Fic: Resident Evil, Down the Line (Chapter 2)
Down the Line
Games!verse, Post RE5. Eventual Billy/Rebecca fic. Chapter 2 of ?
A new variation on the T-Virus threatens the world in a way no other strain has, prompting the BSAA to send one of their own to South America to investigate.
This is the ORIGINAL version of chapter 2.
Chapter 1
It took a few minutes for Billy to find his voice again. And no wonder - he hadn't used that name in over ten years. It almost wasn't his anymore. "C-colonel?" He stumbled over the word. "Sir?"
On the other end of the line, Rainer Graves chuckled. "You're losin' your touch, Lieutenant. The Billy Coen I know wouldn't have missed a beat, not even after a bombshell like that."
Billy opened and closed his mouth a few times. He wanted to say something in response to that, as the Rainier Graves Billy remembered never gave compliments lightly, but nothing came.
Suddenly, Billy straightened and cleared his throat. He said firmly, "Temporary lapse, sir. Won't happen again."
"There's the soldier. Knew he was still in there."
"Semper fi," Billy said. The words came on automatic, but left a bad taste in his mouth. Why should he be faithful to a service that betrayed him? Marines with long, honorable careers carried those words to their graves. Marines who still believed in their government's ability to get things right said those words.
But Billy's career had been short and disastrous, and his government had betrayed him, sending him to die to bury a PR disaster. That was how his government saw him: an easy expense, a small price to pay to calm the angry tides of constituents.
His voice terse, Billy asked, "Why are you calling, Colonel?"
It was a while before Graves replied. His voice heavy, he said, "Briggs killed himself last month."
"What?" Billy couldn't help but take a small step back in shock. Eric Briggs had been one of the other survivors in Africa. They had been friends - at least, Billy had thought they were friends.
Briggs had later testified against Billy at the trial.
Billy pushed a hand through his hair, scratched at the back of his neck. While he didn't exactly feel remorse for the bastard, no one deserved to be so miserable in life that death seemed to be the best alternative. "Why?"
Again, Graves didn't answer right away. "He'd been seeing a psychiatrist for a while. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He'd been doing well - until the Alliance had its little adventure down in Kijuju."
"They cleared Briggs to go one that mission? Is the Alliance that desperate for recruits?"
"No. But it seems the province Tricell had been using as its base of operations wasn't too far off from where your last mission took you. And, judging from the note he left for his sister to find, that was all it took."
"There was a note," Billy said, his voice flat, his tone neither questioning nor making a plain statement.
"There was."
Billy didn't say anything more.
He just waited.
Graves went on, "It was actually rather long. Briggs always did have a way with words. He talked about Africa, about the mission you guys ran. Talked about the heat and the march and what it was like, after everything you'd all gone through, to find that village full of innocent people."
Billy closed his eyes, his whole body tensing. He didn't need this. He didn't need Briggs' memories. He still had his own.
Thankfully, Graves did not recount every detail back to Billy. If Briggs' note had gone over everything in detail - and Billy was sure it had, because he had always been a talker - Graves didn't see the need to tell him all about it.
Instead, Graves finished, "Briggs told the whole story."
Again, Billy didn't say anything. What whole story was that? What story did Briggs tell? The truth? Or was it another twisted versions of events that cleared himself of all blame, while placing it everywhere else?
Besides himself, four people had survived long enough to make it to that village. To this day when he closed his eyes, Billy could still feel the sticky humidity, so many thousands of times worse than the worst day here. He could still hear the birds and the bugs all chirping and buzzing so loudly and so often that their sounds were the silence, and anything quieter than that was just eerie. He could still see the village, with their mud-brick and leaf huts, their simple fire pits, their handmade pots.
Hell, he could still see the wild boar they had hanging over the fire to cook.
But most of all, though, most of all - he could still see them. More than a dozen of them, all clustered together and wide-eyed with terror as big men with guns and anger in their voices pushed and shouted and herded them to the center of their village.
There were no men there. They were out hunting.
There were no terrorists there. Their sources had been wrong.
There were no weapons there. Their informants had lied.
There were just the women, the children, and the old ones.
Billy had woken up in the helicopter, his head throbbing. No one looked at him. No one checked to see if he was okay. No one, it seemed, even wanted to know he was alive.
The cuffs weren't there yet, but they might as well have been.
"It's enough," Graves added, his voice interrupting Billy's thoughts, "that they've opened an investigation."
The heavy weight that had slipped back into the pits of Billy's stomach suddenly dropped. "What?"
"Times have changed, Coen. The military's starting to own up to the mistakes it made sending you boys in there in the first place. And Briggs' note casts enough doubt on your conviction that people want the truth. Not just justice."
This was more than Billy wanted to hear. "Stop," he said. He was surprised to find his voice thick. "Stop." He felt an anger surge through him; anger he hadn't felt since his trial. He was tempted to yell, tempted to scream and kick and hurl the phone into the forest. Let the goddamned Jaguars figure out what to do with the thing.
Billy took a deep breath. Irrational thinking wasn't going to get him anywhere. Getting emotional about this whole thing wasn't going to get him anywhere, either. Let his government do whatever the fuck it wanted to. Let them open an investigation. Let them do the work now that they should have done back in '97. Let them find out he had been the one person, the one goddamned person, that had tried to stop that fucking massacre.
It was too goddamned late. They could canonize him as a mother-fucking saint for all he cared. It would never be enough.
Semper-fucking-fi.
The whole idea could go and kiss his ass.
Billy had begun to angrily pace around his living room, his fist clenched. But now he stopped. His shoulders slumped, and he dropped his head.
"Coen, I know it's a lot to process, but-"
"No. I don't give a shit."
"They could clear your name. You could come home."
"I can't. The country thinks I'm dead, Colonel. You know this. And you know what I say? Let them. Let them know they sent me out to die."
Billy's gaze fell on the edge of his carpet. The fringe was still flipped up over the rest of it.
Asymptomatic carriers, he thought absently.
Then he felt a chill.
He swore angrily to himself. How the hell could he have forgotten-?
"Colonel," Billy said, his mind now replaying the video of that dog over and over again, "we actually have a bigger problem."
"Yo, Becks! Agent Chambers!"
Rebecca Chambers turned as another agent, Derek Lancer, jogged down the hall towards her. Lancer was one of Chris's newer agents - he'd transferred over to the Alliance full-time from the army just over a year ago - but he was already one of Alpha Team's best agents.
Not that you could tell that by looking at him. Lancer was a speed-talker and seemed to live on cracking jokes about nearly everything. But he was easily one of the most observant agents in the Alliance, and knew when to drop his act and behave like a professional.
"Lieutenant," Rebecca said. "What brings you here?"
"Had the morning off and thought I'd come see your talk. Great lecture there, by the way. Really good. Were there really zombie owls out there? Goddamn. Those things'd probably be worse than the Camel Spiders… Look, uh, Colonel Graves is lookin' for you. Sent me down here to find you."
"He sent you all the way down from Central?" Rebecca asked, frowning. Central was the main building in the unit of seven separate buildings that made up the Alliance's D.C. headquarters. She started digging around in her bag, looking for her cell phone. "Couldn't he have just called me…?"
"He said did, but you were giving your lecture, so he sent me down to catch you after. He really needs to talk to you."
"Okay. Of course. Is he in his office?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I thought you said you had the morning off."
"I did! I came in to do some paperwork and was just about to come down and see your lecture on my break when Graves caught me and asked me to get you after you were finished." Lancer grinned. "Did you want me to walk back up with you?"
"No, thank you, Lieutenant. I can find Central myself."
"Never doubted you for a second, Becks," Lancer said with a respectful nod. He added, "Probably just as well. I've been hankering for a burrito all week. Gonna have to go get me one while I still have time."
"All right," Rebecca said, her voice distant as Lancer had already waved and taken off down the hall.
He is so strange, she thought, shaking her head slightly and starting off the opposite way down the hall, beginning the long hike to Central.
The B.S.A.A.'s D.C. headquarters (which were not actually located in D.C., but about an hour's drive outside the city limits) were impressive even from a distance, though no exterior view could do the size of the complex any justice. All told, the five buildings housed well over a thousand agents and at least another two thousand additional personnel - security guards, on-staff copywriters, researchers, interns, personnel on-loan from the military, and the like.
In short, it was a big place. Hell, newcomers had to have escorts their first few days, and the Alliance actually had the funding to keep a few escorts on staff full time. Fortunately, Rebecca was no newcomer to the facility, with almost three years' worth the experience maneuvering through the place and a high enough security clearance that even a wrong turn was little hindrance.
Even so, she always felt a little bit relieved when she finally reached her destination - in this case, Central's third story bullpen, where the majority of the high-grade special agents met and where Graves' office was.
Stepping out of the elevator into the third-story bullpen, Rebecca tucked an errant strand of hair back behind her ear and cast a glance up the short flight of stairs to Colonel Graves' door. It was closed, but the lights were on, so she knew Graves was there. He always turned the lights off when he left the room.
Colonel Rainier Graves was an interesting man. He'd transferred over from the Marine Corps shortly after the B.S.A.A. had been formed, and it hadn't taken him long to rise through the ranks until he was the North American Branch's Assistant Director. He didn't speak much, preferring instead to let others around him do the talking, but his silence didn't mean people forgot he was there.
No, that would have been pretty much impossible. Graves might not have been a talker, but he had a presence. And people acted right around him. He just had that kind of vibe.
He also always seemed, at least to Rebecca, to have an air of regret around him. Like he, like many of the agents here, had some kind of personal reason to fight back against the T-Virus, its creators, and those who would perpetuate its destruction. She had no idea what that might have been, though. Graves - of course - never talked about it.
Sighing softly to herself, she trotted up the stairs to Graves' office and knocked lightly on the door. On the other end, a deep voice said, "Come in."
Turning the knob, Rebecca eased the door open.
"Agent Chambers," Graves said, when he saw her. He ushered for her to take a seat. "Thank you for coming to see me. Please, sit down."
Rebecca strode inside the office and took a seat in the chair across from Graves. She had barely gotten situated when Graves got started.
"I got a call from one of our contacts down South this morning. He's got a sample of the T-Virus he wants us to have a look at."
Rebecca frowned slightly. That…wasn't exactly unusual around here. The Alliance's contacts sent them virus samples on a fairly regular basis, and she'd stopped getting anything more than an E-mail notification months ago. Hell, there were times when she didn't even get that, and the virus just showed up on her desk down in the labs with an ID number and a priority tag, like that was the safe way to handle it. She thought to herself, This cannot be all he wanted to talk to me about.
So, hoping to prompt the Colonel to go on, she said simply, "Oh?"
Graves dipped his head in a brief nod. "Yes."
"Okay," Rebecca replied slowly, with a small nod of her own. "When should I expect it?"
Graves hesitated for a moment, and she saw his gaze shift to the fake palm tree just behind her left shoulder. Talking more to the tree than to her, Graves said, "We won't be getting the sample. Our contact said he doesn't want to send it to us in case something happens to it in transit. So, instead,s we're sending you to it." Graves leaned back in his chair. "Your plane leaves first thing tomorrow morning. I'd suggest you pack."
"Me?" Rebecca said, startled. All her thoughts seemed to freeze in her head, and she couldn't get any of them to come out. Finally, flustered, she managed, "But, sir, I'm not - " a field agent, she was going to finish, but Graves held up a hand to silence her.
"You're our expert, Agent Chambers," he said, "and the best person for this job. I won't trust this mission to anyone other than you."
Rebecca felt her cheeks grow a little warm and she looked away, studying a dark stain on the carpet by the wall. Praise from the Colonel was very, very rare, and there was no way she'd be able to refuse now - no matter how reluctant she was to go back into the field.
Resignedly, she said, "Where am I going?"
"To the Mercado Negro."
"The Mercado Negro?" she echoed, turning back to face the colonel raising her eyebrows. Though her grasp on Spanish was shaky at best (she'd taken French in high school, and that was a little over a decade ago now), it didn't take a rocket scientist to guess what the words meant. "The Black Market? Is that even a real place?"
"It's real," Graves replied, the corners of his gray eyes crinkling as he smiled. "And that is its real name."
"Huh," Rebecca said with a small snort. "Not very imaginative."
"Perhaps, but it works. I do believe it was originally meant to be a pun." Graves picked up another folder from his desk and offered it to her. "This is the man you'll be meeting there."
Rebecca took the folder, flipped it open and quickly scanned it over. Guillermo Rodriguez. She'd heard of him. He was supposed to be one of the most prolific virus dealers on the Market. He had nearly bottomless pockets -only a fraction of it actually came from the Alliance's funding - and over half of the samples the Alliance had in cold storage right now had come from him. His work was impressive, to say the least. The Alliance was lucky to have him as an ally.
The one thing that Rebecca found at all odd about his profile was the lack of identifying pictures. There weren't any pictures of Rodriguez on file. At all. And that bothered her. After six years she figured the Alliance would've been able to snap a picture of him. Or at least given some sort of description in his file.
"Why aren't you going?" she asked, suddenly, looking up from the text-heavy pages. "Or at least coming along? I thought he was your guy." There was even a note in the file that said Rodriguez would only do business through the colonel unless there were extremely special circumstances. "I have other business, I'm afraid, and lack the qualifications you do."
"And he's going to let you send me instead? It says here he doesn't like to work with anyone but you."
"He doesn't like to, no. But I've already spoken to him about it." Graves shot her a look and added, "This is one of those extremely special circumstances, Agent Chambers."
Rebecca frowned and looked over the file again. No pictures. No identifying descriptions. How was she even supposed to know who the guy was if she didn't know who to look for? For all she knew she might end up walking off with a drug runner by mistake.
Again it occurred to Rebecca that she didn't have much of a choice. She was going on this mission no matter what she felt about fieldwork, or this guy, or anything. "You really trust this guy, huh?"
"I do, Agent Chambers." Graves looked at her, and Rebecca thought she saw a hint of sadness in his eyes. But in the next moment that hint was gone, and Graves said, in a tone that would both end the conversation and send her on her way, "Enough that when he says he's worried, we should all be worried."
The flight down to Cancun could have been worse. But it also could have been a lot better, or at least not full of yammering, out of touch tourists that freaked out flying through a little turbulence.
At least she was here. Being here meant she was one step closer to being back in D.C.
I'm not field trained, Rebecca grumbled to herself, shouldering her duffel bag and grabbing her laptop from the carousel before taking off through the terminal. Graves had told her to meet Rodriguez outside a souvenir shop that had a bright yellow back wall, and she kept her eyes peeled for it as she all but stomped along. I am not a field agent. I am not certified for any of this. This is not part of my job.
God, she hoped this place had internet connections somehow. There was no way Eads could handle all of the lab work on his own, even with Griffin's help, not when they had just received another box samples of stuff from the North African branch. Some of that stuff may even have been samples of the Uroboros virus - which, despite the fact that Chris had been around vials of the stuff for days, he hadn't thought to bring back. If that were true, then those samples needed her attention and she needed to be there, not here.
Two weeks. She'd give herself two weeks to do a quick analysis and then she'd be on the first available plane back to the states, back to her lab - away from this guy, this Rodriguez. Can't believe we even trust somebody like him. I don't care what Graves says, I don't trust anyone with more than -
She stopped then, in mid-thought and mid-step, as her eyes suddenly locked onto a face she hadn't seen in ten years.
There was no mistaking that face. Not for her. Not for someone who'd spent a long, hellish night fighting for survival alongside that very face. Not for someone who had thought she was throwing away a career in law enforcement by setting a convicted killer free. Not for someone who had spent the last ten years hoping that that face had managed to get his ass out of Raccoon City in time.
And just behind that man was a souvenir shop with a bright, banana yellow back wall.
Oh, my God. "Billy?"
As soon as she said his name, a man she had just a day ago only been able to imagine ever seeing again, wrapped Rebecca Chambers in a tight hug.
Games!verse, Post RE5. Eventual Billy/Rebecca fic. Chapter 2 of ?
A new variation on the T-Virus threatens the world in a way no other strain has, prompting the BSAA to send one of their own to South America to investigate.
This is the ORIGINAL version of chapter 2.
Chapter 1
It took a few minutes for Billy to find his voice again. And no wonder - he hadn't used that name in over ten years. It almost wasn't his anymore. "C-colonel?" He stumbled over the word. "Sir?"
On the other end of the line, Rainer Graves chuckled. "You're losin' your touch, Lieutenant. The Billy Coen I know wouldn't have missed a beat, not even after a bombshell like that."
Billy opened and closed his mouth a few times. He wanted to say something in response to that, as the Rainier Graves Billy remembered never gave compliments lightly, but nothing came.
Suddenly, Billy straightened and cleared his throat. He said firmly, "Temporary lapse, sir. Won't happen again."
"There's the soldier. Knew he was still in there."
"Semper fi," Billy said. The words came on automatic, but left a bad taste in his mouth. Why should he be faithful to a service that betrayed him? Marines with long, honorable careers carried those words to their graves. Marines who still believed in their government's ability to get things right said those words.
But Billy's career had been short and disastrous, and his government had betrayed him, sending him to die to bury a PR disaster. That was how his government saw him: an easy expense, a small price to pay to calm the angry tides of constituents.
His voice terse, Billy asked, "Why are you calling, Colonel?"
It was a while before Graves replied. His voice heavy, he said, "Briggs killed himself last month."
"What?" Billy couldn't help but take a small step back in shock. Eric Briggs had been one of the other survivors in Africa. They had been friends - at least, Billy had thought they were friends.
Briggs had later testified against Billy at the trial.
Billy pushed a hand through his hair, scratched at the back of his neck. While he didn't exactly feel remorse for the bastard, no one deserved to be so miserable in life that death seemed to be the best alternative. "Why?"
Again, Graves didn't answer right away. "He'd been seeing a psychiatrist for a while. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He'd been doing well - until the Alliance had its little adventure down in Kijuju."
"They cleared Briggs to go one that mission? Is the Alliance that desperate for recruits?"
"No. But it seems the province Tricell had been using as its base of operations wasn't too far off from where your last mission took you. And, judging from the note he left for his sister to find, that was all it took."
"There was a note," Billy said, his voice flat, his tone neither questioning nor making a plain statement.
"There was."
Billy didn't say anything more.
He just waited.
Graves went on, "It was actually rather long. Briggs always did have a way with words. He talked about Africa, about the mission you guys ran. Talked about the heat and the march and what it was like, after everything you'd all gone through, to find that village full of innocent people."
Billy closed his eyes, his whole body tensing. He didn't need this. He didn't need Briggs' memories. He still had his own.
Thankfully, Graves did not recount every detail back to Billy. If Briggs' note had gone over everything in detail - and Billy was sure it had, because he had always been a talker - Graves didn't see the need to tell him all about it.
Instead, Graves finished, "Briggs told the whole story."
Again, Billy didn't say anything. What whole story was that? What story did Briggs tell? The truth? Or was it another twisted versions of events that cleared himself of all blame, while placing it everywhere else?
Besides himself, four people had survived long enough to make it to that village. To this day when he closed his eyes, Billy could still feel the sticky humidity, so many thousands of times worse than the worst day here. He could still hear the birds and the bugs all chirping and buzzing so loudly and so often that their sounds were the silence, and anything quieter than that was just eerie. He could still see the village, with their mud-brick and leaf huts, their simple fire pits, their handmade pots.
Hell, he could still see the wild boar they had hanging over the fire to cook.
But most of all, though, most of all - he could still see them. More than a dozen of them, all clustered together and wide-eyed with terror as big men with guns and anger in their voices pushed and shouted and herded them to the center of their village.
There were no men there. They were out hunting.
There were no terrorists there. Their sources had been wrong.
There were no weapons there. Their informants had lied.
There were just the women, the children, and the old ones.
Billy had woken up in the helicopter, his head throbbing. No one looked at him. No one checked to see if he was okay. No one, it seemed, even wanted to know he was alive.
The cuffs weren't there yet, but they might as well have been.
"It's enough," Graves added, his voice interrupting Billy's thoughts, "that they've opened an investigation."
The heavy weight that had slipped back into the pits of Billy's stomach suddenly dropped. "What?"
"Times have changed, Coen. The military's starting to own up to the mistakes it made sending you boys in there in the first place. And Briggs' note casts enough doubt on your conviction that people want the truth. Not just justice."
This was more than Billy wanted to hear. "Stop," he said. He was surprised to find his voice thick. "Stop." He felt an anger surge through him; anger he hadn't felt since his trial. He was tempted to yell, tempted to scream and kick and hurl the phone into the forest. Let the goddamned Jaguars figure out what to do with the thing.
Billy took a deep breath. Irrational thinking wasn't going to get him anywhere. Getting emotional about this whole thing wasn't going to get him anywhere, either. Let his government do whatever the fuck it wanted to. Let them open an investigation. Let them do the work now that they should have done back in '97. Let them find out he had been the one person, the one goddamned person, that had tried to stop that fucking massacre.
It was too goddamned late. They could canonize him as a mother-fucking saint for all he cared. It would never be enough.
Semper-fucking-fi.
The whole idea could go and kiss his ass.
Billy had begun to angrily pace around his living room, his fist clenched. But now he stopped. His shoulders slumped, and he dropped his head.
"Coen, I know it's a lot to process, but-"
"No. I don't give a shit."
"They could clear your name. You could come home."
"I can't. The country thinks I'm dead, Colonel. You know this. And you know what I say? Let them. Let them know they sent me out to die."
Billy's gaze fell on the edge of his carpet. The fringe was still flipped up over the rest of it.
Asymptomatic carriers, he thought absently.
Then he felt a chill.
He swore angrily to himself. How the hell could he have forgotten-?
"Colonel," Billy said, his mind now replaying the video of that dog over and over again, "we actually have a bigger problem."
"Yo, Becks! Agent Chambers!"
Rebecca Chambers turned as another agent, Derek Lancer, jogged down the hall towards her. Lancer was one of Chris's newer agents - he'd transferred over to the Alliance full-time from the army just over a year ago - but he was already one of Alpha Team's best agents.
Not that you could tell that by looking at him. Lancer was a speed-talker and seemed to live on cracking jokes about nearly everything. But he was easily one of the most observant agents in the Alliance, and knew when to drop his act and behave like a professional.
"Lieutenant," Rebecca said. "What brings you here?"
"Had the morning off and thought I'd come see your talk. Great lecture there, by the way. Really good. Were there really zombie owls out there? Goddamn. Those things'd probably be worse than the Camel Spiders… Look, uh, Colonel Graves is lookin' for you. Sent me down here to find you."
"He sent you all the way down from Central?" Rebecca asked, frowning. Central was the main building in the unit of seven separate buildings that made up the Alliance's D.C. headquarters. She started digging around in her bag, looking for her cell phone. "Couldn't he have just called me…?"
"He said did, but you were giving your lecture, so he sent me down to catch you after. He really needs to talk to you."
"Okay. Of course. Is he in his office?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I thought you said you had the morning off."
"I did! I came in to do some paperwork and was just about to come down and see your lecture on my break when Graves caught me and asked me to get you after you were finished." Lancer grinned. "Did you want me to walk back up with you?"
"No, thank you, Lieutenant. I can find Central myself."
"Never doubted you for a second, Becks," Lancer said with a respectful nod. He added, "Probably just as well. I've been hankering for a burrito all week. Gonna have to go get me one while I still have time."
"All right," Rebecca said, her voice distant as Lancer had already waved and taken off down the hall.
He is so strange, she thought, shaking her head slightly and starting off the opposite way down the hall, beginning the long hike to Central.
The B.S.A.A.'s D.C. headquarters (which were not actually located in D.C., but about an hour's drive outside the city limits) were impressive even from a distance, though no exterior view could do the size of the complex any justice. All told, the five buildings housed well over a thousand agents and at least another two thousand additional personnel - security guards, on-staff copywriters, researchers, interns, personnel on-loan from the military, and the like.
In short, it was a big place. Hell, newcomers had to have escorts their first few days, and the Alliance actually had the funding to keep a few escorts on staff full time. Fortunately, Rebecca was no newcomer to the facility, with almost three years' worth the experience maneuvering through the place and a high enough security clearance that even a wrong turn was little hindrance.
Even so, she always felt a little bit relieved when she finally reached her destination - in this case, Central's third story bullpen, where the majority of the high-grade special agents met and where Graves' office was.
Stepping out of the elevator into the third-story bullpen, Rebecca tucked an errant strand of hair back behind her ear and cast a glance up the short flight of stairs to Colonel Graves' door. It was closed, but the lights were on, so she knew Graves was there. He always turned the lights off when he left the room.
Colonel Rainier Graves was an interesting man. He'd transferred over from the Marine Corps shortly after the B.S.A.A. had been formed, and it hadn't taken him long to rise through the ranks until he was the North American Branch's Assistant Director. He didn't speak much, preferring instead to let others around him do the talking, but his silence didn't mean people forgot he was there.
No, that would have been pretty much impossible. Graves might not have been a talker, but he had a presence. And people acted right around him. He just had that kind of vibe.
He also always seemed, at least to Rebecca, to have an air of regret around him. Like he, like many of the agents here, had some kind of personal reason to fight back against the T-Virus, its creators, and those who would perpetuate its destruction. She had no idea what that might have been, though. Graves - of course - never talked about it.
Sighing softly to herself, she trotted up the stairs to Graves' office and knocked lightly on the door. On the other end, a deep voice said, "Come in."
Turning the knob, Rebecca eased the door open.
"Agent Chambers," Graves said, when he saw her. He ushered for her to take a seat. "Thank you for coming to see me. Please, sit down."
Rebecca strode inside the office and took a seat in the chair across from Graves. She had barely gotten situated when Graves got started.
"I got a call from one of our contacts down South this morning. He's got a sample of the T-Virus he wants us to have a look at."
Rebecca frowned slightly. That…wasn't exactly unusual around here. The Alliance's contacts sent them virus samples on a fairly regular basis, and she'd stopped getting anything more than an E-mail notification months ago. Hell, there were times when she didn't even get that, and the virus just showed up on her desk down in the labs with an ID number and a priority tag, like that was the safe way to handle it. She thought to herself, This cannot be all he wanted to talk to me about.
So, hoping to prompt the Colonel to go on, she said simply, "Oh?"
Graves dipped his head in a brief nod. "Yes."
"Okay," Rebecca replied slowly, with a small nod of her own. "When should I expect it?"
Graves hesitated for a moment, and she saw his gaze shift to the fake palm tree just behind her left shoulder. Talking more to the tree than to her, Graves said, "We won't be getting the sample. Our contact said he doesn't want to send it to us in case something happens to it in transit. So, instead,s we're sending you to it." Graves leaned back in his chair. "Your plane leaves first thing tomorrow morning. I'd suggest you pack."
"Me?" Rebecca said, startled. All her thoughts seemed to freeze in her head, and she couldn't get any of them to come out. Finally, flustered, she managed, "But, sir, I'm not - " a field agent, she was going to finish, but Graves held up a hand to silence her.
"You're our expert, Agent Chambers," he said, "and the best person for this job. I won't trust this mission to anyone other than you."
Rebecca felt her cheeks grow a little warm and she looked away, studying a dark stain on the carpet by the wall. Praise from the Colonel was very, very rare, and there was no way she'd be able to refuse now - no matter how reluctant she was to go back into the field.
Resignedly, she said, "Where am I going?"
"To the Mercado Negro."
"The Mercado Negro?" she echoed, turning back to face the colonel raising her eyebrows. Though her grasp on Spanish was shaky at best (she'd taken French in high school, and that was a little over a decade ago now), it didn't take a rocket scientist to guess what the words meant. "The Black Market? Is that even a real place?"
"It's real," Graves replied, the corners of his gray eyes crinkling as he smiled. "And that is its real name."
"Huh," Rebecca said with a small snort. "Not very imaginative."
"Perhaps, but it works. I do believe it was originally meant to be a pun." Graves picked up another folder from his desk and offered it to her. "This is the man you'll be meeting there."
Rebecca took the folder, flipped it open and quickly scanned it over. Guillermo Rodriguez. She'd heard of him. He was supposed to be one of the most prolific virus dealers on the Market. He had nearly bottomless pockets -only a fraction of it actually came from the Alliance's funding - and over half of the samples the Alliance had in cold storage right now had come from him. His work was impressive, to say the least. The Alliance was lucky to have him as an ally.
The one thing that Rebecca found at all odd about his profile was the lack of identifying pictures. There weren't any pictures of Rodriguez on file. At all. And that bothered her. After six years she figured the Alliance would've been able to snap a picture of him. Or at least given some sort of description in his file.
"Why aren't you going?" she asked, suddenly, looking up from the text-heavy pages. "Or at least coming along? I thought he was your guy." There was even a note in the file that said Rodriguez would only do business through the colonel unless there were extremely special circumstances. "I have other business, I'm afraid, and lack the qualifications you do."
"And he's going to let you send me instead? It says here he doesn't like to work with anyone but you."
"He doesn't like to, no. But I've already spoken to him about it." Graves shot her a look and added, "This is one of those extremely special circumstances, Agent Chambers."
Rebecca frowned and looked over the file again. No pictures. No identifying descriptions. How was she even supposed to know who the guy was if she didn't know who to look for? For all she knew she might end up walking off with a drug runner by mistake.
Again it occurred to Rebecca that she didn't have much of a choice. She was going on this mission no matter what she felt about fieldwork, or this guy, or anything. "You really trust this guy, huh?"
"I do, Agent Chambers." Graves looked at her, and Rebecca thought she saw a hint of sadness in his eyes. But in the next moment that hint was gone, and Graves said, in a tone that would both end the conversation and send her on her way, "Enough that when he says he's worried, we should all be worried."
The flight down to Cancun could have been worse. But it also could have been a lot better, or at least not full of yammering, out of touch tourists that freaked out flying through a little turbulence.
At least she was here. Being here meant she was one step closer to being back in D.C.
I'm not field trained, Rebecca grumbled to herself, shouldering her duffel bag and grabbing her laptop from the carousel before taking off through the terminal. Graves had told her to meet Rodriguez outside a souvenir shop that had a bright yellow back wall, and she kept her eyes peeled for it as she all but stomped along. I am not a field agent. I am not certified for any of this. This is not part of my job.
God, she hoped this place had internet connections somehow. There was no way Eads could handle all of the lab work on his own, even with Griffin's help, not when they had just received another box samples of stuff from the North African branch. Some of that stuff may even have been samples of the Uroboros virus - which, despite the fact that Chris had been around vials of the stuff for days, he hadn't thought to bring back. If that were true, then those samples needed her attention and she needed to be there, not here.
Two weeks. She'd give herself two weeks to do a quick analysis and then she'd be on the first available plane back to the states, back to her lab - away from this guy, this Rodriguez. Can't believe we even trust somebody like him. I don't care what Graves says, I don't trust anyone with more than -
She stopped then, in mid-thought and mid-step, as her eyes suddenly locked onto a face she hadn't seen in ten years.
There was no mistaking that face. Not for her. Not for someone who'd spent a long, hellish night fighting for survival alongside that very face. Not for someone who had thought she was throwing away a career in law enforcement by setting a convicted killer free. Not for someone who had spent the last ten years hoping that that face had managed to get his ass out of Raccoon City in time.
And just behind that man was a souvenir shop with a bright, banana yellow back wall.
Oh, my God. "Billy?"
As soon as she said his name, a man she had just a day ago only been able to imagine ever seeing again, wrapped Rebecca Chambers in a tight hug.