Ministry of Defence — Sub-Basement Level 4, Whitehall | December 2003 | 22:00
The lift did not appear on the building's published schematics.
Alen had reviewed the published schematics three weeks ago, when the summons had arrived through channels that were themselves not in any published documentation — a message conveyed verbally by a man in civilian clothes who had produced credentials for an organization whose name Alen had not been able to find in any registry, and who had told him a time and a location and the instruction to come alone and say nothing to his commanding officer.
He had said nothing to his commanding officer.
The two Military Police who met him in the lobby were courteous and said nothing. They walked him past the visitor sign-in desk without stopping, past three levels of security infrastructure that he noted in passing, into the lift that did not appear on the schematics, and down to a level that the schematics would have placed somewhere in the building's foundation drainage system.
The corridor was poured concrete, recently sealed, lit by halogen strips that threw hard shadows with no warmth in them. The air was the specific air of a space with its own sealed ventilation system — not recycled in the way building systems recycled air, but
managed,
the air of somewhere that needed to be certain about what was in it.
The room at the end was steel table, two chairs, one overhead light, and General Sir Charles Holloway, who was a tall man run to silver and weight in his late sixties, with the particular posture of someone who had spent decades in rooms where what he said determined what happened next and had organized his body around the fact. He had a cigarette, which he did not appear to need permission for, and a folder on the table in front of him, and he was reading it when Alen came in without looking up.
Alen stood at parade rest. He had been in the Army for thirteen months and parade rest was by now automatic rather than performed.
"Sit down, Richard," Holloway said, without looking up.
Alen sat.
Holloway closed the folder. He looked at Alen with the direct, assessing look of someone who had evaluated a great many people and had strong opinions about how much information an initial assessment could reliably deliver. He was, Alen thought, revising.
"Thirteen months," Holloway said. "Not quite the standard route."
"No, sir."
"Your instructors have used, between them, eleven different words to describe your performance. The most common one is 'anomalous.'" He lit the cigarette from the one he was finishing. "The most accurate one, in my opinion, is 'convenient.'"
Alen did not respond to this. He was fairly certain he was not meant to.
"You know what you are, Richard," Holloway said. Not a question. "I don't mean that in the philosophical sense. I mean that you know your own capabilities exceed what we have recorded instruments for measuring. You know this because you've been aware of it since before you got on a bus to Cambridge to sit a degree that you could have completed in your first year." He leaned back in his chair. "I'd like to know if you know
why
you are the way you are."
Alen held his gaze. He had thought about this question, in various forms, for twenty-one years. He had thought about it more specifically since his university work had given him the technical vocabulary to think about it more precisely. He had thought about the bloodwork Jessica had run when he was a child and the careful way she had discussed it with him at twelve, telling him that his biology was unusual in ways she was still working to understand. He had thought about the locket and the name on it and the word
first
that Jessica had used with her last breath.
"I have a working hypothesis," he said. "I don't yet have complete data."
Holloway studied him for a moment. Then he said: "Good enough." He slid the folder across the table.
It was stamped in red across the cover:
PROJECT GRAYWEATHER — EYES ONLY — JOINT OPERATION AUTHORITY.
Below the stamp, in smaller type:
MI6 / CIA / MoD — BIOLOGICAL THREAT RESPONSE — CLASSIFIED LEVEL 5.
Alen opened it.
He read methodically. He did not let his face do anything while he read, which was a discipline he had been practicing his entire life and which was currently being tested by the contents of the folder, because the contents of the folder confirmed, with classified documentation and forensic imagery, approximately sixty percent of what he had spent four years building in his
Anomalies
file. The rest of it was things he had not known and would have preferred, in a narrow personal sense, not to know, because the knowing landed in a different register than the inferring.
BOW designations. Hunter-class, Tyrant-class, the taxonomy of what Umbrella had released and what had subsequently been recovered and what had not been recovered and where the gaps in the recovery were. An incident timeline from 1978 to 2003 that was significantly more detailed than the public record and significantly less complete than Alen suspected the actual record was. Footage stills from four separate post-Umbrella incidents that the public record had categorized as industrial accidents, natural disasters, or classified military exercises.
At the back of the folder: a project brief. One page. Formatted with the spare precision of a document written by someone who had decided every unnecessary word was a liability.
He read it once. He read it again.
"Conventional special operations units," Holloway said, while he read, "encounter BOW-class threats and lose. Not because the operators aren't exceptional — Delta, SAS, they're the best conventional forces produce. But conventional force is calibrated for human threats. You send a four-man team against a T-103-class asset and you lose the team." He drew on the cigarette. "Raccoon City was not the end of this. It was the demonstration of the concept. Every rogue state and ideological organization that got access to what survived has been working from that template for five years. The next event will be worse. The one after that will be worse again."
Alen closed the folder.
"What does the program produce?" he asked. "Specifically."
"Individuals," Holloway said. "Not units. Not teams. The unit model fails because units operate on coordination protocols, and coordination protocols have vulnerabilities — communication failure, chain of command disruption, a single loss cascading into mission failure. We need operators who can complete a mission objective alone, in a biologically compromised environment, without support or extraction." He looked at Alen steadily. "We need, to be precise, operators whose own biology gives them a margin that conventional operators do not have."
"How many candidates does the program currently have?"
"Besides you? Two. One has already washed." He paused. "The remaining candidate is further along in the process. You would be assigned to the advanced conditioning track."
"What does the program know about the biological basis of the candidate profile?"
Holloway looked at him for a long moment. "We know what we can measure. We can measure quite a lot."
"And what you can't measure?"
"Is why this program exists," Holloway said. "Richard. I'll be direct with you. You were flagged not because of what you can do, which is remarkable. You were flagged because of what you don't do. You don't stress in the way human physiology stresses. You don't fail in the ways human operators fail. The biological margin you have over a standard operator in a compromised environment is — we believe — significant enough to be the difference between mission success and mission loss. But we don't fully understand why you have it." He stubbed out the cigarette. "Part of what the program will do is understand that."
Alen sat with this for a moment.
He thought about what Holloway was really saying: that the program wanted to understand him at least as much as it wanted to deploy him. He thought about the classified Umbrella research documentation in the folder — the viral taxonomy, the designation systems, the twenty-five years of bioweapon development that had been allowed to proceed inside a corporate structure with inadequate oversight — and he thought about what organization or organizations had permitted that to continue and who in those organizations was now sitting in sub-basement rooms asking people like him to become a different kind of instrument.
He thought about Jessica. About what she had said about the difference between how and why.
He thought about Raccoon City. About the gap between what had been done and who had been held accountable. About the next incident, and the one after that.
He pressed one hand briefly against the locket under his shirt. One breath. Then he took his hand away.
"I have conditions," he said.
Holloway raised an eyebrow. People did not, in Holloway's experience, present conditions at this stage of a conversation in this room. He was either going to find this interesting or he was going to find it a problem. His expression suggested he was working out which.
"I want access to the complete biological data the program holds on its candidates," Alen said. "Not a summary. The full records. I have a right to understand my own physiology and I will not be doing the work this program requires while operating on incomplete information about myself."
Holloway was quiet.
"Second condition," Alen continued. "The program's mission objectives require a threat framework that the existing Umbrella documentation doesn't fully satisfy. I want access to the Anomalies I've been tracking since 1998, and I want the program's intelligence resources applied to completing that picture." He paused. "I'm not asking for autonomy over mission selection. I'm asking to understand what I'm being sent against."
Holloway looked at him for a long moment. The cigarette had burned down to the filter in the ashtray and neither of them had noticed.
"Those are not unreasonable conditions," Holloway said finally.
"No," Alen said. "They aren't."
Holloway stood. He extended his hand across the table, which was not how this particular kind of meeting usually ended — it usually ended with paperwork, or with the implicit understanding that no further discussion was required — but which felt, in this case, like the correct punctuation.
Alen shook it.
"You understand," Holloway said, "that from this point, Alen Richard is a discontinued identity. Operationally."
"I understand."
"Whatever name we give you — and we'll discuss that — is what you are. The past becomes a liability."
Alen thought about a library floor in Cambridge, and a narrow dormitory room, and a pond in Somerset. He thought about everything the past was and had made him into, and what it was worth, and whether worth could be measured in the way Holloway was implying.
He thought about the locket, which was not a discontinued identity. Which was the one thing he was keeping.
"The past is what I'm fighting for," he said. "That doesn't go."
Holloway held his gaze for a moment longer. Then he nodded once — not agreement exactly, but acknowledgment. The acknowledgment of a man who had spent his career operating in the space between what institutions said and what individuals needed, and who had learned to recognize when the space was not bridgeable and when it simply needed to be named.
"When do I start?" Alen asked.
"You already have," Holloway said.
END OF CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Chapter Seventeen to follow..