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The Company
Time: Saturday, August 7, 2010 (22:10).
Place: Tokyo, Japan.
Last Event: Neutralizing Filipino kidnappers at the Rising Crescent warehouse.
With their opponents out of the way and suitably cocooned in duct tape, the Agents waste no time attending to business. The highest priority is Lev; shot at near point-blank range by a 5.56×45mm rifle, he needs immediate medical attention. Qoqa is already at work, IV bag on her shoulder, scalpel in hand, and haemostatic bandages at the ready. She informs her associates that she'll be fine working alone, and suggests that they focus on searching the place.
Vinnie takes command of Ben, Hamid, Jili, and Paul. The five of them fan out across the warehouse and adjoining ground-floor office. Their primary task is to look for Asuka. Finding information that would narrow down which of the many ships out of Tokyo were used by the human smugglers is equally important, if not as time-sensitive. Vinnie asks his crew to be on the lookout for keys, too – especially vehicle keys. And since the gangsters might have backup, everybody keeps an eye out for guns and ammo as well.
Anabel asks JB and Klas to follow her to the as-yet-unvisited front office adjoining the warehouse. The two men flank Anabel, brandishing the .32 ACP pistols confiscated in the initial assault and doing their best to look menacing. Their main task is to make sure that nobody out there heard the fight in the back office and the warehouse. A secondary goal is looking for the same things that Vinnie's party is searching for.
Wen ignores her bleeding knife wound and snatches up the rifle dropped by the man Zhang tossed off the catwalk. She quickly confirms that the weapon is in working order, although the scope is a write-off. Then she clambers up the ladder to cover Zhang while he checks out the shipping container-turned-office.
Zhang discovers that the door into the container-office is locked, while the "windows" are too small to allow entry, and shuttered besides. He shouts down to the others to look for keys. Vinnie realizes that the sniper was standing guard up there, and dashes over to the man's body. Sure enough, he finds a key ring. Zhang tells Vinnie the lock type, and Vinnie easily identifies the right key and tosses it to Zhang. Then Vinnie runs around the warehouse, using various other keys to lock every exterior door he can find.
Up on the catwalk, Zhang quietly unlocks the door to the container-office and then moves in aggressively. In the light of a single bare bulb, he sees that the only contents are a girl duct-taped into a rolling office chair, which has tipped over in one corner. She has peed herself, her clothes are torn, and she's covered in scrapes and bruises, but she has no obviously serious injuries. Zhang frees her at once, and she falls over in his arms, crying and saying something in Japanese. Wen and Zhang help the girl down to ground level.
In the front office, Anabel and friends find two Japanese men – noteworthy because everybody else the Agents have encountered so far is Filipino. There's a brief moment of panic as the two go for their phones, but neither of them is a match for JB and Klas, who intimidate and manhandle them into submission. Once the men are bound with duct tape, Anabel collects their cell phones, cuts the landline, and locks what appears to be the office's main exterior door.
With the front office secured, Anabel, JB, and Klas take a look around. They find little of interest, though; this looks like a place where laborers report for work, nothing more. There are stairs up, however, and Klas leads to the way. All that's up there is an unoccupied locker room with an adjoining shower and lavatory. The most interesting contents are some hardhats, possibly useful for a disguise later on, and a machine that dispenses refreshing beverages.
Meanwhile, Vinnie finishes matching all the keys to locks. In the back office, Paul turns up information on ship names, cargo weights, insured values, departure and arrival dates, destinations, etc.; some of the information is doubtless false (for instance, none of the entries declare "kidnapped women"), but it's definitely valuable, all told. Ben finds a sawed-off, loaded 12-gauge shotgun taped under the counter in the security post where Lev and Zhang choked out the two guards. Nobody else reports anything of note.
By the time the entire place is secured and searched, Qoqa is done with Lev. As it turns out, Lev received little more than a graze. The bullet – fired almost directly downward – entered the meat of his shoulder and exited cleanly out his upper arm without damaging anything important. He's in sufficiently good shape to walk, make bad jokes, and so on. Still, Qoqa warns him that he got lucky; a few centimeters to the left and he would be out an arm, a lung, or worse.
The Agents decide to hang around for a bit longer to make sure that they've learned all they can learn, and to tie up loose ends. The first order of business is to speak with Asuka and find out what she knows about the situation. Zhang hands the girl over to Anabel, since nobody else has any Japanese, but when Asuka hears the Agents discussing this, she interrupts them: "I went to a top school. I speak English. Are you Americans from L.A.?"
Anabel assures Asuka that her rescuers aren't American gangsters, but "mercenaries" hired by her father to rescue her. Realizing that there's no time for a long interview – because sooner or later, somebody will wonder why the office is locked and the phones are down – Anabel keeps things brief:
Anabel: "Did you see any faces you knew?"
Asuka: "No."
Anabel: "Did you hear any names or voices you recognized?"
Asuka: "No! These are strange men. I left the club with them because, uh, one of them was cute and, um, they were going to what sounded like a great party. When they got rough and brought me here, I was really scared!"
Anabel: "I'd be scared, too! Help us get their boss, Asuka . . . After they grabbed you, they called your father. That's why we're here. He said that they put you on the phone to prove that you were alive. Did they say anything else then – to you or your father or each other?"
Asuka: "Um, they said that I could go home when my dad returned their ship to them. I think they were trying to trade me for a ship. I don't know what ship, though. Look, I could call my dad and he could get us out of here. He has people here in the port. They'll know about the ship, too. Just find my phone!"
Anabel (lying): "I don't think we should do that. Somebody betrayed your dad. We need to get you out of here first."
At the other end of the warehouse, Qoqa decides to have different sort of conversation with some of the prisoners. She brings along JB, Klas, Paul, Vinnie, and Zhang as her goon squad, while an angry-looking, wounded Lev sits nearby, glaring vengeance at the taped-up thugs. Shouting in English, Qoqa tells her captive audience that she knows that English is the Philippines' second language, and that some of them speak it. She grabs the first thug who flinches in response, isolates him, and gets to work, pressing her thumbs into his wounds to hasten the process:
Qoqa: "Are you working with any Yakuza members in this abduction?"
Prisoner: "ARGH! No. No fucking way. NOOO! Why would we work with the fucking Yakuza after what they did on our ship?"
Qoqa: "Did I say to stop talking? What did the Yakuza do? How did they fuck you over on the ship?"
Prisoner: "UNGH! They killed half our guys, you bitch. ARGH! They . . . they killed our guys and took our fucking ship with the cargo aboard. OW! We grabbed their boss' skank daughter so we could make a trade."
At this stage, Paul speaks up. In his long experience beating answers out of gangsters and thugs, it sounds like Qoqa's subject is telling the truth. He says that if he were to guess, he would bet that Chaturvedi's Tokyo backer is Yakuza; that the Yakuza wronged this gang of Filipino human smugglers; and that when the smugglers grabbed the Yakuza boss' daughter in revenge, the boss used Chaturvedi's people to solve his problem. In short, the Company got played and the Agents were used as some scumbag's personal army. If the prisoner's claims are true and Yakuza soldiers have the Filipinos' ship, then Paul fears that once Asuka is returned and the Agents go after the ship, the ship's crew will be forewarned . . . and killing armed boarders is easily justified as fending off a pirate attack.
While the interrogations are going on, Ben takes out his medical gear and sees to Wen's injuries. In some ways, her cut is worse than Lev's gunshot wound! However, the bleeding stopped on its own and nothing serious got slashed. As for the numb arm, that looks to be due to a strained muscle, not the gash. Ben cleans up and bandages Wen's side, and gives her some ibuprofen for the arm.
As Anabel and Qoqa interrogate, and Ben sews up Wen, Hamid and Jili round up cell phones from the incapacitated goons. One of the phones is obviously Asuka's, as it's far too expensive and girly for any gangster. In light of what she heard from Asuka and learned from Paul, Anabel signals Jili not to let on that the phone showed up. It's time to clear out, and Anabel has a plan for this.
Anabel grabs a random phone and calls up Hideo, the truck driver she used to get the group into the port. As it turns out, his cargo is still being unloaded and he's busy filling out forms; he won't be leaving the port for at least another 10-15 minutes. Anabel pitches a story about how the men who ordered the private striptease went off to continue their party at a bar, leaving her alone in their warehouse without a ride. She suggests that if Hideo were to pick her up on his way out, she would make it worth his while. There's a shower upstairs, so she could get naked and soapy and . . . Hideo promises to be there.
As soon as Anabel hangs up, the Agents leap into action. Qoqa wants to clean up blood, shell casings, and so on; she enlists the aid of Ben, Paul, and Zhang for this task. Vinnie takes care of hiding beaten, bound gangsters in shipping containers and the back of the van, with the assistance of Hamid, JB, Jili, and Klas. The medics order Lev and Wen to rest, but both help out anyway. Anabel goes off to change into something less comfortable but considerably sleazier.
Once the place doesn't look so obviously like the site of recent beatings, stabbings, and shootings, everybody but Anabel and Wen steals out the back door to hide in the cargo yard. Qoqa keeps an eye on Asuka, who's sickened by the sight of blood and violence, but not enough to hide her glee at her captors' fate at the Agents' hands. Wen goes up to the locker room and hides in one of the lockers facing the shower. Anabel awaits Hideo's arrival inside the warehouse, next to the door.
Right on schedule, Hideo's truck pulls up out front. Anabel uses the security camera to make sure that nobody is waiting for her out there, and then opens the front gate and signals for Hideo to bring his truck inside. He hesitates for a moment at this unusual request, then takes a look at Anabel and complies. Before long, Hideo's truck is parked in the warehouse, behind the closed gate, and Anabel is leading the trucker upstairs by the hand.
Anabel entertains Hideo as promised. Her performance is more than enough to keep him from noticing that down in the warehouse, a small army of secret agents is boarding his truck. Once Wen realizes that Hideo is more likely to ask Anabel to smack him than he is to do anything terrible to her, she joins the others at the truck. By the time Anabel and Hideo return to the warehouse floor, Anabel's 11 allies and Asuka are hidden in Hideo's trailer, and Vinnie has rigged the door so that he can open it from inside.
It doesn't take much for Anabel to convince Hideo to give her a drive out of the port. She opens the warehouse gate to let Hideo pull out, then closes it behind her and hops into the cab of the truck. Once again, she has to keep her head down . . . and once again, Hideo suggests that his lap would be the best place for this. Fortunately for the Agents, Hideo's indiscretions don't extend to playing games with port security; his documents check out and he drives out into the city.
A story about meeting her next client is all that it takes for Anabel to convince Hideo to drive to the group's hotel. At around 00:30 on August 8, Hideo is pulling into the hotel's parking area. Anabel suggests that she and Hideo go to the hotel bar and have a drink while she waits to be called upstairs. He agrees. Once they're seated at the bar, Anabel texts her allies that the coast is clear.
On receiving Anabel's message, Vinnie pops the back of the truck and makes sure that nobody is looking. Then everybody climbs out, brushes off their clothing, and heads for the elevator from the underground garage. Legitimate hotel room keys remove the need to tamper with the elevator's security system. On the ride up, the cleanest, unwounded Agents – JB, Jili, and Hamid – stand in front, just in case.
The group disembarks on the floor where Chaturvedi booked their rooms. Vinnie insists that everybody come to his room first, since the €1 million in cash and the packaging of the worthless TASERs are there. As well, it's the one room that Chaturvedi has visited, making it the best place to wait if the handler decides that Asuka has to be moved out at once. On arriving at his door, though, Vinnie realizes that somebody has tampered with the lock. Wen immediately texts Anabel about this, warning that there might be some trouble upstairs, and then the Agents move away down the hall, just in case that trouble is in Vinnie's room . . .
. . . only to see two masked men, wearing suits and brandishing MP5SD3 submachine guns, step from the utility room ahead and block the corridor. The rattle of rounds in magazines alerts the Agents to the presence of two more men cutting off the group from behind. The Agents' own weapons – knives, tonfas, and worthless TASERs, plus the two.32 ACP pistols, sawed-off shotgun, and rifle captured at the warehouse – are all packed in rucksacks to avoid drawing suspicion, and thus not in reach. Indeed, with the gunmen standing some 8-10 metres away, even a desperate charge seems ill-advised, as the four suppressed SMGs could cough out more than 50 rounds in the time it would take to reach them.
Wen still has her phone out, and deftly taps the "panic button" to alert Anabel. From Vinnie's room, just to her right, she hears the telltale sound of the alert. The Agents' phones are all set to vibrate, so who could that be? The lead gunman answers her question in Japanese-accented English:
"We have your boss. Set down everything you're carrying and get face-down on the floor, or we'll start shooting."
To be continued . . .