Colorado. Star Fire HQ.
While the aftershocks of the Wilson incident were still rolling through Washington, Ryan had already pulled everyone back to home base. By the third day after returning from the District, life was back to its normal rhythm.
Luis was holed up in the lab picking apart Wilson's "suppressant" formulas. Carlos was drilling the latest batch of Shadow Force rookies down on the range. Sherry and Becky were catching up on the tactical classes they'd missed. Jill sat in front of the big screens in the intel center, working through the endless stream of global surveillance data that never ran dry.
Ryan was leaned back in a leather chair, a cup of coffee gone cold in his hand.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling window, down in the underground training ground, a few new faces were running physical assessments. He watched for a moment, then looked away.
Since Wilson went down, Star Fire's official channels really had opened up. The long-term contracts Graham had personally pushed were all the way through the pipeline. Over on the military side, once the Wilson loyalists had been purged, the newcomers who'd moved up treated Star Fire with something closer to courtesy than suspicion. Everything was trending the right way.
A little too smoothly.
Ryan set the cup down and tapped the desk twice with his fingertip.
Something had felt off to him the past few days. Umbrella was finished, Wilson was finished, Wesker had vanished without a trace after that business on the Island. TriCell was making some small moves in Africa, but only small ones. Every villain seemed to be lying low, a quiet that didn't sit right.
Jill came through the door with a document still warm from the printer, her expression tight.
"We've got something," she said, setting the file in front of him. "Not Wesker. Not TriCell, either."
Ryan glanced down.
The header was an internal Europol bulletin, stamped with a BSAA forwarding seal. The content was brief. Oswell E. Spencer, co-founder of Umbrella. A confirmed safehouse somewhere in Europe. In extremely poor health. Suspected to be near the end of his life.
Ryan's finger stopped on the page.
Spencer.
The old fox who had been behind every disaster had disappeared completely once Umbrella went bankrupt. Six years, not so much as a trace. Ryan had figured at one point the guy would end up tracked down and killed by Wesker the way the canon had it, but history had clearly drifted off course. Probably because Wesker had gotten himself shaved bald in Spain and spent a good long while licking his wounds.
"Address?" Ryan asked.
Jill tapped the bottom of the page. "Western Europe, a place called 'Valley of the Gods.' BSAA came across it by accident while tracing some leftover Umbrella assets. Old man's bedridden, just a handful of servants around him."
"Word get out?"
"Contained. BSAA looped us in first."
Ryan leaned back and looked at the ceiling, then let out a short laugh.
"This old bastard hides for six years and picks now to show his face." He stood and pulled his coat off the rack. "Knows he's about to die. Wants to see someone before he stops breathing."
Jill frowned. "You're going?"
"Of course I'm going." Ryan fastened the buttons. "He's dying. I should see him off."
"I'll come with you."
"No need." Ryan shook his head. "Hold down the fort here. He's a dying old man. What's he going to do, eat me?"
He reached the door and looked back. "Do me a favor, check if anyone else has been heading that way recently."
Jill blinked, then caught on. "You think Wesker's going too?"
"The guy who killed his father is about to die. As a son, he's got to see him off." Ryan smiled and pulled the door open.
---
Western Europe. Valley of the Gods.
This private estate tucked away in the Alps looked, from the outside, like any old-world aristocratic holding. The walls were high, and the iron gate was overgrown with dead vines. By the time Ryan arrived, even the bars at the entrance had rusted, and they let out a grating screech as they were raised.
The BSAA team had already cleared out. Ryan had given them a heads-up before coming, and they'd tactfully left the scene to "more qualified hands."
The grounds were quiet. The fountains that flanked the stone path had long since stopped running, and the building's silhouette was identical to the mansion, which, supposedly, had been Spencer's replica built out of longing for this very place.
A white-haired butler stood at the door. He gave a small bow when he saw Ryan, as though he'd known all along he was coming.
"Mr. Ryan. Mr. Spencer has been waiting for some time."
Ryan followed him inside.
The hallway was long, lined with old photographs from Umbrella's early years. The Stairway to the Sun in Africa. A portrait of Spencer with a young Dr. Marcus. A black-and-white shot of the groundbreaking ceremony for the first mansion. The whole origin story of Umbrella hung on those walls.
Ryan's eyes swept over the photos without pausing.
The butler stopped in front of a heavy oak door, knocked twice, softly, then pushed it open.
"Sir, your guest has arrived."
The room was thick with the smell of medicine, tangled up in the scent of aging wood. The curtains were drawn tight. The only light came from a bedside lamp throwing a dim yellow glow. A ventilator sat by the window, tubes winding their way over to the bed.
Oswell E. Spencer lay on that bed.
Ryan had seen photos of the man many times. Tailored suits, hair combed without a strand out of place, that old-world aristocratic arrogance and cunning in his eyes. But what lay in front of him now was just a shriveled old man curled up under the blankets.
His skin was like parchment left out to dry, his cheekbones jutting high, his lips almost colorless. His eyes were still open, though. The clouded irises turned toward the door and fixed on Ryan.
"Star Fire's... Mr. Ryan." Spencer's voice was faint, like it was being squeezed out of his throat on whatever breath he had left, but it still carried a composed cadence. "Younger... than I imagined."
Ryan walked over, sat down in the chair by the bed, and crossed his legs.
"You're older than I imagined," he said. "You looked pretty lively in the pictures."
Spencer's mouth twitched, the faint shape of a smile that never quite came together.
"The pictures are... forty years old." He paused, drawing in a few breaths. "When a man gets old, he shouldn't... live in photographs."
The butler stepped out without a sound and pulled the door shut.
The room fell quiet. Only the low hum of the ventilator.
Ryan didn't hurry to speak. He looked around at the room. A few rows of leather-bound books on a shelf. A glass of water on the table, untouched. On the nightstand, a picture frame. Inside it, a young Spencer stood in front of an enormous flowerbed.
Stairway to the Sun.
Spencer followed Ryan's gaze, then slowly turned back.
"You have a great many questions... you'd like to ask me," the old man said.
"I do have a lot of questions." Ryan looked back at him. "But I doubt you can give me any answers."
Spencer didn't argue. He fell silent for a while, eyes drifting to the ceiling as though looking at something very far away.
"When I was young... I went to Africa." He started again, his voice steadier than before, clear in the way a candle burns brightest before it goes out. "In a tribe called... Ndipaya, I saw... the Stairway to the Sun. That flower, under the sunlight... it looked too beautiful to be real."
"I know," Ryan said. "And then you used it to make a virus, and destroyed countless lives."
Spencer didn't acknowledge the interruption, just kept going, almost as if talking to himself. "Marcus... my old friend, he believed the virus was... evolution. Edward, he believed it was... wealth. They both had their answers. Only I... didn't."
"So you built a mansion and had them find the answer for you."
"Yes." Spencer's eyes moved, settling on Ryan. "I have always been searching... for an answer. An answer to the question of what humans live for."
Ryan looked at him, and it almost struck him as funny.
"You built an entire bioweapons empire, killed hundreds of thousands of people, all to find an answer?"
Spencer didn't smile. His expression stayed even, with a frankness Ryan hadn't expected.
"You think I'm making excuses?" he said. "No. I genuinely... did not know. Marcus believed the virus was god. Edward believed money was god. I had nothing. So I built Umbrella, I built the mansion, I built those... experiments. All I ever wanted was to know what the meaning of human life was."
Ryan watched him for a few seconds, then said, "That's why you had the ARK Plan. Why you had Elpis."
Something finally stirred in Spencer's gaze.
"Elpis..." He repeated the word softly, as if tasting it. "So you found the file."
"Three floors below the hospital," Ryan said. "Buried deep. But I dug it out anyway."
Spencer was quiet for a long time.
Outside, wind moved through the dead vines with a thin, scattered sound. The lamp threw deep shadows across the hollows of his face.
"Elpis..." he said at last, voice back to that thread-of-breath state, "in Greek myth... is the embodiment of hope. Pandora opened the box, every disaster flew out, and only hope... remained at the bottom."
"I know," Ryan said. "I wasn't asking about the name. I'm asking what it actually is."
Spencer's lips moved. It could have been a smile, or a sigh.
"Do you really want to know?"
"I came here to hear the answer."
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