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The Company
Time: Monday, August 5, 2013.
Place: Seoul, South Korea.
Last Event: Guns, guns, guns! And a grisly cleaning job in the basement.
It's afternoon before Qoqa is convinced that the 28th floor is sufficiently scrubbed down that she's willing to trust Gae's "security men" to finish removing evidence of bloody violence . . . and before Anabel is happy that everyone looks tidy and respectable. By now, Paul has been theorizing aloud for over an hour. In his opinion, CIA was definitely behind the morning's unpleasantness, but the action wasn't a result of the Americans tracking down their missing gizmo, much less the Agents. His analysis is that CIA caught wind of vast sums of Company money moving around in the shadows, and stumbled upon the electronics deal by blind luck.
Now isn't the time to explore that premise, however. As soon as Anabel tidies up Jili, Qoqa, Wen, and herself, she wants to go meet with Mr. Park as originally planned. The others agree. All seven Agents ride as far as the 28th floor, where Klas, Lev, and Paul disembark to look around some more. The women continue on to Park Ventures. Their three associates on the 28th pause for long enough to watch the elevator indicator climb steadily and stop at the correct level.
The personnel of Park Ventures greet Anabel and her staff politely and professionally. It isn't long before Mr. Park is ready for the meeting. He's visibly thrilled that the four women attended the party at the Gae residence on Saturday night. Though his stated reason for this is that it was an ideal opportunity to introduce future business partners, it's painfully obvious to Anabel that his interests were – and remain – somewhat goatish. Nevertheless, he keeps the deal in sight and is soon pushing paperwork across his desk.
Everything Park proposes is consistent with earlier negotiations; any dishonesty on his part was committed then, not in the ensuing contract. Anabel hands over the schematics and engineering specs on the "phone," and has Park sign a binding agreement not to disseminate the information to anyone but Mr. Gae's appointed representative. Jili whispers to Anabel that she strongly suspects that CIA got wind of the arrangement thanks to shoddy communications security between Park and Gae, and suggests doing something about that. Anabel responds by getting Park to promise to transfer the data and legal documents in person, claiming that her employers insist on it. Park vows to have his assistants hand-deliver the files to Gae's aides.
Meanwhile, down on the 28th floor, Klas, Lev, and Paul set out to see what else they can learn about the group's attackers. As the place is closed for renovations, each Agent openly carries an MP5SD6 taken from the hit squad . . . just in case. Assuming the leadership role as usual, Lev sketches out a search plan that divvies up the sprawl of offices and corridors among the three of them. Then the men fan out, Klas and Lev taking the far ends of the building while Paul investigates the area nearest the lifts.
Lev turns up nothing of interest in his zone – just paint and tarps. Klas has more luck; he hears a muffled sound from behind a closed door. Approaching stealthily, he finds the door unlocked and carefully eases it open a crack. As the room beyond is completely dark, he decides to risk flicking on the lights . . . which reveals four Korean men in workers' jumpsuits, who've obviously been assaulted and handcuffed face-down on the floor. Realizing that he isn't the best person to handle their rescue, Klas memorizes the location, switches off the lights, and backs away.
In the central area, Paul moves methodically through the maze of corridors, eyes open for anything of interest. After some twists and turns, he hears whispering from around the bend. Padding up to the corner to take a look, he sees a man dressed as a painter standing watch as two others circulate in and out of a nearby room, stacking a dolly with equipment cases. A nearby tarp suggests that their goal is to conceal all this stuff once the loading is done – and the sentry's suppressed pistol suggests trouble.
Realizing that fetching Klas and Lev would give the mysterious cleaners time to leave with the evidence, Paul elects to engage the men. While he isn't the world's best shot with a submachine gun, he has the luxury of being able to line up a careful shot from concealment. A burst to the legs drops the sentry, and then a burst to the head silences him, though not before he fires wildly and shoots out a light fixture. The weapons' suppressors do little to keep the sounds of gunfire from echoing through the barren halls, summoning allies on both sides – but Paul's friends are more than half a minute away, while his foes are just around the corner.
An instant after Paul strikes, a second man with a suppressed pistol appears, and then a third. Paul exchanges fire with the two. Despite the cover offered by the corner, he gets tagged on the left-hand side of his chest. It may be just a graze from a small-caliber subsonic round, but it still hurts. Paul decides to fall back around the bend and lure his opponents into a trap.
Paul's gambit works, after a fashion – his rivals do pursue him, but not as haphazardly as he had hoped. They round the corner swiftly, one man covering the other, both staying low and clear of the walls. Paul shoots and misses, and then his opponents spread out to give themselves clear fields of fire. Though the textbook move would be to retreat from such bad odds, discouraging pursuit with gunfire, Paul's overdeveloped sense of vengeance kicks in. He wants payback against the people who assaulted his lover, Jili, and who just now shot him.
With blood on his mind, Paul charges the nearer of his two foes. He catches another bullet in the process, but it isn't exactly a man-stopper. Fighting the pain, Paul grabs the shooter, spins him round, and uses him as a shield against the other gunman. In the process, he breaks his victim's arm, sending the man's pistol to the floor. When the second cleaner circles in for a clear shot, Paul abruptly pushes his grappling partner toward him and takes advantage of the distraction to close with him.
From that point on, things go Paul's way. The pair of small-caliber slugs in him serve mostly to spur him on – he has suffered far worse in his time. He proceeds to throw his opponents around, scuffing guns aside and stomping on any body part the men expose. When Lev arrives, he finds a bloodstained Paul foaming at the mouth and kicking a couple of badly battered ragdolls around the corridor. The gore and cartridge casings suggest that Qoqa will have more work to do.
When Klas shows up a few seconds later, he and Lev ask Paul to stay put while they look for a way to patch him up. Lev spots a first-aid kit in a nearby emergency cabinet, while Klas notices a medic's bag among the equipment that Paul's victims were stacking on the dolly. Klas uses this gear to stop Paul's bleeding and clean him up, though Klas warns Paul that there may be foreign matter in the wounds – another job for Qoqa.
Once Paul is no longer leaking, the Agents investigate what the cleaners were doing. Paul checks the room they were emptying, Klas looks over the dolly they were loading with gear, and Lev stands watch. Klas finds pretty much what he expects: cases for rifles, submachine guns, and pistols; boxes of ammo; a portable comms post; a break-and-enter toolkit; and a set of M201 injectors, boxed up with the antidote. Between this and the arrangements in the nearby office, Paul suspects that the cleaners were packing up a command center. More important, though, Paul spots something that looks disturbingly like an explosive or incendiary device.
At this point, Wen, Qoqa, Jili, and Anabel arrive, having concluded their business with Park. Qoqa has Paul sit still while she treats his wounds properly. Meanwhile, Wen examines the device Paul found. She believes it to be a chemical sprayer of some variety, not a bomb as such, but it sports no identifying markings that would help explain its exact purpose. Further inspection does reveal that it's actuated by pulling a pin, not by remote control, and that the pin is still in place. Consensus is that the cleaners intended to use it to cover their trail.
With those tasks done, the Agents stack the bodies and gear of the cleaning squad in the service elevator. Then Anabel uses a key that Gae's thugs gave her to transport everything to the basement nonstop. There, she warns Gae's heavies that there are injured painters handcuffed on the 28th floor, and gets them to promise to rescue the workers once she and her associates have left the building. Upstairs, the rest of the team – led by Qoqa – gets to work erasing the evidence of Paul's recent battle.