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The Company
Time: June 12, 2010.
Place: Belfast, Northern Ireland, U.K.
Last Event: Paul Mullen surveillance, Week 6.
The Agents carry on watching potential recruit Paul Mullen, using cover identities to get close. Anabel is "Vicky," the stressed-out academic across the street; Wen is Vicky's brat, "Dot"; Jili is "Sunita," now established as Paul's girlfriend; and Vinnie is "Vinnie," the loud American cabbie next door. Paul doesn't appear to have grown suspicious of the group. They helped thwart an attempt to abduct or possibly kill him on June 11, but their assistance was mostly low-key and not easily recognized as such.
Week 7: Sunday, June 13 to Saturday, June 19
Wen telephones Chaturvedi to report on recent events – notably the attack on Paul and, by virtue of being with Paul, Vinnie. She passes along the license-plate number of the car she noticed before the van showed up, the one with the chain-smoking man, and requests a check on it. Chaturvedi responds by warning Wen that over the past few days, some party that his sources cannot identify pulled the records on all four false identities (Dot, Sunita, Vicky, and Vinnie). While he has no reason to doubt that the forgeries didn't pass scrutiny, he has no way to confirm they did.
Wen also mentions that the operation has grown dangerous enough that the team wants a medic on site. The plan is to bring in Qoqa. Chaturvedi says that he'll need a few days to fix another false ID, but that he can set up Qoqa as a language professor from Tbilisi, which should be compatible with Anabel's background story. When Wen tells the handler that another reason for wanting Qoqa present is to "clean" behind an abrupt extraction, should things get any hotter for Paul, Chaturvedi makes clear that he can do little to help with that – extractions are for Agents to arrange. He also notes that the Company might not go for recruitment following an incomplete surveillance period.
After that, Anabel calls Qoqa and fills her in on the situation. She tells Qoqa to wait for a false ID and travel arrangements from Chaturvedi. Anabel will personally see to Qoqa's accommodations in Belfast, passing her off as "Zoya," one of Vicky's academic colleagues.
The rest of the week consists of the Agents maintaining their cover and continuing their surveillance. Jili remains closest to Paul, and makes a point of asking about the June 11 attack. Paul answers that the attempt wasn't the first crack that somebody has taken at him, and probably won't be the last. He explains that this is why he has never had a long-term relationship, and that he'll understand if this changes things between them. Sunita tells Paul that she saw far worse violence as a girl in Sri Lanka, and is willing to take it into stride . . . for now.
Dot is very publicly "grounded" by Vicky for running in the street during the fight on June 11. This gives Wen an excuse to stay indoors and keep an eye on Paul's car and the front of his house. She does so from behind the curtains of an upper-story window.
Anabel spends the week playing the part of Vicky and trying to feel out the neighbors on their feelings about the recent violence. Strangely, they appear to expect and reluctantly accept this where Paul is concerned – usually mumbling something about his family having lived around here for generations. At one point she suggests to Paul that with thugs hunting him, it would make sense to move. His response is roughly the same: This is old news, and anyway, his family has lived here for ages. He would only leave if he seriously believed that ". . . all this James Bond shite about erasing the past and becoming someone else were possible in reality."
Vicky also gets the word out around the neighborhood that her academic colleague, Zoya, is coming to town for a while. Vicky's landlady, Ms. Grantham, gets wind of this and offers to let out another flat up the street (past Paul and Vinnie's places). Vicky agrees to take a look at the place. It's dingy, but it will do. Qoqa will doubtless clean things up thoroughly in any event!
Vinnie uses the week to recover from his beating. When he's feeling well enough to walk, he asks Paul to let him check his car daily. He explains that anybody willing to stage an attack involving speeding vans and automatic weapons on a quiet street is likely to try car bombing – and that being a good mechanic, he could spot something out of place. Paul reluctantly agrees to this, largely because he clearly feels terrible that Vinnie got wounded in an attack that targeted him.
Vinnie also plays up how, back in the U.S.A., he'd have a gun for situations like this. He inquires as to whether Paul can procure a firearm for him. Paul seems shocked, but only for a moment. He warns Vinnie that firearms laws exist for a good reason and that he supports them in general . . . but then adds that in light of Vinnie's situation as a foreigner and his own as an ex-cop with black marks on his file, and given recent events, he sees Vinnie's point. On Friday, Paul visits Vinnie with a couple of snub-nosed backup revolvers, one for each of them, and warns Vinnie to keep his stashed.
Anabel also arms herself, albeit more subtly. On the way back from "work" one day, she stops by a high-end sporting-goods shop and picks up a couple of relatively innocent but sharp folding knives. She intends to keep one and give the other to Qoqa on her arrival.
Week 8: Sunday, June 20 to Saturday, June 26
Anabel uses Sunday to straighten out Zoya's flat. Vicky makes a big deal of being frustrated with Dot and not wanting her involved, so Sunita volunteers to help out. In reality, Jili and Anabel set this up to create an opportunity to make sure that the place is "clean" in every sense – notably, that it's free of listening devices. It is.
On Monday, Qoqa flies in from London, where she had been using the Zoya identity for a few days. Vicky hires Vinnie's cab to go meet Zoya at the airport – ostensibly because Vinnie is a cabbie with a big car and happens to live right across the street, but in reality because Anabel wants backup, just in case. However, nothing special happens; the Zoya ID triggers no alarm bells, and nobody seems to be lurking at the airport, looking for Agents. Zoya is soon settled into her flat and cleaning the place (and encountering Ms. Grantham). She heads down to the pub for a while that night.
Tuesday morning, Vicky has Sunita come over to keep an eye on Dot while she and Zoya head off on some academic business. Qoqa and Anabel use this opportunity to ask Jili for the GPS tracker info fed from Paul's car the night of June 11, when he supposedly drove the two wounded thugs to the ER. Jili uploads the data to their Company smart phones, and then Anabel and Qoqa they take off in Anabel's Mini.
The digital trail leads out of the city and into a rural area. Anabel and Qoqa eventually find themselves looking at a pig farm, run by somebody named "O'Carroll," if the sign can be trusted. The GPS data make it clear that Paul simply drove right in the front gate, suggesting that he knows these people. In the end, the Agents decide not to pay the farmer a visit. Qoqa in particular has few doubts as to why one would drive corpses to a pig farm . . .
Back in Belfast, Wen gets a call on her Company smart phone. It's Chaturvedi with information about the smoking man's license-plate number – or, rather, no information that matters. It appears that the car in question was stolen the afternoon of June 11.
Wednesday and Thursday are uneventful, but late Thursday night – really, the wee hours of Friday – Vinnie finds himself awakened by the creaking of the old staircase in his house. Expecting the worst, he grabs his knife and dinky revolver, and quietly slides himself under the bed. Moments later, he can just barely make out the feet of two figures sneaking into the room, which is very dark owing to the old-fashioned blinds and curtains on the windows.
Vinnie waits, his weapons at the ready, as the two figures move about the room and then have a hushed conversation about where "the guy" is. They check the closet first, and then abruptly flip over the bed, uncovering Vinnie! Everyone shoots more-or-less simultaneously – Vinnie with his revolver, his opponents using a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol. Thanks to the darkness, nobody hits in the opening exchange. The noise and flash partially deafen and blind to sufficient extent that everything that happens afterward isn't unlike a gunfight in a noisy, strobe-lit disco.
Realizing that he's outnumbered by people with far more shots than he has, and suspecting that his opponents can't see him all that well, Vinnie takes careful shots from the ground, rolling as he does in order to keep his exact location a mystery. He manages to wing both of his enemies, but the .38 slugs fail to drop either of them. Fortunately, his rivals are all but firing blind, and miss him completely.
Vinnie soon finds himself out of ammo (damned five-shot backup piece!) and taking cover behind an impressively old and weighty chiffonier. The attacker with the pistol keeps blazing away at random. The one with the scattergun has a better idea of where Vinnie is, but his mate clearly can't hear him shouting over the gunfire. Realizing that it's only a matter of time before he gets his head blown off by a shotgun, Vinnie waits for the shotgunner to pause to reload, and then lunges across the room with his knife.
Going for broke, Vinnie tackles the shotgunner out the bedroom door and bears him to the floor of the upper hall, stabbing him several times along the way. Then he dashes for the stairs. Behind him, it seems that the assassin with the pistol has finally shaken off his night-blindness and pulled out a pocket flashlight: Vinnie hears the sound of running feet and sees a beam of light stabbing out of the bedroom doorway. He doesn't wait around to see what happens next.
Elsewhere in the neighborhood, Anabel – who has remarkably keen hearing – is the first to notice gunfire (around the time Vinnie is taking cover and going for his knife). She leaps out of bed, wakes up Wen, and runs out the front door whilst sounding the general alarm on her Company smart phone. Wen follows, also moving at a run. Looking toward the source of the racket, both Agents see sharp flashes around the edges of Vinnie's blinds. Clearly, there's a gunfight going on up there!
Wen and Anabel also see a car stopped across the street and a few doors up, in front of Vinnie's place, with its engine running and a man behind the wheel. Anabel decides to be subtle, and starts sneaking up the street to get closer to the car, using the little brick garden walls for cover. While Anabel has her knife, Wen has nothing, so she decides to look around for an improvised weapon first. The first thing her eyes settle on is a garden gnome, so she stalks over to it and picks it up.
At this point, Vinnie is taking the stairs four at a time and thinking about getting outside. As he reaches the ground floor, he encounters Paul coming the other way, revolver in hand. Paul doesn't wait around for an explanation – he simply hustles Vinnie toward the kitchen door and out into the back garden, shouting, "Sorry to break in. I had your keys. Now get moving!" As Vinnie can hear somebody charging down the stairs, he takes Paul's advice.
By now, Qoqa is awake, alerted by the phone alarm. She makes out the sound of a car idling in the street and decides to dash for her own front door. On her way, she snags a first aid kit, expecting (not without past experience) that it might just be needed. She opens her door in time to see Wen break from cover and charge a car with a . . . wait, surely that isn't a garden gnome?
Wen sprints into sight with her purloined gnome in hand. The man in the car is clearly confused: Why would a young girl come running down the street with a garden ornament at 3 a.m.? Oh, it must be a prank, right? Then Wen lobs the gnome at the windshield. By blind luck, it goes right through the glass and clips the driver on the head before coming to rest next to him on the seat.
Assuming that her target is temporarily blinded by his ruined windshield, if not actually hurt, Wen doesn't slow down. She runs, leaps, dives bodily across the bonnet of the car, and proceeds to reach her arm through the hole in the glass and hit the man in the face repeatedly. He struggles to take out a sawed-off shotgun, and discharges it in Wen's general direction, but the blood and glass in his eyes lead to a wild miss that blows out the passenger-side windscreen.
Anabel capitalizes on this madness to rush the car as well. She guesses correctly that the doors are unlocked to let passengers in quickly for the getaway, yanks one open, and slides into the passenger seat behind the driver, knife at the ready. As she's about to put her blade to the driver's neck, though, the street-side window shatters noisily. Outside, Qoqa and Wen both see a man with a pistol (Vinnie's earlier assailant) burst out of Vinnie's front door and start shooting at Anabel to keep her from knifing the driver.
Qoqa is the first to react. Realizing that Anabel and Wen risk being shot dead, she shouts, "Stop! Police!" Qoqa's rather loud and very intimidating voice grabs the attention of the gunman on Vinnie's front stoop – he reflexively spins to look up the street toward Qoqa. The instant he does, Wen charges him and drops him with a flying kick.
At this stage, Vinnie and Paul realize that nobody is actually chasing them. When they hear the sounds of gunfire and breaking glass out front, and Vinnie recognizes Qoqa's voice yelling at somebody, they stop and turn around. Paul wants Vinnie to keep going for his own safety, but Vinnie refuses on the grounds that innocent people could be in trouble (but in reality because he knows that Qoqa might be in trouble). The two men waste no time arguing and dash back through the house toward the street.
On their way back, Paul and Vinnie observe that Vinnie's front door has been jimmied. Upon stepping through it, they see an unconscious man sprawled in the weeds with an old Browning 9mm next to his body. Then they look up and notice a car with most of its windows smashed and another man slumped over in the driver's seat. Nearby are Dot and Vicky, and Zoya is coming down the street with a first aid kit in hand.
By now, sirens are sounding in the distance, and neighbors are standing in their front windows and doors to see what the row is about. The Agents realize that it's time to clear out of not just the street, but probably Belfast and possibly the U.K. Through nods and silent agreement, they prepare to dash back to their respective residences to grab anything incriminating, and of course to get their faces out of sight on the off chance that some of the neighbors haven't had a good look yet.
When Vinnie turns to Paul to suggest that they get out of town – with no plan made yet as to how to do this without blowing the Company's operation – he realizes that Paul isn't paying attention to him but squinting up the street into the dark. When Vinnie asks what's up, Paul exclaims, "Now who the hell is that lot?" Vinnie turns in time to see the dark shape of a large vehicle pulling out of the shadows most of a long block away, and catches sight of a laser pointed out the back of it, which he suspects was used to aim a camera or perhaps as a listening device in its own right. An instant later, Vinnie hears the telltale sound of a helicopter departing . . .
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What was the gaming of the fight in the darkness like? Do you have a list of the modifiers/penalties used for the fight in the dark?
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