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The Company
Time: Saturday, August 28, 2010.
Place: Vancouver.
Last Event: Dinner with Chaturvedi.
Given that the Tokyo contact the Company provided proved to be a Yakuza boss, and in light of the risky Company directive to investigate Omni-Biotech Distribution Southwest on U.S. soil when American spies appear to be hunting the Agents, Chaturvedi is reluctant to share his team's whereabouts with his superiors until he sorts things out. He orders comms silence while he digs into this. Thus, the Agents – on leave and posing as tourists – keep their phones off as they journey to Toronto by train. Chaturvedi's travel arrangements are impeccable, as always. While everyone remains vigilant, there are no surprises on the trip (aside from Qoqa's reaction to cowboy hats in Calgary). The group arrives in Toronto on the afternoon of September 2.
With little more than false IDs, Company phones, and a change of clothing in hand, the Agents are operating on minimal resources. As agreed, they check in with Chaturvedi on arrival in order to remedy this situation. The handler says that he hasn't resolved the Company peculiarities to his satisfaction, and cannot yet offer the team useful intelligence or material backing on anything but the Albuquerque assignment. He still believes that it would be unwise to enter the U.S., and recommends lying low in Toronto for a few months.
Chaturvedi does have new false identities for everyone – identities that he, personally, set up – and says that he can arrange medium-term accommodations in Toronto. He advises the group to use the autumn for self-improvement. He notes that nobody is likely to look askance at a bunch of "students" arriving from away at the start of a university semester and sharing housing with equally foreign roommates, and assures the team that he can pull the necessary academic and financial strings to secure admission to almost any school, within reason. A semester should give him a chance to investigate fishiness within the Company, and allow the Agents' trail to cool, wounds to heal, and stress to dissipate.
The next week or so involves a lot of setting up house and researching colleges, universities, and vocational schools in the Greater Toronto Area. In the end, seven of the Agents decide to take classes at the University of Toronto:
• Anabel signs up for a number of commerce courses, learning the basics of buying and selling, and writing compelling proposals and reports, in order to better engage in social engineering in business situations.
• The other six decide to focus on that old secret-agent standby: languages. Hamid studies Persian; JB, Portuguese and Spanish; Jili, Spanish; Klas and Paul, Russian; and Qoqa, Arabic and French.
Four of the Agents, posing as the slacker roommates of the first lot, spend their time on more physical pursuits:
• Ben, a strong wrestler and all-around jock, signs up at a good MMA gym in order to broaden his grappling skills. His excuse for being there all day is intensive training for a tournament.
• Lev, on the mend from being shot twice, spends most of the break at a good, old-fashioned health club, getting himself back into fighting form.
• Wen and Zhang take advantage of their athleticism and cultural background to attend a circus school – of which there are several in Toronto – as visiting Chinese acrobats, improving their general ability at a variety of daring athletic moves.
Nobody is sure what, exactly, Vinnie is up to.
The Company phones stay silent until Wednesday, December 22.