How the hell did she know that was standard?
That question was superseded by another one: what the hell kind of dining hall was this?
The space they entered was huge. It was also dark and dank and filled with boxes that were about eight feet tall with large tubes leading in and out of them.
No sign of any of the accoutrements one would expect in a dining hall.
Or much of anywhere else, if it came right down to it.
“Kaplan?” One asked.
“Dining Hall B.” Kaplan shrugged helplessly. “It’s what it says on the map.”
One walked over to take a look at Kaplan’s display. “Maybe you’re reading it wrong.”
Matt gave One a hard look. “Maybe the corporation’s keeping a few secrets down here. Something you’re not supposed to see.”
Kaplan actually looked worried about that, but One remained unaffected. “J.D., you and Rain keep the prisoner here and secure the exit.”
The medic took another air sample.
“Sir, halon levels are nonexistent in this room. Could be the system malfunctioned.”
Alice wondered what that meant, exactly. Then again, there was no reason for anything to start making sense now.
One studied the medic’s readout, then looked up.
“All right, listen up. There may be survivors, so give me a search line—but keep it tight.”
Rain shoved Matt toward one of the smaller crates for him to sit on.
“Move it.”
They moved out in different directions. Alice and Spence were left alone, with only Rain and J.D. staying back to guard Matt. Apparently, amnesia notwithstanding, they were well placed enough not to need babysitters.
So she wandered around the room. If she was supposed to be the head of security for this place, she probably knew what this room was really for. Maybe walking around would give her some kind of clue as to who she really was.
As she navigated among the crates, she noticed that they all had two readouts. On top was some kind of pattern that looked like a stereo sound system oscillation. It was steady, but she had no clue what it was actually measuring, since there was no bass beat to be heard.
On the bottom were one of two words lit up: STABLE and UNSTABLE.
To her relief, STABLE was the one lit on all the crates she could see.
She approached one of them. Each of the crates had a small window in it.
Peering inside, she saw—something. It was living, that was for sure, though it didn’t look like anything she recognized.
But then, would she recognize it, even if it was something commonplace? It was fifteen minutes before she remembered what a bathrobe was, for Christ’s sake.
Then again, this thing couldn’t have been normal. It didn’t have any eyes, for one thing, its skin was all scaly, and it had tubes running all in and out of its body.
Even if it was normal, it was pretty damn gross.
Then she remembered something else.
As the new password was entered into her monitor remotely by Lisa Broward, the Licker came onscreen. Alice knew that for a split second, it could be seen on Lisa’s monitor, too, before the Red Queen shut her out.
One then scared the shit out of her by appearing next to her. She hadn’t heard him approach—one moment he was just there.
He was peering into the window. “I said, keep it tight.” He didn’t even look at her.
“Sorry. I’m not sure I want to remember what went on down here.”
Now he did look at her. In a softer voice than he’d used all day, he said, “I don’t blame you.”
It was the closest One had come to being human since she met him.
Or, she supposed, re-met him.
Whatever.
As she and One went back to the center of the room, not having found anyone or anything save the crates, Alice overheard J.D. and Rain talking, staring at one of the crates while they guarded Matt.
“What the hell do they keep in these things?” J.D. asked.
Rain shot him a look. “How do I know?”
Warner, Kaplan, Drew, Spence, and the medic all rejoined them in the room’s center. “Anything?” One asked.
“No, sir,” Kaplan said. The others just shook their heads.
“All right, we’re proceeding to the Red Queen’s chamber. Rain, J.D., stay here with the prisoner. Let’s move.”
Alice was grateful. Soon they’d be at the computer core, then they could shut her down and get the hell out of this madhouse.
Soon, it’d all be over . . .
FOURTEEN
ALICE WAS A LITTLE DISAPPOINTED—THE RED Queen’s chamber was just another metal, sterile room. That seemed to be all they had in the Hive—metal, sterile rooms. No decorations, no color variations, just metallic sterility.
The room had one table in the center with three computer workstations, three huge metal doors, and little else.
Everyone seemed focused on the door in front of the workstations. Unlike the other two doors, this one had a window right at Alice’s eye level. For lack of anything better to do, she wandered up to the door and stared in.
She saw another sterile corridor, but this one appeared to have glass walls. It was a narrow space that led to—surprise!—a big metal door.
Alice woke up in a house that was almost entirely well-polished old wood. Then she took a train that took her to a place that was almost entirely metal, glass, and plastic. Did Umbrella only work in extremes?
Meanwhile, Kaplan sat at the workstations, jumping back and forth from keyboard to keyboard like some kind of piano virtuoso.
That immediately rang an alarm bell in Alice’s head. Piano virtuoso. She knew what that was.
So what the hell was a piano?
She stared through the window some more. The corridor was just as boring.
“What’s taking so long?”
Alice turned around to see the medic standing over Kaplan, looking impatient.
“Red Queen’s defenses are in place. She’s making it difficult.”
The medic looked cranky. Kaplan ignored her, and kept his virtuoso thing going.
At the sound of cloth rustling, Alice turned again, this time to look at Spence. He had decided to take advantage of this little bit of downtime to rummage through his pockets.
He found a gum wrapper, an ID card with his picture on it, and some loose change.
Everything else went back in his pocket, but he kept out a quarter. Alice was proud of the fact that she not only recognized the kind of coin, but that it was worth twenty-five cents and was one of the new state ones.
Then he started twirling the quarter in his fingers, flipping the coin with one knuckle over the adjacent finger, then repeating it across his hand and back again.
Alice was impressed.
Based on the look on his face, so was Spence.
He smiled. “Didn’t know I had it in me.”
Then the big door opened up. Alice looked over to see a self-satisfied look on Kaplan’s face.
One nodded. “Let’s pack it up.”
Warner and Drew pulled a huge metal cylinder out of the trunk and put it in a duffel bag.
Alice looked at One, then turned to Kaplan. “He’s a cool customer.”
“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 cei
ling 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 . . .
FIFTEEN
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.”
SIXTEEN
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.
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