The Mansion Incident

Chapter Twenty

As it turned out, Wesker forgot one very important detail when he made his plans. Since he first decided to use the S.T.A.R.S. teams as a diversion to fight off the zombies and give him time to complete his work at the lab, he thought of them only as expendable tools. His former fellow police officers were just pieces on a chess board for him to move around and sacrifice at will. But he failed to take one crucial fact into account.

The S.T.A.R.S. members were police officers, and they weren’t entirely stupid. In fact, some of them were fairly good detectives when they wanted to be. Wesker never realized that one or more of them could easily figure out his involvement if they were even marginally observant.

He played back a recording from a security camera the day before. It was from the control room of the aquatic lab in Delta labs, and it showed Enrico flipping through stacks of reports. At first, Wesker thought nothing of it, until he realized that his name was probably on every single report Enrico looked at. And the fact that Enrico seemed to stare intently at the papers was pretty convincing evidence that he recognized those signatures.

Wesker was the head researcher and supervisor at the lab after all, and he personally signed off on every single project and experiment done there. And since even he was not paranoid enough to think of doing otherwise, he simply used the exact same signature on those reports as he did on the police reports back at the RCPD.

So that meant there were probably hundreds of thousands of papers lying around the labs with his signature on them. If anyone paid attention to the name at the bottom, that would effectively spoil Wesker’s surprise. That wasn’t even all of it. Company group photos hung on the walls of many of the conference rooms in the mansion and elsewhere, and most of them featured Wesker right in the front row. In some of his secondary offices, there was a nameplate right on his desk.

Enrico surely knew the truth by now. Wesker scanned some security video of Barry and the others and wasn’t sure how much they knew. Barry passed through some labs awhile ago and searched some paperwork, but he didn’t act as if he saw something important. Chris visited Spencer’s office earlier, but Wesker didn’t think anything in there had his name on it. Jill was in Delta labs now, having entered by way of the cabin in the woods. How she made it out there was anyone’s guess, but Wesker was confident that nothing in the cabin implicated him. Jill probably had no idea he was involved. If anyone else from Bravo was still alive, Wesker could not speculate what they might have discovered.

What if someone from Alpha found Enrico and he told them what he knew? Wesker’s plans for the evening were already ruined by Brad’s cowardice, but that would annihilate any possible chance of success. If they found out Wesker was involved, his final plans would be for nothing.

Everything was going wrong now. Enrico probably knew the truth, and if he didn’t tell someone from Alpha, they might figure it out on their own anyway. Brad was still airborne in the helicopter when he was supposed to be dead in the mansion. And there were too many people still unaccounted for, such as Rebecca and Richard. Wesker preferred to think they were already dead, but without verification, he took the chance that they might actually make it out of the Arklay Mountains alive.

That was the real fear. If anyone learned of Wesker’s involvement and made it out alive, then he was done for. He naturally assumed that he could get away while everyone else was killed, and there would be no witnesses left to contradict the belief that no one survived the outbreak. Wesker would be assumed dead, even if no body was ever recovered. But if anyone survived the massacre, and they knew Wesker arranged the whole thing, then they would have to assume he made it out alive. His continued survival afterward depended on people thinking he was dead.

Wesker considered just getting out now while he still had the chance, taking anything he could grab and to hell with all his plans. But that would solve nothing. In fact, it would probably guarantee his eventual failure. He needed to stay and finish it, despite the risks.

He needed one of two things to happen. The preferred outcome was for every member of S.T.A.R.S. to die in the labs. But if they escaped and returned to Raccoon City, they absolutely must believe that Wesker was dead. Either they die, or they live to report Wesker’s death.

Actually, the more he thought about it, maybe the second option was even better than the first. If someone made it out who could positively say that they saw Wesker dead, that would be perfect. Even if they told the world that Wesker was behind the whole outbreak, it wouldn’t matter by that point. The world would believe he was dead. If no one made it out alive, the world could only assume that he was dead, but at this point, Wesker did not want to trust an assumption.

Enrico would have to die before he told anyone what he knew. And Barry’s forced assistance would be necessary now, to make sure at least someone made it to the final lab. As soon as it all fell apart, everything seemed to slide back into place as Wesker’s new plan formed in his mind.

He let his thoughts wander back to the lab where the Tyrant was waiting for the S.T.A.R.S. members. There was a case of test tubes there, some of the last to be packed away, that contained Wesker’s most private experiment. If worse came to worst, that little test tube might come in handy. But could he risk it? They never tested it on a human subject.

But if it came to that, did he really have a choice?

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