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The Company
Time: Friday, March 16, 2012 (early evening).
Place: Vancouver International Airport.
Last Event: Relieving two suspicious characters of travel documents.
The first-class boarding announcement for the flight that "Bruce" is catching comes at around 18:00. Wen and Zhang – the team's speediest Agents – lurk nearby, ready to dash in to deal with any trouble. However, their services aren't needed; "Bruce" and Zulfiqar make it safely to their plane. Just before the general boarding call, Wen sees the two suspicious men waiting in the gate area reach for the papers that Anabel stole. When the pair realize that their documents are missing, they simply leave at a brisk walk. Wen tries to shadow them, but they lose her in the crowd.
A short time later, at the gate where the Agents' flight to Mexico will be departing in an hour, two female CBSA officers approach Anabel. They seem rather serious, and say only that there has been a "serious complaint" about her. They're quite insistent that she come with them to answer some questions. Anabel decides to cooperate rather than cause a scene with couple of uniformed public-safety officers, figuring that she can probably talk her way out of trouble. Paul decides to shadow the three as they walk away, just in case.
Anabel finds herself escorted some distance from the gate to an isolated side corridor, where the CBSA officers stop at a heavy door. One of the women unlocks the door and the other motions for Anabel to step through. Anabel is then ushered down a quiet concrete staircase. Behind her, the door shuts with the audible click of a heavy lock. Outside, Paul subtly confirms that he has been locked out.
As she's led downstairs, Anabel starts to have second thoughts about the situation. In particular, one of the CBSA officers strikes her as "not quite right." Thus, Anabel isn't completely surprised when this woman unlocks another door to reveal, not a bustling office, but a dark broom closet. When her other escort moves behind her and audibly draws some kind of weapon, Anabel is already ducking and lunging forward, causing the first blow to fall short. However, Anabel's narrow escape comes at the cost of stumbling into the closet. When she wheels to face her assailants, she finds them blocking the exit, one wielding a stun gun and the other brandishing a collapsible baton.
The ensuing struggle is overwhelmingly stacked against Anabel. While she puts up a fight, she's no Paul or Wen. She's soon shocked, stunned, pushed to the ground, injected with some sort of drug, bound with duct tape, and finally whacked on the head with a baton for some reason. Just before everything goes dark, Anabel sees the men from the gate area appear and help the two fake CBSA officers drag her through a doorway to a waiting van.
Upstairs, Paul doesn't hear Anabel's shouts or the sound of a scuffle – the airport is noisy, and there's a heavy door and a staircase in the way. Thus, he simply stays put, waiting for Anabel or the CBSA officers to emerge. As the team's departure time draws near, Vinnie grows concerned and joins Paul, who fills him in on the situation: Anabel is still in there, most likely being interrogated about stealing identity documents, which is a serious crime. Knowing that Paul is an ex-cop, Vinnie volunteers to take over his vigil while he finds a law officer and make some casual inquiries.
Paul easily locates a security station, where he asks the duty officers whether they have any news about his traveling companion, who was taken off for questioning by a couple of CBSA women. It soon comes out that there have been no complaints about anybody fitting Anabel's description. Paul manages to spin this as cause for concern, pointing out that there may be fake CBSA personnel walking around, and convincing the security staff to check out the door through which Anabel was taken. Before long, a mixed group of CBSA, CATSA, and RCMP officers, airport guards, and so on is following Paul to the doorway, where they examine the locks and surveillance cameras. A few minutes later, they announce that they've found signs of a struggle, and ask Paul to return to their post with them.
On seeing and hearing this fuss from where he's lurking, Vinnie returns to the rest of the team. He informs the others that Anabel may well have been grabbed, and that Paul has made contact with every kind of cop and guard imaginable. Vinnie asks Hamid and Jili whether they can track Anabel's phone, but they explain that this isn't an option without specialized gear. Thus, the Agents simply gather their carry-on bags, leave the gate area, and get ready to act, while Vinnie returns to keep an eye on Paul. Vinnie shows up in time to see Paul being shown Anabel's phone, which has been stomped to bits. Then Paul disappears into a back room with several men in uniform.
Paul gets the impression that the federal officers questioning him are worried about a possible abduction on their watch, a crime made all the worse by the perpetrators posing as their colleagues. They check out his papers as a matter of course, but it seems that Chaturvedi paid top dollar for a strong identity, because this raises no questions. Once the officials are certain that they know who Paul is, and are convinced that he's actually Anabel's acquaintance, they work on getting a formal statement from him. Realizing that time is of the essence, Paul uses his knowledge of law-enforcement thinking to convince the officers that it might be wise to have someone who can recognize the victim view the surveillance camera footage at once.
Getting suitable permissions takes a few minutes, but finally, the gaggle of CBSA, CATSA, and RCMP officers escort Paul to a small room, where a technician sets up a video monitor and a computer. The techie soon starts replaying surveillance videos, which reveal that the cameras in the staircase were disabled before Anabel was grabbed, but also that the abductors didn't disable the exterior cameras for whatever reason – there's a clear shot of a van pulling up and Anabel being bundled into it. Everybody watching agrees that it looks as if two criminals obtained CBSA uniforms and access to restricted areas, and then abducted Anabel with the aid of two accomplices.
At this point, Paul recognizes the men carrying Anabel in the video as the ones she pickpocketed, and decides to tell the assembled lawmen that Anabel literally ran into those two earlier. He leaves out the part about picking pockets, of course, and simply says that Anabel stumbled. The technician calls up some footage from a camera watching the gate area and plays back the entire incident for everyone present. Fortunately, Anabel's theft isn't visible from this angle, but it's quite evident to all that the men at the gate were the same pair who later assisted the fake CBSA women.
Paul plays up the situation for all it's worth, aiming to muster as much official help as possible in the search for Anabel. He underlines that Anabel is attractive and clearly got the attention of these men before being grabbed, hinting at the possibility that they might have kidnapped Anabel to sell her into prostitution ("Maybe these guys think that someone leaving on a trip won't be missed for a while."). He also draws attention to the plate number on the abductors' van. This isn't easy to see in the video, but Paul's trained eye manages to pick it out, and one of the RCMP officers says that she'll get it out to the Vancouver PD at once.
Eventually, Paul does give a statement, in the process explaining that the man taking Anabel's photo in the surveillance footage – Hamid – is the victim's boyfriend, and ought to be told of the situation. Paul further notes that he was traveling with his own girlfriend (Jili), who might be worried about him. Paul's story about two couples traveling together to Mexico on holiday seems to work for the law officers, and they bring in Hamid and Jili to give statements of their own. Hamid's photos of Anabel and two of her abductors prove to be of great interest, and the best of these are sent out to the Vancouver PD along with the van's plate number.
It takes Hamid, Jili, and Paul considerable time to deal with several levels of law-enforcement and security bureaucracy. The three manage to keep Klas, Lev, Qoqa, Vinnie, Wen, and Zhang in the loop via surreptitious text messages. The latter group waits in a nearby lounge, ready to move. However, until they know where to go, they can do nothing but wait and hope that their associates somehow glean a few clues from federal officers whose job is to interrogate them, not share information.
Anabel is awakened by cold water and the pain of tight bonds biting into her limbs. Above her is a dirty corrugated metal roof hung with industrial lighting, and she can't turn her head to look to either side. Before long, she sees faces: the two women who were posing as CBSA officers and the two goons whose papers she pilfered. As soon as Anabel's captors realize that she's awake, they start with the waterboarding. Between the drug they injected earlier and the torture they're gleefully applying now, Anabel loses track of how much time passes or whether she tells them anything . . . her next lucid moment comes as she's being carried into a big industrial oven of the sort used to cure paint on auto bodies.
Unsure whether her torturers are coming back for her or just leaving her to bake to death, Anabel struggles with her bonds. Luckily for her, she was tied up tightly but not particularly well – or perhaps the heat is causing the rope to soften or loosen in some way. Whatever the reason, she manages to slip free. Avoiding the heat lamps as best she can, she goes over and listens at the little maintenance door she was carried through. She can hear her captors out there discussing what she said and the information on the SIM they removed from her phone. She decides not to pull the safety lever on the hatch and stagger out in front of them.
Looking around, Anabel realizes that there's a much larger entrance at the far end of the oven, probably the main door used to load and unload the oven during routine operation. It, too, has a safety lever, and Anabel decides to pull it, lift the gate a little, and roll out the crack. Pausing to listen for trouble, she hears her abductors' discussion continuing – it seems that they didn't hear her escape. Risking a look around the corner, she sees that she's in some sort of large auto shop, and that the only exits from the building are in full view of her captors. However, there is a small office at the back of the place, half a storey above the shop floor, and offices often contain phones.
Realizing that she could crawl along the oven's roof to reach the back of the shop and approach the office relatively unseen, Anabel decides to take the risk. She climbs up the oven's exterior – which is insulated, thankfully – as quietly as she can. Then she creeps along the flat top, staying as far back from the edge as possible. From there, she inches onto the narrow flange joining the upper and lower courses of the corrugated metal wall, and sidles toward the office in the shadows behind her abductors. Finally, she drops down by the office door and steals inside.
The office is cluttered and dirty, but it does have a phone – and thankfully, the phone is connected. A quick, quiet search turns up a bunch of matchbooks advertising this place, which is apparently a business that specializes in custom bodywork and paint jobs for cars and motorcycles. Once Anabel knows where she is, she dials Wen's mobile phone. When Wen answers, Anabel fills her in on the situation – where she is and how many hostiles there are – and requests immediate aid. Wen promises to get right on that, and ends the call.
As soon as Wen tells her associates about Anabel's situation, they get moving. Vinnie leads Klas, Lev, Qoqa, Wen, and Zhang out to the long-term parking area. While Vinnie professionally finds, breaks into, and starts a convenient minivan, Wen texts Hamid, Jili, and Paul to bring them up to speed on the situation. After that, Vinnie pulls out, with Qoqa sitting beside him and the other four ready to jump out of the rear. He stays under the speed limit to avoid unwelcome police attention, but he does everything else in his power to reach the body shop as quickly as possible.
At the body shop, Anabel makes staying out of sight her top priority. Before her companions arrive, though, it becomes clear that her abductors have further questions for her, and one of them goes to fetch her from the oven. When her captors discover that she's missing, they pull out guns and start searching the place. Anabel flattens herself out of sight and stays as quiet as possible, hoping that the office – being far from the exits – is the last place they'll look.
A block from the body shop, Vinnie lets Zhang out so that he can sneak over to the place from behind and potentially infiltrate via a back door, a vent, or a skylight. Then Vinnie hits the gas and drives past the front. Everything is locked down, though, and there's no way to see what's going on inside. Vinnie frowns at this, and tells Klas, Lev, Qoqa, and Wen to belt up. As they comply, Vinnie backs down a cross-street, pointing the minivan at one of the large aluminum doors on the front of the shop . . .
Without further warning, Vinnie steps on the gas and rockets toward the body shop. Picking up speed the whole time, he plows the minivan into the big roll-up door. The aluminum panel twists, pulls free of its moorings, and is carried along on the nose of the vehicle. As soon as the van is inside the building, Vinnie brakes expertly and stops it with a controlled crash. Everybody is a bit shaken up, and the airbags inflate in Vinnie and Qoqa's faces, but there are no casualties.
The instant the minivan slams to a stop, Klas, Lev, and Wen all bail out, rolling for cover behind heavy tool carts and auto hoists. Vinnie, quite accustomed to this kind of thing, somehow pushes the airbag aside, gets his door open, and hits the deck as well. Only Qoqa is left inside the vehicle, struggling with her airbag. The Agents' first priority is to assess the situation visually and grab whatever improvised weapons the auto shop has to offer – mainly, heavy tools and machine parts.
Anabel's abductors are somewhat taken by surprise by Vinnie's Hollywood entrance. Two of them simply stare at the crashed minivan in disbelief. However, the other two raise their weapons and fire. As it turns out, they're packing Glock 18 machine pistols. One of them riddles the vehicle with bullets, while the other blazes away at Klas' hiding place. Qoqa and Klas are both hit, but fortunately, their concealed body armor stops the relatively low-powered 9mm rounds.
The next few seconds are pure chaos. The other two hostiles bring their machine pistols into play, and then all four of them hose down far side of the shop, shooting holes in anything and everything the Agents might be using for cover. The Agents regain their feet behind cover, doing their best to close the gap without getting shot – except for Qoqa, who struggles desperately to escape the wrecked minivan. For the most part this works, although Klas gets clipped in the neck. While he doesn't face certain death, the injury is definitely serious.
Ultimately, the Agents manage to advance to within a few metres of their rivals and charge from cover while most of their opponents are reloading. A barrage of hurled objects followed by body slams take two of the group's foes to the ground, where Vinnie and Wen deliver a brutal kicking and beating. Anabel joins in by running out of the office and dropping a heavy chair on the head of one of her abductors. There's a brief panic when one of the still-armed, still-dangerous enemies turns to attack Anabel, who isn't wearing armor, but Wen comes to the rescue with a Hail Mary of a flying kick that scores a knockout. The melee ends when Lev manages to grab his evasive foe an instant after she reloads and a heartbeat before she shoots, whereupon Qoqa drives a screwdriver into the woman's staring eye.
When the short, violent clash is over, three of Anabel's four captors are prone on the floor, battered unconscious by hurled tools, rugby tackles, punches, kicks, and stomps. The fourth is quite dead, shanked in the eye by Qoqa. As for the Agents, mostly they have no injuries worse than a bit of whiplash and some nasty bruising where their armor stopped bullets. However, Klas is bleeding badly, his hand clamped over his neck wound, and Anabel – formerly running on adrenaline – is on the verge of collapse, having been beaten, drugged, tortured, and baked alive.