Resident Evil_ Extinction - Keith R. A. DeCandido [29]
“How could this have happened, Doctor?”
“Right now, we’re a little more focused on containment. Besides, the CDC guys are all looking at me funny.”
In a tight voice, Isaacs said, “I’m not interested in how you socialize with the Centers for Disease Control, Doctor. I’m interested in how the T-virus has spread to the Mission Hill District of San Francisco.”
Jaime sighed. “As best as I can tell, sir, it was Dr. Knable.”
Isaacs frowned. “Knable? What does he have to do with this?”
“He’s one of the people infected, sir.”
“What?” Isaacs yelled the word loudly enough that Jaime feared it would blow out the speakers on her laptop. The connection was spotty, so the camera providing Isaacs’s face refreshed only every second and a half or so, which meant his expression went from glowering to screaming with his mouth open in an instant. Jaime had to suppress the urge to giggle.
Isaacs continued: “Knable was tested before we put him on the bridge—with, I might add, his own foolproof test.”
“It wasn’t foolproof, sir—sometimes it gave false negatives.”
“But not false positives. So how—”
“My guess, sir, is that he got it while he was on the bridge.”
“That’s not possible. The virus wasn’t airborne yet, and—”
“We don’t know that, sir,” Jaime said emphatically. “We don’t know the precise vector of the virus, because we abandoned Raccoon City before we could track it properly. We don’t know how long it incubates, how quickly it becomes airborne or gets into the ground. We’re spitting in the wind here, sir.”
“All right,” Isaacs said after a distressingly long pause. “Your primary purpose there remains the same: stop the spread of the virus by whatever means are necessary.”
“Yes, I know. I was standing right there next to you when you told me that,” Jaime said angrily. “Unfortunately, I don’t know that I can.”
“Why not?” Isaacs said angrily. “You’ve been granted executive authority over this by the order of the governor.”
“Yeah, and that went over real well.” She winced, recalling the confused, angry, and hurtful—but mostly angry—looks from her fellow doctors when she handed the governor’s order over. She’d overheard Dr. Bousquet, one of the locals, refer to her as “some private-sector diva with pull.”
“How it ‘goes over’ is comparatively irrelevant, Doctor.”
“The problem is, one of the CDC doctors is making the connection to what happened in Raccoon.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Sir, the dead are walking. I think we seriously need to revise our notions of what constitutes impossible.”
“Oh, you have no idea, Doctor. But that’s neither here nor there. How can one of those doctors connect this to Raccoon City?”
Jaime shuddered in her Hazmat suit. She’d heard rumors about Project Nemesis and Project Alice and the odd bioengineering that Isaacs’s office had been spear-heading.
“She downloaded Valentine and Olivera’s video.”
“That’s not possible—we had that removed from the site that was hosting it, and we’re trying to trace the uploader now. We also confiscated all the copies.”
“Well, however long it was up before you took it down was long enough for some people to see it. Dr. Yu-Chin has it on her hard drive, and she’s noticing that the people we have restrained look just like the people on the video. Not everyone believed the meltdown story, you know.”
“The ravings of conspiracy theorists are not to be taken seriously, Doctor.”
“Dr. Yu-Chin isn’t a conspiracy theorist; she’s an intelligent woman with a medical degree who recognizes parallel symptoms when she sees them. Also—” She hesitated. This was the main reason she had come into the Umbrella tent to contact Isaacs, and she’d been dreading it.
Isaacs obviously noticed the hesitation. “What is it, Doctor?”
“I’ve managed to hold them off from sending the test results outside the quarantine area, but I don’t know how much longer