Chapter 1: The Ask
There were three things Leon Kennedy knew for certain about Ada Wong, and he had paid for each of them in blood.
One: she always showed up when he was at his worst. Not at his best, never at his best. Never on a Tuesday afternoon when he'd slept eight hours and his shoulder didn't ache and his gun was clean. Always in the middle of a burning village, or on top of a collapsing train, or at the bottom of a whiskey glass at eleven at night in a bar off Wilson Boulevard that the DSO's younger agents had stopped coming to because it was full of old guys like him.
Two: she always wanted something, and she always got it.
Three: she always left.
So when the stool beside him scraped back and the air shifted and he caught the faintest trace of something expensive and floral under the bar's smell of fryer oil and spilled beer, he didn't look up from his drink.
"No," he said.
"I haven't said anything yet."
"Doesn't matter."
"You're not even going to look at me?" Her voice hadn't changed in seventeen years, give or take. Low, unhurried, amused at a joke only she'd heard. "I wore red."
"You always wear red."
"Then you'll know it's me."
He looked. He couldn't help it; he never had been able to help it, which was the whole problem. She was sitting sideways on the stool with her legs crossed, a red silk dress that had no business in a place like this, black hair cut sharp at the jaw. A few fine lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn't been there in China. She looked like she'd just walked out of an embassy party, and, knowing Ada, she probably had, and probably with something in her purse that hadn't been hers when she walked in.
The bartender was staring at her. So was the guy at the end of the bar with the Nationals cap. So was Leon.
"Ada," he said.
"Leon." She smiled, the small private one, the one that made him feel twenty-one again in a bad way. "You look tired."
"I've been tired since 1998."
"I know. I remember." She nodded at the bartender without looking at him, and a glass of something clear appeared at her elbow as if it had been waiting there for her all night. "How's your shoulder? The left one. From Lanshiang."
"How do you know about my shoulder?"
"I know about everything." She took a sip and set the glass down exactly in the ring of condensation it had come from. "I need a favour."
There it was. He laughed, short and without much in it. "A favour."
"I'm asking nicely."
"You've never asked me for anything in your life. You just take it and then you're out a window before I can turn around."
"Well. I'm asking now." She didn't smile this time. That was what made him put his drink down. "I need to get into Raccoon City."
The bar was loud. Someone had put a song on the jukebox about trucks. On the TV over the bottles, the Capitals were losing to somebody in a way that made the guy in the Nationals cap groan. None of it seemed to reach the little space between their two stools.
"There's nothing in Raccoon City," Leon said. "There's a crater, and some trees, and a federal fence with a lot of armed guys on it whose job is to keep people from going into Raccoon City."
"Below the crater, there's something."
"Ada."
"Spencer Memorial had a basement." She turned her glass a quarter turn on the bar. "Below the basement, Umbrella had a records annex. Personnel files, asset files, internal security, everything they didn't trust to a server. The vault was rated for a direct hit. They built it in eighty-nine, when everybody was still afraid of the Russians." She glanced at him. "It's still there, Leon. The strike didn't touch it."
He believed her. That was the thing. He'd stopped asking himself why years ago. "And you want what's in it."
"I want it gone. There's a difference."
"Why?"
She didn't answer. She looked at her glass instead. He'd seen her bluff a man with a gun to her head, and he'd seen her lie to his face with tears in her eyes, and he'd seen her stand on the deck of a ship on fire and tell him she'd see him around. He had never once, in all that time, seen her look at a glass like it might tell her what to say.
"Someone else knows it's there," she said finally. "A man named Callum Voss. Private broker. Very well funded, very patient, very interested in anything Umbrella left lying around. He's putting a team together to go in. In a week, maybe less. I'd like to get there first."
"So go. Since when do you need help getting past a fence?"
"Since the government put motion sensors and thermal drones on this one." Her mouth twisted, wry. "And since your badge has DSO clearance for every federal exclusion zone in the country. You could walk us through the front gate. Sign a form. Say you're inspecting something."
"I'd lose my job."
"You won't. I've already handled the paperwork."
"You've already..." He stared at her. "Of course you have."
"I'm efficient."
"You're insane." He picked up his glass again, mostly to have something to do with his hand. "No. I'm not walking you into Raccoon City so you can steal something from Umbrella and sell it to the highest bidder and disappear. Not again. I'm not doing Spain again. I'm not doing China."
"That's not what this is."
"It's always what it is."
"Leon." She said his name like she was setting something down carefully. "I'm not going to sell it. I'm going to burn it. Every page. You can watch me do it. You can hold the match."
"What's in it?"
The question sat there. He watched her decide whether to answer.
"Something about me," she said.
And that was all. She finished her drink in one long swallow, which he had never seen her do either, and slid a folded bill under the empty glass for the bartender, and stood. Heels. Of course heels. She could run a quarter mile in those, he'd seen her do it.
"Think about it," she said.
"I already did. No."
"Think about it anyway."
She touched his shoulder on the way past, the left one, very lightly, right where it still ached. Then she was gone through the front door, out into the November drizzle, a red shape in the streetlight and then nothing.
Leon sat there for a long time. He ordered another drink and didn't drink it. On the TV, the Capitals lost.
He walked home. It was a mile and a half in the drizzle and he could have called a car, but he wanted the cold on his face. He went the long way, past the shuttered office buildings and the dry cleaner and the Ethiopian place he kept meaning to try, and he thought about all the times she'd left.
Raccoon City, the first time, when he'd thought she was dead. He'd held her and she'd gone limp in his arms, and he'd mourned her for six years with a single-mindedness that embarrassed him now, and then she had walked out of the fog in a Spanish village like nothing had happened. Spain itself, the jet ski keys tossed to him from the helicopter door, her voice drifting down over the rotors, the island going up in flames behind them, and her taking the sample and the sky and leaving him the ocean. China, a rooftop in Lanshiang, a wave over her shoulder and gone, and him standing there with Helena asking who that was, and him not having a single good answer.
Every time, he'd told himself it was the last time. Every time, he'd known it wasn't.
He'd tried, once or twice, to explain her to someone. A therapist the Agency had made him see after Spain. A woman he'd dated for most of 2009 who'd found a red silk scarf in his glovebox and asked whose it was, and he'd said "a colleague's," and she'd looked at him for a long moment and then very kindly broken up with him at a diner in Silver Spring. There wasn't a way to explain it. You couldn't say: there's a woman I've met maybe five times in my whole life, under fire every time, and she's the only person who's ever been in the same place I was. You couldn't say: I don't even know her real name.
He didn't go back to the bar. He went home.
He was all the way back at his apartment, keys in the bowl, jacket half off, before he felt the stiff edge of something in the inside pocket that he hadn't put there.
It was a photograph. Old, the colours gone warm and faded, the kind printed on actual paper. It took him a second to recognise what he was looking at, and then the floor seemed to tilt.
Security camera footage, printed off a still frame. Grainy, black and white, a timestamp in the corner: 09/30/98, 02:14. A sewer tunnel under the Raccoon Police Department, water glinting, pipes overhead. A man in a torn RPD uniform, slumped against the wall, clutching his side. A woman in a red dress (it showed grey, in the footage, but he knew it was red) kneeling over him, her hand pressed to the wound, her face turned toward the camera.
He had never seen this picture before. He hadn't known there were cameras down there. He hadn't known anyone had seen.
On the back, in neat handwriting he would have known anywhere:
They kept this. They kept everything. Thursday, 0600, Gate Four. Bring the badge.