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The Company
Time: Sunday, December 26, 2010 (dawn).
Place: Vancouver.
Last Event: Arriving in town aboard an old bus.
The Agents decide to start the hunt for Chaturvedi at the hotel where he was staying when they last saw him, about four months ago. Their plan is to scour his former room for clues, and perhaps to get a look at the hotel records and even the safe. Searching the room should be easy: Either check into it legitimately or get rooms nearby and do some quick break-and-enter work, neither of which will call for much more than the price of a hotel room for the night.
Getting behind the front desk won't be as easy, though – the hotel is a pricy one, doubtless with decent computer security and a proper vault for its patrons' valuables. Gaining access to such things requires either a good lie or a decent distraction. Vinnie proposes the second, and recommends grabbing a hydro truck, getting under the street, and cutting the electricity. Wen adds the touch of blowing nearby manhole covers sky-high when the power is cut, to give the impression of a dramatic mains failure. Explosions out front of the hotel followed by a blackout ought to do the job!
With those plans in mind, the Agents get to work. Jili, Qoqa, and Wen go shopping. Jili buys the tools and cables she'll need to tamper with the hotel's computers. Qoqa picks up a few common items that almost every operation ends up needing: cleaning supplies, first-aid gear, and large duffle bags. Wen purchases household chemicals from which to manufacture pyrotechnics. In all cases, the challenge is mostly that of finding suitable shops open on the Sunday after Christmas. Fortunately, Boxing Day sales are a sacred Canadian tradition at drugstores, electronics boutiques, and hardware shops alike.
Klas and Vinnie stake out the hotel and a hydro company motor pool, respectively. Klas simply dresses nicely and buys lunch at the hotel restaurant, reads a newspaper in the lobby, and generally acts as if he belongs there while he assesses the place's security. Vinnie scouts the streets around the hydro parking lot on foot. He spots a vehicle that ought to meet the team's needs, as well as a place where he could cut the wire fence and drive it away without being seen by the guard at the entrance.
By lunchtime, the shoppers are back with their purchases and Vinnie is reporting on what he learned. Wen immediately gets to work on her homemade explosives. Vinnie heads back out to buy heavy-duty wire cutters with which to cut the fence at the hydro compound, as well as some metal band clamps to use to close the resulting gap after he steals the hydro van. Anabel is up and about by now, and after dressing as nicely as she can on short notice, she takes a cab to the hotel to check in as a guest.
At the hotel, Anabel passes Klas without a glance and heads to the front desk. She plays at being an eccentric who won't take a room until she has a feel for its feng shui and numerology. As always, she's extraordinarily convincing. The desk clerk – a chap named Richard – seems entirely unfazed by this, and assigns a grumpy bellboy named Jimmy to show her around. It isn't long before Anabel spots Chaturvedi's former room, confirms that it's vacant, and checks into it. Her lack of a legitimate credit card proves to be a minor hitch; she talks her way around it by making a sizeable cash deposit and promising that her husband will arrive shortly with their bags and cards.
After checking in, Anabel calls Ben and tells him to bring a credit card. As luck would have it, Jili collects scam cards, and has several in men's names that should check out. Ben takes one of these, heads to the hotel bearing his and Anabel's "luggage," gives the desk clerk a credit-card number, and joins Anabel in Chaturvedi's former room. For the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, Anabel and Ben search the room from top to bottom. It turns out to be a good starting place: In the space under the bathroom vanity unit, hidden behind a loose piece of trim at floor level, is a flat attaché case which Anabel remembers having seen in Chaturvedi's possession. It has a high-end lock on it, which Ben and Anabel decide to leave for Vinnie to open later on.
Toward evening, Klas returns to the motel where everyone but Anabel and Ben is busy making preparations for the night's fun. He reports in on the hotel's security. He relates the number, location, and general attentiveness of the security staff, doormen, and clerks. More important, he fills in everyone on the location of cameras, lights, and blind spots.
After that, Vinnie takes Lev and Zhang to visit the hydro lot. The night is damp and foggy (and Hockey Night in Canada), allowing them to snip through the fence unseen. Vinnie sneaks in, finds that the van he wants is practically waiting to be stolen, and simply rolls the vehicle out the gap. Some quick work with pipe clamps has the fence looking superficially intact. After that, it's a short drive back to the motel.
On arriving at the motel, Vinnie pulls up out of sight of the office. Lev and Zhang hop out, join the others, and tell them where Vinnie is parked. Hamid, Jili, and Wen steal out and climb aboard the van, carrying computer gear and explosives stowed in duffle bags. Then Vinnie heads for the hotel. On the way, Hamid and Jili root around in the back of the vehicle – which of course is loaded with tools for working on electrical mains – and pick out what they'll need to cut the power.
It's about 22:00 by the time all this is done and Vinnie is pulling up next to a manhole in front of the hotel. He, Hamid, Jili, and Wen pull on hydro-company coveralls, gloves, and hardhats, and then pose as legitimate technicians setting up a manhole barricade. Nobody so much as glances at them – the Agents are good at this kind of thing, and in any event, gawking at a hydro crew doing emergency work isn't the way most people like to spend a damp Sunday night over the holidays.
Before long, the four faux hydro workers are beneath the street with their tools and explosives. Wen gets to work planting charges under a string of manhole covers in front of the hotel; she links the detonators together and puts the whole setup on an ingenious delay trigger. Hamid and Jili locate the hotel's connection to the power mains, and get the equipment in place to cut the power. Vinnie scouts for a manhole on the next block, out of sight of the hotel, to use as an escape route.
When everything is ready, Jili, Vinnie, and Wen head topside, leaving Hamid in place to cut the power. They take down their manhole barricade and cover the manhole, and then Vinnie drives them around the block to the manhole he located from below. While Wen minds the van and pretends to be taking a coffee break, Jili and Vinnie sneak down an alleyway that cuts across the block, stopping in the shadows just around the corner from the hotel's front entrance.
After a short wait, Wen's homemade bombs go off, barely dislodging three manhole covers but sending up alarming pillars of sparks and smoke. The instant Hamid hears the detonator go "beep," he shuts down the power and then dashes for the far manhole. With the hotel plunged into darkness for an instant while its generators kick in, and the security staff both distracted and dazzled by Wen's fireworks, it's easy for Jili and Vinnie to slip into the lobby unseen – especially given that they know exactly where to walk and where not to walk, thanks to Klas.
When the emergency power comes on at the hotel, the Agents are all safely out of sight. Hamid is in the van with Wen, driving away from the scene and back toward the hydro lot. Inside the hotel, Jili and Vinnie are in the offices behind the front desk. Anabel and Ben simply stay out of sight in their room, although Anabel does snap a beautiful shot of the pyrotechnics from the balcony!
In the hotel offices – largely empty because the sparse holiday night shift is either at the desk dealing with alarmed patrons or outside gawking at the fire and smoke – Vinnie and Jili act quickly and stealthily. Jili locates the server room, whips out the electronics gear, and gets to work, hoping to capitalize on the power outage to mask her tampering. Vinnie heads to where the hotel safe should be, where he finds an actual walk-in vault, like that of a small bank, with its heavy outer door open but its inner steel grille securely locked with an expensive keypad lock. Beyond it, Vinnie can see walls full of numbered, locked boxes, some large enough to hold suitcases.
Realizing that he cannot get past the lock quickly – and that he has no way of knowing which box to look in even if he does – Vinnie goes back to ask for Jili's help, electronic security systems and computer records being among her specialties. By now Jili has managed to break into the computer system and call up the client database. She finds a note indicating that the client staying in Chaturvedi's room on August 30 left an item in the vault. However, the entry is flagged for "insurance purposes," and further digging reveals that the box was one of several emptied by thieves on September 21, the same day the Agents' accounts were emptied and their faces appeared on Interpol notices. Neither Jili nor Vinnie believes that this is a coincidence.
Given that there's almost certainly nothing of interest in the vault now, Vinnie and Jili decide that there's no reason to break into it – it's time to leave. They sneak through the offices to the back door, their generic hardhats and baggy coveralls largely rendering them unidentifiable to the security cameras. Then they dash outside, their departure setting off an alarm. Pausing only to ditch their borrowed hydro uniforms in a Dumpster, they wind their way through the back alleys and onto the street a block away.
As Jili and Vinnie emerge onto the street, however, one of the policemen dealing with the chaos of the manhole blasts spots them. He's predictably suspicious of people leaving an alleyway a short distance from a series of explosions, and insists that they show him some ID. They comply, knowing that this is likely to burn their only cover identities if their fake names show up when enemies come asking later on, but also quite aware that they can't afford to be detained by the police right now. Once the cop is satisfied that they're just a couple of tourists who took a wrong turn, they walk some distance away and then take a string of cabs back to the motel.
By now, Hamid has driven back to the hydro compound where Vinnie stole the van. All is still quiet there. He and Wen quickly and stealthily remove the clamps from the fence, roll the van back into the compound, and leave it where Vinnie found it – albeit minus two uniforms and a few tools. Then the two of them sneak out, close up the hole in the fence once again, and head back to the motel on foot.
By the wee hours of December 27, everybody but Anabel and Ben is back at the motel. Those two check in by phone, report that they've found Chaturvedi's attaché case, and make plans to meet at daylight. Overall, the undertaking was a success. The cost: Two valuable identities, plus just about all of the team's remaining cash to cover the operational expenses. The gains: Chaturvedi's case and the knowledge that Chaturvedi checked out on August 30 without claiming some other item from the vault, which was stolen three weeks later, on the day that the Agents' enemies drained their offshore accounts and put out Interpol notices on them.
The next morning, Anabel and Ben check out of their hotel room and take a series of cab rides back to the motel where their colleagues are waiting. While they're in transit, Qoqa "cleans" the team's motel rooms. Ben and Anabel arrive around noon, whereupon everyone checks out of the motel and climbs aboard the old bus. As soon as the doors are shut, Vinnie cracks open Chaturvedi's attaché case. The contents:
• Cash. £10,000, €10,000, C$10,000, and US$10,000 in mixed bills.
• Passports. A thick stack of passports from the world over, each bearing Chaturvedi's photo and a different pseudonym.
• Phone. A cheap cell phone with nothing stored on it but a single number. Jili says the number is for a U.K.-registered mobile phone.
Vinnie searches the case for hidden items, just in case. Sure enough, he finds something concealed in the lining: some sort of coiled steel spring. Wen informs everyone that it's an urumi, a flexible sword used by Indian martial artists. It seems like an odd thing to find, but then again, nobody knows all that much about Chaturvedi's life before he ended up with a prosthetic leg and a desk job.
The Agents decide to dial the number on the phone only after the old bus is warmed up and ready to roll, both so that they can clear the area at once should the call bring trouble and so that they're ready to move if it leads to a clue. The voice on the other end is that of Alfred, the truck-driving assassin whom Chaturvedi used in England. After Vinnie and Alfred have identified themselves to each other, Alfred fills in Vinnie on what he knows: Chaturvedi last called him on August 30, to warn that things might go bad and to prepare an escape plan. Knowing that Chaturvedi was in western Canada, Alfred made his way to Alberta, where he is presently holed up and awaiting instructions. He has no idea what's going on, but he has guns, grenades, demolition gear, thermite, and even a mortar . . .