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Carlos shook his head. “Yeah, but this isn’t Treasury’s jurisdiction.”

Jill was about to agree, when her face suddenly broke into a wide smile. “Sure it is.”

“No, he’s right,” Alice said. “I don’t see how we can—”

“Secret Service’s job is to protect the president, right?” Jill asked.

Carlos and Alice both nodded.

“So,” Jill went on, “only the president is authorized to fire our nuclear weapons, yes?”

“Technically,” Alice said, “but—” Then she broke into a smile of her own. “I like it. It’s a stretch, but it’s a start.”

Carlos looked confused. “I don’t get it.”

Alice turned to Carlos. “By firing a nuclear missile on American soil in a situation that was not a test, they usurped the power of the president of the United States. It’s possible—possible—that we can convince Treasury that this brands them a threat to the president.”

“Which is their jurisdiction.” L.J. shook his head. “Knew I shoulda been watchin’

The West Wing and shit—I dunno what ch’all’re talkin’ ’bout.”

“It’s a long shot,” Alice said.

“What’s the alternative?” Jill asked. “We can sit on our asses and run from the feds. The longer we wait, the easier it’ll be for Umbrella to cover this up. We gotta get people picking at the scab before it has a chance to heal.”

“It’s done.” That was Angie. Jill and the others all turned toward the bed to see that she had opened the laptop and was using it.

“What’s done?” Alice asked.

“I put the video online—all the footage of Raccoon City and your confession. I had to put it in two separate bits, since the website I’m using only lets me put up videos up to two minutes at a time.”

“Angie,” Alice said in a panicky voice, “if they can trace it—”

“They can’t.” Angie spoke with the classic give-mea-break tone that all children knew instinctively. Jill, God knew, had used it on her parents often enough when she was Angie’s age. “I used an untraceable e-mail address and used one of my father’s programs to mask the IP address. No one’ll know where it came from.”

“How’d you get online?” Carlos asked. “Don’t tell me this place has wireless?”

Angie grinned. “No, but someone who lives nearby does, and they never changed their network key from the default.”

Alice grinned right back. “Your father teach you how to do that?”

“Actually, I taught him.”

They all got a good chuckle out of that, even though Jill didn’t entirely believe it. Whenever she’d used that know-it-all tone at Angie’s age, she was usually about a hundred percent wrong—but, like all kids, she didn’t realize it until she was a grown-up and discovered how much more complicated the world was.

Then again, Angie had a pretty good idea about that. Like Alice, she was swimming with the T-virus, which had regenerated her legs. Those limbs were atrophied at birth, a hereditary condition she got from her wheelchair-bound father, but the T-virus—along with a regular dose of the anti-virus, both of which Angie kept in a Spider-Man lunch box that never left her side—had regenerated the limbs to working condition.

Dr. Charles Ashford’s own body was too far gone for the T-virus to help him, but his daughter was young enough to be able to regenerate the muscle and nerves that needed strengthening.

Then, according to what Alice and Angie had both told them, the research was taken away from Ashford. He had wanted to use the virus as a tool for healing. Umbrella—which owned the patents of anything Ashford (or anyone else) created while working for it—took it away from him and turned it into the basis of a wrinkle cream that they could sell for millions and a bio-weapon they could sell for billions. According to Alice, the project had been given over to two younger, more malleable doctors in the Hive named Mariano Rodriguez and Anna Bolt, who had been refining it into something more fitting with Umbrella’s corporate mandate.

Bolt and Rodriguez had been infected when one of Alice’s coworkers, Spence Parks, let the virus loose in their office. Their legacy, however, lived on in Raccoon.

Jill took