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The Company
Time: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 (evening).
Place: Tokyo, Japan.
Last Event: Poisoned spray and crashing cars.
Qoqa gets moving the instant she receives Wen's phone call about the sprayer attack in the ladies' room. She skirts the scene of the wreck in the street, noting as she passes that Vinnie and Zhang are being grilled by the police and thus are in no position to help. As she enters the court building, she keeps an eye out for the mysterious woman whom Wen described. She spots nobody who fits the description. In fact, the place is largely empty – likely because everybody has either gone home or run outside to gawk at the flipped car. On reaching the restroom door, she knocks and announces herself to Wen.
Wen shows Qoqa where the spray hit the wall and floor. Qoqa motions for Asuka and Wen to stay back, and then carefully gathers samples. The stuff's appearance and scent offer no clues – identification will require lab work. Once Qoqa is done, she raids a maintenance closet (locked, though not for long with Asuka's help) for powerful cleansers that she knows will break down most contact poisons. Then Qoqa cleans up the toxin carefully and thoroughly; fortunately, nobody walks in while she's doing this. After that, the three women leave the room.
Meanwhile, in the street out front, the police finish collecting evidence and taking statements from witnesses. They leave Zhang to go his own way – from their perspective, he's just another bystander – but ask Vinnie to come to the precinct house with them. Vinnie agrees, and subtly signals to Zhang to go help Asuka, Qoqa, and Wen. As Vinnie leaves in a police car, Zhang spots the women emerging from the court building and links up with them.
After a brief discussion, the decision is that since Qoqa wasn't visible during the day's events, she should safeguard her low profile by returning to the hotel on her own. Wen and Zhang will escort Asuka. Without Vinnie to drive them – and indeed, without a vehicle – they must be cautious about this. After all, Vinnie spotted men try to follow him yesterday, and the heat has been turned up several notches since then! Thus, the Agents' strategy is to switch between cabs and subway rides several times along the way, trading speed for misdirection.
This precaution proves wise: On the first taxi ride, Wen spots a minivan shadowing the cab. When the Agents disembark with Asuka at the subway station, the van stops nearby and two men hop out and disappear into the crowd. An attempt to convince a policeman that somebody is following proves unsuccessful – the cop takes a good look around, but when he sees neither the van nor suspicious men lurking nearby, he rolls his eyes, mumbles something about tourists, and says, "Please move along." Whoever is tailing the group seems to be good at this game.
Rather than enter the packed Tokyo underground with possible assassins in tow, the three double back and hail another cab. The Agents keep their eyes peeled for trouble. Sure enough, Wen sees one of the men who got out of the minivan push his way to the curb and point a phone at the departing taxi. As soon as the car turns a corner, Wen asks the driver to let her and her friends out, pays him to keep going for a while, and leads the others to yet another cab. Before long, though, the van somehow shows up again.
The Agents switch taxis yet again and finally lose the minivan. Wen continues to look for trouble, however. Before long, she thinks she spots it in the form of a barely visible helicopter hovering over the busy city. It's at the altitude that a news or police chopper might use, and may well be one or the other, but given the situation – and the ease with which the group's pursuers seemed to track cab changes – it raises Wen's suspicions. The three get out at the next subway station.
The next hour consists of a series of metro rides, with many transfers and a lot of doubling back. The only stop is at a large shopping complex, where everybody buys a new coat in an effort to somewhat change their appearance. Eventually, the group returns to ground level and strolls outside. Figuring that Vinnie must be done with the police by now, Wen gives him a call.
Vinnie is at the police station throughout all this. The police are courteous and don't accuse him of anything, but they're also thorough. Over the course of the evening, they take a statement from Vinnie, verify his ID (which is false but checks out), and have the rental agency from which Vinnie obtained the car verify that he's a legitimate client with suitable insurance. Vinnie tries to convince the supervising detective to share whatever the investigation turns up, but the man politely turns him down, saying that's a police matter. Moments after he leaves the precinct house, his phone rings – it's Wen, saying something about being shadowed and needing extraction.
As soon as the call ends, Vinnie makes a beeline for the subway. He heads to where he parked the spare car that Anabel obtained, moving as quickly as he can. He pauses only to verify that nobody has tampered with his ride. Before long, he's behind the wheel and on his way to the address Wen mentioned. He keeps an eye out for tails, but as far as he can tell, nobody is following him.
From the entrance of the shopping complex, Wen sees the helicopter reappear about two minutes after she contacts Vinnie. She immediately suspects that her call might have revealed her position, and asks everyone to ditch their phones. When Asuka takes out her phone to comply, it proves to be the same "collectable" model she had when the Agents met her! Wen and Zhang are shocked – Asuka is carrying a phone that's certainly known to her deceased father's Yakuza associates, and thus probably to rival gangsters and the TMPD, and conceivably to the CIA operators to whom Toru was selling information. Asuka reluctantly discards her prized possession in the street.
Zhang spots a nearby kiosk selling prepaid phones, buys several, and hands one each to Asuka and Wen. Nobody calls Vinnie or anybody else, however. The Agents leave their new phones switched off, for use only as needed. It takes some arguing, but Wen eventually convinces Asuka to agree to this precaution as well.
Before long, Vinnie shows up and draws Zhang's attention with a prearranged signal. Zhang leads the other two to the car. Wen keeps her eye on the crowd, but nobody seems to be following this time. As soon as everybody is aboard, Vinnie pulls out. An instant later, though, he spots a dark-colored minivan on his tail. He asks Wen to take a look at it, and she confirms that it's either the same van she saw earlier or one so similar that she can't tell it apart.
Vinnie curses and starts driving evasively. It takes many sharp corners, several illegal turns, and a few decidedly unsafe bursts of speed, but he eventually loses his pursuer in Tokyo's busy streets. It's a testament to his skill that he manages to pick his openings in a way that lets him accomplish this without attracting police attention or endangering pedestrians! Wen keeps an eye on the sky the whole time – but after a few minutes of Vinnie's crazy maneuvering, the helicopter is nowhere to be seen. This seems to suggest that it was indeed following Asuka's phone.
Ultimately, Vinnie pulls up at the team's hotel without any pursuing vehicles in tow. He drops off everybody else, then drives the car some distance away and parks it out of sight, on the theory that it would be safest to rent new vehicles in the morning. Meanwhile, Wen breaks off and takes the lift up to the floor where she has a room alongside Anabel, Jili, and Qoqa's, while Zhang escorts Asuka to her suite. Qoqa made it back in one piece ages ago, but by the time Vinnie rejoins Asuka and Zhang, it's quite late.
Despite the hour, the Agents use the hotel's phone system to set up a conference call, which Jili renders as secure as she's able, given the scant gear she has on hand. Zhang speaks first, delivering his theory about what's going on: His professional opinion as an ex-cop and security serviceman is that the assassin armed with poisonous spray and the helicopter-borne, phone-tracking spooks are pros – mobsters rarely operate that way. As dedicating massive assets to shadowing someone is excessive if you merely want to kill her, he also suspects that at least two different groups of pros are involved. Finally, he feels that there's no reason why one set of pros couldn't be working for the same side as the unsubtle thugs who approached Vinnie, but on a different level, as they appear to have similar goals.
The others accept Zhang's hypothesis, but it does raise the question of just who these pros might be. Top players include the American CIA, Russian FSB, and Chinese MSS, but this sort of thing wouldn't be beyond the U.K.'s MI6, Israel's Mossad, or several other services. Nobody can offer a motive for MI6 or Mossad, and while the FSB aren't exactly allies, it seems evident that if they wanted Asuka tracked or dead, they would have V manipulate the Agents to do it. On the other hand, Toru was openly in bed with the CIA, which may be all the reason the MSS needs – after all, the two are rivals, have a strong presence in Japan, and would benefit from having Yakuza puppets to use for direct action.
If any of this is true, then surviving the next few days of meetings and hearings might prove difficult for Asuka and quite possibly the Agents. The CIA and MSS are big dogs; relative to the Company, they have effectively bottomless budgets and manpower. Even if they decide to pull back and act indirectly, such action would probably be through Yakuza heavies operating with the home-ground advantage – and indeed the mob seems to be taking the initiative regardless of what its putative international backers might want, whether out of an honor code or straightforward greed.
Police protection would be nice – and given Vinnie's good show tonight, a reasonable request – but it's hard to gauge the extent to which the CIA, Yakuza, and other groups might have infiltrated the TMPD. Jili comments that she could at least use her back door into the police network to see whether the evening's events produced any kind of suspicious activity. After a few minutes, she reports that the police network was attacked in a relatively subtle way, and that the case file associated with Vinnie's adventures was deleted. When her associates joke, "What, did Chinese hackers get to it?", Jili responds, "Actually, what I'm looking at is consistent with that, so I'd say they did."
This revelation provokes a new discussion: If Jili's assertion about Chinese hackers and Asuka's claim that Toru sold intelligence on Company operations in Canada to the CIA are both correct, then perhaps this whole affair is China vs. the U.S.A. played out in a Yakuza succession war. In that case, the mysterious angels providing Hiroshi Kasahara and Kenji Tanaka with expensive lawyers might be national intelligence services. Each would have a reason to eliminate the other side's man, with Asuka becoming a secondary target of both. That would explain a lot.
Wen decides that fighting fire with fire is the only way to handle this. She draws an excellent sketch of the ladies' room assassin, and then uses her handy forgery gear to touch it up and scan it. After that, she asks Anabel to send the image to Terence West and V, along with the woman's modus operandi. It's unlikely that MI5 or the FSB would share information with freelancers, but their contacts might at least be able to hint whether this tidbit is consistent with what they know about current CIA or MSS operations in Tokyo.
Anabel makes the calls and sends the scans. Terence expresses severe doubts that the U.K.'s domestic security service would have any information on CIA or MSS operations in Japan, but he promises to pull what strings he can – largely out of personal dedication to Anabel. V is more forthcoming, clearly seeing a chance for the FSB to position Asuka as its puppet in Tokyo, in the process pulling off a coup against two rival intelligence agencies. She says that she'll have her staff look into this, and adds that her opinion is that poison spray is consistent with Mossad or MSS methods, but not CIA work.
With that done, Anabel calls Chaturvedi on one of Jili's secure phones. The handler isn't happy to hear about all the violence and espionage surrounding Asuka's inheritance claim – he had hoped that the Company would acquire a wealthy Japanese backer with minimal fuss. He says that at least the legal side of the proceedings is going well, as of today's update. Anabel requests that Chaturvedi send along Hamid, Klas, Lev, and Paul as backup, equipped as well as the Company can manage and stashed in another hotel; Chaturvedi promises to take care of that. When Anabel asks Chaturvedi whether he could recommend a lab to analyze the samples of contact poison that Qoqa collected, he can't, but he suggests that V would surely have that capability.
When Anabel calls back V and mentions Qoqa's samples, V is very interested indeed. She says that she'll arrange for a handoff at once, before the chemical degrades to the point where it can't be analyzed. After making Anabel wait on hold for a few minutes, she comes back on the line and dictates the address of an all-night noodle stand. She also describes the FSB contact and the signal he will give. All Anabel has to do is identify the man and drop the package in his coat pocket.
In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Vinnie meets Anabel and Wen in the parking garage, near the vehicle that Anabel, Jili, Qoqa, and Wen have been using. Vinnie takes the wheel and drive the other two across town. Wen's presence is mainly for added security, but that prove unnecessary. The drop goes smoothly, and the only delay is to let Wen order a feast of noodles as a late-night snack. After that, everybody gets as much sleep as the remains of the night allow.
By the time everyone is up and about, it's late morning. Fortunately, Asuka's meetings are once again in the afternoon. Today's plan is for Vinnie to drop off Asuka at the courts, with Zhang as her bodyguard and Wen playing the role of personal assistant. Once again, Qoqa will enter the area separately and lurk nearby, medical gear stuffed in her handbag. Vinnie will remain with the vehicle this time, just in case. While the others get ready, Vinnie ducks out and rents another car.
Around noon, Vinnie chauffeurs Asuka, Wen, and Zhang to the courts. He keeps an eye out for shadows but doesn't see anybody following him. When he pulls out after dropping off the other three, though, he spots a car tailing him. He takes his pursuer on a wild goose chase, and eventually loses the suspicious vehicle in traffic. After that, he parks his ride, visits a rental agency on foot, and rolls off the lot in yet another car.
For most of the day, things are largely boring for everyone. Qoqa wanders around the area playing sightseer, taking pictures of whatever other tourists are photographing and drinking far too much tea at cafés (which don't serve vodka). Vinnie cruises just a little further away, stopping only for lunch and keeping his phone close at hand. In the court building, Zhang once again stands watch outside the meeting room, while Wen goes inside with Asuka and listens to lawyers and clerks natter and chatter as they shuffle papers and tap away at notebook computers.
There is one interesting wrinkle, however. Somebody left a sealed, unaddressed envelope at the lawyers' offices overnight. It bears Asuka's name along with "Your Eyes Only – Evidence Supporting Your Claim." When the counselors hand this over to Asuka, Wen intercepts it and Asuka plays along: "My assistant will take that." In reality, Wen is leery of a letter bomb, and has the expertise needed to identify and disarm such a thing. When she's fairly certain that there's no explosive present, she carefully opens the packet for Asuka.
Within seconds of opening the bubble wrap-lined envelope, Wen's fingers tingle and she catches a whiff of solvent smell. An instant later, she feels nausea and muscle contractions coming on. Her military training kicks in as she recognizes the solvent as a vector used to deliver nerve agents and the symptoms as being consistent with such a poison! She just manages to gesture for everyone to leave the room before she's unable to talk. Her last words to Asuka are "Qoqa! Now! VX!"
Qoqa's phone rings seconds later. When Qoqa answers, she hears a frantic Asuka babbling about VX and Wen vomiting on the floor. Qoqa shouts back, "That courthouse will have an infirmary. Tell the medic that Wen needs atropine!" Even as she yells into the phone, she dashes toward the courts, looking around for anything useful as she runs. As luck would have it, there's an ambulance parked nearby. While it probably won't have pralidoxime aboard (then again, it might after the Aum Shinrikyo attack), that can wait for a few hours. It'll certainly have atropine.