mousy Dr. Aquino had had the nerve to try and hide
from him - although looking at him now, Nicholai
thought it was more likely that the scientist hadn't
even known that he was being hunted and had eluded
Nicholai by pure accident. Aquino looked like the kind
of man who could get lost in his own backyard; even
now, the "watchdog" didn't realize that he wasn't
alone anymore, that Nicholai was only three meters away.
"Doctor!" Nicholai called loudly, and Aquino
jumped around, gasping, involuntarily waving his
hands in front of him; his surprise was absolute.
Nicholai couldn't help a slight smile.
"Who, who are you?" Aquino stammered. He had watery blue eyes and a bad haircut.
Nicholai stepped closer, deliberately intimidating the
scientist with his size. "I'm with Umbrella. I came to see how you were progressing with the vaccine
among other things."
"With Umbrella? I didn't - what vaccine, I don't
know what you're talking about."
No weapon, no physical skills, and he can't tell a lie
without blushing. He must be brilliant.
Nicholai lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Opera-tion Watchdog sent me, Doctor. You haven't filed a de-
tails report lately. They've been worried about you."
Aquino seemed on the verge of collapsing with re-
lief. "Oh, if you know about ... I thought you were... ... yes, the vaccine, I've been very busy; my, ah, contact
wanted the initial synthesis broken down into stages, so
there isn't an actual mixed sample cultivated, but I can
assure you that it's only a matter of combining ele-
ments, everything's ready." The doctor practically bab-bled in his effort to submit.
Nicholai shook his head in mock wonder, playing his
part. "And you've done this all yourself?"
Aquino smiled weakly. "With help from my assis-tant, Douglas, God rest his soul. I'm afraid that I've
been running a bit ragged since his death, day before
yesterday. That's why I've been remiss in my re-
ports..."
He trailed off, then attempted another smile.
"So ... you're the one they sent to pick up the sam-
ple - Franklin, isn't it?"
Nicholai couldn't believe his own luck, or Aquino's
naivete; the man was about to turn over the only
TGViral antidote in existence, and all because Nicholai
had said that Umbrella sent him. And now another one
of his targets would be showing up...
"Yes, that's right," Nicholai said smoothly. "Ken Franklin. Where is the vaccine, Doctor?"
Aquino rumbled for his keys. "In here. I was just hiding it - the vaccine base, I mean, we've kept the
medium separate - I hid it in here for safekeeping, until
you arrived. I thought you were supposed to come in
tomorrow night ... no, the night after, you're much
earlier than I expected."
He opened the door and gestured inside. "There's a refrigerated wall safe behind that rather tacky land-
scape - a recent addition by a wealthy patient, an ec-
centric as I understand it, not that that's important..."
Nicholai stepped past the driveling doctor, tuning
him out, still feeling dumbfounded that Aquino had
been selected as a Watchdog, when he suddenly real-
ized that he'd allowed the scientist to get behind him.
It all came together in that instant, a complete sce-
nario in Nicholai's mind - the stupid, gossiping science
nerd, putting his enemies at ease, capitalizing on their
underestimation of his abilities...
The awareness took only a fraction of a second, and
then Nicholai was moving.
He dropped to his knees and swung his arms around,
grabbing Aquino's calves and following through, liter-
ally sweeping him off his feet.
Aquino yelped and collapsed on top of Nicholai. A
syringe clattered to the floor and Aquino lunged after it,
but Nicholai still held his bony legs. The doctor had no
muscle to speak of. In fact, Nicholai found it quite easy
to hold the flailing doctor with one arm while reaching
for the knife sheathed in his boot with his other.
Nicholai sat up, jerked Aquino closer, and stabbed
him in the throat.
Aquino put his hands to his neck as Nicholai with-
drew the blade, staring at his killer with wide, shocked
eyes, blood pouring over his fingers as his heart contin-
ued its work.
Nicholai stared back at him, grinning and pitiless.
Aquino had been slated to die, anyway, and that he'd
attacked Nicholai only made his death a pleasure, in
addition to its being a necessity.
The scientist finally fell over, still clutching his bub-
bling throat, and lost consciousness. He died quickly
after that, a final spasm and he was gone.
"Better you than me," Nicholai said. He searched the cooling body and found several more syringes and a
four-digit code on a slip of paper - undoubtedly the
wall safe's combination. Aquino obviously hadn't ex-
pected Nicholai to be around to steal the vaccine.
Nicholai stood and walked to the safe, revising his
plans as he always tried to do after any unexpected oc-
currence. Aquino had been expecting Ken Franklin to
pick up the sample, which meant that Franklin would
be putting in an appearance, unless the doctor had been
lying. Nicholai didn't think so. Aquino had been so
convincing because he had been telling the truth, an ex-
cellent technique to distract one's opponent...
... so I synthesize the vaccine, maybe enjoy some hunting while I wait for Sergeant Franklin to show up,
get rid of him - and then destroy the hospital, Aquino's
research along with it. If Umbrella's watching, they'll think everything is going according to plan. After that,
there's only Chan and the factory worker, Terence Fos-
ter...
To hell with Mikhail and the other two, they weren't
important anymore. As the soon-to-be only surviving
Watchdog with information to sell, Nicholai would be
worth millions. But with the TG vaccine in hand, there
was no limit to what Umbrella might pay.
By the time they reached the building's back rooms,
Jill was almost ready to admit defeat. They'd been
everywhere, picking locks, slogging through each taste-
fully furnished room, stepping over corpses and creat-
ing a few new ones. A broken picture window outside
the tower's chapel had allowed several carriers to get
in, and they'd come across another viral spider in the
hallway just past the library.
Along the way, she told Carlos a little about the
mansion and grounds of the Spencer estate, history that
she had dug up after the S.T.A.R.S.'s disastrous mis-
sion. Old man Spencer, one of Umbrella's founders,
had been a fanatic for secret hiding places and hidden
passages and had hired George Trevor, an architect
renowned for his creativity, to design the mansion and
to help renovate a few of the town's historical land-
marks, tying parts of Raccoon to Spencer's spy fan-
tasies.
"This was all thirty years ago," Jill said, "and the old man was completely crazy by then, so the story goes.
As soon as everything was finished, he boarded up the
mansion and moved Umbrella's headquarters to Eu-
rope."
"What happened to George Trevor?" Carlos asked. They stopped outside yet another door, what had to be
one of the last rooms.
"Oh, that's the best part," Jill said. "He disappeared just before Spencer skipped town. No one ever saw him
again."
Carlos shook his head slowly. "This is one nut job of a place to live, you know that?"
Jill nodded, pushing open the door and stepping
back, revolver up. "Yeah, I've been thinking that my-self."
Nothing was moving. Stacks of chairs to the right.
Three statues, busts of women, straight in front of
them. There were two corpses huddled together to the
left of the door, a couple, holding each other, making
Jill wince and look away - and there, hanging on the
southern wall in heavy gold frames, were the three
clock paintings.
They walked into the room, Jill nervously studying their surroundings. It seemed normal...
... but so did that room in the mansion that turned out to be a giant trash compactor. On impulse, Jill stepped back and used one of the chairs to prop the
door open before going to take a closer look at the
paintings.
Well, kind of paintings. She supposed technically
they'd be called mixed media. The three pieces were of
women, one on each canvas, but each also contained an
octagonal clock - the first and last set at midnight, the
one in the middle at five o'clock. A small, bowl-like
tray protruded from the bottom of each frame. They
were labeled as the goddesses of the past, present, and
future, from left to right.
"On the postcard, it said something about putting
your hands together," Carlos said. "That's like the clock hands, right?"
Jill nodded. "Yeah, makes sense. It's just obscure enough to be annoying."
She reached forward and lightly touched the tray on
the middle frame, a dancing woman. There was a tiny
click and the tray dipped like a scale, the weight of her
hand pushing it down. At the same time, the hands of
the clock started to spin.
Jill jerked her hand back, afraid that she'd set some-
thing off, and the clock hands quickly spun back to
their previous settings. Nothing else happened.
"Hands together...," she murmured. "Do you think they mean that all of the clocks have to be set for the
same time? Or do they mean literally, the hands
aligned?"
Carlos shrugged and reached out to touch the tray of
the future goddess, definitely the creepiest of the paint-
ings. The past was a young girl sitting on a hill, the
present a dancing woman ... and the goddess of the fu-
ture was the figure of a woman in a slinky cocktail
dress, her body enticingly posed, but with the bald,
grinning face of a skeleton.
Jill suppressed a shudder and didn't let any thoughts
get started on the theme of imminent death, like I don't have enough of that already.
The tray Carlos touched dipped down, but again, it
was the hands on the clock of the present goddess that
moved. Apparently, the other two were fixed at mid-
night.
Jill stepped back from the wall, arms folded, think-
ing - and suddenly she had it, she knew how the puzzle
worked, if not the exact solution. She turned around,
hoping that the missing pieces were nearby, and she
smiled when she saw the three statues - ah, the symme-try - and the shining objects they held in their slender stone fingers.
"It's a balancing puzzle," Jill said, walking to the statues. At closer inspection, she saw that each held a
tray with a single, fist-sized stone. She picked them up,
hefting each orb, noting the different weights.
"Three balls, three trays," she continued, walking back to the pictures, handing the black stone - made
from obsidian or onyx, she wasn't sure to Carlos. An-
other was clear crystal, the third a glowing amber.
"And the goal is to make the middle clock hit mid-
night," Carlos said, catching on.
Jill nodded. "I'm sure there's a motif to the solution, a color match, like black for death, maybe ... or
maybe it's mathematical. It doesn't matter, it won't
take that long to try all of the combinations."
They set to work, trying each ball on one painting at
a time, then using them all, Jill carefully studying the
present clock's hand movements with each placement.
It appeared that the different balls held different values,
depending on which tray they were in. Jill was just
starting to feel like she could figure it out - it was defi-
nitely mathematical - when they lucked across the so-
lution.
With crystal in the past, obsidian in the present, and
amber in the future, the clock in the middle struck mid-
night, chiming softly. The minute hand started to move
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