Genesis (16 page)

“Kept us all alive a long time.”

Given their apparent line of work, this was no small thing.

One moved to the door, rifle at the ready.

Alice started to move behind him, which prompted him to stop and stare at her. “You stay
here.”

He spoke with finality. A retort of, “No I won't, either,” died on her lips. Instead, she nodded and backed off, going to stand next to Kaplan at the computers.

One continued into the glass-lined corridor slowly. His rifle was out, he was bent over slightly, and looked ready to take on anything.

Halfway down, a series of lights behind the glass walls came on. Alice had to avert her eyes from the sudden brightness, which reflected off the ceiling and the other parts of the glass.

One shot Kaplan an irritated look, and the latter checked his monitors.

Then Kaplan spoke into the walkie-talkie on his left shoulder. “The lights are automated—nothing to worry about.”

One nodded, and continued down the corridor.

As Alice watched, One made his way to a door that looked like—something.

A bank vault. That was it. It was certainly thick enough.

Reaching into one of the dozens of pouches on his all-black outfit, One pulled out some kind of transmitter. At least Alice assumed that was what it was, based in part on the small plastic antenna that he pulled out before affixing it to the big vault door.

Then he spoke into his own walkie-talkie—the abbreviation PRC popped into her head all of a sudden—and she heard his words over the like devices on everyone else's shoulder:

“Transmitter in position.”

“Roger. Running the bypass.” Kaplan's fingers started flying across three keyboards. The left-most workstation had a stream of code flying by. The monitor in the middle blinked with the words
LOCKING SYSTEM OVERRIDE,
and the one on the right was running a passcode search, running all the mathematical possibilities for the five-digit code that would allow them to gain ingress.

Alice found herself engrossed by the right-most screen, watching the numbers change rapidly until settling on one each:

X X 1 X X

X X 1 X 7

X 2 1 X 7

1 2 1 X 7

1 2 1 7 7

“Checkmate.” Kaplan smiled.

As he spoke, the vault door opened. One looked inside, rifle pointing right inside, but there didn't appear to be anything there.

“Move up,” he said with a come-here gesture.

From this distance, Alice couldn't make anything out, but she doubted that One would call up the rest of the team if there was any serious problem.

Warner and Drew picked up the duffel, and headed in, the medic right behind them.

Alice indicated the bag with her head and asked Kaplan, “What is that?”

“That's what's going to shut the Queen down. It delivers a massive electrical charge, scrambles the mainframe, and forces it to reboot.”

Alice nodded. Simple, straightforward, yet productive. She admired the simplicity.

Then the vault door closed . . .

SO FAR SO GOOD.

Days like this, One felt proud of the work he'd done here. Most of the time, providing security for Umbrella felt like a waste of his considerable talents. He'd survived the jungles of South America, the killing fields of Eastern Europe, and the deserts of the Middle East. He'd done and seen things that would make most people either suicidal or homicidal—or both. Or, at the very least, sick to their stomachs.

The fact that he did all of these things in the service of his country was one of the reasons why he took Major Cain up on his offer to join the private sector. Not so much that he didn't like the work, but he needed a change. He'd done the work for half a dozen different presidential administrations, all with theoretically
different ideologies, but all in need of people like One who could get things done without anybody knowing about it. It wasn't a boast for One to say that he'd kept the world safe for democracy—hell, safe for
humanity
—on more than one occasion, but he also knew that the very people he'd saved would never know what he did.

That got tiresome.

Besides, Umbrella paid better than the government. Not that money was of great concern—he did the work because he was good at it, and really only took the money because that was how the world worked. He had no real use for the money. Still, better to have it than not, he supposed.

Now, he and his team were in precisely the kind of situation he reveled in: unpredictable, unknown parameters, x-factors like Parks's and Abernathy's amnesia and that cop, and curve balls like the dining hall that wasn't a dining hall.

Throughout, his team remained calm, cool, professional, competent.

He expected no less, but that didn't mean he wasn't glad when it happened. The situation had been anything but textbook, but his team's response had been perfectly by the book.

That was the only way to accomplish anything.

Warner, Drew, and Danilova came in, the former two carrying the duffel with the EMP. They'd shut the Queen down, pull out the motherboard, and then they could go home.

Then the vault door closed.

One turned around to see that the outer door had also closed and locked.

The four of them were locked in the corridor.

Warner and Drew dropped the duffel and pulled out their rifles even as One called into his PRC, “Kaplan!”

Kaplan's voice came over the tiny speaker. “Some kind of dormant defense mechanism.” One could have worked that one out on his own. “We must have tripped it when we opened the door.”

“Put it back to sleep.”

“Working on it.”

Kaplan sounded panicky. One gritted his teeth. Kaplan was a good soldier, but he had a blind spot when technical problems didn't go his way.

One backed up slowly, joining up with Warner, Drew, and Danilova, figuring they were safer bunched together than spread out.

“Hold your positions.” More for Kaplan's benefit than the others', he added, “Everyone stay calm.”

“What's that?”

At Warner's words, One turned to see a thin white beam of light that extended horizontally across the length of the corridor right in front of the door to the Queen's chamber.

A laser.

Then it started moving toward them.

“Down!” One cried, pushing Drew, who was closest, down with him. To his credit, Warner ducked on his own. One couldn't see how Danilova reacted, and there wasn't time to check.

Instinctively trying to keep his balance, Drew thrust his right arm up as One knocked him over. That turned out to be a nasty mistake: the laser sliced right through the fingers of his gun hand, causing his rifle and the tips of his fingers to fall to the floor.

Drew grabbed his right wrist with his left hand and started screaming in agony.

To One's initial surprise, Drew's finger stumps weren't bleeding. Then, after only half a second, he realized that they wouldn't be. The laser was not only hot enough to cleanly slice through whatever it encountered, but also enough to cauterize any wound.

“Medic!” One cried.

He looked up to see why Danilova hadn't responded. To his utter amazement, she was just
standing
there like some kind of statue.

What in the hell was wrong with the woman? She'd never been anything but efficient and competent before, why was she just standing there now with that strange look of confusion frozen on her face?

Then One saw the trickle of blood that ringed her neck.

Olga Danilova's head started to slide forward on her neck, then tumble to the floor. As with Drew's fingers, the laser had cut through skin, muscle, and bone cleanly.

A moment later, the headless body fell to the floor as well.

In a lifetime of fighting, the man who now went by the
nom de guerre
of “One” had seen pretty much every type of death imaginable—and several that he couldn't
imagine, even having seen them. He'd seen much grislier, more painful, far, far more brutal deaths than what he just witnessed.

And yet the simple decapitation of Olga Danilova was done with such mechanical, ruthless, unthinking efficiency that One found it to be in its own way the most repugnant death he'd ever seen.

He forced his attention back to Drew, who was shaking, his eyes starting to flutter shut.

“Stay conscious—you're going into shock.”

This admonition appeared to have no effect on the commando.

So One tried a more direct approach. “Stay
awake!”
he barked as loud as he could.

“Sir! It's coming back—it's coming back!”

Not happy that Warner was also panicking, One stood up, as did Warner. This time, the laser ran along the floor.

At once really impressed with and seriously pissed off by the efficiency of the security program that ran this room, One got ready to jump.

The laser sliced through Drew.

Warner jumped up to avoid it, but even as he did so, the laser shifted upward and sliced through his torso. His feet and legs landed on the floor; half a second later, his head, arms, and torso landed on top of his legs with a squelching sound.

Having only another half a second to mull, One looked up, saw the ceiling light fixture, jumped, grabbed hold of the fixture, then pulled his body horizontal so it would be over the beam.

Feeling the heat of the beam as it passed under his legs, ass, and back, he heard a metallic clanking sound as it went by.

He landed, ready for anything. Taking a quick look down, he saw that the laser had sliced through his titanium knife and its holder.

The laser launched a third time.

One was ready for anything.

Or so he thought.

This time it spread into a diagonal grid that took up the entire breadth and height of the corridor. He could feel the heat of the massive deathtrap on his face as it neared him, ready to cut him into distressingly small pieces.

Nowhere to jump, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

One's last word before he was literally cubed was: “Shit.”

BARTHOLOMEW JOSEPH KAPLAN HAD BEEN having a really good day.

Then again, any day that had One saying “Let's move out” was a good day as far as Bart Kaplan was concerned. After years of frustration, he was at last living his dream life at his dream job.

When he was a teenager, Kaplan had found his vocation: to be an agent working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was the only thing he ever truly wanted.

Also when he was a teenager, he discovered that he had a tremendous aptitude for computers. Actually, he had a tremendous aptitude for most academic subjects; he finished Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in three years, then blew through NYU's undergraduate program in two with a BS in computer science.

While his peers were still finishing their sophomore years and trying to determine what to do with their lives, Kaplan was being recruited by dozens of large companies.

He turned them all down, because dammit, he was going to work for the FBI.

As it happened, the FBI was happy to have him—as a computer expert. His skills as a computer geek were of tremendous use to the feds, and they were thrilled to have him as a resource.

There was only one problem: Kaplan didn't want that. He wanted to be a
field
agent. He explained that to his superiors.

Most of them didn't laugh, though it was an effort for them.

Kaplan was a good shot, he had good instincts, and he kept in excellent shape. There was no good reason for them to keep him out of the field, save one: computer guys didn't go out in the field.

Besides which, good shots with good instincts who kept in excellent shape were a dime a dozen. The Bureau had people like that banging down their doors. They had fewer with Kaplan's skill set actually willing to work for a government salary.

But Kaplan didn't care about the money. He wanted to do field work.

That was when Umbrella came calling, with an offer to work for their Security Division.

It meant relocating to Raccoon City, but Kaplan considered it a small price to pay. Hell, he didn't have to
pay
anything—they quoted him a salary that was, frankly, obscene. Just because he didn't care about the money didn't mean he wouldn't take it, either.

What mattered, though, was that his computer skills were put to good use
and
he got to go into the field.

It wasn't quite the ideal situation he'd hoped for. The other guys in the squad treated him like some kind of technogeek who didn't know one end of his MP5K rifle from the other. J.D. and Rain in particular rode him like a prize pony.

But when the shit hit the fan, they relied on him for all the techie know-how. They counted on him to have their backs, just as he counted on them to have his.

So seeing the words
LEVEL 5 WEAPON SYSTEM ACTIVATED
on the right-most of the three flatscreen monitors in front of him disturbed him greatly. The doors should never have shut, and no weapon system should be activating at any level. He was sure he'd bypassed
everything,
dammit!

“Will you open that door now, please?” Spence asked with a certain urgency.

Kaplan spoke through clenched teeth. “I'm trying.”

Alice then said, “Kaplan, quick, something's happening in there.”

That Kaplan knew, since the left-most monitor showed the security camera's view of what was happening in the corridor.

Shit. The laser. Kaplan didn't even think that was operational yet. It had only been recently installed, meant as a last-ditch security device only to be used in
the direst of emergencies. Apparently, this qualified, and it had its own level of security. That was how Kaplan missed it.

“Kaplan, you've got to hurry, you've got to
help
them!”