![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Company
Time: March 15, 2010 (evening).
Place: Beirut.
Last Event: Working out how to get someone inside the target area.
Because the target hotel has no vacancies over March 19-21 and isn't hiring before March 22, it will be tricky to get an Agent inside. The plan is to infect some of the housekeeping personnel with a minor-but-unpleasant gastrointestinal ailment, creating a need for temporary staff. Qoqa's significantly above-average qualifications should be enough to get her hired, and her references will check out flawlessly – rigging false phone numbers is trivial, and most of the crew are skilled liars. The challenging bit is pulling off biological warfare on a tight time and equipment budget!
The Agents – minus Hamid and Zhang, who are at the hotel for the night – discuss their options. Eventually, they agree to a few basic objectives:
1. Obtain false ID as public-health officials, which should make it far easier to get near suitably sick people and/or vital equipment.
2. Procure necessary laboratory equipment. After careful consideration, the labs of the American University of Beirut (AUB) are singled out for a night visit.
3. Collect samples from sick people. All of the team's medical experts agree that kids are by far the best breeders of GI bugs. A visit to any large school, with suitable false ID, should do the trick.
Anabel gets to work on the first goal, researching the general area of the city where the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) is headquartered. Then she and Lev hop in the car, drive to within a few blocks of the neighborhood, and – staying separate but in sight – take a walk. It isn't long before Anabel spots what she's looking for: a café. Sure enough, some off-duty MOPH employees are present, and one or two of them have left badges clipped to jackets. On cue, Lev creates a distraction by spilling a coffee and bellowing in Hebrew, suggesting that he's an Israeli (and thus possibly an illegal visitor to Lebanon). An instant later, Anabel has skillfully snatched a badge.
Lev and Anabel return to the yacht unharassed. Wen immediately gets to work on the pilfered badge, carefully replacing the photo with Ben's, altering the name, and adjusting the job title. This doesn't take very long – she's done before midnight. After some discussion, the Agents decide not to create additional fakes wholesale, as they would likely look makeshift and attract unwanted attention.
At around 00:30 on March 16, Anabel, Jili, Qoqa, and Vinnie get ready to tackle the second item on the list: stealing equipment from AUB. Vinnie takes a few precautions just to be sure, swapping license plates and plotting a circuitous, indirect route before driving to the university. A few blocks from the Department of Biology, Anabel hops out. Her plan is to scream and attract security, claim that she was assaulted, and then send the campus cops on a wild goose chase looking for her attacker.
Approaching the objective, Vinnie spots an arm gate and a camera that might prove troublesome. He stops out of sight and lets Jili out. She hops over a shrubbery, sneaks up on the unmanned security cabin, and quietly works her electronic magic. A few minutes later, she steps into sight and gestures for Vinnie to come through the open gate, past the blinded camera. Then she reconnects everything behind the car. Vinnie pulls up in the shadows, as close to the building as he dares.
A few minutes later, Anabel starts her act. Screaming, activating every emergency response device in sight, and banging on the window of a security office, she soon has the guards rushing to see what's going on. They buy her story about a mugger and possible molester attacking her. When she begs them to help her find the scumbag who grabbed her backpack (which contained her ID, naturally) and then runs off into the dark, the men hastily move to accompany her.
Jili, Qoqa, and Vinnie capitalize on the distraction to break into the Biology building. They find a secondary entrance that wasn't properly locked and sneak inside. Qoqa takes the lead, looking for labs that Ben identified as belonging to research groups doing work that requires the equipment he needs but that isn't scary enough to necessitate serious security measures. The Agents move stealthily, and the only person they encounter is a research scientist. Qoqa handles the situation by explaining that she and her colleagues are slightly jetlagged researchers visiting from away.
The three burglars check out Ben's list of candidate labs until they find one that's devoid of late-night experimenters. Vinnie unlocks the door, and while he and Jili stand lookout, Qoqa identifies the necessary gear. The apparatus isn't especially heavy – just delicate. Vinnie and Qoqa have both done this sort of thing before, though, and carefully stash the equipment in boxes, which they stack on a small wheeled lab cart. Before long, they're ready to roll.
The trip back to the car goes well – everybody moves quickly and quietly, and there are no challenges or alarms. Qoqa skillfully packs the gear in the trunk, Vinnie takes the wheel, and Jili handles the security systems on the way out. Once again, Vinnie follows a somewhat indirect route. Back at AUB, Anabel eventually fills out a bogus incident report and takes her leave, having the guards call her a Banet Taxi "pink cab." She goes as far as the city center and then switches cabs . . . just in case.
During this whole caper, Zhang is out and about at the hotel. Sticking to shadows and avoiding cameras in the halls, he does a thorough foot reconnaissance. He takes many photos of elevators, staircases, windows, doors, locks, fire alarms, cameras, etc. When Jili returns from the late-night lab burglary, she finds her Company inbox clogged with hundreds upon hundreds of images e-mailed by Zhang – everything anybody who plans to rob or raid that hotel could ever want. Then everybody gets some rest.
Mid-morning on March 16, it's time to check off the third item on the list. Anabel picks out a large school to visit. Then she and Ben dress conservatively – Ben sporting his doctored MOPH badge – and work out a simple cover story: Ben is a visiting WHO/OMS epidemiologist from Canada, sent to the school by MOPH as part of some vague children's health initiative. Anabel is his local guide and translator.
Once that's settled, Ben and Anabel drive over to the school. There's no meaningful security; getting in is a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Anabel has little trouble introducing Ben to the overworked school principal . . . who promptly fobs off the Agents on the overworked school nurse. After a lot of rather boring talk and wading through scribbled notes, a student eventually comes in sick. Given that Ben is a physician, the school officials are only too happy to let him attend to the boy. Ben treats him (he really is a doctor!), and in the process makes sure to collect liberal samples to culture.
Everybody is back on the Cephalopod by late afternoon. Ben and Qoqa immediately get to work down in the engineering spaces. Ben focuses on setting up the labware and preparing his cultures. Qoqa focuses more on sealing off the area from the rest of the yacht, just in case. The result is hardly a high-tech, high-containment facility, but it will do.
Over the course of March 16-17, the Agents see to their prep work. Ben labors away in his lab, assisted as necessary by Qoqa. Zhang and Hamid return from the hotel, and dump another load of reconnaissance photographs – this bunch including quite a few photos of hotel staff, as well as some snapshots of security panels taken by Hamid. Jili and Hamid then start preparing miniature cameras and microphones for future bugging operations. Klas, Lev, and Wen head into the city, rent rooms at hotels near the objective, and start keeping an eye on the other patrons and the streets below.