Cambridge, England — Municipal Cemetery | August 21, 2011 | 07:00
The morning mist was in the cemetery the way morning mist was always in Cambridge cemeteries — with the specific permanence of something that had been there since before the headstones and would be there after.
He walked through the gate and along the path he knew. He had been here once, in 2002, to arrange the headstone. He had not been back. That was a choice he had made at the time and had not revisited, because revisiting it would have required more of something he had needed to preserve for other uses.
He stopped in front of two markers.
Jessica's stone first. Gray granite, the inscription he had chosen:
Dr. Jessica R. Richard — Beloved. Healer.
Beside it, Jason's — the man he had known through Jessica, through the photographs on the study walls and the pipe on the mantle and the stories she had told in that particular voice she used for things she was missing:
Jason Mitchell — Philosopher. Husband.
He set the white lilies he had bought at the train station on the wet earth between them. He stood for a while in the mist.
He had been, for nine years, a man who did not have time for cemeteries. He had been running operations. He had been building the understanding of what Simmons was doing and what Tricell was building and what the C-Virus designation meant in the context of a decade of post-Umbrella biological research acquisition. He had been becoming the person that the work required.
He had also, in parallel, been the person that Jessica had made. Those two things had coexisted for nine years, sometimes easily and sometimes under considerable strain, and standing here he could feel both of them clearly — the Phantom standing in front of his mother's grave, the son who had lost the only anchor he had ever had and had organized the next nine years around the thing she had told him mattered most.
"Simmons took my team," he said. His voice was quiet and the mist absorbed it. "He took my name. He nearly took my life. But he didn't." He touched the cold granite. "I'm still here. And whatever comes next, I'm going to carry your voice through it. I promise you that."
He did not stay long. Staying was not the point. He had come to say what needed to be said in a place that warranted saying it, and he had said it, and now the work of what came next had to begin.
* * *
The Richard estate sat behind its iron gate, the ivy heavier than it had been nine years ago, the gate itself slightly more rust than he remembered. He reached under the loose stone at the base of the right pillar — a hiding place Jason had shown him when he was seven, the specific delight of a philosopher who believed that children should know where the important things were kept. The key was there, unchanged.
He walked up the drive. The house received him without ceremony.
Inside: nine years of undisturbed stillness. The dust of a house that had been maintained by its trust administrator but not lived in. Jessica's reading glasses on the side table. Jason's pipe on the mantle. These things had not moved because there was no one to move them and the administrator had been instructed only to maintain the structure.
He walked through the rooms slowly. The study, with its wall of books and the large oak desk where he had done most of his adolescent thinking. The kitchen, where Jessica had made coffee badly and tea well and had talked to him over dinner for two hours at a time without noticing the time pass. The garden door, which still had the specific reluctance of a door that had always needed a firm pull.
He opened the curtains in the study. Light came in.
He sat at the desk.
John Michael Kane had arrived in England through Heathrow at six-forty in the morning. Alen Richard, by the official record, had died in a Siberian ravine on August 8th. The Valkyrie designation had been retired with full honors in a closed-casket ceremony at Langley that he had obviously not attended. Simmons had the confirmation of his immunity — Carla's report. The C-Virus program was continuing. Neo-Umbrella was receiving funding through Family channels. The Edonia situation was building toward something.
He had all of this. He had it without any official capacity to act on it, which was both a constraint and an advantage.
He picked up a pen. He took a piece of paper from the desk drawer — Jessica's notepaper, the good heavy stock she had preferred, which had been sitting in this drawer since 2002 and was still intact. He thought about what he had said at her grave:
I'm going to carry your voice through it.
He thought about what she had taught him about the difference between the
how
and the
why.
He wrote one name at the top of the page.
DEREK SIMMONS.
He looked at it. He thought about Hunnigan watching the static on the briefing room screen. About the off-book message she would have received. About the fact that she had said, in December 2010, that she was going to find him — in the precise, committed tone of someone making a statement rather than expressing a hope.
He would need to contact her. Not yet — not until he had rebuilt enough of the picture from outside the structure that he could bring her something worth the risk of contact. But eventually.
He thought about the locket around his neck. About the word
first.
About what Jessica had said and what it had meant and what it was going to mean when he was finally ready to follow it to its source. He was closer now than he had been. Not because Simmons had given him anything useful — Simmons had tried to kill him, which was the opposite of useful — but because being dead gave him something he had not had since 2002: the ability to move without the framework watching.
He underlined the name on the page. Twice.
Then he turned the paper over and began to write.
Not a plan yet. A map. Everything he knew, organized outside the classification systems that had been containing it — the Tricell thread from WilPharma to the ESR to the Neo-Umbrella shell entity, the C-Virus development timeline, the Family's financial architecture as he had read it from the inside, Simmons's specific methodology for eliminating threats before they could surface.
He wrote for four hours without stopping.
Outside the study window, Cambridge went about a September morning. Students. Cyclists. The specific quiet of a city that had been producing thinking people for eight hundred years and was continuing to do so with considerable indifference to any particular person's involvement.
He had come home. He had not come to rest. He had come because this was where his foundation was — Jessica's books on the shelves, Jason's pipe on the mantle, the desk where he had first understood that intelligence required purpose to mean anything — and he needed the foundation before he could build the next thing.
He kept writing.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Chapter Forty to follow...