Genesis (2 page)

Well, no, it was a
bolder
plan. That didn't necessarily make it better, simply one with greater rewards if they were successful.

“There's one more advantage,” Matt said quietly.

Aaron swiveled the chair back toward Matt. “Oh?”

“If she's caught, she can't be traced back to us.”

It was all Aaron could do to keep from laughing. “What are you going to tell her, Matthew, that the secretary will disavow all knowledge of her mission?”

Matt did smile at that, but the smile didn't reach his eyes. Matthew Addison had blue eyes that were at once soulful and intense, and right now those eyes were boring into Aaron Vricella.

“We have to get
something,
Aaron. The new legislation they got through Congress makes it even harder to prosecute them,
and
gives them tax breaks up the ass. If the rumors we're hearing are right and they're developing biological weapons . . .”

He trailed off. He certainly didn't need to elaborate. They lived in a world where people blew up vehicles
filled with children, sent deadly poisons to total strangers, and flew airplanes into skyscrapers. Any kind of bio-terrorism weapon that could be produced by a company with Umbrella's resources would be eagerly embraced by any number of governments, and Aaron wasn't at all sanguine about the world's prospects if
any
of them got their hands on such weapons.

“All right.” Aaron stood up. “We'll give it a try, Matthew. But we can't support her if things go wrong. People who go to work for the Hive sign five-year contracts, and NDAs that are binding in ways that only the most expensive lawyers in the world can make them. She's making a massive commitment here, and she'll be on her own.”

“Not if she succeeds, she won't be.” Matt spoke with a confidence that Aaron didn't share. “Prosecuting busted non-disclosure agreements will be the least of Umbrella's problems if this works.”

“Your faith is touching.” He took another sip of his wine. “I know what she's getting herself into, and obviously you do. The question is, does she?”

“Yes.”

Matt spoke without a moment's hesitation, which made Aaron all the more suspicious. “Really?”

“Yes, really.” The intense blue eyes bored into Aaron a second time. “Trust me, she has her reasons for wanting to do this.”

“Very well.” Aaron sighed. “I'll put the wheels in motion on our end. And God help all of us.”

IN HER MIND'S EYE, LISA BROWARD—NÉE Lisa Addison—still saw the hollow look on Fadwa's face the day of Mahmoud's funeral.

It had been four years, and that look simply refused to dislodge from her brain.

“I gotta ask, Ms. Broward, why the change?”

“Hm?”

Lisa banished the image of Fadwa's eyes dripping with unattended-to tears, and forced herself to focus on the round face of Casey Acker, the human resources drone who was conducting her latest in a series of interviews with the Umbrella Corporation. Acker was a jovial, overweight man in his forties who was sweating more than he should in the air-conditioned office. His thick, plastic glasses kept slipping down his nose, and
he constantly tried to get a glance between the buttons of the placket of Lisa's white shirt, as if he'd win some sort of prize if he actually spied the white lace of her bra. She found herself wishing she'd worn a pullover blouse—or at least buttoned her suit jacket.

“Why the new attitude, Ms. Broward? Six years ago, we offered you a similar job, and you turned it down. I gotta know what's changed in the last six years, y'know?”

Acker was the fourth person to ask her that question, and only wasn't the fifth because he was just the fourth person to interview her. With the ease of long practice, she repeated the answer she'd given the other three. “I had a steady job with Citibank at the time, and I wasn't prepared to leave New York. My husband and I were caring for his sick mother.”

“And now?”

“She died—and my husband and I have since divorced.”

“Really?” Acker said the word in such an eager voice that Lisa felt the sudden need to take a long, hot, cleansing shower. Of course, that image was probably one that would turn Acker on . . .

“Yes. Since the divorce, I've been working freelance, but steady work is getting harder to find.” She sighed, brushing a lock of blond hair behind her ear. “With the economy the way it is, I'd like something steady. And I wouldn't mind starting over in a new city.” Favoring Acker with a false smile, she added, “Even if it is half a mile underground.”

Acker grinned, showing yellowed teeth. “Well, it don't get much steadier than Umbrella, Ms. Broward. You'll be thrilled to know that your background check went through just fine—you passed with flying colors.”

She forced herself to smile. “I didn't realize it was a test.”

The smile caused Acker to beam proudly, reminding Lisa of a cat she and Matt had as a kid. Mittens always had that expression when he brought a dead mouse to the bedroom door. “Sort of. You have to understand that the kind of work we do—and the kind of work you'll be doing—is very sensitive. We gotta be real careful about who we hire, y'know? Now, I know Mr. DellaMonica explained all about the five-year contract and the fact that you'd be living in the Hive, but I'm afraid I gotta go over it all again.”

Lisa tuned out Acker's droning as he went through the litany—she knew all this even before she went on the first interview. She and Matt had discussed it thoroughly. Umbrella's most sensitive work was done in the Hive, their name for the underground complex that served as Umbrella's primary corporate headquarters. From what Matt had told her, the corporate carelessness—and lack of accountability—that led to Mahmoud's death was only the tip of Umbrella's iceberg of unethical, illegal, and immoral activity.

Contract or no, she had no intention of working for this company for five years. Because she had no intention of allowing it to remain in business that long.

Unbidden, the image of Fadwa came back. Walking
her back to the car after Mahmoud's funeral service. Visiting her when she got the settlement check, wondering how anyone could put a price on her husband's life.

Mahmoud al-Rashan was one of Lisa's coworkers at Citibank. He had also been a close friend, always lending a sympathetic ear when she and Nick were having their problems. When Nick started neglecting her after his mother died, Mahmoud was there for her to talk to. When she decided to leave him, Mahmoud and Fadwa offered their couch until she could get her own place, and both helped navigate the real-estate minefield that was apartment-hunting in New York City. And Mahmoud had been great about recommending her for contract work after she went freelance.

In turn, Lisa had been there to help comfort him when what should have been a simple surgical procedure on an ulcer in his stomach turned into something worse, and the drugs prescribed to alleviate the post-surgical complications served only to exacerbate the problems.

Mahmoud's lawyer had urged him to sue, a decision Lisa had supported. However, the hospital was not the only target of the suit. The surgeon who had operated on Mahmoud was employed by a service called RPC—the Reserve Physician Corps—which provided supplemental medical staff for overburdened hospitals. The equipment used in the surgery—which was, according to the expert hired by Mahmoud's lawyer, substandard—was supplied by Caduceus Medical Supplies, and the bad
drugs they prescribed were supplied by Armbruster Pharmaceuticals.

RPC, Caduceus, and Armbruster were all subsidiaries of the Umbrella Corporation.

Three things happened between Mahmoud filing the suit and the arrival of the first settlement check:

First, the al-Rashans found themselves the subject of a brutal IRS tax audit. They came through with a clean financial bill of health from the government—both Mahmoud and Fadwa had always been meticulous with their finances—but the process itself was excruciating, and did nothing to aid Mahmoud's failing health.

Then Mahmoud's gung-ho lawyer abruptly switched from wanting to roast Umbrella on a litigational spit to urging Mahmoud to settle. He never explained the reasons for his change of heart, but they all had their suspicions, especially after all was said and done and he took a very long vacation to Europe.

Finally, Mahmoud died from post-operative complications.

The Umbrella Corporation had, for all intents and purposes, murdered Lisa Broward's friend, and gotten away with it by writing a check to his widow.

Fadwa was bound by a gag order that was part and parcel of the terms of the settlement. Strictly speaking, Lisa wasn't bound by it, but all the details she knew were hearsay, and any attempt to reveal the truth would only give Umbrella the excuse they needed to ruin what was left of Fadwa's life.

So when Matt came to her with an opportunity to
pay the bastards back, she took it. It didn't matter if it meant a commitment of time that might number in years. It didn't matter if she risked her life. It didn't matter that she risked provoking the ire of a corporation for whom forcing an IRS audit was the mildest of weapons in the arsenal they could call to bear on the average citizen.

With the divorce final, and Nick off contemplating his navel or whatever it was he decided to do with his life now that his mother was dead, Lisa had no family to concern herself with. They had never had kids—for which she was now eternally grateful, as the divorce had been ugly enough without that factored in.

She was free and clear to exact her revenge on the sons of bitches who murdered her friend.

Any time she had any doubts, she thought about Fadwa.

After that, it was easy.

Let them move her into an underground complex a thousand feet beneath Raccoon City. Let them only allow her occasional trips to the surface. Let them force her to spend ninety percent of her life in a hole providing maintenance and upgrades on their computers' security systems, allowing them to keep their precious secrets from an inquisitive world.

Let them give her access. Because with that access would come her revenge.

“All right, then,” Acker said, clapping his pudgy hands together. It sounded like someone playing a percussion riff on a ham. “I guess that just leaves us to fill
out all the paperwork. I gotta tell you, though, there's a
lot
of it. NDAs, employee contracts, the whole nine yards, y'know?”

Once again plastering a smile onto her face, Lisa said, “Bring it on, Mr. Acker. I'm ready to join the Umbrella family.”

Acker returned the smile. “Glad to hear you say that, Ms. Broward. Trust me, you won't regret this decision.”

She didn't, but not for the reasons Casey Acker thought . . .

WHEN ALICE ABERNATHY WAS A LITTLE GIRL growing up in Columbus, she had imagined that getting her wedding picture taken would be a glorious moment of joy. She'd be surrounded by friends and family, a band playing her favorite music, and tons of food and drink. Dressed in a beautiful white dress, her prospective husband in a tuxedo (it had to be a tuxedo—she'd
never
marry a man who wouldn't get married in a tuxedo), they'd stand as close to each other as they could, reveling in the feel of their embrace, while the photographer said something ridiculous like, “Say cheese!”

The moment of pure happiness would be frozen forever in that photograph.

The mansion on the outskirts of Raccoon City was a
long way from Ohio, both physically and metaphorically. Two-and-a-half decades removed from that childhood fantasy, Alice found herself in the white dress embracing a man she barely knew as a photographer employed by the Umbrella Corporation muttered something noncommittal and snapped another photograph.

At least her “husband” was wearing a tuxedo.

It was all part of their cover. Alice had taken over as the head of security for the Hive, the semi-secret underground facility owned and operated by the Umbrella Corporation. However, the promotion came with a new assignment. The person who ran security for the Hive had to spend the first three months of the job with what was considered either the best or worst assignment in Umbrella's Security Division: mansion duty.

The mansion—a massive estate that felt to Alice like it belonged in a museum or a Jane Austen movie rather than a suburb of a small American city—was located in the neighborhood of Foxwood Heights, two miles outside the Raccoon City limits.

Raccoon itself only had an official population of approximately 853,000, including the five hundred employed by Umbrella who lived and worked in the Hive. The existence of the Hive was not kept a secret—it was impossible to sequester away five hundred employees, many of whom were in the upper echelons of their respective fields, without someone noticing they were missing—though it was not widely advertised either. Umbrella kept its public headquarters in downtown Raccoon where everyone could see it: the public face of the
company that provided the best computer technology and health-care products and services in the country.

Part of Alice's job—and that of her fictive husband—was to keep the public from knowing any more than that.

Mansion duty meant posing as the couple who lived in that weird old mansion that all the guides to Raccoon cautioned against tourists visiting. Although an architectural marvel—built by an eccentric old millionaire in the 1960s—and rumored to be filled with trap doors, secret corridors, and other reflections of the millionaire's obsession with spy thrillers, it was currently occupied by a reclusive couple who did not appreciate strangers knocking on their door and asking to see their house. More than one nosy visitor had found themselves escorted out of the area by the Foxwood Heights Police Department—or even sometimes the Raccoon City P.D.—for trespassing.

That couple's reclusive tendencies were a direct result of their not being a true couple, but the latest two members of Umbrella's Security Division who had drawn mansion duty. For, unbeknownst to the people who wrote those tourist brochures, the mansion was, in truth, a secret access point to the Hive. Given the nature of the work Umbrella did in the Hive, the mansion was the first line of defense against everything from reporters to industrial sabotage to outright thievery.