Umbrella Corporation, Manhattan. Rooftop helipad.
The city's nighttime glow caught the underside of the clouds as Matthew stood on the landing pad in full tactical gear, facing the assembled Alpha Team.
"Listen up. HUNK is out of action, so I'm leading this operation personally."
The team stood with their hands behind their backs, faces unreadable.
"The mission objective is straightforward. We're conducting a covert infiltration of the research facility. We retrieve classified company files, neutralize personnel who pose a risk to the company, and destroy compromising evidence." He looked across the line of faces. "Questions?"
"No, sir."
"Good. Board up."
The helicopter lifted off into the dark and crossed the sky without drawing a second glance from anyone below.
The flight ended over a stretch of rural ground outside Raccoon City. The team touched down, moved fast, and folded into the tree line without pausing to regroup. Matthew had distributed the facility's floor plans before departure, along with specific tasking for each team member. By the time they reached the perimeter of the surface installation above NEST, everyone knew exactly where they were going.
Matthew looked up at the outer wall. Five meters, topped with high-voltage wire. He glanced at the entrance, where two guards stood in the kind of bored posture that meant they hadn't seen anything unexpected in a very long time.
"Hunter." He addressed the team's network specialist without turning. "You're staying topside with your equipment. Penetrate the facility's internal network. Once you're in, kill every surveillance feed in the building."
"After that, hold position and wait for my orders."
"Yes, sir."
"Everyone else, with me."
Hunter was good at what he did. The acknowledgment came over the earpiece in under two minutes.
"Network breached. Cameras are down."
"Move."
Two shots. The guards dropped without a sound. The team was through the gate and moving before anyone inside had time to understand that something had changed.
In the monitoring room, it had already been a bad few minutes.
"What do you mean all the feeds are showing the monitoring room itself? That doesn't even make sense!"
The supervisor's voice had reached a pitch that made the overhead lights feel like they were vibrating. The staff hunched over their terminals in the particular way of people trying to make themselves smaller without technically leaving.
A balding technician attempted to explain the situation calmly.
"Sir, if you could just give us a few—"
"A few what? A few minutes? I'll give you thirty. Thirty minutes to fix this, and if the feeds aren't back up by then, I want every single one of you to clean out your desks and go."
The technician chose not to push it further and went back to his keyboard.
The situation didn't last thirty minutes. The lights flickered twice and went out completely.
The supervisor stepped into the hallway to find it fully dark except for the red emergency strobes cycling at the end of each corridor.
The power was out.
Down in the utility room, Alpha Team watched as Matthew raised his weapon toward the electrical panel.
"Sir," one of the team members said carefully, "what are you doing?"
"Destroying the fuses. Obviously."
He fired. A fuse blew.
"The reason we destroy the fuses," he continued, firing again, "is so that anyone who comes after us has to spend time finding replacements and restoring power. It creates a secondary task for their response teams and splits their attention."
A beat of silence from the team.
"Sir, is that really why, or are you just—"
"That's why." He cleared the rest of the panel in three more shots. "Let's keep moving."
The facility above them had already begun falling apart in the way that facilities do when their lights fail and their alarms start screaming. Red emergency lighting pulsed through every corridor. Somewhere ahead, boots were moving fast on hard floor, the sound of a rapid response unit converging on the power room.
They came around a corner and met Matthew's team head-on.
"Drop your weapons! You are not authorized—"
The sentence ended before it finished.
The corridor went quiet again. Matthew stepped over the bodies and kept moving.
In the underground lab below, William Birkin read the message coming in from upstairs and felt his stomach drop.
"Damn it." He said it quietly, then looked across the lab at his wife. "Annette. I have bad news."
She looked up from her station.
"My instincts were right. Spencer's people are already here." He kept his voice even with the effort it took. "They're here for the G-Virus. Everything we've built."
"We're not letting them take it."
He moved toward the door. "Go to the secondary lab and wipe the data. Every file, every backup. All of it."
"What about you?"
Birkin hesitated for just a moment, then made the decision that was already made. "I'll take the virus samples myself. Physical copies. They can't have those."
He stopped her before she could argue.
"Once the data is gone, get Sherry and leave. Don't wait for me. This place isn't safe anymore."
"But—"
"No buts." He gripped her arm for a second, then let go. "I love you both. Go."
He ran.
Spencer. The name burned through him with every step. You think you can just take what belongs to other people? You think you can take what I built?
He reached the lab, threw open the storage unit, and transferred the G-Virus samples into a carry case with hands that weren't entirely steady. Years of work. His life's work. The "G" stood for God, and he had meant it. What he'd created was the closest thing to genuine human transcendence that anyone had ever synthesized. It was not going to end up in Spencer's hands.
He snapped the case shut.
The lab door beeped.
He spun with his pistol up.
The door opened.
Red emergency light flooded in from the corridor behind the figure who stepped through. He walked in unhurriedly, like someone arriving somewhere they'd been expecting to be for a while. Black tactical gear, no urgency in his body language, hands open.
"Allow me to introduce myself. Matthew Lawrence, head of security for Umbrella Corporation, commanding officer of this operation." He glanced around the lab with mild professional interest, then back at Birkin. "Dr. William Birkin. I've been looking forward to meeting you properly. This isn't exactly the setting I would have chosen."
He brought his hands together in a single, deliberate clap.
Two more figures were pushed through the door by members of his team. Arms bound behind their backs, both of them pale, both of them clearly afraid.
Annette. And Sherry.
William Birkin's gun hand dropped two inches before he caught it.
Matthew looked at him calmly across the width of the lab.
"So," he said. "Ready to talk?"