Chapter 24: No Comparison, No Pain
That night.
Ada sat in the villa in a change of clothes, looking at the room with an expression she would not have been able to name precisely. Her eyes came to rest on the new set of keys on the bar counter.
Matthew's words when he handed them over came back without invitation.
"You're my assistant, which means you need somewhere decent to live. The address is on the key. Go find it whenever you want. I'll have the deed transferred to your name."
"As for a car. Do you prefer something fast or something that can go off-road? Bugatti or Bentley? Or I can give you two million and let you choose yourself."
"One thing. Once you have the car, be on time."
Ada leaned back into the sofa and looked at the chandelier overhead. The expression on her face was one she didn't often wear: genuine bewilderment.
This company's benefits package was real?
She had been getting shot at for years. What exactly had that been for?
She thought about a phrase she'd encountered once: you brace yourself to go out in the rain and step outside to find there's no rain at all. She hadn't understood it until right now.
After washing up, she lay down on a bed that was softer than anything she had slept on in longer than she could remember. Years of moving from place to place, never in one location long enough to call it anything, and now she was lying in a bed that someone had just put in her name.
The thought that had been forming all evening took clearer shape.
Working for an employer like this might not be the worst thing.
No questions about her past. Real money, not promises. A house. A car. No unspoken conditions attached to any of it. And from what she'd heard around the office, if she ran into trouble, the company would back her up.
She'd been listening to how people talked about Matthew in the building all week. The picture that emerged was consistent: generous with his people, treated everyone the same regardless of position, department pay running forty percent above the parent company's standard. Even the cleaning staff had good things to say. The whole thing had a quality of unreality to it.
She was beginning to understand, for the first time, why throughout history capable people had thrown their lot in with particular leaders rather than others. If someone like this had existed in her line of work, she would have followed him without much deliberation.
Everyone else she'd ever worked for had described her as a spy, an operative, an asset.
He had called her a talent. A rare one.
She was still turning this over when her phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Unknown number.
A brief pause. She picked it up.
"Yes."
"It's me." Wesker's voice came through without warmth, carrying the particular quality of someone checking the status of a piece of equipment. "How is the assignment progressing? Any results?"
Ada was quiet for a moment. Her eyes moved across the room, took in the furnishings, the window, the car visible in the courtyard outside.
Results.
Getting paid does that count.
What she said into the phone was: "Nothing to report yet."
"Nothing." The temperature in his voice dropped noticeably. "You disappoint me. This target is a newly installed security chief with no real standing inside the company and no prior training. You have been embedded as his assistant for seven days and have produced nothing. I'm beginning to question your competence."
"The organization is not pleased."
"If the next time I call, the assignment is still stalled." The sentence didn't need to be finished. "I imagine the FBI would find a detailed file on you quite interesting."
The line cut off. No questions, no space for explanation, no hesitation. In his view, if there were no results, there was nothing worth hearing.
Ada held the silent phone for a moment, then set it back on the nightstand.
She slept well as a rule. Years of living on the move had trained her to go under fast regardless of surroundings.
Tonight, for reasons she declined to examine, she couldn't.
Every time she closed her eyes, the comparison was there. Two employers, side by side, and the gap between them was not a small one.
One called with nothing but a threat and a deadline. One handed her a house key and asked if she wanted a Bugatti or a Bentley.
There wasn't a version of this where the choice was difficult. And yet she lay there thinking about it until the room started getting light.
She sat in front of the bathroom mirror the next morning, looked at the shadows under her eyes that had no business being there, and reached for more concealer than usual.
At the office, she made his coffee out of habit. Evian from downstairs. Hand-ground.
Matthew took the cup, drank a small amount, and smiled slightly.
"I should tell you. The Evian thing was also a joke."
He put the cup down.
"And I don't actually like coffee. It tastes like medicine." He looked at the cup without affection. "Eleanor keeps telling me the beans are expensive. I genuinely cannot tell the difference. My actual range of beverage judgment goes about as far as whether my lemonade has too much sugar in it."
Ada looked at him for a moment.
She said nothing.
That day, he transferred a portion of what was normally Eleanor's workload to her. Task scheduling, department accounts. It was the first time since she'd arrived that she was looking at anything operational.
After a rough pass through the numbers, she noticed something and brought the tablet to his desk.
"Mr. Lawrence. Based on what I'm seeing, if the department maintains this level of compensation, expenditure is going to outrun income fairly quickly."
He didn't look particularly concerned. "There's a supplementary budget from the last board meeting. Two hundred million, separate from what shows up on the regular books." He glanced over. "The department isn't going to starve anytime soon."
He seemed to think of something. He turned toward her.
"After work today. Come with me somewhere. There's a project I want you to look at."
"Sure." She was already back in the accounts.
The city's edge, after dark.
They pulled up in front of a building that had seen better decades. The inside was lit up and loud with the sounds of active construction. Excavators, pile drivers, workers calling back and forth. Ada put her fingers in her ears against the noise and looked at him.
"This is the project?"
"Yes."
"All right." She dropped her hands. "An assistant accepts all manner of unreasonable requests from her employer, even when the company has an entire department for exactly this kind of thing." She looked the building over, turning over possibilities. "What are you building here? Research facility? Weapons development? Something more classified?"
"A children's welfare center."
"..."
Ada Wong: ...Damn it. I'm a terrible person.
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