WEDNESDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 1998
09:47 — UMBRELLA USA CORPORATE TOWER, 41ST FLOOR
SEVEN DAYS BEFORE THE STRIKE
————————-
Later, when the city was ash and the hearings had begun and a small grey man in a small grey suit was asked under oath when exactly Umbrella had known, he would answer — truthfully — that they had known on a Wednesday morning, before the coffee had cooled.
The forty-first floor was quiet at that hour. It was always quiet. The carpet absorbed footsteps the way good lawyers absorbed questions, and the air smelled faintly of nothing at all. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, a city that was not Raccoon City went about its morning. Couriers. Taxis. A woman walking a small grey dog. The sun, climbing.
The Director sat at his desk and finished a telephone call.
“No, no,” he said, in the warm voice he kept for these conversations. “I appreciate the call, Senator. Of course. Of course we will. You have my personal assurance.”
He listened for a moment, smiling at nothing, and said, “Yes. Give my best to Eleanor.”
He set the receiver down with the care of a man returning a borrowed pen.
On the desk in front of him: a fountain pen, capped. A single framed photograph turned away from the door. An espresso cup, drained at half past eight. A crystal pitcher of water, sweating faintly in the climate-controlled air. The Umbrella logo, etched into the frosted glass partition behind him, threw its red-and-white shadow onto the wall in slow, sliced bands as the morning sun moved.
The intercom buzzed.
“Mr. Halloran is here, sir.”
Ms. Yeager’s voice, through the speaker. He had known it for nine years. He pressed the button.
“Send him in, please.”
The door opened.
Mr. Halloran of the Department of Defense was fifty-six years old, dark-suited, narrow at the shoulders, and the kind of polite that was not friendly. He carried a leather portfolio under one arm. He did not smile when he entered. He inclined his head, which was a different thing.
“Director.”
“Mr. Halloran. Thank you for making the trip.”
“Thank you for the time.”
The Director gestured to the chair across the desk and rose halfway out of his own to take Halloran’s hand, the small theatre of welcome. Halloran sat. The Director sat. The crystal pitcher caught the light.
“Water?”
“Please.”
The Director poured two glasses. He set one on Halloran’s side of the desk and kept one on his own. He did not drink from his.
“How can I help, Mr. Halloran?”
Halloran took a small black notebook from his portfolio. He did not open it. He held it in his lap with both hands, the way a churchgoer holds a hymnal.
“As a courtesy, Director. Nothing more. The Subcommittee asked me to be — thorough. With certain matters. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course.”
“July last.”
“July.”
“The Arklay Mountains.”
“Ah.”
“There were certain reports.”
“There were.”
“Survivor testimony. From your local — specialist police unit.”
“S.T.A.R.S., yes.”
“They described, ah.” Halloran consulted the unopened notebook as if it might have changed its mind. “Phenomena. Unusual phenomena. Biological.”
The Director allowed himself the smallest of smiles, the smile of a tired schoolmaster about to be patient with an old question.
“Mr. Halloran. Forgive me. I have read those reports. The men and women of S.T.A.R.S. were brave officers who walked into a deeply unpleasant chemical fire in a remote wooded facility belonging to one of our research partners. What they saw — what they believed they saw — has been examined, examined again, and reviewed by independent assessors retained by the State of —”
“I have read the assessments, Director.”
“Then you’ll know.”
“I’ll know what the assessments say.”
A small pause.
“Mr. Halloran. We are, as ever, a partner to the federal government. Anything the Subcommittee requires of us, we make available. Anything. The Arklay matter is closed. Painfully, but closed. I would hate to think we were re-opening old wounds for officers who have suffered enough.”
Halloran inclined his head again. He still had not opened the notebook.
“And — separately, Director. There has been a — a small piece of chatter. About one of your researchers.”
“Oh?”
“A scientist of some seniority. Reportedly attempting — informal — contact. With certain elements within the Department. Concerning a particular field of work.”
“I see.”
“Mutagenic virology, as I understand it.”
The Director did not move. He did not, with any visible muscle, react. But Halloran was watching him, and Halloran had the patience of a man who already knew what he was going to do with the silence after he stopped speaking.
“You wouldn’t have a name for me.”
“I’m afraid I’d need to know which scientist you meant before I could tell you whether I had a name.”
“Of course.”
“We employ a great many scientists, Mr. Halloran.”
“You do.”
“Very few of them are of seniority, fewer still of the kind that would have anything the Department might want.”
“Quite.”
“And I would, of course, be the first person any such overture would be reported to.”
“I’m sure.”
“So you can imagine,” the Director said, lightly, lightly, “my surprise.”
Halloran looked at him for a long moment. Then he closed his hands more carefully around the notebook.
“Director. I’m going to be candid with you for a moment, and then we’ll go back to being polite.”
“By all means.”
“The Subcommittee already has a name. I came here this morning as a courtesy — to give you the chance to tell me it before they do. That’s all. I thought you should know that the courtesy was offered.”
The Director opened his mouth to answer.
The knock came.
It was a quick, small knock — and the door was already opening before the come in had been given. Ms. Yeager stepped into the office.
The Director felt, before he understood, a small quiet wrongness move through the room.
She was holding a manila folder against her chest.
Both hands.
Flat.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Halloran,” she said, and her voice was perfect. “Director — forgive me. I wouldn’t have, but it’s a matter that won’t keep.”
Her smile arrived at the right time, and was the right size, and stopped just short of her eyes.
The Director felt the wrongness register somewhere beneath thought, and filed it for later. He kept his face open, regretful, professional.
“Mr. Halloran, you’ll have to forgive me. The pharmaceutical business is rarely as quiet as we’d like.”
Halloran rose. He did not look at the Director. He looked, briefly, at the folder Yeager was holding wrong, and the Director saw him see it. He gathered his portfolio under one arm.
“Director.”
“Mr. Halloran. We’ll continue this.”
“We will.” A small pause at the door. He did not turn, quite. “Director. Don’t make me come back.”
He left.
The latch clicked.
The Director allowed himself one sharp exhale and turned to her.
“Yeager. This had better be —”
The line died in his throat.
She had not moved from where she had stopped just inside the door. She was still holding the folder against her chest. She crossed the room now and laid it on his desk, very carefully, the way one might set down something that had recently been alive. Then she stepped back. Not forward. Back. Two small steps, and stopped.
“Yeager?”
“Sir.” A pause. “The report, please.”
He looked at her.
“Yeager, what —”
“The report, sir.”
She said it again, quieter the second time, and he understood that she was not going to tell him. She was not going to summarise. She was not, he realised with a small interior coldness he did not yet have a name for, willing to put it into her own mouth.
He pulled the folder toward him and opened it.
The cover sheet was a NESTWRECKER preliminary. He skimmed it. He felt, almost at once, the small lift of relief he had been waiting for since the call had gone out the previous night.
Birkin, William. Confirmed deceased. Engagement at twenty-three forty-five hours, twenty-second instant. Resistance. Discharge of sidearm by subject. Return fire by Alpha Team operator. Subject down.
Duralumin case retrieved.
G and t-Virus samples accounted for at point of recovery.
Traitor neutralised.
He almost said good. He did not quite. He looked up at his secretary, mildly puzzled, mildly irritated.
“Yeager. Why is your face like that. This is what we wanted.”
She did not answer.
She looked at the folder.
He turned the page.
The cover sheet behind the first was different. Heavier paper. Black type across the top.
INTERNAL — EYES ONLY — RACCOON DESK
COMPILED 09:31 EST, 23 SEP 1998
His eye snagged first, of all things, on the codename — halfway down the first paragraph, sitting in the prose like a stone in a shoe. Subject G. Then back up, because reading was no longer linear, because some part of him had already understood and his eyes were skipping ahead of his understanding to confirm it. Ambush. Unidentified mutagenic entity, parameters consistent with — and there it was again, the codename, and he knew the parameters, he had read the parameters in funding documents, he had signed them. The page slid sideways under his attention. Alpha Team did not make extraction. Higher up, the paragraph he had skipped: all operators confirmed deceased in sewer system access except one. Status: unknown. Codename retained for operational reasons. Presumed lost. No contact established as of compile.
Telemetry next. He had not turned the page; he had only looked further down it. NEST containment alarms, seventeen successive cells, timestamped through the small hours of the morning. Sample seal failures across the duralumin case — internal sensors had registered each fracture as it happened, a series of small obedient digital deaths between twelve fourteen and twelve nineteen on the morning of the twenty-third. A field note from the recon team Umbrella had sent down after Alpha Team had gone silent. Three operators dead. Partially consumed. A blood trail consistent with high-mass mutagenic vector. Vials recovered: zero. Vials accounted for as broken: nine.
A map. Small. Arrows.
He saw the arrows before he read what the arrows meant. He did not, for a long moment, look at the legend. He did not need to. He had funded the storm-water survey. He knew, without reading, where those arrows pointed.
Victory Lake.
He turned the page.
There was only a single line on this one. It had been pulled, evidently, from somewhere else — a different system entirely; the typeface was different, plainer, civic, the kind of font in which a city writes to itself.
RCC PUBLIC WORKS — WATER QUALITY ANOMALY FLAG
VICTORY LAKE RESERVOIR INTAKE — 04:12, 23 SEP 1998
The Director read the line.
He read it again.
He closed the folder. He laid his hand flat upon it.
The espresso, drained at half past eight, was cold now.
“How long,” he said.
His voice was steady. He was pleased, distantly, to find that it was steady.
Yeager spoke from where she was standing.
“The samples broke approximately ten hours ago, sir. Field analysis suggests the rodent vector reached the reservoir intake within the last four. Possibly less.”
“Possibly less.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sat with his hand on the folder.
The line came out of him before he had decided to say it.
“They’ve been drinking it since breakfast.”
Yeager did not answer.
The Director looked, slowly, at the crystal pitcher on his desk. At his own untouched glass. At the small condensation mark it had left on the wood. He thought of a school crossing guard he had seen from his window earlier that morning, in a city that was not Raccoon, waving children across an intersection with a hand-held sign. He thought of the brass plaque on the children’s hospital wing on the east side of Raccoon City that bore his name and that he had never visited. He thought of one hundred thousand people. He thought, last and quickly and without permitting himself to dwell, of Spencer.
Yeager spoke, then. He had not asked her to. She did not raise her voice. She said it in the same quiet professional register she had used since she walked through the door, as though if she only kept her tone level the words themselves might be persuaded to behave.
“Sir.”
“Yes, Yeager.”
“I have a sister in Raccoon City.”
She did not say her sister’s name.
She did not ask whether her sister would be told. She did not ask whether her sister would be evacuated. She did not ask anything. She stated the fact, into the room, and then she stopped speaking, and stood where she was.
He heard it.
He moved on.
When he spoke, it was in the voice of a man closing a ledger.
“Bring everyone in. Crisis protocol. Use the Mondrian channel — nothing on the open network. I want Madame Henri on a secure line within the hour. U.B.C.S. command on standby for deployment. Vladimir to be told personally, by you, not by aide. Are you writing this down, Yeager.”
“I am, sir.”
She was not. She did not need to. She had not moved from where she was standing.
“Nobody outside this building learns the word biohazard. Nobody. We are going to call this a contamination event. Then we are going to call it an industrial accident. Then we are going to call it whatever the lawyers tell us to call it. Are we clear, Ms. Yeager.”
“Crystal, sir.”
“And Yeager.”
“Sir.”
“If Mr. Halloran calls back this afternoon, my schedule is regrettably full for the remainder of the week.”
“Yes, sir.”
She crossed to the desk. She picked up the folder. As she lifted it, her hand shook — once, and was gone.
He saw it.
He did not comment.
She did not acknowledge it.
They both pretended, for the half-second it took her to turn and walk to the door, that it had not happened. It was the most Umbrella thing either of them had done all morning.
The door clicked shut behind her.
The Director sat for a moment longer in the quiet of his office, his hand still resting where the folder had been. Then he rose and walked to the window.
He placed one palm flat against the glass.
The glass was cold.
Below him, in the city that was not Raccoon, a delivery van had pulled up at the kerb that had been empty an hour ago. The woman with the small grey dog was gone. A different child, smaller than the others had been, was being walked across the road by a woman who might have been her mother, holding her hand a little too tightly. The school crossing guard waved them past.
Somewhere in a city he had funded but had never visited, a school bell was ringing. Children were going inside. The water in their drinking fountains was already wrong.45Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡD1Ak8GTYbF
and then Add to home screen.