Genesis (5 page)

“That, too.” Lisa's tone grew more serious. “All kidding aside, it's a necessary concern. Most of the security problems on networks like this are because people don't bother to take the simplest precautions. And changing your password every eight days is pretty damn simple, don't you think?”

Alice sighed. “Apparently not, since I haven't changed mine in eight days.”

Peering at her monitor and noticing a date on a particular line, Lisa said, “Nine, actually. Didn't you log on yesterday?”

“No. Spence and I had—other things to deal with yesterday.”

“All day long?” Lisa grinned mischieviously. “I didn't know he had that kind of stamina.”

“Very funny.”

Lisa noticed that Alice didn't exactly deny her lascivious interpretation of what Alice and Spence had been doing all day. After all, they were both in that decadent mansion, most of their days were spent doing jackshit, and Spence was
very
easy on the eyes. Not her type, really, but she could see how someone in close proximity to him every day—especially one sharing the pretense of matrimonial bliss—might want to see if his body looked as good out of the tight jeans as it did in them.

She shook off the thoughts quickly. Ever since she and Nick split, she'd had an unhealthy preoccupation with other people's sex lives, which she mostly attributed to a lack of occupation with one of her own. Not that she'd had a shortage of offers, starting with Casey Acker shortly after her first day's human-resources orientation session, and proceeding to potential dating partners who didn't make her want to actually projectile-vomit, but she'd rebuffed all of them.

After all, she had a job to do. Forming attachments would not be a good idea. That would make it harder to do what needed to be done.

Whenever she felt herself weakening, she thought of Fadwa.

After that, it was easy.

Moving back to the left-hand window, she typed in another series of commands. The random character generator created a new password for the AABERNATHY account. Lisa Alt-Tabbed over, typed the username and then D84GTKVB8.

Then she hesitated.

Taking a deep breath and blinking twice, she hit
ENTER.

A wealth of information appeared on the right-hand side of her screen for about a second. Lisa had a phenomenal memory, and she tried to take in as much as possible.

After that second, the screen went blank, replaced with two familiar words:
ACCESS DENIED.

As expected.

But at last, after a month, her brilliant idea had paid off.

Everything Lisa had told Alice was absolutely true. Forcing people to change their passwords on a weekly basis did wonders for keeping the Red Queen secure. The more one had to change one's password, the more creative those passwords became, and creative passwords were much harder to hack into.

However, that was not why she insisted on the policy.

Because it wasn't so much that people were stupid, as they were lazy. Too lazy to read memos, too lazy to follow the instructions in them—especially when most of them had other concerns relating to the high-intensity work they were doing here in the Hive. When you were
trying to come up with the next great medical marvel or to fulfill a government contract while being harassed by your supervisor—herself being harassed by some four-star general in the Pentagon—remembering to change your password generally was pretty low on your to-do list.

Which was exactly what Lisa was counting on.

What she had just gone through with Alice, she had gone through with half the employees of the Hive. Each time, Lisa had to reset the password and test it.

And each time, she'd been able to see the information that the person in question was trying to access.

Most of the time, that information was harmless, personal, uninteresting, or all three. Occasionally, it would be something she wasn't allowed to see, although still uninteresting and or harmless.

On the latter occasions, she would still catch a glimpse of it before security kicked in. Even the Red Queen was only so fast, and it took her a second to recognize that there were two linked terminals, but only one was attached to a user authorized to view the information on the monitor. At that point, Lisa would get the
ACCESS DENIED
message.

This time, though, she had something.

“Thanks a lot, Lisa,” Alice said. “Hey, listen, you want to have lunch on Thursday? You're up for your next city trip then, right?”

Lisa frowned. Umbrella knew better than to think that they could keep people holed in the ground indefinitely. Even the false images in the windows could only
go so far. Every employee was allowed to go topside once every two weeks, be outdoors, see the sun, breathe air that wasn't recycled.

Lisa had heard through the grapevine that there had been a fight over that interval among the powers-that-be of Umbrella. Some hardliners didn't want to let anyone out at all, citing the delicate nature of the work they did as reason not to risk any kind of security breach. Others pointed out that the people they were doing that delicate work for would probably not be terrifically appreciative if the people doing that work went stark raving mad, which they would if they were forbidden from leaving the Hive for five years running—or even one month running.

Two weeks had apparently been a compromise. Lisa's two weeks were indeed coming up on Thursday, but she was surprised to hear that Alice knew that.

Then again, Alice
was
the head of security for the Hive, and one of the top brass in Security Division generally.

“Sure,” Lisa said. Maybe then she could get the truth about her and Spence's “day-long project” out of her.

“Great. We'll meet at the train station at eleven on Thursday.”

“Okay,” Lisa said.

The “train station” was the terminus of the train that went from the secret entrance under the mansion to the Hive's topmost floor. That was the access point to the Hive for most people, as well as the tube that went straight up to the basement of Umbrella's corporate
headquarters in Raccoon City. The latter, however, was only for emergencies and for the higher-ups in the company. Lesser mortals like Lisa had to take the train to the mansion, get cleared by the “happy couple” in the mansion—at present, Alice and Spence—and then depart. On the off-chance that they were seen, they would simply be friends visiting the reclusive couple in the mansion, but that rarely happened. The mansion's reputation—and very real threat of the law being called on trespassers—generally kept prying eyes away.

Sometimes reputation was the best security.

Lisa removed the headset and hit the
END
button on her phone. Then she stared at the monitor for several seconds.

“Is something wrong?”

“No,” Lisa lied to the AI. “I think we've nailed this down.”

“Agreed. Let's hope it doesn't happen again.”

With that, the face of a ten-year-old-child-cum-Frankenstein-monster winked out from the upper-left-hand corner of Lisa's flatscreen.

Lisa had to resist the urge to stick out her tongue at the faded image.

Instead, she sat back in her vinyl chair—a product of PosturePerfect, a subsidiary of the Umbrella Corporation, designed to be ergonomically correct and damned comfortable—and thought about what she had seen on Alice's monitor.

It had contained two graphics and a huge block of text. She hadn't caught all the text, but several words
jumped out at her: “T-virus,” “anti-virus,” and “fatalities.” All three words showed up several times, in fact.

The graphics, however, were of more immediate concern. One showed a white rabbit being injected with some kind of blue substance.

As for the other one . . .

The more Lisa thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed, and the more she thought that perhaps she had been imagining things.

But that, she feared, was wishful thinking. The graphic had taken up about a third of the available space in the window.

It was like something out of a nightmare. Or one of those old monster comic books Matt had collected when they were kids.

Nominally, it had a human shape: two arms, two legs, though its spine was bent in such a way that it could move on all fours—which it appeared to be doing in the graphic. It had skin like a rhinoceros's, plated and faceted, only it was more brown and red than the gray of a rhino. Lisa wasn't sure, but it looked like there were bones sticking out amidst the corded skin. The thing's fingers and toes ended in huge claws that looked like they could rend steel.

What Lisa remembered most clearly from her brief glimpse, however, was the head.

It had a huge, squared-off mouth, filled with jagged teeth and a tongue that looked like a snake had taken up residence in the thing's mouth.

Scariest of all were the creature's eyes.

It didn't have any.

At once, Lisa Broward was thrilled and scared.

Thrilled because she had finally stumbled onto something big, something that Matt and his friends could use to expose Umbrella for the scum-sucking weasels they were. Creating fatal viruses was not part of Umbrella's corporate mission statement as far as she knew, and she was pretty sure it wasn't particularly legal either. Not to mention whatever that—that
thing
was.

Scared because anything that could create a fatal virus and a monster out of every child's nightmare may not have been someone she wanted to go up against.

Then she thought of Fadwa.

After that, everything was easy.

LISA BROWARD HAD KNOWN SHE WAS GOING to have to make sacrifices when she moved from New York to Raccoon City, but the one she had least expected to have an impact was the one that wound up hitting her the hardest: the lack of decent restaurants.

For all that non–New Yorkers complained about the price of a dinner at the average Big Apple eatery, the fact of the matter was, at least as far as Lisa was concerned, you got what you paid for. In terms of sheer variety and quality, nothing beat New York City restaurants for high-caliber cuisine. The only exceptions she had ever been willing to make were for Mexican food—that was better in Southern California and Texas—and barbecue—superior in the midwest, especially Kansas—but that was it.

So she knew that transplanting to Raccoon City
would mean a serious downturn in the quality of food, even more so given that she'd be spending most of her time in the Hive. True, its dining facilities were infinitely superior to those of other office cafeterias where she'd choked down fare during her career, but those offices were all in midtown Manhattan. All it took was a phone call, and the nearest gourmet eatery would deliver victuals of almost any kind right to the front desk of the building. Or, time permitting, she could go out for a sit-down meal at a superior Greek, Italian, French, Indian, or Japanese restaurant. For a time, she worked close to a magnificent Sri Lankan place. Sometimes, in her dreams, she could still smell the spices . . .

Even on those occasions when she was able to go out for food, however, Raccoon City proved to be a wasteland. The “fine Italian dining” served a tomato sauce that would be deemed unacceptable at a neighborhood pizza joint in New York, the one and only time she ventured into a sushi place she left with an upset stomach gained after eating the most doleful looking fish she'd ever seen, and the grape-leaf salad she'd had at an “authentic” Greek eatery wasn't fit for Umbrella's guard Dobermans. It had gotten to the point where she would gravitate toward fast food and family restaurants, if for no other reason than her expectations were considerably lower and therefore she wouldn't be disappointed. And those places, at least, didn't charge exorbitant amounts for their relentlessly average foodstuffs.

It was, therefore, with a due sense of ennui that she approached her Thursday meal with Alice Abernathy. Her main reason for wanting to go along was the company, not the food. Plus a desire to get out of the hole for a day.

Since employees who worked in the Hive had no particular reason to follow the traditions of the Monday-through-Friday workweek, they worked in staggered and rotating schedules. Everyone was scheduled for only five eight-hour workdays per week, though overtime was a near-universal constant, especially when project deadlines and the end of the fiscal year loomed.

But which two days a week one got off varied, thus allowing there to be work going on within the Hive seven days a week. At present, Lisa's schedule called for her to work Saturdays through Wednesdays, with Thursday and Friday constituting her weekend. On some of those weekends, she had to work, of course, but for some, she was permitted to go topside and actually see the sun. This was one of those weekends, and she was grateful to Alice for giving her a reason to get out into the world for a little bit.

Especially after seeing that—that
creature.

She'd thought of little else since seeing it, and was no closer to figuring out what it was, nor what it had to do with a T-virus or an anti-virus. Linking the image to that of “fatalities” was less of a stretch, though—she couldn't imagine that thing leaving anything in its wake
but
fatalities.

The question foremost in her mind was: what was it?
Genetically engineered monster? Mutated animal? Mutated
human?
Alien borrowed from Roswell? What?

She shoved those thoughts—and thoughts of Fadwa, which never stayed shoved for long—to the back of her mind as she disembarked from the train that ferried her from the Hive to the mansion. The train was a one-car affair, mostly one big cargo space that could ferry equipment in bulk as well as up to a hundred people—if they crammed rush-hour close to each other—back and forth from the mansion to the Hive. The train didn't come equipped with seats, but given the short duration of the trip, that wasn't much of a hardship.