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The Company
Time: Friday, June 22, 2012 (wee hours).
Place: A scummy apartment building in London.
Last Event: Acquiring gear and visiting Terence West.
After a late-night summit to hear what Anabel learned from Terence, the Agents hit the hay. Come late Friday morning, everyone is rested and ready to work. The first order of business is to stake out the region highlighted on the map in the briefing materials. This task falls to the team's scouts and observers – Klas, Lev, Paul, Wen, and Zhang – with Vinnie as their driver. Vinnie announces that he has already appropriated and fixed up an abandoned van for the purpose, and intends to remain nearby in case rapid extraction is needed.
Without further ado, the stakeout squad sets out in Vinnie's graffiti-covered piece of junk. Everyone but Vinnie has binoculars, and all six carry radios (the ones modified by Hamid and Jili). Zhang and Vinnie also pack the group's stun guns, just in case. Vinnie drops off the others one at a time throughout the area of interest, and then finds a good place to fake a breakdown.
Anabel and Jili decide to support the operation from a safe distance – specifically, from computer terminals at a library. They depart at around the same as the others, leaving Hamid and Qoqa to hold the fort, and use the Tube for transportation. On arrival, they stock up on caffeine and begin the tedious task of poring over real-estate listings and news items pertaining to the neighborhood that their associates are staking out, with the goal of identifying buildings that have been either abandoned or for sale since at least the date on the photo that Qoqa says was taken in that area.
The day is long and boring for everyone. It's almost midnight when the team is reunited at the apartments, exchanging notes. It seems that Klas was the only one who had any luck: He spotted a man whom he recognized from a photo in the briefing packet – one of the bomb-maker's apparent bodyguards – darting down an alleyway. Paul sits down with Anabel and Jili's notes on the area's buildings and identifies two addresses of interest along that lane. The stakeout team decides to focus on these places tomorrow, after which Qoqa takes care of sore feet and backs, and everyone gets to bed.
On Saturday morning, the same six Agents head off to keep watch on the buildings that Paul singled out. Lev, Paul, and Wen take one, Klas, Vinnie, and Zhang get the other, and they all do their best to stay out of sight. At around 12:00, Klas sees the man he spotted on Friday, carrying a grocery bag this time, disappear through the door he's watching. Klas immediately calls the others on his radio, and Wen, Paul, and Lev show up shortly thereafter to increase the number of eyes on the situation.
Toward 16:00, those watching the alleyway observe the arrival of a second man, also present in some of the photos, carrying a satchel. He ducks through the same doorway as the first chap. At this stage, Zhang suggests over the radio that it would be a good idea to wait for these guys to leave and then follow them. Everyone agrees with this plan, but Vinnie points out that if the men leave in separate vehicles, the team will need a second set of wheels. Vinnie volunteers to take care of this, and then steals away, leaving his colleagues to keep tabs on the building.
Vinnie sees the perfect score up the alleyway and roughly 100 metres down the street: a decent-but-inexpensive four-door, parked outside a windowless brick building with nobody nearby. He sneaks up and gets to work. Just as he's about to pop the lock with his slim jim, though, he catches sight of movement in his peripheral vision. Unfortunately, he ducks too slowly. His face meets the side window with enough force to star the glass.
Being a tough nut, Vinnie shakes off the pain and wheels to confront his attacker. He finds not one but three hard-looking customers glaring at him: his original beefy assailant, whose stance and scars suggest "bare-knuckles boxer," flanked on one side by a skinny weasel with a flick knife and on the other by a club-swinging charmer with "Fuck Cozzers" tattooed across his forehead. The three are in no mood for conversation. Vinnie's attempts to defuse the situation verbally are met by "You tried to nick the wrong fucking car, you wanker!" Blows follow.
The fight is frantic and dangerous. Vinnie finds himself both cut (though not fatally) and clubbed. Fortunately, he manages to get out his stun gun and drop both of his armed attackers before they can really mess him up. Unfortunately, his unarmed opponent proves to be a raging bull, and completely ignores the one jolt he receives. Vinnie's last memory is of collapsing from his wounds and receiving a succession of vicious kicks on the ground.
None of Vinnie's allies hear this commotion, but after a while, Zhang wonders what's taking Vinnie so long – in the past, Vinnie has vanished, stolen a car, and returned in a fraction of the time he has been gone. Telling the others that he suspects trouble, Zhang darts quickly and quietly down the alley in search of Vinnie. On rounding the corner, he spots somebody sprawled in the street, and suspecting the worse, runs over to check on it. He finds Vinnie unconscious in a mess of broken auto glass and blood, stripped of his jacket, knife, radio, and stun gun.
Zhang radios the others for help. They sneak away from their objective and then break into a run, showing up in less than a minute. While Klas, Lev, and Wen see to Vinnie, Zhang zips off to locate a phone box from which to call Qoqa, and Paul dashes for the van. Paul and Zhang return at almost the same time, and Zhang warns that based Qoqa's reaction to his report of Vinnie's injuries, time is of the essence. Klas and Lev carefully lift Vinnie into the back of the van, and then Paul hits the gas.
The drive back goes as well as could be expected. Paul manages to make good time without attracting police attention, while Klas and Wen do what they can to stop Vinnie's bleeding. Before long, Klas and Lev are ferrying Vinnie upstairs to the empty apartment, which is where Qoqa said she would be waiting. Wen notices the watcher in the window across the street paying attention to the commotion, but decides to leave that alone for the time being.
Upstairs, Qoqa gets to work sewing up wounds and repositioning shattered ribs while keeping Vinnie breathing. Fortunately, she has seen worse – far worse – and has the job done quickly and efficiently. Qoqa keeps a close eye on Vinnie, but it looks as if he'll live, although he'll likely be off his feet for a couple of weeks.
With nothing to do but wait, the others decide to turn in early so that they can pay a pre-dawn visit to the building they were watching. In the wee hours of Sunday, June 24, Paul drives Klas, Lev, Wen, and Zhang to the objective. He parks a few blocks away, and then all five Agents sneak over to the alleyway. After 30 minutes, it appears that nothing is going on in the area – there are no lights, and nobody spots anyone lurking nearby, much less activity.
After a brief conference, the squad agrees that it's time to take a closer look. This is a job for Zhang, who quietly clambers onto the roof, finds an old skylight, and squints inside. It's extremely dark down there, but he neither sees lights nor hears any signs of life. He slips inside and climbs down to ground level like a monkey, using the old factory's ironwork like a ladder.
Inside, Zhang notices three things of interest: two caravans and a stack of large drums of the sort used for industrial chemicals. He can't get a look inside the caravans, as they're locked and have their windows painted over; his police training tells him that this would offer a simple-but-effective countermeasure against someone peering into the building with a fiber-optic camera. As for the drums, they're unlabeled, and Zhang opts not to poke at them – not when they may well be part of a bomb!
Realizing that he can't accomplish much without technical assistance and a lot more light, Zhang decides to see what he can do about letting the others in. A systematic tour of the interior perimeter turns up two large, garage-style entrances and three smaller ones. Four of the doors are sealed with heavy, high-quality chain and expensive padlocks, both of which would easily defeat low-end bolt-cutters. The fifth, a small exit to the alleyway, isn't chained, but Zhang can see some sort of box attached to it – though he cannot tell whether this is an alarm, a lock, a bomb, or something else again.
At this juncture, Zhang elects to leave the way he came in. He zips up the ironwork and back out onto the roof, where he carefully closes the skylight. Then he climbs silently down to the others and reports on the situation inside. In his opinion, a solid brick building containing a deliberate "blind" surrounded by barrels of chemicals, protected by heavy doors secured using tough chains and locks, is very suspicious indeed. He suggests returning with flashlights, lockpicks, heavy bolt-cutters, and a few portable fire-escape ladders – the sort that roll up and fit into a backpack.