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The Company
Time: Monday, January 2, 2012 (morning).
Place: The Artist's house, outside Kyoto, Japan.
Last Event: Plotting an intricate ruse to falsify many deaths.
Upon receiving the shipment of biomedical gear from Darmatech, Qoqa proceeds to spend the day collecting biopsies from all and sundry, carefully preserving each specimen according to the instructions included with the instruments. Her efficient, systematic way of working gets the job done quickly enough that one of the Artist's ninja is able to drive the carefully packaged samples into the city that night and send them on their way to Darmstadt via courier. Then it's time to wait again. The Agents decide that as their current base of operations hasn't been attacked and thus is probably unknown to their enemies, it would be wise to lie low and wait for Darmatech to do its thing.
Over the next two weeks, the Agents work on several tedious-but-important elements of their plan. One such task is helping the Artist pack her sculpture into a series of containers that the Company arranges to have dropped off and picked up, no questions asked. The last of these – being the "escape capsule" – is the subject of much work by Qoqa and Vinnie, who outfit it to be as comfortable as possible and do what they can to ensure that it will pass inspection as an art shipment. Hamid and Jili are also very busy, systematically altering surveillance records and writing complex, disintegrating code to take care of the final day, when they'll be off-site in a container and unable to intervene directly. A beneficial side effect of the enforced stay with Sakata and friends is that the team's spoken Japanese improves greatly.
On the morning of Monday, January 16, another large shipment arrives for the Artist, this one refrigerated and apparently consisting of "gourmet sausage" from Germany. It seems that Chaturvedi's bribes and forged documents worked well, because the delivery isn't accompanied by angry officials or tiresome paperwork. The ninja fetch this and truck it back to the house, taking care to make the whole production look like it has something to do with packing art for the Artist's upcoming tour. In the crates, the Agents find the cultured tissue from Darmatech, meticulously preserved and loosely disguised as sausage. Everyone hopes that no one who inspected the contents was tempted to steal a bite to eat . . .
The meat's arrival triggers the final stages of the Agents' plan. Qoqa and Vinnie put the finishing touches on the specially rigged escape container, stocking it with perishables and hiding outward signs that it has been altered. Indoors, meanwhile, Anabel and Lev carefully plan and script the false assault on the house, working out believable tactics and "stage directions." Klas prepares hollow-point ammunition that will pancake on the team's body armor – part of believably simulating a few casualties during the scripted raid – and then carefully loads all the handguns with it. Wen lectures the ninja on their role in the upcoming drama, going into detail on the handguns, ammo, and body armor in order to minimize the odds of real injuries. All these preparations keep Jili and Hamid extremely busy looping and altering surveillance records to hide the activity!
By evening, everything looks good to go. This leaves the matter of building a bomb big enough to obliterate any incriminating evidence or errors in the plan – a device that will leave investigators with no doubts as to the fate of everyone present. The first steps down this path are to steal a truck from one of the high-crime areas that Anabel identified earlier in the month, and then to pay late-night visits to seven sites where ANFO ingredients can be found, as painstakingly researched by Hamid. To pull off eight thefts in a single night, most of them involving heavy bags and drums of chemicals, the Agents conclude that they'll need a good-sized crew: Hamid to take care of alarms, Vinnie to handle locks and vehicles, and Klas, Lev, Wen, and Zhang for stealthy manpower.
The ninja drive the six thieves out to the general area of one of the truck depots that Anabel selected, drop them off, and pull out at once. As soon as the ninja are gone, the Agents move up to take a look. Vinnie quickly spots a suitable vehicle for the bomb, sneaks over to it, breaks in, and gets it started. If anybody hears the engine, nobody cares – Vinnie rolls out of the lot unchallenged and picks up the other five. The next stop is the nearest of the agricultural and chemical warehouses that Hamid picked as ideal places to steal oxidizing agents in bulk.
The seven thefts that follow are routine, as thefts go. All seven targets have basic, civilian-quality alarms and cameras which Hamid easily defeats, whereupon Vinnie takes care of the locks, none of which challenge his skills. Though two of the warehouses have watchmen, Wen easily distracts them by playing at being a young girl looking for a lost dog – her deception greatly assisted by the childlike features that Darmatech's surgeons gave her. The physical work of carrying away the chemicals and fuel goes quickly and quietly, and Vinnie is his usual cool self when it comes to driving. It's around 05:00 on Tuesday morning when the stolen truck laden with booty rolls up to the Artist's house, where everybody grabs a few hours of sleep.
Later that morning, Anabel verifies that the shipping company is still on schedule to pick up the escape container that night, the cover story (backed by Company-provided documents) being that it's full of art destined for Taiwan. Next, the Agents make sure that Sakata, the Artist, and the ninja are packed and ready to go, and know their parts in the night raid. After that, most of the team takes a walk around the property to confirm that the container is positioned in such a way that the men coming for it won't be able to see the parking area behind the house, where the truck bomb will be parked – and Wen uses this opportunity to pick the best place to park the bomb for destructive effect. Meanwhile, Hamid and Jili check that the surveillance cameras are still blind to what's going on. Then Qoqa starts a final pass over the property to "clean" away all traces of the group's presence, while everybody else boards the truck full of bomb ingredients and hits the road.
Vinnie drives to an out-of-season family park that Wen spotted during an earlier trip, taking great care not to draw any kind of attention to the stolen truck. As soon as the coast looks clear, he turns off the highway, where the Agents deftly lift the gate, admit the truck to the grounds, and park behind the concealment of trees. The place is completely abandoned, which is exactly what the group needs if they're to spend several hours assembling a huge bomb.
The task of mixing fuel and oxidizing agents falls to Wen, who conscripts most of the team to help her lug drums of fuel and bags of chemicals. Vinnie, however, goes off by himself and improvises a booster charge from small-arms ammo and primer caps, and then rigs a timer from a clock and other parts scrounged over the past few weeks. He also puts together a fake cell-phone detonator. As daylight fades, Wen and Vinnie carefully assemble the ANFO, booster, and timer into a huge time bomb that Wen estimates should be comparable to a one-tonne general-purpose aircraft bomb – more than enough to turn the Artist's property into a crater and rain down shreds of evidence almost a kilometer away. Then Paul skillfully plants the decoy phone detonator in a manner that will likely see it sent flying by the blast, hopefully giving the impression that the device was remotely detonated, thereby disguising the fact that it was on a timer.
It's a little after dark when the bomb-makers return to the house. When they arrive, Qoqa informs them that she has cleaned the house, workshop, and property – as well as the truck used by the ninja – of any and all traces of the Agents' presence. Jili and Hamid head inside to verify that their code is ready to run, inserting a day of recorded surveillance logs into the record to cover today, and then time-stamping all of tonight's events as happening tomorrow, just before real-time recording resumes and the bomb goes off. With that done, and the cameras looking on blindly, Anabel and Vinnie get into the cab of the bomb truck, while the rest of the team boards the SWAT van (with Hamid at the wheel), and then both vehicles pull out onto the lane.
On Jili's mark, the surveillance cameras roll and the false assault begins. It starts with Hamid "defeating" the security on the front gate. Then the two vehicles creep slowly and carefully down the lane with their lights out, ultimately pulling up behind the house, where they're completely out of sight of the highway and the container sitting out front awaiting pickup. Vinnie is careful to park the bomb in the spot where Wen told him it would do the most damage. As soon as the convoy comes to a stop, it's time to put on a show.
All of the Agents leap from their vehicles, brandishing firearms. While most of them sneak up to the house, Vinnie stays with the truck to prepare the bomb, fiddling with something in the back of the vehicle and then emerging to punch a code into a cell phone. Right on cue, the rest of the group breaks into the house and abducts Sakata and the Artist at gunpoint. The ninja give chase, leading to an exchange of gunfire that sees one of the ninja shot while another shoots Vinnie. Both men are hit in their concealed body armor, which causes the hollow-point ammo to flatten out with a convincingly nasty kick but no penetration. The "dead" ninja takes a convincing dive, while Vinnie makes a great show of fumbling with his phone . . .
Then Anabel yells, "Cut!" As soon as she does, the Agents dig out the cultured tissue and carry it over to the bomb truck. Qoqa carefully plants this in such a way that the blast will scatter it around the property. Then she collects the clothing that everyone was wearing for the staged attack and uses this to cover the meat, both to protect it from vermin and to add another layer of believable evidence. Once that's done, she gives Jili the nod to do her thing.
Jili dashes inside to make sure that the surveillance footage of the raid – and logs of Hamid's tampering with the gate and back-door security – will appear in the digital records as happening precisely 24 hours in the future. She also verifies that the system will shut down right on cue with Vinnie being shot, while Vinnie ensures that the time bomb is set to match this timing down to the millisecond. Then Jili does one final check to ensure that anyone examining the records for the intervening day will see nothing interesting happening. Once Jili is done, Qoqa cleans up behind her and everybody retires to the escape container, leaving the meat-draped vehicles and ticking bomb hidden from sight behind the house.
After that, everything depends on luck and the Company's shipping arrangements. From the noises outside and the container's motion, though, it seems as though the shipping company is on time. Listening intently, the Agents hear nothing that suggests that the work crew noticed anything out of the ordinary. The next day passes slowly and uncomfortably, with 18 people – 10 Agents, Asuka, Sakata, the Artist, and five ninja – crammed into just over 28 square metres of floor space. However, the team's experience with human-smuggling operations pays off here; among other things, Qoqa and Vinnie installed creature comforts such as half-height bunks.
When the 24-hour mark comes on the evening of Wednesday, January 18, 2012, the group is in a container on a ship a few days out of Taipei – and if all went well, there was a huge blast on an isolated property outside Kyoto.