Partners

 

 Umbrella took full advantage of the post-war reconstruction period in Vietnam, when foreign business began to invest in rebuilding the country, and had a lot of branch offices with suspicious underground adjuncts in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. When the company got taken down, their shipping networks, both legal and otherwise, were almost immediately repurposed for smuggling both bioweaponry and Golden Triangle opium. It is not unheard of for one to contaminate the other, which has resulted in at least one small-scale outbreak that the BSAA knows about.

Chris first gets assigned to the case in mid-2008. It leads to six weeks of gathering intel, interrogations and stakeouts, and by that July - a very typical sort of July in southeast Asia - he's had about enough of this shit.

He goes in alone, but just to show his common sense has not completely failed him, he calls for backup right before he kicks in the office's front door. The first floor of the old building was once a cubicle farm, where two generations of Umbrella's pencil-pushers took care of paperwork. Now it's full of startled local Vietnamese people in their underwear, weighing out careful amounts of unusually-pure heroin.

The workers on the floor are being supervised by an Anglo in a bad white suit, who half-turns towards Chris and reaches under his jacket. Chris takes two big steps across the room and right as the Anglo gets the gun up and level, Chris is in position to grab his wrist. He pulls the Anglo's gun hand out of position and throws a sharp right cross at the guy's face. The Anglo's nose explodes and he corkscrews to the floor, held up by Chris's grip on his wrist, and Chris lets him drop.

Chris picks up the Anglo's pistol, ejects the clip, works the action, and tosses it into the corner of the room. The people who're packaging the product all break for the doors at once, and Chris lets them go without a second look.

The head of the operation in Hanoi is Harry Keller, who would be third-generation Umbrella if there still was an Umbrella. He's Chris's primary target and intel indicates he's not likely to go down quietly. His personal office is up a short flight of stairs from reception.

Chris expects to find Keller either jumping out his window or hiding behind the desk with six more guys and an assault rifle, but there's nothing. Chris advances into the office with his pistol drawn and sees somebody's sprawled out on the floor behind the desk. Chris kicks him over onto his back and it's Keller, unconscious.

"Consider this a gift," a woman says behind him.

Chris whirls and points his gun at her. It's the familiar woman from Jill's funeral, seated in an office chair. She wears a long red silk dress, with a high collar like a cheongsam, no sleeves, and a slit from the hemline to near her hip. She still has an air taser held loosely in one hand and pointed at the floor.

"My name is Ada Wong," she says. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"I've heard of you," Chris says, and keeps the gun's sight over her left eye. "What's your stake in this?"

"Keller had some information I wanted," Ada says, "but he was more of a useful idiot. I arranged for his guards to be otherwise occupied. I felt we should meet."

"Why's that?"

She slowly crosses one leg over the other. It's not a seductive gesture, although it certainly works as one. It's so she can reach the pouch she has strapped to her thigh. Ada produces a thumb drive from it and holds it out to him.

"In our business, Chris, it's difficult to say anyone is truly dead," Ada says, "and doubly so if there's no body."

He lowers the gun slightly and stares at her. "Wait, are you--?"

"What I have to say on the subject is all on this drive. Don't take my word for it. I know what that's worth."

Chris takes his left hand off the pistol and accepts the thumb drive from her. "You aren't doing this out of the goodness of your heart."

"No."

"Will you tell me what you get out of this?"

"No."

He looks down at the thumb drive, then back at Ada. "If this is some game you're running on me, I'm going to find you again, and I will kill you."

"I'd expect nothing less." Ada stands up and walks to Keller's window. Outside, a jungle-green humvee rolls up. Chris's backup has arrived. "Good hunting, Chris. Nice to meet you."

Chris doesn't say anything. Ada opens the window and casually hops out of it. The building's swarming with BSAA agents from the Southeast Asia branch about ten seconds later and none of them have seen a woman in a red dress.

---

 

When Chris gets back to London, he has Quint Ketcham do a full security sweep of both his computer and his apartment. He listens to Quint's stream-of-consciousness babbling about virus scanners and password integrity and nods at the right moments just as if it makes sense to him, then hands the man a case of beer and sends him on his way.

Chris draws the blinds, locks the door, disconnects his Internet cable, and plugs Ada's drive into his computer. Quint's programs scan it, it comes up clean, and Chris opens it up.

The drive's full of files that neither Ada nor Chris are supposed to have. The first document is an Interpol dossier on an unidentified blonde woman, who's a person of interest in several thefts and assassinations throughout North America, Europe, and northern Africa. In each case, the site's security was evaded or defeated in a shorter time frame than was previously thought possible, and recovered items from the crime scenes indicate the use of specialized, expensive hardware.

She's good, but it's nearly impossible to enter an urban area at all without being seen or recorded by something. She's tied to each criminal act through feeds from traffic and ATM cameras and a single eyewitness, a janitor, who's helped to provide a police sketch. The woman is blonde and a couple of inches taller, but the face is right. She could be Jill, or a close relative of Jill's.

Chris leans back in his computer chair, in the apartment he moved to after the funeral. It's still full of boxes he hasn't unpacked, because he's rarely here and anything he's owned for more than three years is an emotional land mine.

The law in most nations is that a person cannot be declared legally dead until seven years after the date of their disappearance. With Jill, it took three months, start to finish. If Chris had been in anything close to his right mind, he'd have noticed and dealt with that before now, since a five-year-old child would be thinking "coverup" right now, but he went straight from grief to anger to continually distracting himself with other people's problems. He's been running from this for two years.

It's worth keeping an eye on this woman. It's not enough to get his hopes up, but Chris has not had a great deal of interest in his personal survival for a while now. Looking at the police sketch, he feels that slowly begin to change.