Chapter 41: Old New York's National Profanity
"You made it just in time."
Ada was standing in the middle of the wrecked living room. She found a surface that could still be sat on, settled onto it, and opened a beer.
Whatever happened next wasn't going to require her involvement.
Across the room, the man with the laser dots on his chest had stopped making any attempt at resistance. He lay face down on the floor, entirely cooperative, and waited in silence while Hunk and his team moved in to take him.
From arrival to cuffs, the whole thing took less than a minute. Hunk had the man loaded into the vehicle and moving before the situation had fully finished processing.
The villa fell quiet.
Ada and several dead men were the only ones left.
Fifteen minutes later, the NYPD arrived.
Under New York's castle doctrine, combined with a full team of top-tier attorneys that Umbrella kept on retainer for exactly this category of situation, Ada was inside the precinct for barely long enough to account for the drive there. A brief statement. A few signatures. Then she walked out.
Outside the precinct.
Eleanor was standing at the entrance in a black business suit, a white Porsche parked at the curb behind her. The expression on her face was the composed, professional one she always wore, with a layer of involuntary sleepiness underneath it that she hadn't quite managed to clear. Her eyes held the specific flatness of someone who had been perfectly fine until an hour ago.
She drew a measured breath when she saw Ada come out the door, adjusted whatever she needed to adjust internally, and held out a carry bag she had brought from the car.
"Change in the restroom. The director has arranged new accommodation for you."
"New accommodation." Ada took the bag. "Where?"
"My apartment."
Ada looked at her.
"Oh, darling." A beat. "I'd honestly rather sleep at the office."
"Not an option." Eleanor's expression did not change. "There are no spare rooms."
A pause.
"There will be by the time we get there."
Underground. Floor fifteen. The familiar one.
The man Hunk had brought in was here, in a cell, waiting. The time passed in the way time passed on this floor: slowly, and with unwelcome awareness of every minute of it.
The elevator opened.
Matthew walked out at an unhurried pace, four armed guards falling in behind him.
The footsteps came down the corridor, each one carrying clearly in the silence. To the man in the cell, each step landed somewhere in his chest. His skin had started prickling before he even saw who it was.
When he did see, his eyes went straight to Matthew's hand.
There was a syringe in it.
The prickling turned into something worse.
He ran through the possibilities quickly. Nobody came down to this floor at this hour carrying a syringe to give themselves a glucose drip. The syringe had one credible purpose, and that purpose was pointed at him.
Truth serum.
"F..." He couldn't get the whole word out. His entire body was shaking.
Then something shifted in him. He made a decision, fast and desperate.
"I'll tell you everything!" He raised his voice before Matthew had reached the cell. "Everything I know! Just tell me I can walk out of here when I'm done!"
Better to throw his hands up than to hold out for nothing. The syringe made resistance pointless. One injection and he'd be talking regardless of what he wanted.
So why hold out.
Matthew stopped. One eyebrow went up.
"That saves some time." A small smile at the corner of his mouth. He pulled the cell open and stepped inside.
"Tell me everything. Once you're done, you can go."
"You promise?" The man still wasn't entirely convinced.
"I promise." Matthew's expression shifted into one of complete sincerity. "I am a devout Christian. I swear to you, on God's name, that if you tell me honestly, I will let you leave this room."
The man looked at him for a moment. Then he talked.
The story was actually straightforward once he got into it.
The whole thing, at its root, was Matthew's fault.
When Matthew had put Hammerhead down and dismantled the Magia Gang's core operation in one night, he had left behind a vacuum. Hell's Kitchen had devolved into chaos. The Devil's Gang and Fisk's organization, recognizing the Magia Gang was finished, had moved in hard on the abandoned territory. Every casino, every loan book, every distribution network, absorbed or destroyed.
Which left the surviving Magia Gang members with nothing, and a very clear idea of who was responsible.
They had pooled resources and hired professionals.
The original plan had been to go after Matthew directly.
That had hit a problem: Matthew was never accessible. He was at the Umbrella building, then inside the Umbrella building, then somewhere in the Umbrella building again. Constant surveillance for weeks had produced no opening. The man was practically nocturnal inside his own company headquarters.
They had adjusted. If they couldn't reach Matthew, they would take one of his assistants, extract whatever Umbrella proprietary information could be monetized, sell it to a competitor, and call it a partial win. Revenue plus revenge.
They had chosen wrong.
The target they had selected was not Eleanor. It was Ada Wong.
The outcome had been eight professionals dead and one man currently explaining all of this from the inside of a cell.
Matthew listened to the end of it.
He said nothing for a moment.
So today's entire situation was something he had set in motion himself. He hadn't thought about the downstream effects of the Hell's Kitchen operation on the remaining Magia Gang survivors. He probably should have.
"Do you know where your employers are now?"
"Yes. Though because the Devil's Gang and Fisk's people have taken everything, they've all scattered. No central location. They're spread out."
"Write down everything you know."
Matthew produced a folded sheet of paper and a pen from his jacket pocket and slid them through the cell bars.
The man took them. Whatever hesitation he might have had about handing over this particular information had been fully processed during the previous several minutes. He wrote quickly, without pausing.
Thirty seconds. He set the pen down.
"That's everything I've got." He looked up with the expression of someone who had completed their half of an agreement and was ready to have the other half delivered. "That's all I know."
"I can leave now. Right?"
Matthew took the paper. He folded it once, neatly, and tucked it back into his pocket.
Then he took two unhurried steps backward until he was standing outside the cell.
He cleared his throat.
"Of course not."
The cell door shut with a clean, definitive sound. The lock engaged.
The man stared at the closed door.
Then he grabbed for the bars. The chain anchoring him to the wall stopped him short. He pulled against it and screamed.
"You liar! You said you'd let me go! You swore on God!"
"You broke your oath! God won't forgive this! You're going straight to hell!"
Matthew regarded the display with mild interest.
He spread his hands in a small, unbothered shrug.
"Sorry to disappoint you. I'm not actually a Christian."
"I'm a Pastafarian."
A pause.
"Senior ordained member."
The man's face had been flushing steadily throughout this exchange. By the end it had arrived somewhere past red.
This was not embarrassment. This was a man running at full temperature.
"FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOUR WHOLE GODDAMN FAMILY!"
He screamed this at the top of his lungs and kept screaming it, working through every variation he could reach, and when he ran out of content he attempted to reinforce his position by spitting through the bars.
The spit didn't reach.
His mouth did not have the range.
Matthew watched this for a moment. Then, as if something had just occurred to him, he held up the syringe and turned it once in the light.
"One more thing I should mention."
"This isn't truth serum."
"It's glucose."
"Completely standard. Nothing interesting in it at all."
He considered the man's expression.
"I apologize for the confusion."
He turned and walked back toward the elevator.
Behind him, the sounds from floor fifteen pursued him down the corridor for a while and then didn't.
What remained in the silence after the elevator closed was one man, one empty floor, and the word he finally reduced everything to, delivered at full volume into the uncaring air:
"FUCK!!"
***
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