was requesting information from Sybyl about a location."

"What location?"

Hammond moved the mouse and clicked. She read the letters out loud. "A-F-S-M-S-C."

"Which stands for?" Jackson asked.

"Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center," Hammond answered.

Dalton wondered what that had to do with HAARP.

"She wanted to know where it was and what it did," Hammond continued. "Sybyl gave her the data. The team was cut off less than a minute later." She continued to use the mouse and keyboard, searching further into the data, when she suddenly stopped. "Oh my."

"What?" Dalton asked.

Hammond's eyes shifted about as if afraid of being overheard even though there was no one else in the room. "Sybyl's been infected."

"Infected?" Dalton repeated. "With what?"

"A bug."

"From where?" Jackson asked.

Hammond frowned as she looked at the data on her screen. "That's the weird thing. I think the bug has been there all along. An integral part of the master program."

"A time-delay activation?" Jackson asked.

"It's been active all along," Hammond replied.

It was Jackson's turn to look confused. "What does the bug do?"

"As far as I can tell by looking at this, it tracks Sybyl's activity and notes whenever the virtual plane is accessed here. I think there's more to it than that, though. It's going to take me a while to break down the lines of code. But someone had access to this data real-time when that first team was on the psychic plane."

"So whoever it was knew about the request reference AFSMSC by Eileen Raisor?" Dalton asked.

"Yes."

"Who could have put the bug in there?" Dalton wanted to know. "And why?"

"It had to have been someone here inside Bright Gate," Hammond said. "We're secure to the outside world."

"No, you're not," Dalton said. "I don't know much about computers, but you just told me someone's monitoring Sybyl, which means that information is getting out of here in some manner, correct? And if information from the computer can go out, then someone on the outside can get into Sybyl, right?"

"No." Hammond was shaking her head. "We were tested by the NSA. We're secure from hackers."

"Unless the NSA did the hacking," Dalton said. He thought of what Eichen had said about the government being infiltrated and about Jenkins, Hammond's predecessor. "Raisor said the first PW team was betrayed by someone in our own government."

"But why would someone outside of here want to know when Sybyl is active on the virtual plane?" Hammond asked.

"To hide something from Psychic Warriors when they're deployed," Dalton said. He thought about it. "We've got two problems. One is we don't know who is doing this surveillance. The second is we don't know what's being hidden from us."

"I think-" Jackson began, but suddenly stopped.

"Go ahead," Dalton urged her.

"I shouldn't say anything. I don't really know for sure, anyway."

"Know what for sure?" Dalton asked.

Jackson glanced at Hammond. "You weren't with the original Bright Gate program, were you?"

Hammond shook her head. "I was brought in after Professor Jenkins died in a car crash."

"Who brought you here?" Jackson asked.

"I was working for the Department of Defense at Livermore. A General Eichen approached me."

Dalton considered that. Since she mentioned Eichen's name so easily, Dalton assumed that she was an unwitting participant and not reporting back to him.

"So you weren't NSA or CIA?" Jackons asked.

"No, why?"

"Because the NSA and the CIA started Bright Gate," Jackson said. She shook her head. "It's nothing. Really." She quickly walked out of the room, leaving Dalton alone with Hammond.

"She's right," Hammond said.

"Right about what?"

"There's something really strange about this place, this program. All of it. Beyond the technology. I was working on quantum physics at Livermore when Eichen tapped me to come here and take over, and we had no clue about any of this level of advancement in physics. It's like it came out of the blue."

"The Russians had the hyperspace howitzer way back in the early sixties," Dalton noted

"Yeah, and where did they get that from? I've been studying the data the Russians recovered on that and it's definitely far too advanced for the time it was developed. Hell, it's too advanced for us now. I don't think we could duplicate the howitzer even with what we know. It's good it was destroyed."

Hammond leaned back in her chair, exhausted. "There's something else. I've been looking at some of the information you brought back from the Russian SD-8 base."

"And?"

"Chyort-the devil avatar-he was..." Hammond trailed off into silence.

Dalton waited a few moments. "Tell me."

"Even with what they did to his mind-- making a direct interface with the computer-- he was more than the sum of his parts. Or lack of parts," she added, referring to the scant human remains that had constituted the man who had been Chyort.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning I don't understand this." Hammond shifted her tired gaze to Dalton. "You've constantly accused me of not knowing what I'm doing, and I'm admitting to you now that I agree with you. All of this--" she waved her hand to indicate the Bright Gate control center-- "it's based on concepts we don't really understand. I don't think the Russians had much of a clue what they were doing either."

Dalton was trying to follow what she was getting at. "But you said it didn't matter if you understood the concepts as long as you can use them."

Hammond gave a defeated smile. "I did say that, didn't I? But I've been thinking about it, and the best analogy I can come up with is that it's like saying we didn't understand the concept of the internal combustion engine, but we built one and used it in a prototype car. The question is, who did understand the concept enough so that we could build it? Who was able to invent and build a mind-computer interface at SD-8 so well that the results were far beyond what we could have imagined? How was Sybyl developed?"

"Have you heard of a Professor Souris?" he asked.

"Who is that?"

"She's the first one to work on Bright Gate."

"That's strange," Hammond said. "There's no record of her anywhere here."

"Couldn't all this," Dalton indicated the control center, "be the result of an intuitive leap on one person's part? I mean, where do scientific breakthroughs come from?"

"If that's true and Souris did this," Hammond said, "I would expect to see some documentation. More data. We've got the equipment, the computer, the system, but we don't have anything detailing the supporting theories. That doesn't make sense. That's not how a scientist works. And the Russians made a similar leap."

To that Dalton had no reply.

Hammond rubbed her eyes. "Oh, well. I need to get working on the program to see what the hell is going on."

Dalton left her and went to the bunkroom. Jackson was lying on her back, hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling. Hammond's words bothered him. He had assumed from the very beginning that Bright Gate—and the Russian's SD-8 when he'd learned of it-had been the result of brilliant scientific work. But to have the lead scientist here say she was baffled was disturbing. He knew he'd have to call this in to Eichen at the first opportunity.

"Sergeant Major?" Jackson was sitting up.

"It's Jimmy," he said without thinking. He saw the surprise on her face. "That's the way we operated in Special Forces. Between a team leader and a team sergeant. Who respected each other. But only when they were alone, not in front of others. If that's all right with you, ma'am," he added.