Chapter 3: The Truth About Ada Wong
Leon didn't draw on her. He wanted that noted somewhere, by someone, for the record of his life. He had every reason in the world. She had walked him past a federal checkpoint and into a sealed Umbrella vault with a badge that opened every exclusion zone in the country, and on the floor was a message thanking her for delivering him, and he didn't draw.
He just looked at her.
"Leon," she said.
"Was the photo real?"
"Yes."
"Was any of it real?"
"Yes." She didn't look away. He'd give her that. She stood there in the flashlight glow in the bottom of the world with that phone in her hand and looked straight at him. "Voss came to me three months ago. He knew about the vault. He knew about the file. He told me if I got him your access codes, he'd give it to me, and I could burn it, and that would be the end of it." She paused. "I told him I'd think about it."
"And you thought about it."
"For about a week." Her mouth twisted. "Then I decided to go around him. Get here first, find it myself. I didn't need your codes, I just needed you to get me through the gate. I thought I was ahead of him." She looked at the empty box on the floor. "I was wrong. He let me think it. He's been watching me the whole time."
"So you did use me."
"I asked you," she said. "I told you what I wanted. I told you it was about me. I just didn't tell you all of it." A breath. "I've never told you all of anything. You know that."
He did know that. He'd always known that. That was what made it so hard to be angry, and so easy at the same time.
"What's in the file, Ada?"
For a long moment, he thought she wouldn't answer. She turned the phone over in her hand. She looked at the dark shelving, the endless grey boxes, the empty one at her feet.
"My name," she said. "My real one. Where I was born. Who my parents were. Where I grew up, who recruited me, the first job I ever took, the first person I ever..." She stopped. "Umbrella found all of it in ninety-eight, after they figured out someone was leaking from inside. They ran me down. Built a file. They were going to use it, but then the city..." She made a small, flat gesture at the ceiling, at the crater, at all of it. "And it sat down here, the only copy, ever since. The only record anywhere of who I was before I was this."
"And Voss wants to use it."
"Voss wants to own me." She said it simply. "With that file, he could find anyone I've ever cared about. Anyone who ever knew me. He could make me do anything." Her eyes met his. "And now he's going to use it to make me give him you."
Above them, very faintly, something rumbled. Thunder, maybe. Or a vehicle.
"Okay," Leon said.
She blinked. "Okay?"
"Okay. So we go take it back."
"Leon..."
"He wants my badge and my codes. Fine. He can have them." He pulled the badge out of his jacket and held it up between two fingers. "You know what's on here? My access. My face. A tracking chip that pings DSO headquarters every time I go through a federal checkpoint." He watched her understand. "Which means Hunnigan already knows I'm here. Which means if Voss takes it, she'll know where he is too. Which means we only have to hold him until she gets here."
Ada was staring at him.
"You're giving me the badge," she said slowly.
"I'm giving him the badge. Through you. You do the deal. You get your file. And then we take him down."
"You'd trust me to do that? After..." She gestured at the phone, at the box, at him. "After this?"
Leon thought about it. Really thought about it, standing there. Spain. China. Every time she'd saved his life, and every time she'd vanished, and every time he'd stood on some burning rooftop with her name in his mouth, looking at an empty sky. Half his life spent never knowing if she'd shoot him or kiss him or both.
"Yeah," he said. "I would."
Voss was waiting in the hospital's old parking lot when they came up into the rain. Of course he was. He'd brought four men with rifles and a black Range Rover and an umbrella, a real one, black, held over his head by a fifth man whose sole job apparently was holding umbrellas. He was silver-haired and smiling and his jacket probably cost more than Leon's rent.
"Ada," he said warmly. "You look wonderful. Agent Kennedy, a genuine honour. I've read so much about you."
"Wish I could say the same," Leon said.
"Oh, you will." Voss held out a hand. In it was a thick manila folder, worn and battered and stamped all over in red: UMBRELLA INTERNAL SECURITY. RESTRICTED. "Shall we?"
Ada walked forward alone. Leon let her. It was the hardest thing he'd done all day, harder than the licker, harder than the crater. He stood there with the rain running down his collar and four rifles on him and watched her walk across that broken asphalt in the rain with his badge in her hand, toward a man who wanted to own her. He told himself he trusted her. He found that he did.
She stopped in front of Voss. She held out the badge. He held out the file.
They made the trade.
Then Ada smiled at Voss, the small private one, the one Leon had always thought was only for him, and said, "Smile, Callum. You're on camera."
She tossed the badge back over her shoulder. Leon caught it. And at that exact moment, from the ridge above the parking lot, from the trees, from everywhere, came the roar of helicopter rotors and the floodlights of three DSO tactical units sweeping down onto the lot, and Hunnigan's voice blared out over a loudspeaker, flat and furious and absolutely beautiful: "This is the Division of Security Operations. Drop your weapons. Now."
Voss's men dropped their weapons. Voss stood there under his umbrella, smile frozen, looking at Ada.
"You," he said. "You were supposed to..."
"I was supposed to lie to him," Ada said. "I know. I usually do." She tucked the file under her arm. "I'm trying something new."
They found an oil drum in the ruins of a gas station half a mile from the hospital, rusted through on one side. Leon kicked it upright and Ada dropped the file inside and doused it from a little silver flask she'd had in her jacket the whole time, apparently. Then she held out a book of matches.
"You said I could hold the match," Leon said.
"I did say that."
He took the matches. He didn't strike one.
"You don't want to read it first?" he asked. "Just once?"
She looked at the file in the bottom of the drum. Grey sky, grey rain, the crater stretching away behind her.
"No," she said. "I know what's in it. I was her. I don't need to be her again."
"Okay." He struck the match. It flared, bright in the rain. He held it a moment. "For what it's worth," he said. "I don't need to know your name to know who you are."
Something moved across her face, quick and unguarded, like light through a window. Then he dropped the match into the drum, and the file went up with a soft whump, and they stood there side by side and watched it burn. A dead company's careful secrets, curling and blackening, gone to smoke in the rain.
When it was ash, she turned to him.
"Leon," she said. "Thank you."
He'd waited a long time to hear her say that and mean it. He found he didn't know what to do with it now that he had. So he did the only thing that made sense, the thing he'd thought about doing in Spain, on that ship, on every burning rooftop in the world.
He kissed her.
She went still for one heartbeat. Then her hand came up and curled into the front of his jacket and she kissed him back, slow and sure, like she'd been waiting for it as long as he had. Her lipstick tasted like wax and roses. The rain ran down both their faces. Somewhere behind them, a helicopter was lifting off with Callum Voss in handcuffs, and the floodlights were sweeping the ruins, and Hunnigan was probably watching all of this on a drone feed with her head in her hands. Leon didn't care. For once in his life, he had Ada Wong right here, in his arms, not leaving.
When they finally broke apart, she didn't step back. She rested her forehead against his chin and laughed softly.
"Took you long enough," she said.
"I was waiting for you to stop shooting at people."
"That'll be a while."
"I've got time."
She looked up at him. And then she did something he had never in his life seen her do. She took his hand, and laced her fingers through his, and stood there with him in the rain at the edge of the crater, not going anywhere.
They stood there a long time.
Then the earpiece in Leon's pocket crackled, and Hunnigan's voice came through, deadpan and very tired: "Leon. When you're finished. Voss had a second team. They hit an Umbrella storage site in Europe an hour ago." A pause. "Ask your friend if she knows anything about something called Project Lycoris. Because apparently it's got her name on it, too."
Leon looked at Ada. Ada's hand had gone very still in his.
"Ada," he said.
"I know," she said quietly. "I know. Not this time, Leon." She didn't let go. "This time, I'm coming with you."