“Except this place?”
Alice nodded. “They don’t take reservations, and only about three-quarters of the tables were filled. I wound up having the best meal of my life. It’s run by a single family, and it’s like eating at your aunt’s house.”
Lisa fixed her companion with a dubious look. “Your last name is Abernathy.”
“My mother’s maiden name is Ferrara.”
“Ah.”
A young woman with black hair, and a face that was a younger version of the old woman who led them in, came over and handed them menus. “Can I get you anything to drink?” she asked.
Before Lisa could say anything, Alice said, “A bottle of the Chianti Classico.” Then she looked at Lisa with those penetrating pale eyes of hers. “You do like Chianti, yes?”
“It’s been so long since I had a decent glass of wine, I honestly don’t remember what I like.”
The server nodded, and went off.
Lisa glanced at the menu. “So are you still alone? Or is married life treating you well?”
Half-smirking while looking at her menu, Alice said, “Hardly a marriage.”
“Yes, but you’re both living in that huge house—”
“Which makes it very easy for us to avoid each other.”
“And you’re working together.”
Alice’s half smirk spread into a full smirk. “Among other things.”
Lisa hit her hand on the table. “I knew it! I want details!”
“Forget it.”
Fixing her with a look, Lisa asked, “So why tell me in the first place, except to torture me?”
“Maybe I think you’ve earned a little torture.”
“For what?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
That brought Lisa up short. Up until now they had engaged in harmless girl talk. But there was something in Alice’s tone, a seriousness that had been wholly absent from their conversation since the train first pulled in.
Before she could pursue it, however, the young woman with the black hair came back with a bottle of wine. She poured a bit of it into Alice’s glass. After Alice sipped it and gave her approval, she poured full glasses for both of them, then listed the specials.
Lisa, however, had made up her mind as soon as she spied one particular item on the menu.
“So, can I take your order or do you need a few minutes?”
Alice closed her menu. “That mushroom risotto special sounds wonderful.”
“I want the veal parmigiano.”
The server nodded, not bothering to write either order down. Lisa hoped that didn’t mean she’d wind up with lasagne or something.
After the server took the menus and moved off, Alice gave Lisa a dubious look. “Veal parmigiano? This is a restaurant run by an Italian family. They came over here from Italy and opened this place. The food is cooked by a husband-and-wife team that made food for their family every Sunday back in Chieti. They’ve got salmon in mustard sauce. They’ve got risotto to die for. The penne in vodka sauce melts in your mouth. And you’re ordering veal parmigiano? You can get that anywhere!”
Letting out a long sigh, Lisa said, “You don’t understand.”
“No, I don’t.” She fixed her with another look. “So explain it to me.”
“When I was a kid growing up, we used to go to this place in the Bronx. I don’t even remember the name of it—it closed down when I was nine or ten or so. They had the absolute best veal parmigiano I’ve ever had. We’d go there every Friday night and I’d always have it. I haven’t had a decent veal parmigiano since. I keep trying, and I never ever find it. But you said that this place was really good, so I’m going to try it.” She grinned. “I guess I’m trying to recapture my youth.”
“We should all be so lucky.”
Again, Lisa heard it—the odd tone. Something was up with Alice, but she wasn’t sure what it was.
She didn’t get any clues about it for the rest of the meal. They talked about everything and nothing. Alice, a midwestern native, had a ton of questions about living in New York, which Lisa answered as best she could. She even went so far as to talk about her marriage to Nick and its disastrous end.
The one subject she did not broach was Fadwa.
The initial bite of the veal parmigiano when it arrived exploded magnificently in Lisa’s mouth. The breading had just the right blend of spice and dovetailed perfectly with the tenderness of the meat and the heat of the sauce.
For a brief moment, Lisa was nine years old again. Matt was punching her in the arm for whatever arcane reasons brothers hit their sisters. Mom and Dad would talk about their day at work, interrupting periodically to unenthusiastically tell their children to stop fighting, fully aware that nothing would stop the endless dance between siblings.
Even as she swallowed, Matt suddenly got older. He was telling her all about the Umbrella Corporation and the things they did.
And she thought about Fadwa.
The rest of the veal didn’t taste as good.
“Something wrong?” Alice asked.
“No,” Lisa lied. More truthfully, she said, “This is great. Best I’ve had—”
“Since the Bronx?”
“Yes, since the Bronx. Something wrong with that, Ohio girl?”
“Not at all.”
By the time they got to dessert—Lisa ordered tiramisù, Alice ordered tartufo—Lisa knew something was going on. This wasn’t just a social visit. It had taken Lisa until dessert to realize that she had been sharing all kinds of stories about her life with Alice, but she hadn’t learned a damn thing about Alice that she didn’t already know.
Hell, Alice hadn’t even confirmed whether or not she and Spence were sleeping together.
This, Lisa knew, was an interrogation.
Now she was getting nervous. Did Alice know what she was doing?
No, that was ridiculous. If she knew, she’d do something a bit more demonstrative than take her out to lunch.
But maybe she suspected. Suspicions wouldn’t be enough for her to act on.
Or would it? Alice didn’t work for the cops, after all, she just worked for the corporation that gleefully let Mahmoud die. Cops would need things like probable cause. Alice Abernathy didn’t need anything. If Matt’s suspicions were right—and what Lisa had seen over the past two months made her think those suspicions were dead on—they would find a way to get rid of her if they thought she was any kind of risk.
When they were done, Alice paid for the meal with her corporate credit card. The old woman at the front asked how the meal was.
“It’s the best I’ve ever had.” Lisa was only slightly exaggerating.
“Bene, bene. You should come back.”
“I hope I have the chance to,” she said with a look at Alice.
Alice, tellingly, said nothing.
The same Lincoln Town Car with the same jowled driver was parked in front of the restaurant, parked right under a NO STANDING sign. Lisa wondered if it had been there all along, and whether or not anyone from the Raccoon Police Department had come by.
Probably the driver looked at the cop with his bright blue eyes and said that he worked for Umbrella, and then the cop moved along.
Lisa pulled her battered old coat tightly around herself. She suddenly felt much colder than warranted even by the fall temperatures.
The ride back to the mansion was unusually quiet. Although the lunch had been full of gossip, the tension level had risen steadily as it progressed. Lisa knew that something was going on, but she for damn sure didn’t know what, and this sudden silent treatment from Alice wasn’t helping matters.
As the Town Car pulled onto the road that led to the mansion, Alice suddenly leaned forward. “This is fine, we’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“We will?”
Alice nodded, opening the door. “Charge it to my account.”
“Sure,” the driver said nonchalantly.
For the first time since she paid the check, Al
ice smiled. It was that odd half-smile of hers again.
The wind chose the moment that Lisa exited the Town Car to whip up, sending the autumn leaves whirling around her feet. The driver closed the door after holding it open for both of them, favored each woman with a smile, then got back into the vehicle and departed, leaving more whirling leaves in his wake, making a noise like paper being crumpled.
They stood in a wooded area with the giant mansion in sight, maybe twenty minutes’ walk. Without preamble, Alice started walking toward it, not bothering to look to see if Lisa would follow.
Still wondering what the other woman was playing at, Lisa followed.
“I know what you’re doing,” Alice said. “It took a while, but it wasn’t too hard to figure out once I knew what I was looking for.”
“Huh?” Lisa said, a hand of ice closing around her heart. She hoped that her genuine confusion about what was suddenly happening was enough to make it sound like she really didn’t know what Alice was talking about.
As the pair of them passed by a winged statue, Alice said, “I didn’t forget to change my password, Lisa.”
Lisa stopped walking. In addition to the statue, which looked like it belonged in a museum’s Ancient Greece section, they were surrounded by broken Doric columns, giving the area a Hellenic feel. The wind blew more strongly, and she pulled her coat tightly around her, the chill from more than the weather.
“What’s going on, Alice?”
“I actually didn’t put it together until last week. Something about you has bugged me since you started, but you’d already been checked out, and there wasn’t anything amiss in your file. Your story as to why you turned us down six years ago but came to us looking for work now checked out, too. It certainly tracked with the ups and downs of the job market in your field. But something was nagging me.”
Alice’s blue eyes grew as cold as the wind that continued to keep the brown leaves swirling.
“I got where I am now by paying attention to things that nag me. So I just kept an eye on you. Then I noticed something.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, silver device. About the size of a PDA, Lisa recognized it as something Umbrella’s techs had been working on: a mini-DVD player that their employer would introduce onto the market as soon as the mini-DVDs they’d pioneered—about a third of the size of the common disc—became commonplace.
Alice activated the device, and the screen lit up first with the stylized logo of the corporation: a rotating U with an umbrella resting atop it, the umbrella’s handle between the two prongs of the letter. Then the image switched to that of Lisa sitting at her desk.
Lisa closed her eyes and sighed. The ubiquitous security cameras. She herself performed regular checks of the cameras to make sure they were functioning properly.
The recording from the camera played out: Lisa on the phone, talking with someone. Alice had left the volume turned down, so it wasn’t until Lisa was able to make out the image on her monitor that she remembered that she had been talking to Dr. Rosamonte down in Pharmaceuticals about a month or two earlier. She recognized the code that applied to the doctor’s account. As she had with Alice the other day, Lisa had walked Rosamonte through the process of trying the password again, realizing that she hadn’t updated it in the requisite eight days, and so she reset it.
As with Alice, for a brief instant, she saw what Rosamonte had on her monitor before the security kicked in.
And only then did Lisa realize her mistake: she peered intently at the monitor. Anybody watching her on the security camera would know just from the expression on her face that she was studying every pixel on that monitor during that all-too-fleeting moment.
She remembered a disparaging comment Matt had made once about her lack of a poker face—in fact, it was right after he cleaned her out during a friendly family game Christmas night when they were both home from college.
“Once I realized that your little password-change rule had an ulterior motive, I looked at your file again.” Again that odd smile. “I have to give you credit for that—it’s the perfect cover. It’s a good security procedure, well within your job description. Hell, it shows initiative and brains. But you were also using it to try to find something. Once I knew you were looking for something, I knew what to look for in your file.”
Alice leaned against the winged statue. Lisa asked hoarsely, “What’d you find?”
“Your brother, for one. A former Federal Marshal, but one who retired under odd circumstances a few years ago. But that wasn’t what really got my attention. After all, that was in your initial background check, and if there was anything weird about your brother, it probably would’ve come up then. But then there was Mahmoud al-Rashan.”
The hand of ice became a tightly clenched fist.
Alice’s odd smile became a full-fledged grin. She straightened up and walked toward Lisa, putting an encouraging hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t panic too much, I only found the connection between you and al-Rashan after a month of computer searches that I did in my spare time. It gets very boring on mansion duty some days, and even Spence has his endurance limits.”
Despite herself, Lisa actually returned the grin.
But it didn’t last. She couldn’t stop thinking about who this woman was, and what she could to do Lisa—and to Matt.
And to Matt’s organization.
“Once I realized that you and al-Rashan were coworkers and friends, it all came together. Pursuing a job with the same corporation that was all but responsible for your friend’s death, to the point where you relocated from the city you’d lived in all your life, a relocation you’d rejected six years earlier. Sure, there were circumstances to explain all of that—but not why you were so aggressively trying to get peeks at stuff you aren’t cleared for.”
Lisa’s breaths started coming more shallowly. As Alice reached into her pocket, Lisa feared that a gun with a silencer would come out of it. Or would she even bother with a silencer? They were in the middle of nowhere, and the only person likely to hear the gunshot was Spence, and he was on Alice’s side.
But all Alice did was put the mini-DVD player away.
“What did you think of what you saw?”
Lisa blinked. “What?”
“On my monitor. What did you think of it?”
Honestly, Lisa said, “I don’t know what to think. That creature was—it was a nightmare. And that virus—it looked like something we were developing, not studying. Not something natural. And certainly that—that thing wasn’t natural.”
“It’s a T-virus, and you’re right, it’s not at all natural. Believe it or not, it came about from a study into something that would retard the aging process—an ointment that would keep the skin cells from aging.”
“A glorified wrinkle cream, you mean?”
Alice raised an eyebrow. “A bit more than that, but yes. However, the virus does more—a lot more. Inhaling it is fatal. It has a one hundred percent kill rate—”
Again, Lisa shivered.
“—and it keeps the body animated after death.”
“What?” Lisa asked incredulously. They had just veered into bad science fiction territory. Or maybe back to those godawful monster comics of Matt’s.
But the creature with no eyes on Alice’s computer screen wasn’t the flight of fancy of a 1950s-era comic-book artist. That was real.
“The body still generates electrical impulses for some time after it dies,” Alice said. “The T-virus works by stimulating cells.”
“So they’ve created a killer that turns you into a zombie?”
Alice nodded. “It could be a brutal biological weapon,” she said, understating the case somewhat, “and there are certain people in the U.S. government—and other governments—who’d pay top dollar for it. Developing it is in violation of half a dozen domestic laws and half a dozen more international ones.”
“Why—why are you telling me this?” Lisa swallowed. “Are yo
u just telling me because you’re going to kill me?”
The weird smile came back. “I may look like a Bond girl, Lisa, but I’m not a Bond villain. I didn’t bring you here to kill you. I brought you here to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“I thought that was obvious. After all, Mahmoud al-Rashan was your friend—and I can’t imagine that the settlement Umbrella gave his wife did much to alleviate her grief. It took a lot of guts to do what you did.” Alice took a long breath. “You want the virus?”
Lisa didn’t let herself say anything for several seconds. This was the dangerous part. She had no idea if she could trust Alice or not. But then, she could very easily have killed Lisa by now, and without ever telling her why.
On the other hand, if this was legitimate, it was the ticket she and Matt needed.
Alice knew about Mahmoud. But there was no indication that she knew about Matt’s organization. There was no need to let her know that she wasn’t working entirely on her own.
Struggling to keep her voice neutral, she said, “I might.”
“I can help you get the virus. I have access to security plans, surveillance codes, the works.”
Alice hesitated.
“But—?” Lisa prompted.
“But there’s going to be a price.”
That, to Lisa’s mind, was a given. “Name it.”
Speaking very slowly, Alice said, “You have to guarantee me that you’ll bring this corporation down.”
Lisa came within a hairsbreadth of laughing in Alice’s face. That wasn’t a price, that was a gift.
But she didn’t. Instead, she forced herself to keep focused on the mission, and most importantly not to expose Matt and his people.
“What makes you think I want to bring anyone down? Maybe I just want to use the virus to kill the people who killed Mahmoud.”
Again, that damned smile of hers. At this point, Lisa just wanted to smack it off the other woman’s face.
“You’re not that type, Lisa. Trust me, I know killers. I’ve spent all my adult life surrounded by them, on both sides of the law. You don’t have it in you. What you do have is outrage, and that’s what I need.”
Genesis Page 5
