When the other three are in place, I’ll wait until they’re off looking for the final piece and then slip right out the door. . . .
He considered going to check the diagram, but decided against it. The house was big, but not that big, and there was no need to expose himself to further risk of being seen. Besides, they probably hadn’t managed to find any of the other crests yet. He’d already had a close call when he’d gone downstairs to retrieve the jewel, almost stepping directly into Chris Redfield’s path. Chris had found the rookie and the two of them were blundering around, probably look-ing for “clues.” . . .
Besides, this room is comfortable. Maybe I’ll take a nap while I wait for the rest of them to catch up. He leaned back in the desk chair, pleased with himself for all he’d accomplished so far. What could have been a disaster was turning out quite nicely, thanks to some quick thinking on his part. He had already found one of the crests, he had Barry and Jill working for him—and he’d had the good fortune to run into Ellen Smith while he’d been in the li-brary. . . .
Oops, scratch that. It’s Doctor Ellen Smith, thank you very much.
After fetching the wind crest, he’d gone to the library to check the small side room that overlooked the estate’s heliport, the entrance concealed behind a bookcase. A quick search had revealed nothing useful, and he’d been about to check the back room when Dr. Smith had shambled out to greet him.
He had tried to get a date with her ever since he’d moved to Raccoon, drawn in by her long legs and platinum blond hair; he’d always been partial to blonds, particularly smart ones. Not only had she repeatedly turned him down, she hadn’t even tried to be nice about it. When he’d called her Ellen, she’d coolly informed him that she was his superior and a doctor, and would be addressed as such. Ice queen, through and through. If she hadn’t been so damned good-looking, he never would’ve bothered in the first place.
But my, how your beauty has faded, Dr. Ellen. . . . Wesker closed his eyes, smiling, reliving the experi-ence. It had been the ratty strings of blond hair that had given her away as she’d shuffled out from behind a shelf, moaning and reaching for him. Her legs were still long, but they’d lost a lot of their appeal—not to mention a fair amount of skin.. . .
“What lovely perfume you’re wearing, Dr. Smith,” he’d said. Then two shots to the head, and she’d gone down in a spray of blood and bone. Wesker didn’t like to think of himself as a shallow man, but pulling the trigger on that high-riding bitch had been wonder-fully—no, deeply—gratifying.
Like icing on a cake, a little bonus perk for taking matters in hand. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll run into that prick Sarton down in the labs. . . .
After a few moments, Wesker stood up and stretched, turning to scan some of the titles on the bookshelf behind him. He was eager to get moving, but it might take the S.T.A.R.S. awhile to find the rest of the puzzle pieces and there was really nothing he could do to hurry the process; he might as well keep busy. . . .
He frowned, struggling to make sense of the techni-cal titles. One of the books was called, Phagemids:
Alpha Complementation Vectors, the next one was, cDNA Libraries and Electrophoresis Conditions. Biochemistry texts and medical journals, terrific. Maybe he’d get that nap in after all. Just reading the titles was making him sleepy.
His gaze fell across a heavy-looking tome sitting by itself on one of the lower shelves, bound in a fine red leather. He picked it up, glad to see a title he could read printed across the front, even one as stupid as, Eagle of East, Wolf of West_Wait—that’s the same thing written on the foun-tain—
Wesker stared at the words, feeling his good mood slipping away. It couldn’t be, the researchers had gone nuts but surely they wouldn’t have locked down the labs, there was no reason for it. He opened the book almost frantically, praying that he was wrong—
• and let out a low moan of helpless rage at what was tucked into the sham book’s glued pages. A brass medallion with an eagle engraved on it lay in the cut away compartment—part of a key to yet another of Spencer’s insane locks.
It was like the punch line to a cruel joke. To get out of the house, he had to find the crests. Once out in the courtyard, he’d have to make his way through a winding maze of tunnels that ended in a hidden section of the garden—where there was an old stone fountain that marked the entrance to the under-ground labs. The fountain was one of Spencer’s fanciful creations, a marvel of engineering that could be opened and closed to hide the facility under-neath—provided, of course, that you had the keys: two medallions made out of brass, an eagle on one, a wolf on the other. . . .
Finding the eagle meant that the gate was closed. And that meant that the wolf could be anywhere, anywhere at all—and that his chances of even getting to the lab had just dropped down to somewhere near zero.
Unable to control his fury, he snatched up the medal and threw the book against the desk, knocking the lamp over with a crash and plunging the room into sudden blackness. There was no longer any point in holding on to the wind crest; his perfect plan was ruined. He’d have to give up his edge and hope that one of the others would inadvertently stumble across the wolf medal for him, secreted away somewhere on the massive, sprawling estate.
Which means more risk, more searching—and a chance that one of them will reach the labs before I do. Seething, Wesker stood in the dark silence with his fists clenched, trying not to scream.
TWELVE
JILL HEARD SOMETHING LIKE BREAKING glass and held perfectly still, listening. The acoustics of the mansion were strange, the long corridors and unusual floor plan making it hard to tell where sounds were coming from.
Or if you even heard them at all. . . . She sighed, taking a last look around the quiet, book-lined sitting room at the top of the stairs. She’d already checked the three other rooms along the gallery railing and found exactly nothing of interest—a sparse bedroom with two bunks, an office, and an unfinished den with a locked door and a fireplace inside. The only switches she’d found were light switches, though she had gotten excited over a rather sinister-looking black button on the wall of the of-fice—until she’d pushed it, and found that she’d managed to discover the drainage control for an empty fish tank in the corner.
She’d found some ammo for the Remington, she supposed she should be grateful for that—a dozen shells in a metal box underneath one of the bunks in the bedroom. But if there’d been any hidden crests, she’d missed them.
Jill took out Trent’s computer and checked the map, finding her position at the top of the stairs. Just past the sitting room’s second door was a wide, U-shaped corridor that angled back around to the front hall balcony. The corridor also connected to two rooms, one a dead end and the other leading through several more. . . .
She put the computer away and drew her Beretta, taking a moment to clear her mind before stepping into the corridor. It wasn’t easy. Between trying to figure out what had happened in the house to create monsters and her concerns for and about her team, her thoughts were distinctly messy.
Should’ve looked closer at those papers. . . . The office had been simple, a desk, a bookshelf—but there was a rack of lab coats by the door and the papers strewn across the desk had mostly been lists of numbers and letters. She knew just enough chemistry to know that she was looking at chemistry, so she didn’t bother trying to read them—but since finding the papers, she had begun to think of the zombies as the result of a research accident. The mansion was too well maintained to have come from private money, and the fact that it had been kept a secret for so long suggested a cover up. She guessed that there was a couple of months worth of dust on almost every-thing—which coincided with the first attacks in Rac-coon. If the people in the house had been conducting some kind of an experiment and something had gone wrong . . .