Encrypted Digital Briefing — Secure Channel | December 26, 2010 | 04:15
The connection ran through three proxy servers before resolving. He had timed this before the call: twelve seconds. For an encrypted channel operating through civilian infrastructure in an active conflict zone, twelve seconds was excellent.
The screen populated. A woman in a room softly lit by monitor glow. She had glasses and her hair pulled back in the efficient way of someone who had stopped worrying about how they looked at four in the morning and had not started worrying again. She was clearly tired. She was clearly focused. The combination was specific — not the tiredness of someone running on inadequate sleep, but the tiredness of someone whose attention had been running at high operational tempo for long enough that it showed in the corners.
She looked at him for a moment through the camera. He looked back.
"Agent Kiniaev," she said. Her voice was precise and warm in equal measure — a register that took years to develop, the specific quality of someone who had learned that the voice in an operator's ear could keep them alive or get them killed, and had decided to be the kind of voice that kept people alive. "I'm Ingrid Hunnigan. I'll be running support for Operation Winter Ghost."
Alen kept his expression neutral, which was always his expression. "I've heard you're the best."
"I've heard you don't officially exist," Hunnigan said. "Which is impressive paperwork. I also have your biometric file." She glanced at something off-screen — consulting a second monitor, he judged from the angle of her eyes. "Resting pulse thirty-eight. Cellular regeneration markers that my medical contact called 'an editorial error' before I confirmed the second read. Progenitor-adjacent response profiles across six categories." She looked back at the camera. "I've worked with exceptional operators. Your file is different."
"I function well in the field," Alen said.
"You function without a safety net that most operators need to survive," she said. The precision of it was not a challenge. It was just accurate. "Which is why you're going into Dveri when nobody else can." She pulled up a shared map — topographic, the village marked with a red indicator, the church at its center. "What I have on the ground: Dveri has been designated abandoned by the ESR government following artillery operations. The civilian population relocated or were relocated — I'm working on confirming which. Thermal imaging shows active heat signatures beneath the church structure. Industrial-level power draw from an underground source."
"The lab," Alen said.
"Whatever they've built down there, it's been running for at least six months based on the power consumption data. The civil war gave them cover — nothing goes in or out of the exclusion zone that the government doesn't want to go in or out, which means this facility has had six months of completely unobserved operation time." She paused. "Alen. The energy readings are unstable. We don't know what six months of unsupervised Plaga modification research produces, but we have data on what happens when Plaga variants are incorrectly spliced with T-Virus gene sequences, and it is not orderly."
"Noted," he said. "Infection vectors in the village?"
"Confirmed Plaga presence in the exclusion zone. Government forces have been running Licker squads through the subordinate strain, which means any former civilian or rebel in the area who has been in contact with those forces is a potential host. The dominant strain — the one the rebels were given, the compromised version — we don't know the current infection rate in the village specifically. You're going to encounter hosts. They're not the T-Virus profile. Plaga hosts retain motor function, coordination, and in some cases partial cognition. They are not slow."
"I know the Plaga profile," Alen said.
"I know you do," Hunnigan said. "I'm briefing you because I want you to come back, not because I think you need the basic information." A beat. "Gear is at the border drop. Everything standard plus what Section Q specified for the biological environment. Your cover identity will hold at the military checkpoint — I've confirmed the bribe rate for this crossing is American cigarettes and incuriosity."
He almost smiled at that. Almost.
"One more thing," she said. "If you encounter anything down there that you cannot identify — anything the Grayweather files don't have a classification for — I want you to tell me immediately. Don't engage, don't assess, tell me. I can pull satellite data, cross-reference Tricell's known research parameters, and give you context faster than you can build it in the field."
"You've been tracking Tricell's research parameters?" Alen asked.
"For two years," Hunnigan said. "Since it became clear they were buying up every post-Umbrella asset with scientific value and asking no questions about provenance." She looked at him steadily through the camera. "I suspect we've been looking at the same thread from different ends."
He thought about the word
catalogue.
The word he had been carrying since the WilPharma extraction vehicle in 2005. He thought about the thread from Raccoon City through WilPharma through Tricell through the Eastern Slav Republic, and what it looked like when you followed it far enough to see the shape it was making.
"We'll compare notes when I'm out," he said.
"Stay alive long enough to do that," Hunnigan said. "Going dark."
The screen went blank.
Alen sat for a moment in the Vienna apartment with the dead laptop screen and the inadequate radiator and thought about a woman in a softly lit room who had been following the same thread as him from the other end.
He thought that this was a good sign, and that good signs were worth noting when you encountered them in this work, which was not frequently.
He went to pack.
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Chapter Twenty-Seven follows...