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Still, it was cheap, and they took cash. L.J. insisted he had plenty of credit cards they could use, but Jill found herself strangely unwilling to commit credit-card fraud until they got really desperate.

L.J. had snorted and said, “Once a cop, huh?”

The motel also had a back alley between two long buildings that provided a handy escape route, if one was willing to crawl out through a dirty, old sealed window that Alice had managed to force open. A quick escape was something they might need. They did their best not to get noticed on their way here from San Francisco, but with the number of people after them and with the resources those people commanded…

Now they sat around on the two beds in the women’s room, plotting out their next move. Carlos’s contact who’d gotten them the forged papers had stopped answering his cell phone. “I’ve got a bad feeling that they made him disappear.”

“They’re good at that,” Alice said.

“We need to get this information out to someone Umbrella can’t touch,” Jill said.

“And who would that be, exactly?” Carlos asked. “Umbrella made significant campaign contributions to the chair of every important committee in Congress and each of the last four presidents. Umbrella lobbyists are all over D.C. rewriting laws to suit them. They—”

Jill exploded. “They blew up a fucking city, Carlos!”

“No, a nuclear plant melted down,” Carlos said snidely. “Didn’t you see it on the news? The very same news outlets that we gave copies of Terri’s tape to? Umbrella owns half the TV news outlets and three-quarters of the print ones.”

“They don’t own all of it, though, do they?” L.J. asked.

“There are a few independent stations,” Alice said, “but Umbrella has at least a piece of most of them. It’d be impossible to get this done through the mainstream press. I’m surprised you even bothered trying—all it did was put you two on the most-wanted list.”

Jill ignored Alice’s criticism. She hated to admit it, but L.J. was on the right track. “So fuck the mainstream.” She pointed at the laptop that sat next to Angie. “Put the video online.”

“That whole shit with Clinton and the blow job,” L.J. said. “That happened ’cause a some motherfucker online, right?”

“Matt Drudge,” Alice said.

“Drudge is a jackass with delusions of grandeur,” Carlos said.

“Maybe,” Jill said, suddenly feeling energized, “but it’s people like him who’ll get this story out—the people who don’t give a fuck about corporate sponsorship.”

“The numbers are meaningless,” Alice said. “A few thousand people, maybe.”

For the first time, Angie spoke. “It’s a few thousand more than know now, though—isn’t it?”

“Girl’s got herself a point,” L.J. said.

Alice shrugged and got up from the bed. “Fine, we put it online. That can’t be all we do, though.” She thought a moment. “Treasury.”

L.J. grinned. “What, we gonna rob Fort Knox to finance the revolution? I’m down with that.”

“Is a felony your answer to everything, L.J.?” Jill asked.

“Nah—I’m strictly misdemeanor.”

Jill shook her head. L.J. was a cockroach, a two-bit hustler who made his living on small-time shit. He’d gone through the Raccoon City Police Department in handcuffs half a dozen times a month, and he usually got kicked by dropping a dime on someone. L.J. had his fingers in many pies and knew to give up little enough so that he didn’t piss off the people on the street but not so little that it wouldn’t be worth the cops’ time. It was a delicate balancing act, and Jill knew that several uniforms were looking forward to the day that he lost his balance and they could bust him proper.

That day would never come, of course. Jill was the only member of the RCPD still alive, while L.J., like any good cockroach, survived the holocaust.

She was amazed he hadn’t bailed yet.

Alice was explaining herself. “What I meant was, I still have some friends in the Treasury Department. It’s not much, but those guys are pretty autonomous. If we bring this to the FBI or Congress, the White House could come down on them like a ton of bricks, but