SIX
ADA WONG FIT THE SHIMMERING DISC OF
metal into the slot on the statue, patting it into the
opening until it was flush with the marble. As soon as
it was in place, she heard the shift of hidden levers
and stepped back to see what would happen. Her
footfalls echoed through the massive lobby of the
RPD building, the sounds reverberating back to her
from three stories of open room.
Another key? One of the subbasement medals? Or
perhaps the sample itself, hidden in plain sight. . .
wouldn't that be a happy surprise.
If wishes were horses. The water-bearing nymph
made of stone slid forward at a slight angle, the
pitcher at her shoulder dropping a slender piece of
metal atop the lip of the defunct fountain. The spade
key.
She sighed, picking it up. She already had the keys;
in fact, she had everything she needed to search the station,
and most of what she needed to get into the lab.
If it wasn't for someone at Umbrella dropping the
bomb, the job would have been a walk. Easy money.
Instead, I get a three-day vacation sans comfort, I
get night of the living standoff, I get to play Put the
Bullet in the Brain and Let's Find the Reporter at the
same time. The samples could be anywhere by now,
depending on who survived. Assuming I make it out of
here with the goods, I'm asking for a big goddamn
bonus; no one should have to work in these conditions.
Ada slipped the key into her hip pack, then gazed
unseeing at the upper balustrade of the impressive
hall, mentally checking off the rooms she'd been
through and the ones she'd searched more thoroughly.
Bertolucci didn't seem to be anywhere on the
east side of the building, upstairs or down; she'd spent
what felt like hours staring into dead faces, searching
the reeking piles of corpses for his square jaw and
anachronistic ponytail. Of course, he could be moving,
but from the information she had on him, it was
improbable; the reporter was very much a rabbit, a
hider in the face of danger.
Speaking of danger...
Ada shook herself and got moving, heading back to
the door that led into the lower east wing. The lobby
was safe enough from the virus carriers, they didn't
seem to understand the concept of doorknobs, but
there were threats besides the infected. God only
knew what Umbrella might send in to clean up ... or
what had been freed from the laboratory when the
leak occurred. Less frightening but just as bothersome
were the live cops that might still be trooping around,
looking for someone to save. She'd heard gunfire,
some distant, some not, every hour or three since
she'd gone to ground; there were still at least a few
uninfected left in the expansive old building. Trying
to convince a panicky he-man with a gun that she was
alive and didn't want an escort made facing the
undead seem almost appealing.
Walking on the balls of her feet to avoid additional
noise, Ada slipped through the door and then leaned
against it at the end of a long hall, safe to decide on
her next move; although she hadn't checked out the
basement yet and there were still several carriers
wandering around in the detectives' room, the hall's
doors were all closed; if someone or something
wanted to get at her, she'd be able to see it coming and
get out in time.
Ah, the exciting life of the freelance agent. Travel the
world! Earn money by stealing important things! Fight
off the living dead when you haven't showered or eaten
a decent meal in three days - impress your friends!
She reminded herself again to insist on that bonus.
When she'd arrived in Raccoon less than a week
before, she thought she'd been prepared; the maps
had been studied, the reporter's files memorized, her
cover story set - a young woman looking for her
boyfriend, an Umbrella scientist. That part was almost
true; in fact, it had been her brief relationship
with John Howe ten months before that had landed
her the job. More of a one-night stand, actually, and
not a very good one at that, but John had thought
otherwise, and his connection to Umbrella, though it
had probably killed him, had turned out to be a lucky
break for her.
So, she'd been ready. But within twenty-four hours
of her self-assured check-in at Raccoon City's nicest
hotel, her luck had changed; while eating dinner in the
vinyl-encased and mostly empty lounge of the Arklay
Inn, she'd heard the first screams outside. The first,
but by no means the last.
In some ways, the disaster was an asset; there'd be
no guards posted around the lab, no endless covert
trial runs. The prep work she'd done on the T-Virus
had assured her that the airborne was short-lived and
dissipated quickly; the only chance of catching it at
this point would be through contact with a carrier, so
that wasn't a problem - and once she and a couple
dozen others had made it to the police station, she'd
seen that Bertolucci was among them. Even with the
undead factor, it initially looked like things were
going in her favor.
Mission objectives: question the hack, find out how
much he knows and kill him or ignore him, depending;
retrieve a sample of the new virus, Dr. Birkin's latest
wonder. No problem, right?
Three days before, with the knowledge of how the
Umbrella lab connected into the sewer system and
Bertolucci standing right in front of her, the job had
looked pretty wrapped. And of course, that's when
things had started to go wrong.
The rearranged station, with the rooms shifted
around after the S.T.A.R.S. fiasco, making half my
preparations obsolete. People disappearing. The barricades
that kept coming down. Police Chief Irons,
throwing off commands like some cut-rate dictator,
still trying to impress Mayor Harris and his whiny
daughter even as the dead piled up...
She'd watched Bertolucci closely enough to see that
he was going to duck and run, but had missed the exit;
she hadn't even had time to make contact before he
had disappeared somewhere into the maze of the
station, losing himself in the commotion of the first
wave of attacks. Ada had decided to fly solo herself
when three-fourths of the civilians were wiped out in
a single mass assault not an hour later, all because no
one had bothered to lower the garage gates. She wasn't
willing to die to keep up her cover as a frightened
tourist looking for her boyfriend.
And so came the wait. Almost fifty hours of waiting
for things to settle, tucked in the clock tower on the
third floor, slipping downstairs to find food or to use a
bathroom in the lengthening stretches of time between
gunplay. Between the echoing clatter of shots
and the screams . . .
Terrific. So now you're out and what do you do?
Stand around and reflect. Get on with it; the sooner you
finish, the sooner you can collect your wages and retire
to some nice island somewhere.
Still, for a moment Ada didn't move, tapping the
muzzle of her Beretta absently against one long,
stockinged leg. There were three bodies sprawled in
the hallway; she couldn't stop staring at one of them,
crumpled beneath a window counter halfway down
the corridor. A woman in cutoff shorts and a halter,
her legs crudely splayed, one arm cocked above her
blood-soaked head. The other two were cops, no one
she recognized, but the woman had been one of the
people she'd talked to when she'd first made it to the
station. Her name had been Stacy something-orother,
a nervous but strong-willed girl just out of her
teens.
Stacy Kelso, that was it. She'd run into town to pick
up some ice cream and had ended up caught in the
takeover - yet in spite of her own predicament, she was
more concerned about her parents and little brother,
still at home. A conscientious girl. A good girl.
Why was she thinking about it? Stacy was dead, a
ragged hole at her left temple, and Ada hadn't capped
her; it wasn't like she had anything to feel personally
responsible about. She'd come in on a job, and it
wasn't her fault that Raccoon had gone nova...
Maybe it's not guilt, some part of her whispered.
Maybe you're just sorry she didn't make it. She was a
person, after all, and now she's as dead as her parents
and kid brother probably are...
"Snap out of it," she said, softly but with an edge of
irritation. She tore her gaze from the woman's pathetic
form, fixing it instead on a broken ashtray at the
end of the hall. Feeling bad about things she couldn't
control wasn't her style, it wasn't how she'd gotten to
the top of her trade - and considering how much
Mr. Trent was putting up to retain her services, now
wasn't the best time to be analyzing her empathy
skills. People died, it was the way of the world, and if
she'd learned anything in the course of her life it was
that agonizing over that particular truth was pointless.
Mission objectives: talk to Bertolucci and get the
G-Virus sample. That was all she needed to worry about.
There was a mechanism that Ada still had to check
a few twisted passages away from where she stood, in
the press conference room. Trent's notes on the architect's
latest additions to the station had been sketchy,
but she knew it had to do with the ornate, sculpted gas
lamps and an oil painting. Whoever had commissioned
all of the work had one serious secret life going
on; there were actual hidden passages upstairs, behind
the wall of what had once been a storage room. She
hadn't gone through them yet, although a quick glance
had told her that the room itself had been remodeled
as an office. Judging from the overstuffed and neurotically
macho decor, it was probably Irons's. Even from
the short time she'd been in his company, she'd
ascertained that he wasn't the most stable man who
had ever walked; there was no question that he was on
Umbrella's payroll, but there was also something
about him that just screamed dysfunctional.
Ada started down the hall, her dress flats clicking
loudly on the scuffed blue tiles; she was already
dreading yet another time-consuming mechanical
puzzle. Not that there was any help for it; she had
assumed from the beginning that the virus was still in
the lab, but she couldn't afford to take any chances on
passing up an earlier retrieval. The files indicated that
there were between eight and twelve one-ounce vials
of the stuff, information from a two-week-old video
feed - and Birkin's lab was far from impenetrable.
With the underground lab connected to the station
through the sewer mains, she had to entertain the
possibility that the samples had been moved. Besides,
Bertolucci could be tucked away in the research
library or in the S.T.A.R.S. office on the west side,
maybe the darkroom; dead or not, he had to be found.
And it would also give her a chance to collect a few
more nine-millimeter clips from the fallen RPD.
She followed the passage as it led her past a small
waiting area, complete with vending machines that
had already been pried open and ransacked. As with
the rest of the station, the corridor was cold and badly
in need of air freshener; she'd grown used to the
smell, but the chill was murder. For the hundredth
time since abandoning her table at the Arklay, Ada
wished that she'd dressed more casually for dinner.
The sleeveless tight red tunic dress and clattery shoes
were fine for cover, as mission gear, however, the
outfit was somewhat less than practical.
She reached the end of the hall and carefully
opened the door to her left, weapon half-raised. As
before, the corridor was clear, yet another testament
to the faded elegance of the building - dusky sandcolored
walls and symmetrically patterned tiles in this
one. The station must have been magnificent once,
but years of serving as an institutional facility had
leeched away its grandeur; the tattered grand moviehouse
look and the cold, hopeless atmosphere created
a distinctly sinister feel - as if at any moment a cold
hand could fall across your shoulder, a soft gust of
diseased breath whisper across the back of your
neck...
Ada frowned again; after this job, she was going to
take a very long vacation. Either that, or it was time to
find a new career. Her concentration - her ability to
focus - wasn't what it used to be. And in her business
a slip at the wrong time could literally mean death.
Big bonus. Trent smells like money. I'll ask seven
digits, high six minimum.
In her attempts to let her thoughts go, to let animal
awareness take over, she found that she couldn't keep
out the persistent image that crept into her mind. A
memory of young Stacy Kelso, anxiously pushing her
hair behind her ears as she talked about her baby
brother. . .
After what felt like a very long time, Ada shook the
troublesome vision and continued down the hall,
promising herself that there would be no more lapses
of concentration and wondering why she couldn't
make herself believe it.
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