Chapter 18
Damascus Kelly sat down with a sigh and took a tired breath. He felt cramped and irritable after the long plane flight, but duty called. His expensive business suit was wrinkled and needed cleaning, and he needed a shower as well. He foolishly thought that after the Decontamination was complete, his work in Raccoon City would be over. How very wrong he was.
“Want a drink?” the Arizona Director asked, standing by his desk and staring out the large windows of his office, his hands folded behind his back.
“No, thank you,” Kelly said.
“Well, go make one for me then,” the Director said.
Kelly put his hands on the arms of the chair and pushed himself to his feet. He walked over to the expensive mahogany liquor cabinet and pulled out some bottles. He poured the drink, saying nothing, and dropped two ice cubes into the glass.
“Excellent work,” the Director said with a smile as took the glass. The ice cubes clinked together when the Director swirled the glass before taking a drink. Kelly returned to his chair and sighed again.
“What are you thinking, Kelly?” the Director asked. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”
“Right now I’m thinking I would love to go to bed,” Kelly said honestly. “I don’t think there is any work left for me to do.”
“Sure there is,” the Director said. He looked out the windows again and stared out across the city of Flagstaff. The Director’s lavish office was located on the 30th floor of the Umbrella Administration Center in the middle of the city. Actually, his office was the entire 30th floor of the building. The room was large enough to play a baseball game inside, but Kelly and the Director were the only two people there at the moment.
“I’m not really qualified to handle the supervision in Raccoon City at this point,” Kelly said warily, unsure what the Director had in mind. “Much of the city is still impossible to enter. The Ecological Response Teams know far more about what needs to be done than I do. Unless you want me to handle the media, but I thought that the Public Relations Department had all that covered.”
The Director chuckled. It was a dry, humorless sound. “Kelly, you always suspect the worst, don’t you?”
“I thought that was my job, sir.”
“And you’ve done a stellar job so far,” the Director said. He turned to face Kelly and returned to his desk, setting the drink down and taking a seat. “Dealing with that disaster was the most thankless job in the entire world. Congratulations on not screwing it up.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And onto new business.” The Director tapped a few keys on the keyboard sitting atop his desk, and the enormous flat screen television on the wall nearby blinked to life. When the image came up, it was a map of the world with hundreds of tiny red dots across all seven continents.
“You know what that is, I suppose,” the Director said.
“Looks like a map of all of our facilities worldwide.”
“Correct. That is accurate as of this morning. But by the end of the year, we are going to have to close perhaps a fifth of them. In two years, maybe a third of them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But that’s not the bad part,” the Director said. “Closing all those facilities isn’t the real problem, even though it is a huge problem. The real problem is all the people who work there. You follow me so far?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Just what in the hell are we going to do with all those workers?” the Director asked rhetorically, spreading his hands. “Those scientists and researchers and interns and paper pushers and janitors and security and everyone else? We’re going to have to fire them, of course. And then what?”
“Our competitors will snatch them up.”
“Precisely. Companies like Tricell, Vorhaven, Elemental, WilPharma. They’re circling us like sharks smelling blood in the water. It is going to be increasingly difficult for us to maintain any sort of intellectual secrecy once we have to start shutting down all these labs. All the other Directors know this already, but we haven’t talked about it yet. Too many other things to worry about at the moment.”
The Director leaned back, propped one leg up on the other, and sipped his drink, giving Kelly a moment to think.
Kelly looked hard at the screen, trying to do some quick math in his head. If they closed down a hundred labs, with perhaps fifty personnel for each lab to worry about, although that was a very conservative number, and that meant five thousand individuals with knowledge about Umbrella’s top secret projects, namely the Progenitor and the T-Virus. Maybe ten people per lab with intimate, detailed knowledge of the Progenitor. That was one thousand people that Umbrella could not afford to get rid of.
They all signed extensive non-disclosure agreements, of course, but it would be hard to track each one of them. If a hundred of their people all got hired on at one of their competitors and that competitor suddenly knew all about the Progenitor, how could Umbrella possibly figure out who broke the agreement? And how could they file a lawsuit without the public learning about the Progenitor as well? Shutting down so many labs would create far more problems than it could possibly solve.
The Director finished his drink and set the empty glass back on the desk. Leaning forward, he set his elbows on the desk and steepled his fingers. “You see, we have to consolidate our resources here. In a nutshell, we must figure out exactly who knows what. I’ve compiled a list of about sixty facilities that are good candidates for being shut down. What I need from you, Kelly, is a report of exactly what employees at those facilities are the highest risk, in terms of their clearance level and what knowledge they possess.”
Kelly nodded, already thinking ahead.
“We start now,” the Director said in a conspiratorial tone. “Shut down all Progenitor research at these labs, transfer the high-clearance personnel to new locations. Then, when the time comes, we shut the whole lab down without losing any valuable people.”
“Of course, sir. I can get on that right away.”
“Good, glad to hear it.”
“Is there anything else you wanted me to take care of?”
“There’s a million things you can do, but let’s focus on the most important. For example, I haven’t heard any updates about our old friend Ozwell Spencer.”
Kelly shrugged. “There’s nothing to report, sir. We haven’t made any real progress in the investigation. It’s possible that there may have been more information at the Arklay mansion, but we didn’t have time to follow up on every lead before we torched the place.”
“Well, leave no stone unturned. Spencer’s alive and hiding out somewhere, I know it. He’s a top priority as far as the Directors are concerned. We want him found as soon as possible. No excuses.”
“Yes, sir. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we find him.”
The Director nodded, but the look on his face told another story. He looked at his empty glass and sighed, as if disappointed that it was empty. He said, “I assume you read the reports on that girl they discovered, right? Lisa Trevor?”
Kelly hesitated, and then nodded uncomfortably. “Yes, sir, I did.”
“What are your thoughts on that?”
“My thoughts?” Kelly said. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
The Director sighed. “You never met Spencer, did you?”
“No, sir. I’d never even heard of him before this happened.”
“You’re lucky then. Ozwell Spencer was the coldest, meanest, most ruthless son of a bitch I ever met in my life. It takes a certain kind of person to do what we do for a living. I suppose we’re all a little bit ruthless now and then, but he took it to a whole new level. And we let him get away with it because he always got results. Hell, his lab is the one that originally discovered the T-virus. And he’d been in the company so long that to be honest, some of the Senior Managers and even the Directors, myself included, were
almost afraid of him.”
He paused and turned in his chair to look out the windows again. “But even then, I could never believe that he could be responsible for something like that. I’m no saint, Kelly. My hands have their share of blood on them. You know more than enough about the things we’ve done in the name of science. But killing that family and locking the little girl up for three decades? That’s beyond ruthless, that’s just insane. It’s evil.”
“I agree, sir,” Kelly said, secretly relieved that his boss felt that way. For a moment, Kelly had been terrified that the Director was going to confess something even more terrible than that. Even Kelly had his limits.
“We have a man in Atlanta dealing with the Trevor girl, his name is Alex Carlisle. One of the troubleshooters from our European offices. You ever met him?”
“I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“He’s a smart kid, he’ll go far in this company. You should probably look him up, since you’ll be competing with him for promotions in the future, I suspect. Anyway, he sent us a new report a little over an hour ago.”
“About Lisa Trevor?”
“Yep. We naturally assumed that she escaped her confinement at some point during the outbreak. But it turns out that she was deliberately released.”
“What?” Kelly asked, astonished. “By whom?”
“According to the girl, Arklay’s Research Supervisor, that man named Wesker, is the one who set her loose. She didn’t actually use his name, but we’re certain that’s who she was talking about.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes some sense,” the Director said. “I think it puts a whole new spin on this whole situation. What do you think?”
“I’m really not sure,” Kelly admitted. “I mean, we already knew that Wesker was alive during the outbreak. We know he coordinated the police teams that came to the mansion, and if that policewoman’s story is to be believed, he arranged to have them all killed in the end. I’m not sure where Lisa comes into the equation.”
“The girl’s sense of time is all screwed up,” the Director explained, smiling to himself that Kelly apparently could not grasp the situation the way he did. “So she has no idea exactly when she was set free. It was probably after the outbreak started, but ...”
“It might have been before,” Kelly finished. “Jesus.”
The Director nodded. “See where we’re going with this?”
“I think I can put two and two together, sir.”
Kelly’s investigation into the outbreak at the Arklay lab complex uncovered incontrovertible proof that the virus was intentionally released there. The Arizona Director knew this, although that information was carefully kept secret from the other Directors. Spencer seemed the most likely culprit, although his motive for doing so was impossible to guess. However, they really had no solid evidence that either Spencer or Wesker were actually responsible for the outbreak. It could very well have been some other researcher at the facility. For all they knew, the entire outbreak could have been the action of one disgruntled employee or even someone suffering from mental illness.
But if Wesker had deliberately released Lisa, then that put Umbrella’s suspicions squarely on him. Why would he set her free, except to cause more disruption and chaos, and spread the virus even farther? That was the only possible reason. And if he was the one who set her free, then wasn’t it more likely that he was also the one who infected the entire mansion with the virus?
Kelly, and the rest of Umbrella as well, it seemed, knew almost nothing about Wesker. Despite his status as Research Supervisor and Project Manager for the entire Arklay lab, there were very few records of his time with Umbrella, and in the aftermath of the infection, what information they did find was mysterious and hard to believe. Apparently, he had infiltrated the RCPD and worked there for almost ten years as the commander of a special unit, while also performing his duties at the Arklay lab for that entire span of time as well.
Given the huge number of projects and experiments at the lab, all of which appeared to be under Wesker’s direct supervision, it seemed absolutely impossible that he could have managed to also work full-time at the local police station in such a high position. How could any one man live such an incredibly stressful double life?
Had the pressure finally been too much? Had Wesker finally snapped? Had he released the virus in a fit of madness in order to destroy the lab, and then lured his teammates there to destroy them as well?
“Do you think Wesker is alive?” Kelly asked.
“Hard to say,” the Director said with a shrug. “I read that Valentine woman’s story too, and she swears up and down that he was killed by the Tyrant. But it doesn’t make sense that he would be fool enough to set the Tyrant loose without knowing the dangers. But maybe he expected to die after all, maybe that was part of his whole plan. Kill everyone at the lab, kill the police, kill everyone he knew. And then kill himself in the end.”
“It’s possible, I guess,” Kelly said. “But what about Spencer, then?”
“Spencer must have known something bad was going to happen. The man was a control freak. He ruled that lab with an iron fist. He probably pushed Wesker too far and realized too late what Wesker did. And then he took off and tried to save his own skin.”
It was all speculation on their part, but Kelly couldn’t see anything wrong with that line of reasoning. Unfortunately, they simply did not know enough about Wesker or his time at Umbrella to make any concrete conclusions about his behavior. But it did seem to make sense.
“Focus on finding Spencer,” the Director said. “He’s the only one that tell us what we need to know.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Director stared at nothing and then said in a lower voice, “Spencer needs to be found. Not just so he can be punished for what he’s done, but because he’s dangerous, especially now that he’s on the loose. The man is clearly a psychopath. Who knows what he might do? Who knows what else he’s already done?”