Mother Russia

Chapter Two

In a studio apartment located just outside Paris, a woman lay asleep in bed. She was face down, one arm dangling off the edge of the bed, the cream-colored sheets twisted around her legs. Her shoulder-length black hair was draped over the side of her face, moving just slightly with her breath.

In another life, she might have had a successful career in fashion or modeling, but events had conspired to take her along a different path. She was tall and slim, with long legs and slender shoulders, but despite her deceptively thin frame, she had the compact muscle mass of a ballerina or professional gymnast. She was undeniably beautiful, as many men would quickly confess, but her appearance was strangely unmemorable, and those who came into contact with her often had trouble remembering exactly what she looked like. This was due in part to her indeterminate ethnicity, which at times seemed to be Asian or Hispanic or perhaps even Hawaiian. In her experience, most white people were terrible at telling the difference.

She was known by many names. All of them were fake. Mitsuko Yoshida, Kathleen Baker, Miriam Rodriguez, Denise van der Westhuizen, Jing Wei Cheung, Vanessa Cooper, Emily Takashi, Ada Wong.

The cell phone on the nightstand rang. Coincidentally, the ringtone was a beeping noise that sounded much like a digital alarm clock.

Ada lifted her head, eyes barely open, and reached out with a fumbling hand to pick up the phone. She put it close to her face so she could see the name of the person calling her and then frowned and dropped her head back onto the pillow.

She put the phone to her ear. “What do you want?” she mumbled.

The voice on the phone was flat and without inflection. “Did I wake you?”

“It’s six in the morning.”

“I forgot about the time difference. I apologize. It’s afternoon here. But now that you’re awake, you might as well get up. I have work for you.”

“I just got back last night from the last job.”

“Yes, and a fine job you did. Very good work. Now get out of bed and get dressed. How’s your Russian?”

Ada opened her eyes. “My what?”

“Russian. I want you on a plane to Moscow as soon as possible.”

Slowly, Ada slid her legs off the side of the bed and sat up. She brushed her hair out of her face and took a deep breath. “And what, pray tell, do you want me to go to Moscow for? To answer your question, my Russian is kind of rusty.”

“You can practice on the plane. I need you to set up an operation. Surveillance, infiltration, the whole works. Time is of the essence.”

“Are you serious? Don’t you have anyone else?”

“Sure, I have lots of other people. But I’m calling you because I like you. It’s so hard to find people you can trust. Besides, this is an easy assignment. It’s right up your alley. Take some pictures, hack into some computer files, seduce a few lonely scientists.”

“That sounds like a lot of work. How long of an operation are we talking here?”

“Unknown. A couple of months.”

Ada swung her free hand down and slapped the side of the bed. “A couple of months?” she said incredulously. “Are you kidding me?”

“Just pretend you’re on vacation. It’ll be a walk in the park.”

“Kiss my ass, Wesker.”

“Call me when you get to Moscow. Have a nice flight.” Click.

Ada tossed the phone onto the bed. She wanted to hurl it into the wall, but it wasn’t worth the effort. Besides, she wasn’t actually that angry. In truth, she had overslept, so she couldn’t even get mad at him for waking her up.

Sometimes it occurred to her that it probably wasn’t wise to speak to her boss the way she did, but ever since the Tricell Corporation had effectively purchased her contract from her previous employer, Ada discovered that she had considerably more personal freedom to speak her mind. She would never have dared to speak that way to the people she used to work for, but her new boss seemed unfazed by her comments and even seemed to get some kind of perverse amusement from them. Although technically, she worked for Tricell, in reality she reported directly to Albert Wesker.

A little less than one year ago, Ada was sent to an American city called Raccoon City to meet with some prospective assets who were interested in selling information regarding the secret work they did with a powerful pharmaceutical company called the Umbrella Corporation. She had a dossier on some of Umbrella’s high-level employees, and it included Albert Wesker, then the Project Manager of a top secret facility hidden in the Arklay Mountains just outside of Raccoon City.

However, unbeknownst to Ada and the agency she worked for, that facility had suffered a catastrophic outbreak of a highly-contagious virus just a few days before she arrived. When the virus somehow got into the city’s water supply, it infected approximately three-quarters of the entire city’s population. Needless to say, Ada’s planned meetings with her prospective informants never took place.

In the end, Ada had to fight her way out of a city literally crawling with infected people turned into undead zombies. Along the way, she had temporarily joined up with some other survivors, and had actually risked her own life to save them. Then she just barely escaped the city before it was destroyed with a nuclear weapon on the direct orders of the President of the United States. She hadn’t made it out alone, however. An Umbrella commando named Hunk had accompanied her through the Arklay Forest on their way to safety.

Albert Wesker had also escaped Raccoon City, although the details of his escape, and his rumored involvement in the original outbreak, remained unclear. Legally, Wesker was declared dead, along with one hundred thousand other residents of the city. His employment with Tricell was a highly-guarded secret, and all work he did was under an assumed name, although Ada and a select few others knew who Wesker really was. When Ada’s former employer sold her to Tricell, she was almost immediately scooped up by Wesker to serve as his personal agent. Wesker liked to do things directly, evidenced by the fact that he chose to call Ada himself rather than deal with her through intermediaries.

In many ways, he was still a complete mystery to her. Frighteningly intelligent, completely lacking in emotion, and utterly ruthless, Wesker was a dangerous man. But Ada felt that it was safer to be working for him than against him.

And there was much work to do. Wesker kept her busy and paid her well. In the aftermath of the destruction of Raccoon City, Umbrella was faced with almost inconceivable financial losses. Their stocks took a complete nose-dive and were now almost worthless, and they were assaulted with thousands of lawsuits, hundreds of government fines, worldwide boycotts, and legions of employees losing their jobs. And in all this chaos, Umbrella’s numerous business rivals saw opportunity.

When Wesker was hired by Tricell, he brought with him mountains of data, research, and biological samples from his years of work with Umbrella. But Wesker wanted more. With Umbrella closing dozens of facilities all over the world and transferring valuable employees and top secret research to other locations in order to consolidate their holdings and protect their intellectual property, it became possible for a highly-skilled individual such as Ada to take advantage of all the confusion and get their hands on some of that top secret research. Her toolkit included bribery, espionage, extortion, seduction, and regular old-fashioned burglary.

After her latest successful mission, Ada had hoped for a few weeks off. But Wesker never took a vacation and apparently didn’t think anyone else should either. There were rumors that the man never slept, among other things. Ada had only dealt with Wesker face-to-face for a few days in Japan when she was hired by Tricell, and in that short time she came to the conclusion that Wesker just barely qualified as human. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he was a robot wearing human skin like a Terminator.

Despite all of that, Ada liked her job. Working for Wesker was far easier than the work she did before, when she basically had to start completely from scratch each time she took a new assignment. Now, she worked for the same person and all of her assignments were related to the same long-term goal. Each assignment built on the one before it. Any investigations she did might benefit her months or even years down the road. As her knowledge of the inner-workings of Umbrella increased, it made each job easier than the one before it. Pretty soon, Ada felt like she could do it in her sleep.

“Russia?” she asked no one in particular. “Aren’t there any nice Umbrella labs in Cancun or Jamaica? Anywhere but Russia.” She pressed her hands against her face and then swept them through her hair, crudely brushing it back.

She stood up and untangled the bedsheets from around her legs. On the way to the bathroom, she opened her laptop and purchased her flight to Moscow, and then called a taxi to come pick her up in an hour. She had a direct flight, and the travel time was only about four hours, which wasn’t too bad. As Wesker had suggested, she would spend the flight reacquainting herself with the Russian language. She wasn’t going to fool anyone into thinking she was fluent, but she could at least make herself understood.

After a quick shower and an even quicker breakfast, she packed her things. Most of the equipment she would need for the mission could be easily procured at her destination, so she didn’t worry too much about the particulars. She opened her safe and took out a packet of passports, drivers licenses, and assorted other identification cards from various countries. She decided to use her French passport, with the name Jeanette Archambeau. She’d speak French as her native language on the trip instead of English, just to switch things up. Wesker gave her the freedom to arrange her own cover identities, another nice perk of working for him.

Normally, French citizens couldn’t travel to Russia without a Visa obtained by the Russian Embassy, but Ada didn’t bother with such formalities. She simply contacted Tricell with a number that Wesker had given her, and they would have the Visa approved by the time she arrived at the airport.

The taxi was on its way. She zipped up her two small suitcases and sat down to put on a pair of red sneakers, to match her red leather jacket. Her outfit consisted of black slacks and a plain white shirt with the Nike swoosh logo on it. She put her hair into a plain ponytail.

On her way out the door, she placed a pair of large black sunglasses on her face, and then walked out towards the waiting taxi.

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