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  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  About the Author

  To Danelle, for paving the way . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to editor Marco Palmieri, who dragged me into this; agent Lucienne Diver, who kept me in it; author S.D. Perry, who did all the other books; writer/ director Paul W. S. Anderson, who provided the source material; the game developers at Capcom, who provided Paul’s source material; to Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Eric Mabius, James Purefoy, Martin Crewes, Colin Salmon, and the rest of the cast of the first Resident Evil film, who gave me voices to work with; GraceAnne Andreassi DeCandido, who kept my writing sound; and my super-duper wonder sweetie Terri Osborne, who keeps me going.

  ONE

  AARON VRICELLA REGARDED THE YOUNGER man sitting opposite him with a combination of awe and outrage.

  He took a sip of Chianti before speaking. “You know, Matthew, I did warn you when I recruited you that this was an endeavor that might claim your sanity. I must confess, however, that I did not expect the fall to happen so soon.” He set the wine glass down on one of the few clear spots on his massive oak desk. The Tuscan vintage went down a bit too smoothly. Aaron preferred the harsher red wines from northern Italy—the type of wine you need to punch a hole through the wall to get down.

  In the guest chair, Matthew Addison sat staring down at the desk. An overburdened wire-frame inbox took up one corner, Aaron’s flatscreen monitor and keyboard, both products of the Umbrella Corporation, another. The irony of his equipment being of Umbrella manufacture was not lost on Aaron, given that a goodly portion of the machine’s computing power was given over to trying to expose that corporation’s illegal activities.

  The rest of the desk’s wooden surface was laden with random assortments of books, CDs, Zip disks, floppy disks, Post-its, printouts, spiral-bound reports, envelopes, folders, and quite possibly the corpse of Jimmy Hoffa. Aaron had been meaning to clean the desk in his office since the Carter administration.

  Once you got past the desk, the office—located in the western corner of Aaron’s large suburban home—was quite orderly. Bookshelves lined one wall, contents arranged neatly. A wet bar—from whence he had taken the Chianti—and several landscape paintings adorned the opposite wall, and behind him was the picture window looking out on his acres of property. A cleaning service came in twice a week to vacuum, dust, and make sure everything was in order, but the cleaners were not allowed to touch Aaron’s desk. Any attempt to disturb his chaotic jumble would, he was sure, destroy the consulting business that paid for the house and the cleaning service. The sloppiness worked for him.

  Matt finally looked up at Aaron and stared at him. “It’s the only way this’ll work.”

  “It’s insane. Matthew, we cannot involve a civilian in this.”

  “Civilian? Listen to yourself, Aaron. We’re all civilians. The whole point of this organization was that it was as outside the system as Umbrella is above it.”

  Aaron grabbed his glass of wine. “Yes, but at least we all know the risks. And yes, we’re all civilians now, but most of us at least have the experience necessary for this kind of work. Your sister—”

  “Can do this.” Matt leaned back in his chair. Only then did Aaron notice that he was fiddling with a paperweight that Aaron had been trying to find for the last two months. “Look, if we try to send anyone else in undercover, it won’t work.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, it isn’t. If I go in, or Marcus, or Dora, or Zara, or Ripley, they’ll make us. And you know why?”

  Sighing, Aaron said, “No, but I assume you’ll tell me.”

  “Because we’ll all have cover stories.”

  “Of course you will.” Aaron finished his wine in one gulp. It was definitely too smooth. “That’s what the ‘cover’ in undercover means.”

  “And that’s why it won’t work. Umbrella’s got their fingers in everything—no matter how good a cover we come up with, they’ll find some way to plow through it, and we’ll not only be back where we started, we run the risk of exposing the whole operation. That’s why we need Lisa.”

  “So you’re saying that the only person who can possibly successfully infiltrate the Umbrella Corporation in order to obtain the information we need to bring them down is someone who has absolutely no experience in infiltration or information retrieval.”

  “Yes and no.”

  Aaron rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger in a futile attempt to stave off a headache. “Matthew—”

  “Yes, she has no experience in infiltration, except what she may have picked from me by osmosis.”

  Chuckling, Aaron said, “Talked about your work in the Federal Marshal’s office around the dinner table, did you?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Matthew, this is ridiculous. It’s too dangerous—”

  To Aaron’s surprise, Matt slammed his hand on the oak desk, sending several pieces of paper, two CDs, and a Post-it with Aaron’s daughter’s cell phone number onto the floor.

  “This whole fucking thing is dangerous, Aaron! If it wasn’t dangerous, it wouldn’t need to get done! But the longer we sit on our asses worrying about what risks we might want to take, Umbrella keeps getting closer and closer to doing something they can’t cover up without getting a lot of people killed! Now either we do this, or I’m out.”

  At that, Aaron laughed. “An action which will have repercussions from one end of your head to the other. Honestly, Matthew, do you truly think yourself so mighty a cog in our wheel that we will do something insanely stupid just to appease you?” He leaned forward. “I helped found this organization, and I’ve been one of its primary financiers. Believe me, no one wants to bring Umbrella down more than me. One of the reasons why Umbrella doesn’t know about us is because we’re well spread out, well organized, and because we haven’t taken stupid risks.”

  “Yeah, and Umbrella’s still going strong without any sign of being actually brought down by this organization dedicated to doing so because you’re not taking any risks, stupid or otherwise.”

  Aaron got up. “I need another drink. You want anything?”

  Ignoring the question as Aaron went over to the wet bar, Matt instead sat bolt upright in the guest chair. “Besides, if I quit, it just means I’ll go off on my own. One nice, big loose cannon asshole of an ex-Marshal who’ll stumble around like an idiot trying to expose Umbrella, and probably get captured along the way. That wouldn’t bode too well for your precious fucking organizat
ion.”

  Rolling his eyes, Aaron said, “Really, Matthew, if you were the sort to do something like that, I never would have recruited you in the first place.”

  Matt deflated, now slumping. “Yeah, I know, but it was the only card I had.” He looked up at Aaron. “Can you pour me one of those?”

  Smiling, Aaron removed another wine glass from the cabinet, pouring the last of the too-smooth Chianti into it.

  As he poured, Matt said, “Look, Lisa’s got something none of the rest of us have.”

  “Besides a lack of experience?” Aaron handed the glass to Matt.

  “Actually, yes. You assumed that she had no experience retrieving information. But in fact, what she does for a living is work in computer and internet security. She’s one of the top people in that field. Before she went freelance, she put in some good years at a lot of the top firms—KPMG, Bear Stearns, Citibank. She’s got a killer rÈsumÈ. Not only that, but Umbrella headhunted her a few years back.”

  Aaron blinked. “She turned them down?”

  Matt nodded as he sipped his wine. Aaron was stunned. If Umbrella set their sights on a potential employee, they rarely stopped until that person was an actual employee.

  “Why?”

  “She was living in New York at the time, and didn’t want to relocate to Raccoon. Couldn’t, really. She and Nick were still married, and that was when Nick’s mother was getting sick. No way they were gonna leave town with all the care her mother-in-law needed.”

  “Umbrella has an office in New York.”

  “Yeah, but they wanted someone for the home office.”

  Snorting at the euphemism, Aaron said, “You mean the Hive?”

  Matt nodded. Most of Umbrella’s private sector work was done at their various locations around the globe: technology and equipment relating to computers and health care. The Hive was the underground complex under Raccoon City where the company conducted business relating to its government contracts. Officially, the Hive existed in order to preserve the classified nature of some of those contracts. Unofficially, that was an excuse to do work—both for the government and the private sector—that was not necessarily legal or ethical.

  “But she’s divorced now, yes?” Aaron retook his seat.

  Matt nodded again. “And even if she wasn’t, the mother-in-law in question is dead. Lisa went freelance a couple years back, right after she and Nick split. With the economy in the shape it’s in, though, I don’t think she’ll have any trouble convincing the recruiters at Umbrella that she’d like something more secure—if they’re still interested. And, given the premium they place on security, I’m willing to bet real money they’ll still be interested in taking her on, especially since she’s got much more varied experience now.”

  Aaron snorted. “You’re living on a Federal Marshal’s pension, and quite a meagre iteration of same, at that, Matthew—you don’t have any real money to bet.” He sighed. “But what if they find out who she is?”

  “They’ll know who she is—a top-notch computer geek, who’ll be working directly with the company’s security people. You’ve met her, she can charm the socks off anyone. She’ll be able to get us the info we need.”

  “What happens when they run the background check and find out that her brother is a retired Federal Marshal?”

  Matt shrugged his deceptively small shoulders. “We’ve lived on opposite sides of the country for most of our adult lives; we don’t see each other that often. If I tried to get a job with Umbrella, they’d probably dig deep enough to find out what kinds of things I’ve been doing since I retired, but as the brother of a prospective employee, my”—he grinned—“veneer of respectability should hold up.”

  Swiveling his chair slightly so he could glance out the picture window, Aaron took a thoughtful sip of his wine. It could work. His reservations notwithstanding, it was actually a better plan than anything else they had attempted.

  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.”

  TWO

  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.