The words seemed to echo over the line, making the period of deep silence that followed them all the heavier.
So Birkin had made it out of Raccoon City. Wesker had absolutely no idea how it was possible, and yet, despite the odds, he had. Much as William had erroneously mourned Wesker's death, so too, had Albert made a grave mistake in underestimating his old friend.
Of course, Wesker knew that William Birkin was no longer the man he remembered him to be. Ada, as well as other sources of intel, had conveyed to him the mutated state that the (now former) Umbrella scientist had assumed, a result of injecting himself with the highly-volatile and still-unstable G-virus.
The action, Wesker knew, had been a means of protecting his work, rather than himself. If he knew Birkin like he thought he did, the action was an impulse, last-ditch effort to sequester the virus somewhere far away from the team that Umbrella had sent to retrieve it, rather as a life-saving gesture from a dying man.
"When was this?" Wesker asked, parting the silence with an interested inquiry.
He was, of course, fully aware that it had been HUNK's team sent to obtain the virus, but it was unlike HUNK to fail at such a thing. And, according to Wesker's sources, the entire team had been eliminated. HUNK, as usual, had survived the encounter and lived to tell the tale, although the tale hadn't been transcribed into Umbrella's files, interestingly enough.
HUNK's subsequent escape from Raccoon before the blast, and Birkin's survival were undocumented in the files that Wesker had retrieved from the Russian base. As far as he had been aware, Sergei had been a trusted second to Spencer and the files there should have been whole and complete duplicates.
As usual, there was a campaign of half-truths and deceit being played out under the guise of trust in the former-company's ranks. Typical Spencer M.O.