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… ormaybe it's mathematical. It doesn't matter, it won'ttake 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 backwards with a clattering sound – and then the face of the clock itself fell from the picture, pushed out by some machinery that Jill couldn't see. In the revealed hollow was the glittering gold cog that had been miss-ing from the tower's bell mechanism.