Chapter 39: Ada Wong: Wesker, Stop Calling Me — I Don't Want Matthew Getting the Wrong Idea
Night had settled over the city. The streetlights were coming on.
Ada drove away from the welfare center construction site, heading back into the city.
Under her supervision the project was close to completion. And if she was being honest with herself, since Matthew had stopped running his elaborate workplace experiments on her, she hadn't realized work could be this straightforward.
No weapons. No fieldwork. A few phone calls a day, some computer time, the occasional site visit. A company this size had departments for everything, and senior staff had no reason to handle operational details personally. That was what the departments were for.
Ada rested her arm on the open window and let the cool night air come in through the trees. Her eyes half-closed.
This was the kind of life she had actually wanted.
The knife-edge existence was genuinely exciting, in the way that things were exciting before you'd done them long enough to understand what they cost. Nobody actually wanted to spend their entire life in a firefight, nerves permanently at full stretch, unable to sleep properly. That was what hell looked like from the inside.
She lit a cigarette and found herself humming something.
Beer, she decided. And real BBQ. That was what the evening called for.
Her phone rang.
Unknown number.
She looked at it.
She ended the call.
Somewhere in a dark room.
Wesker looked at the screen.
Call ended.
His already-unpleasant expression moved in a worse direction.
He had a reasonable guess at what the result was. Ada had either been exposed without completing the mission, or she had completed it and was keeping the output. Or she had done the one thing he had been most hoping to avoid: switched sides entirely.
"Ada."
He said the name to himself.
His phone buzzed. A message.
[Unknown: My apologies to my former employer.
After careful consideration, I've decided to withdraw from your assignment.
My current employer is simply more generous. And more to the point, he treats the people who work for him with consistent decency. Since joining, he's provided a villa in the city center worth six million, and he doesn't spend his days wearing that particular expression or threatening people with whatever leverage he happens to be holding.
In summary: you're fired.
Bye.]
The screen glowed in the dark room.
The vein at Wesker's temple did not stay still.
On the road, Ada was already noticeably more relaxed. She turned the music on.
Was there anything more satisfying than firing a difficult employer?
Probably not.
Her phone buzzed again.
[Unknown: Ada. You understand what betraying me means. What betraying the Alliance means.]
Ada considered this for a moment.
"Are you referring to sending my file to the FBI? My current employer anticipated that. He arranged legitimate documentation for me before I was formally on staff."
She typed the rest.
"Your leverage doesn't work anymore. And you might want to start thinking about your own situation. I've already passed information about your Umbrella betrayal to Umbrella's main office. They'll probably be looking for you soon."
She thought about it.
There was something even more satisfying than firing a difficult employer.
Firing him and reporting him in the same afternoon.
The sound that came out of Wesker's room was not a word.
He threw the phone at the wall. It came apart on impact.
Ada's betrayal landed on him at exactly the wrong time.
After faking his death, Wesker had joined a new organization, the Alliance. To establish himself quickly and rebuild his standing, he had brought two things to the table. The G-Virus, as a proof of capability. And Ada Wong, vouched for personally by him.
The Alliance had not trusted Ada on her own terms. A freelance operative with no fixed allegiances and no institutional backing was not their preferred profile. Wesker had pushed hard for her inclusion, and they had accepted her provisionally on the strength of his word.
Now: the G-Virus had never arrived. Ada had defected. And Umbrella was beginning a search for him.
None of it had been delivered.
And before all of this, there had been the Spencer Mansion incident. The Tyrant that Wesker had intended to bring the Alliance as an initial gift had been killed during the window when he was playing dead. The Alliance had been underwhelmed from the start.
He pressed both fists against his knees.
Everything he had put in place was coming apart simultaneously. Every promise unmade, every resource unavailable, every path closing.
Why was everything going wrong at once.
He sat in the dark room and raged at no one.
Ada stopped at a supermarket and picked up beer. She found a barbecue spot and got food.
Back at the villa, she changed into a deep red silk robe and settled onto the sofa with everything arranged to her satisfaction: beer cold, food still warm, television on, something she had been meaning to watch for two years finally playing on the screen.
She drank. The foam and the cold and the particular smell of wheat-based beer in a good cold glass was exactly right.
"If I'd known it was this good here," she said to the room, "I would have come two years ago. All that time on edge for nothing."
The show played.
At the window, a thin white vapor was moving along the gap in the frame, drifting inward with the quiet patience of something that was in no hurry.
Time passed.
The television laughed.
Ada slid sideways on the sofa.
Her hand with the skewer fell slack to her side. The other arm settled naturally underneath her. To anyone watching, she looked asleep.
Thirty seconds later, the front door was forced open.
A team of men in suits entered the villa. The alarm Ada had set began its tone in the empty space. The man at the front moved to the panel without hesitating and silenced it.
The men looked at each other, then moved toward the sofa without any particular caution.
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