The rest of the pages were blank. Rebecca looked up at Steve, not sure what to say, her mind working to glean the relevant bits of information from the ram-bling tirade. There was something in there that both-ered her, something that she couldn’t quite place. Missing chemicals. Infection process. The brilliant, creepy Dr. Griffith. . . .
She no longer had any doubt that Griffith had killed the others, but that wasn’t what sent her internal alarms jangling. It was—
“Block D,” Steve said, a look of anxious fear playing across his face. “If we’re in A, Karen and John are in D”
Where there’s enough of the T-Virus to infect the entire compound. Where the infection process took place. “We should tell David,” Rebecca said, and Steve nodded, both of them moving quickly for the door, Rebecca hoping desperately that John and Karen wouldn’t find room 101—and that if they did, they wouldn’t touch anything that could hurt them. The test room was big, three of the walls lined with open-ended cubicles. Once he’d turned on the lights, he saw that the tests were clearly numbered and color-coded, the symbols painted on the cement floor in front of each one.
All of the red series was on his left, closest to the door. He saw brightly colored blocks and simple shapes on the tables in each cubicle as he walked past, heading for the back of the room. The green series lined the wall opposite, though he ignored it entirely. The back wall was marked with blue triangles, the number four test in the far right corner. As he neared the back of the room, he heard a faint hum of power coming from the blue test area. There was a small computer on the table in number two, a keyboard and headset in three. As promised, the series was activated—though what they were con-nected to, he couldn’t imagine.
Can’t imagine and don’t care. Once we solve these little puzzles, we’ll find whatever’s been hidden for us and get out, away from this cemetery. It can’t happen soon enough.
David had seen all he wanted to see of Caliban Cove. The corpses in the front hall had been bad, but it was the thoughts that they’d inspired that troubled him, made him so suddenly eager to get his team out. The Trisquads were dangerous and deadly, the mon-ster in the cove’s waters had been horrible—but somewhere in the facility lurked a monster of a different kind entirely, one that had murdered his own people and then stacked them like kindling in a dark place. That kind of insanity chilled him far worse than the immoral greed of Umbrella, and he was afraid of what such a man might do to the handful of soldiers trying to stop him. We’ll find the “material, “probably notes on Umbrel-la, perhaps on the virus itself—and then break for the fence, get well away from this madness. Let the Feds handle the rest. If they’re smart, they’ll blow up the entire compound and gather the information from the ashes....
He stopped in front of the last cubicle, returning his attention to the task at hand. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to see, but the set up of test number four surprised him nonetheless. A table and chair, utilitarian gray metal. On the table was a pad of paper, a pencil, and an inexpensive chess set, all of the pieces in place. As he stepped into the cubicle, he saw that there was a metal plaque set into the surface of the table, a string of numbers etched into the steel. David sat in the chair, peering down at the num-bers.
9-22-3//14-26-9-16-8//7-19-22//8-11-12-7 He frowned, looking up at the chess set and then back at the numbers. There was nothing else to look at; that was it. He quickly sorted through the clues of Ammon’s message, wondering which was supposed to be the answer. Was it, “the letters and numbers reverse,” or “don’t count”? Since there didn’t seem to be anything relating to time or a rainbow, it had to be one of the two....
If the lines are in the same order as the tests, this is the letter and number reversal. But what letters, there aren’t any—
David smiled suddenly, shaking his head. The numbers on the plaque didn’t go any higher than 26; it was a code, and a fairly simple one. He picked up the pencil and quickly jotted down the letters of the alphabet, then numbered them backward; A was 26, B, 25, all the way back to Zed, 1. Glancing back and forth between the plaque and the paper, he wrote down the numbers and then started to decipher the message.
R . ..£... X. .. M. . .
The final letter was a T, and he stared down at the sentence, then at the chess board. It seemed that somebody had a sense of humor.
REX MARKS THE SPOT.
“Rex” was Latin for “king.”
White always goes first, so . . .
He reached out and touched the white king. As soon as his finger contacted the piece, it swiveled in place, turning around to face the back of the board. At the same time, there was a soft, musical tone from overhead. He looked up and saw a tiny speaker set into the ceiling.
Nothing else happened, no flashing lights or secret passageways opening up behind the wall. Apparently, he’d passed.
How anti-climactic.
It seemed like an awfully complicated test for some-thing as supposedly mindless as a Trisquad zombie—though perhaps the researchers had been making plans for something else, something intelligent.. . . It was an unsettling thought, and not one he wanted to ponder. He stood up and turned toward the front of the room—
• just as the door burst open, Rebecca and Steve hurrying in, wearing matching expressions of fear. “What is it?”
Rebecca held up a book, talking fast. “We found a journal. It says that the strain of the virus used to infect the Trisquads is in block D, in room 101. Maybe everything’s fine, but if John and Karen touch anything that’s been contaminated—“ He’d heard enough. “Let’s go.”
They turned and he strode past them, leading them back the way they’d come, his thoughts racing. They had passed an exit on the far side of the building, he could send Steve and Rebecca to the next block over while he went to D, just as originally planned—only much faster, and now carrying the horrible, heavy fear that two of his people might accidentally uncover the T-Virus.
It won’t happen, they’ll be careful, the chances of one of them getting a cut and then touching something dangerous in a room that’s bound to be marked as some kind of a laboratory...
The reassuring facts did nothing to ease his mind. They hurried toward the exit, a deepening knot of dread settling into the pit of David’s stomach. They stood in the bright corridor at the center of D block, silently listening for a sound that would tell them David had come. From their position, they should be able to hear any one of the three external doors being used. After securing the building and finding the test room, she and John had chocked open all of the passages that led to the block’s exits. Karen checked her watch and then rubbed her eyes, feeling a bit worn out from all of the night’s events, and still sickened by what they’d found in room 101. Even John seemed unusually subdued, and definitely quieter than normal. He hadn’t cracked a single joke since they’d walked back to begin their wait. Maybe he’s thinking about the gurneys, fixed with bloody restraints. Or the syringes. Or the surgical equipment heaped in the sink....
They’d found the test room first, a large chamber filled with little tables, each marked with numbers between five and eight; Karen had been somewhat disappointed to see that the blue series number seven was just a handful of colored tiles with letters on them, half of them upside down and unreadable. All the colors corresponded to a rainbow’s, though there were two extra violet tiles in the heaped pile. Since they couldn’t risk messing with it until David had completed the first test, she’d reluctantly turned away, suggesting that they check out the rest of the block. They’d gone through a couple of offices, empty, and a cluttered coffee room, where they’d found a box of incredibly moldy donuts and little else. It had been the chemical lab that had told them the most about what kind of place Umbrella had created—and although Karen didn’t believe in ghosts, the room had given her a feeling like nothing she’d ever experienced before; it was haunted, plain and simple, haunted by the misery of fear and the cold, nazi-esque precision of scientists committing atrocities against their fellow man—