Reaching the garage level two, they left the portable lift behind as they hustled her out of the shaft. She experienced a moment of hope when she saw the two men in service uniforms who appeared to be working on a conduit and control box. That hope vanished when one promptly gathered up his tools and headed around to the front of the service van, while his companion quickly opened the single back door of the vehicle and stepped aside.
She stumbled repeatedly as her abductors impelled her toward the open van, and managed to kick off her remaining shoe and its heel-less companion. Now barefoot, she offered no resistance as they hoisted her inside. The service tech who had entered first shut the door behind them. She heard his footsteps as he moved rapidly forward to join his associate in the front of the vehicle.
As they were laying her out on her back on the floor, the shift from an upright position caused her to start to choke. Crouching close in front of her, the intruder who had wielded one of the two drills met her gaze evenly.
“You won’t do either of us any good if you choke to death.” A hand reached toward her face. “I’m going to remove your gag. You raise your voice above conversation level and it goes right back in—choking or no choking. Understand?”
She nodded to indicate that she did. As he carefully removed the gag, she considered her options. At the moment, even the best of them was no better than notional. Very well, she decided. If she could not run, she could listen. Anything she learned might prove useful to the police later. That meant she had to keep them talking.
“Very professional,” she said quietly. “I would compliment you, but I would rather kill you. I saw what you did to our protectors. So you are all guilty of murder, as well as kidnapping.”
“Yutani threatens far more deaths than can be imagined,” declared one of the black-clad abductors. He was quickly shushed by another, who appeared to be in charge. That reaction itself, she felt, must be indicative of something significant. But what?
“There were bodies everywhere inside the meeting room.” She swallowed hard. “Are you telling the truth, when you say that my father and his subordinates are not dead?”
“I told you before, they’re only sleeping.” Rising slightly from where he was sitting, the leader peered out the front of the van between driver and assistant, then returned to kneel down beside her. “They will awaken with migraines, and hopefully some remorse.” He paused, added, “We would not have killed your bodyguards, had they not resisted.”
“You mean, had they not tried to do their jobs,” she shot back.
He remained unmoved. “Believe whatever you wish to believe. I will not debate peripherals with you.”
“How about ethics?” she tried. “Will you debate ethics with me? The ethics of murder and abduction?”
He looked down at her, and she was startled to see that he was on the verge of weeping. “You do not want to argue ethics with me, Ms. Yutani. Or with any of my associates. You will lose. Badly.”
As she mulled over the peculiar response she tried another tack. “My father will pay whatever ransom you demand. In whatever currency, credit, or electronic format you specify.”
“Will he now?” The three black-clad figures exchanged a look. For some reason, they seemed to find her amusing. “It remains to be seen.” The leader looked down at her once more. “We aren’t interested in money. What we want, and what we will communicate to your father and his board, is for—”
One of the other abductors gestured as if to cut the leader off, but he waved the objection away. “It doesn’t matter if she knows now or later.” He returned his attention to his captive. “What we want, what we demand, is that Weyland-Yutani cancel the Covenant mission.”
She was startled. “So you are not ordinary kidnappers. You are fanatics.” That, she knew, would make her captors harder to deal with. “Do you know what Weyland-Yutani has invested in the Covenant mission? Do you have any idea of the cost? Not just to the company, but to the hundreds of colonial families who have sold everything they own, and made their final goodbyes to every friend and relative on Earth? You seek to destroy their dreams!”
“Perhaps.” The response of the leader of the kidnappers was remarkably blasé. “But we will save them from their nightmares, as well, and everyone else along with them.”
It took her a couple of moments to try to parse that. She failed, shaking her head in confusion.
“You’re not making any sense—but then, being fanatics who aren’t behaving rationally, I suppose it would be too much to expect you to speak rationally. Unless,” she tried, “you’re working for the Jutou Combine.”
“The Jut…?” The leader paused in mid-reply. He glanced at his associates, and a moment later all three were chuckling softly. Yet again, it wasn’t a response she had expected. When the inappropriate bout of hilarity finally passed, he looked down at her again.
“Our ultimate purpose may or may not be made clear to you—that’s for others to decide. It’s enough for you and your father and the rest of Weyland-Yutani to understand that the Covenant mission must be scrapped. Not postponed. Cancelled. Permanently.”
Her mouth tightened. “That’s not going to happen. You could kill me, you could kill my father, you could slaughter the entire board of directors, but the Covenant will embark on its mission, and Origae-6 will be colonized. Mankind demands it!”
“Mankind is stupid.” The third abductor spoke with absolute conviction. Which was exactly what she would expect of a dedicated fanatic. Bits of a puzzle floated around in the back of her mind, then suddenly came together as if welded. Her eyes widened as she regarded her captors anew.
“The incident on board the ship. The would-be saboteur who blew himself out of an airlock. He was one of you!” When they declined to reply or meet her gaze she continued. “What just happened in London—the woman who attempted to sign on with the Covenant security detail, and the man who tried to kill the head of ship security, Sergeant Lopé. They were your employees, too.”
“Comrades.” The leader of the team of abductors corrected her quickly. “Good people. Dedicated people. One day statues will be erected in their honor and the memory of what they tried to do will be the subject of veneration from one side of the planet to the other.”
She took a risk with her response. “Failures are not venerated. Statues are not raised to madmen.”
Yet again the leader was not perturbed. “Yesterday’s madmen are today’s saints. Time and perspective are the lenses through which actions are evaluated. We’re not worried about how history perceives us. We are quite prepared to render judgment on ourselves.”
“You won’t have to.” She looked away, toward the front of the speeding service van. “The courts are going to do that for you.”
“They will have to catch us first,” the second kidnapper insisted. She was no longer sure which was which, and it didn’t really matter. She straightened as much as she could, listening intently.
“If I’m right, that should be soon.”
They heard the sirens a moment before the man in the front passenger seat looked back. His expression was grim.
“We have company.”
The leader of the abducting trio rose. Moving forward, he steadied himself with one hand each on the back of driver and passenger seat, while he studied the readouts on the front of the van’s surprisingly sophisticated console.
“How many?”
The passenger also examined the flourish of new information provided by the van’s rear-facing sensors and cameras.
“Two. Company security.” He paused. When he spoke again, his tone was somber. “Also two, maybe three city police cruisers with them. One chopper.” He looked back and up at the team leader. “Probably more of both on their way.”
“Kuso,” the other man replied tightly. “Any chance we can lose them?”
“Doubtful.” The driver spoke without looking back. “Too many on us already and as Ichiro says, more likely coming. You’ll have to di
tch and be picked up later. And a suitable diversion will be necessary.” Across from him his associate was already punching information into a comm unit. “Our friends will have your location.”
“What about you?” By this time the leader had been joined by another of the black-clad kidnappers, peering over his shoulder and studying the multiple readouts. That left only one man next to Yutani.
The driver’s voice did not change. “We’ll buy you time enough to be safely picked up. We will do what is necessary.” A pause, then, “As all of us are prepared to do.”
The leader said nothing.
Yutani shattered the solemn silence by throwing herself forward and using her right shoulder to strike the nearest abductor squarely in the groin. As he went down and his two companions began to react, she spun, kicked against the floor, and threw herself backward against the rear door. Having identified the exit switch the moment she had been loaded inside, she shoved both bound hands hard against it. The single rear door obediently flew open. For just an instant her gaze locked onto that of the leader of the abductors, then she let herself tumble out the open back of the van.
His parting, shocked curse trailed away rapidly as she tucked her head as tightly as possible into her neck and upper chest. She brought her legs and arms in tight against her body, hit the pavement, bounced, and began to roll. One earring was torn off, then another, each costing many tens of thousands. Blood spurted from her earlobes, then began to spray in red droplets from the places where her clothing was ripped. There was a screaming in her ears, and she was blinded by headlights.
The sound faded quickly as the lead police cruiser screeched to a stop, skidding sideways as the frantic driver braked just in time to avoid running over her. She felt consciousness slipping away as she heard another officer yelling into his comm unit, calling for an airborne ambulance. Then hands were on her, rolling her onto her back. Though they were gentle, their touch on her road burn still made her want to cry out.
“She’s alive!” Looking back, the officer bending over her called out. Dimly, she could hear the sounds of other vehicles braking to a halt nearby. “Where’s that damn ambulance!”
Trained in general martial arts from an early age, one of the first things she had been taught was how to take a fall. That simple, undramatic bit of instruction might have just saved her life. She did not feel as if anything was broken. At least, she told herself weakly, nothing vital.
She was smiling when she passed out. Her abductors weren’t the only ones who could dedicate themselves to a cause.
IX
Within the van there was frustration. An immensely difficult, dangerous, and complex operation had come to naught because one of their number had been caught relaxing, for just an instant. No one yelled at the injured offender, none of his colleagues spoke at all. There was nothing to be done about it. The aim of their enterprise had been lost.
There was nothing for it but to move on.
In order to do that they had to survive, which meant escaping the attentions of those police who hadn’t stopped, and who continued to pursue. Though the van’s driver was skilled and his vehicle had been enhanced, it wasn’t capable of outmaneuvering a police cruiser, much less the two choppers that were now tracking the van from above.
Twice, pursuing police tried to cut the van off. One cruiser attempted a pit maneuver. It failed because the van was equipped with gyroscopic correction firmware that wasn’t standard issue for such a vehicle.
While the police and company security were eager to take their quarry into custody, they were willing to take their time. Kept under close observation both from street level and from the air, there was nowhere the van could hide. Given the speed at which it was traveling, its battery pack would run down soon.
The pursuing police began to fall behind.
Executing a hard right, the van shot into an open, ten-story parking structure. Having scoped out the route during rehearsal runs, the driver knew where he was going without having to check with the vehicle’s navigation system.
Choppers took up positions outside the garage’s two exits while newly arrived cruisers and armored vehicles began to seal off every possible escape route. The structure abutted the dark ribbon of the Sumida River, which naturally eliminated one option.
On the fifth floor, the van swung to the right toward a line of parked vehicles. It slowed but did not stop. The heavy individual in the passenger’s seat fingered a cluster of controls on his comm unit.
In response to his manipulations the trap doors built into the bottom of the van dropped open. The large dark container, once again holding the three black-clad abductors, fell free and slid out between the van’s rear two wheels. Riding on four smaller solid wheels built into its corners and driven by a self-contained electric motor, it followed a homing signal silently to its right until it was directly underneath one of the hundreds of parked vehicles—another van, though not a utility vehicle.
Double doors that matched those on the underside of the fleeing service truck slid open in the underside of this new, privately owned van. Twin hoists clutched the container and lifted it up as the trap doors slid shut beneath it.
All three of the abductors rapidly changed into the clothes that were waiting for them. Two remained out of sight in the back of the vehicle as the third took the wheel, pulled out of the parking slot, and drove slowly back the way they had come.
As they headed toward the exit, several police cruisers screamed past them. The trio knew they were being scanned, but no one moved to stop them. By the time the last official vehicle entered the parking structure, the van had emerged onto the same street they had used to enter.
* * *
The service van sped up the ramp that led to the tenth floor of the parking structure. Emerging onto the open roof, it was instantly transfixed in the spotlights of two hovering police helicopters. With a dozen or so pursuing cruisers blocking the down ramp and closing in from behind, there was nowhere for the fugitives to go.
Making a sharp left, the van accelerated. It continued to accelerate even as several police cruisers slowed and turned sideways to form a blockade behind it. Exiting their vehicles, a number of officers took aim with weapons and attempted to shoot out the tires of the fleeing van. In their haste and in the uneven light, they missed.
The van was still accelerating when it smashed through the low retaining wall that ran around the top floor of the parking structure. It seemed to slow somewhat as it fell, describing a smooth arc as it soared through the air, then impacted the dark water of the Sumida. Within minutes there was no sign of the service vehicle. It sank completely out of sight, leaving behind only bubbles.
Operating on the possibility that the occupants had enough foresight to store emergency padding and portable breathing gear in their vehicle, police on shore combed the river embankment while choppers played their lights over the river in both directions. The search went on even after police divers located the van.
* * *
Extracting the badly damaged vehicle from the river bottom, a heavy lift chopper brought it to the top of the parking structure, where a temporary command post had been established.
With the front end of the van mangled from the impact of hitting the water, it took some time to cut away both crumpled doors and extract the bodies within. There were only two. Since Jenny Yutani had stated that the van had contained five men, an immediate search was launched for the remaining three. The intensive effort that followed, however, found no one in the parking structure, in the office complex next door, or on the streets outside.
The identification found on the two bodies indicated that they were employees of a large, reputable service firm that specialized in the maintenance of electrical and plumbing systems in big commercial buildings. Very quickly, what appeared at first to be a relatively straightforward matter of identification began to unravel when it was discovered that the service vehicle they had been driving had recently been stolen from
a company lot. The uniforms they were wearing had been tailored and weren’t company issue, and their identification cards were counterfeit.
This required the police to run physicals. Facial scans reconstituted their features, given the damage. Retina scans proved useless, again due to facial damage. In the end, it was DNA matching that finally succeeded in identifying the two dead kidnappers.
The results were as shocking as they were unexpected.
X
Twenty-four hours after the break-in, the boardroom was entirely unavailable as the police searched, scanned, and vacuumed it and its contents down to the molecular level. As a result, Hideo Yutani was forced to convene his next meeting in far less glamorous surroundings.
At present otherwise deserted, the tower’s executive cafeteria dining room offered functional if comfortable chairs, unpretentious bottled water instead of Yamazuki 24, and a scattering of tables much smaller and less ostentatious than the priceless slab of polished hinoki that graced the main boardroom.
While Davies was there, one of his colleagues had flown home to England to inform Weyland’s chief executives of what had transpired. The other was in hospital undergoing treatment for exhaustion and trauma. Of the Yutani hierarchy who had been present during the assault, two sat nearby. Having suffered a mild heart attack, the redoubtable Takeshi-san was in a different hospital. He was expected to recover fully, and Yutani certainly hoped so. Executives who spoke their mind were difficult to find.
Captain Katsumi Sato, the administrator in charge of building security, was also present. A large man with significant musculature and an impressive mustache, he looked as if he wished fervently to be elsewhere. He sat quietly, prepared to answer questions and offer explanation to the best of his ability.