Chapter XXXIII: Revelations

1430hrs, 13 December 2013, Kowloon, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People's Republic of China

"Once war has been undertaken, no peace is made by pretending there is no war." Udyoga Parva, The Mahabharta.

"Oh my god." Amy and Mina were left speechless at the recording that Zhong…Chung…whoever had just played for them.

"It's unbelievable," he said to them, staring at the video on the computer screen. "I had to play it several times to actually understand what was going on."

"That's some insurance policy you have there," Mina said. "You were planning to take it to Nakanishi?"

Zhong nodded vigorously. "Well, yeah. I was hoping that they would stop coming after me and perhaps get a lot of money. Set me up for life, you know?"

"I thought you were smarter than that," Amy replied. "Nakanishi would have never let you go if they knew you had this information."

Zhong didn't understand. "But I thought that…"

"Listen, you're in deep shit," Mina said. "Nakanishi has already screwed you over once, and they will do it again."

"They can't touch me if they know I have this information," Zhong protested back. He waved to the computer. "If something were to happen to me after this date, this information would be sent to all the major news networks, all major law enforcement agencies in Japan, the United States and Europe, and would implicate everyone involved."

"I don't think so," Amy said. She pointed at his computer that was sitting on the desk in the safety deposit room. "Who made that computer?"

"Uh…" Zhong took a look at it. It said "NAKANISHI GROUP, MODEL T800."

"Oh shit."

"Oh shit is right," Mina said. "The minute you send anything out, they have your exact location and all the information you had on them. The only reason that nothing bad has happened is because you've only used that computer on a closed network, in this secure building. The moment you set foot outside this building with that information, or access the internet, or do anything to transmit that information, you're hosed."

Amy looked at Mina. How did you know all of that? she thought.

Heh, I'm so good, Mina smirked on the inside. Amy's freaking out on how I know all of that. I'm not that dumb.

"So my plan…" Zhong began.

"Was completely doomed from the start," Amy said. "You would have probably died. Here…"

She pulled out a flash drive and connected it to the computer. "Should have kept it on one of these." It only took a couple of seconds for the data to transfer over.

"I've got one more question, Mr. Zhong," Amy asked him, giving the computer back to Zhong. "Why did you blow us up?"

"Who is us…?" It took him a second to realize who he was talking to. He gulped and continued on. "You're the people that I had that Korean guy blow up." He looked down in shame. Zhong hadn't been the one to detonate the explosion, but he might as well have.

"Yeah, that would be us," Mina quietly said. "Why did you do it?"

Zhong looked down at the ground, ashamed of his actions. "I owed Jadeite a favor, from a long time ago when he bailed me out of a situation when I working with the Ministry of State Security. So, he told me to blow up some high school named Azabu Jūban. But I'm not a monster…well, that much of a monster. I didn't want to do it, but I owed him. They wanted to get the SAILOR project off the ground ASAP, and they needed fresh bodies."

"Why not get orphans or homeless people?" Amy asked. Mina shot her a look, but it was a question that had to be asked.

"They don't have the support structure of a family, at least in the formative years," Zhong replied, wiping his brow, which had been collecting sweat all of this time. "That's what Jadeite told me, anyway and if we hit a high school, we would scare the ever living shit out of the Japanese government and Nakanishi's contracts with the JSDF and domestic law enforcement would go up drastically."

"But you couldn't do it." Amy stared at the balding, pot-bellied man in front of her. He looked really scared, and that was a good thing. But then again, he was just somebody trying to get by as well. If that meant killing a few innocents, then…

"No…not to a thousand students."

"Only five," Mina snapped.

"Yeah…I knew that road was traveled by high school students, so I had Kim Yejun blow that place up."

"Better five than a thousand," Amy coldly said. But if she and Zhong had her positions swapped, she would have probably done the same thing. Maybe.

"I guess that was my reasoning," Zhong said, trying not to panic or show too much emotion. "I'm sorry."

"Yeah, I'm sure that you are," Mina snarled at him. "You could have taken him on."

"Yes, let me, a middle-aged, financially insecure and dependent on Nakanishi for day-to-day living, go against my master's wishes because I have a conscience," Zhong replied, somewhat sarcastically. "Look what happened to me when I didn't do what I was asked to do."

Mina wanted to slap him, and made a move with her right hand, bringing it up in the air and making Zhong flinch.

Amy stopped her though, grabbing her hand in mid-air and shaking her head no. Mina glared at her, then at Zhong, but lowered her hand and Zhong relaxed.

Satisfied, Amy and Mina stopped interrogating him and left Zhong slumped in his chair, exhausted from the round of questioning. Amy pondered their next method of action, when suddenly, Mina saw something move.

"Amy…company."

Mina pointed to a video monitor on the side of the vault. It displayed the inside as well as the outside waiting area. Three men came up to the guard at the front of the vault and showed some IDs to him. Mina noted that it was the same three men from before, but dressed in business suits now. The guard responded, hitting the button to open the door to the safety deposit vault.

"Do you have your weapons?" Zhong asked nervously, still winded from his interrogation.

"Of course," Mina said, pulling out her Glock 26. Amy did the same.

"You might want to get to cover."

She gave the computer to Zhong, who cuddled it against his chest, and ducked down when Mina flipped over the desk, making a loud clang as it hit the ground. Amy did the same with the table, aiming her weapon toward the entrance.

The door swung open and one of the men charged in, a MP9 machine pistol at the ready.

Mina decked him with a double-tap, brains and blood spewing all over the polished floor and walls. The other two held back for a second, then rushed in as well armed with the same machine pistols as the first one. Amy fired first this time, three rounds in a tight group in the chest of the first man who rushed in. He slumped to the ground, dead.

The third man brought his weapon up and fired a burst at Mina, bullets whizzing by and hitting Zhong in the throat and riddling the computer with bullets. Mina fired back and killed him, with a shot to the head.

"Shit!" Amy rushed over to Zhong and placed her hand over his throat wound, but she knew that he was a goner. He clutched the computer, now useless, and it started to drop on the floor.

"Take…take the data…" he gurgled, spitting up blood. "Stop…stop…them." With that, the life faded from his eyes.

"No…" Amy looked at him, but there was nothing that she could do but take the flash drive she had dropped on the ground in the excitement of the battle. She put it in her purse, noticing that everything was stained with blood.

Mina meanwhile, had dashed up to the door and had kicked the weapon away from the guard who was waiting outside.

"Sorry," she said to him, and handcuffed him to the desk. "Hey!" she waved to Amy, motioning to her to come over.

"Pick up their weapons," she said to her. Amy complied, picking up two machine pistols on the ground and handing one to Mina.

"Thanks."

"Who are you guys?" the guard asked. He struggled against the handcuffs.

"Hey, none of your business," Mina said back. "Our quarrel is with the Nakanishi Group."

"But I work for their security company…" the guard said in protest.

Mina looked at Amy, who shrugged. "Well, just those guys." She gestured toward the three dead men on the ground. "You're not with those guys, right?"

The guard shook his head vigorously.

"That's what I thought. Have a nice day."

She and Amy ran toward the door on the opposite end of the lobby, which was just being opened up by the other guard in the lobby with the receptionist.

As he came in, Amy clobbered him in the face with her pistol and disarmed him while Mina ran out into the lobby and tackled the receptionist who was making a run for the elevators.

"Nice try," she said to her, dragging her back to the desk and handcuffing her to it with a pair thrown to her by Amy as she came walking out of the safe room.

"Amy, do your thing with the computer."

"On it." Amy didn't even have to ask for a password, she just simply cracked open the network using the terminal that the receptionist usually sat at.

"Maybe you should have locked this computer before you left," Amy dryly noted to the receptionist, who glared back. Amy proceeded to delete all information pertaining to Zhong (Han in the system), their information that had been collected on them earlier and everything else just to be sure. She then destroyed the retinal scanner and the fingerprinter with a hearty pistol-whip from her weapon.

"Okay, that should slow the local authorities down," Amy muttered to herself. There was no doubt in her mind that it would point back to them, but it would be traced to their aliases not the real person behind the disguise. Or so she hoped anyway.

"Are you ready?" Mina asked her.

"I'm all finished here," she replied, yanking the cords out from the tower CPU and putting a couple of rounds in the hard drive.

"Let's get out of here."

She and Amy headed toward the stairs, on the right of the bank of elevators knowing that the elevators would be locked down and monitored.

"I'm going to do a scan of the area," Amy said to Mina, pushing the stair doors open and running down the first flight. She tapped into the communications network of the building security.

"Damn," she said out loud.

"What's up?"
"The police are waiting in the lobby and are clearing out the rest of the building."

"How the hell are we supposed to get by them looking like this?" Mina and Amy's clothes were stained with blood, and they were carrying several weapons on their person as well.

"I don't know." The two of them stopped on the fifth floor, re-assessing their options.

"Wait, there's another IFC building right across from this one," Amy said, checking a map of the area on her HUD. "And there's a hotel nearby as well."

"Okay, but how does that help us?"

"How was your Cantonese again?"

Mina glared at her. "This is payback for earlier, isn't it?"

Amy smirked at Mina's irritation. "You bet it is. I'm going to place a couple of calls to the emergency services. You are going to play the role of a distressed tourist or something like that."

"But I don't have to speak Cantonese for that."

"You don't. But the emergency service people do."

"Oh great. Fine, just do it."

Amy pulled out a burner mobile phone and dialed the emergency service number(112). She handed it to Mina, who continued to glare at her.

"Emergency Services, fire, police, ambulance?"

"Uh...uh…yeah…police, we need the police here?" Mina used her British English to make it sound like she was a tourist.

"Calm down ma'am, where is your location?" The operator immediately switched to English as well.

The phone didn't have the ubiquitous GPS locator on it for emergency services to triangulate the call, so they had to rely on the person knowing where they were at the moment.

"I'm at the…the…" Mina looked at Amy for some guidance.

"Four Seasons Hotel."

"I'm staying at the Four Seasons Hotel, somebody is shooting in here!" Mina was trying to act panicky, like any good foreign tourist, but her training was counteracting all of that.

"Are you sure?" the operator sounded suspicious of that.

"Goddammit, yeah I'm sure!"

"Where exactly are you in the hotel?"

"I'm in the lobby, please hurry, they're coming!" With that, she terminated the phone call.

"Nice. I'm punching up into their communications…now."

"Unit 663, respond to possible shooting in progress." Despite what the operator thought, it was still prudent to maintain the safety of the people nearby. "Unknown shooter, at the Four Seasons Hotel."

"What about the IFC?"

"Unit 124 and 105 will cover the IFC Tower I and Unit 104 and 125 will cover the IFC Tower II. SDU are on the way, ETA ten minutes."

"Who are the SDU?" Mina asked Amy.

"They're the SWAT team."

"Oh. Then we'd better move."

"Alright, here's the second part," Amy said to Mina.

"Wait, what?"

"I lied about you not having to speak Cantonese. You're going to be the operator!"

"Shit."

Down in the lobby, Officer 124 and 105 were escorting civilians out of the area when they got a call over their radio.

"124, 124, come in over."

124 looked down at the radio on his tactical vest. The operator sounded a bit different than before.

"This is 124, over."

"New orders, clear out of there and wait for the SDU team to arrive."

124 didn't like those orders, but whatever. "Roger. We're moving out." He motioned to 105, and they escorted the last of the civilians out of the building.

A couple of seconds later, 124 saw a couple of women stagger out, covered in blood.

"Hey!" He ran over to them and helped them stagger out of the lobby.

"Uh…hi," one of the women said back in English. She had nice blonde hair. The other one had…blue hair?

"What happened?" 124 asked them. Like most people in HK, he could understand English pretty well.

"We came from the eighth floor," she said to him. "It's a massacre over there."

"Are you hurt?" 124 made a move to inspect the women more closely (to check for injuries, of course), but the blonde woman pulled back.

"NO!" she shouted. "I mean…no, we're fine." 124 was taken slightly aback, but he had been in situations like this before.

"Alright, there's some ambulances over there, on the road." He pointed to a bunch of flashing lights and ambulances over by the main road passing by the IFC. "But stick around, we need to take your statement later."

"Okay, thanks." The two women dashed off, running toward the ambulances. 124 radioed the operator that there was possible massacre on the eighth floor of the building.

"I'm awaiting the SDU outside of the IFC Tower I," he said.

"124, your orders were to stay inside IFC Tower I and escort any civilians outside," the operator responded.

"That's a negative," 124 said back to the operator. "I was given orders to evacuate outside and wait for the SDU."

"Uh…I gave no such order." The operator was really confused right now. "Hey!" she yelled to the other people in the control room. "Did anyone give orders to have the police units clear out of IFC Tower I?"

While there was confusion in the police communications department, Mina and Amy were safely hi-tailing it out of there, back to their hotel across Victoria Harbor.

"Are you two alright?" the taxi driver asked them as they drove under the tunnel connecting the two parts of Hong Kong together.

"We're fine," Mina reassured him. "It was a costume party that got out of hand. If it makes you feel any better, we can pay you more."

"Oh, I was just wondering." Extra money was always appreciated.

Thirty minutes of strange looks, convincing the concierge not to call the police (with a help of some more money), and a change of clothes later, Amy called into Artemis, who was eating cheese puffs behind his computer monitor.

"Hey," he replied casually. "What's up?" He had been told not to pay attention too closely to Amy and Mina's excursion, which was totally fine with him.

"We got something big," she said over the secure network that had been set up earlier. "You'll want to hear this."

"What is it?"

"Just watch. Get Luna in there as well." Amy plugged the flash drive into her USB port on her tablet computer, then remote-accessed it to her HUD and sent it back to Luna and Artemis.

A couple of minutes of streaming data later, Luna and Artemis were staring aghast at the damming implications of the Nakanishi Group had in store for the world.

"This is unbelievable," Luna muttered.

"Tell me about it," Amy said. She looked over at Mina, who was painting her nails whilst lying down on one of the beds in the hotel room. "Is it true about us becoming zombies though?"

Luna and Artemis sighed. "Not really," Luna replied. "That was based on some estimates done earlier this year and they've been disproven. But there are significant mental drawbacks to using the microchips implanted in your brain."

Amy was way ahead of her on that one. "Like, mood swings, irritability, depression, minor brain damage, and things like that?"

"You bet," Luna said. She was looking at a list of symptoms that had been brought up by Dr. Kawasaki. "You hit all the major ones. But he wanted to do more surgery on you guys when you came back from the Sudan."

"Is he getting orders from Nakanishi?" Amy really wanted to know what was going on behind the scenes there.

"Some suggestions, but that's about all. They've been really trying to get Kobayashi off of the team as of late."

"Well, we can deal with all of that later then." Despite her curiosity, there was a pressing situation at hand that really needed to be resolved. "I need you to book me a flight to America."

"Uh…where in America?" Artemis asked.

Amy facepalmed herself and was reminded that America was not one, solid monolithic institution. Just like the rest of the world.

"They were mentioning something about these Representatives in Congress. Something about how they were making trouble and how they were being handled."

Artemis rewound the conversation to the part about the congressmembers. "Representative Clemens and Representative O'Conner." He did a database search on them. "Full names are Georgia Clemens from…Georgia and Charles O'Conner from Illinois. They serve on some subcommittees in Congress; they're pretty minor in terms of importance, but O'Conner still has powerful connections in the government."

"I've got some other stuff as well," Luna butted in. "I've checked the travel itinerary for Clemens, she's going to be back in her home constituency before heading back to Congress to listen to the president give a speech before a session of Congress."

"And where would that be?"

"She's holding a meet and greet with her constituency at a library in Atlanta, Georgia."

"Alright, that's where we need to go. Alert the other SAILOR members because we are going to stop this thing before it causes serious damage."

"Affirmative," Luna said. "But what about Col. Iwasaki? And the others?"

"I think Col. Iwasaki is going to have to be put in isolation after he suffered a major mental breakdown," Amy sardonically mentioned, checking the police networks to see if they were on them. There was still no mention of their handiwork at the IFC building.

"That's just what I was thinking," Artemis said. "I'll tell the medical staff here about his condition. I will also deploy the rest of the SAILOR team to take down the headquarters of Nakanishi in Tokyo."

"Very good then. Luna, make sure that Kobayashi and the others know the full extent of this operation, we will not let Nakanishi crush the rest of the world underfoot."

"Why do you need to go to America?" Artemis asked. "Couldn't you just send it to the Representatives and leave it at that?"

"That's a negative," Amy replied. "From what it sounded like, they been in trouble with Nakanishi and besides, we need to find those nuclear weapons that they've hidden in the United States. They might have information that they won't or cannot give to the local authorities. We have to talk to them in person and make sure that nothing happens to them."

"I have that," Luna said. She finished booking the flights (first class too!) and relayed the information to Amy and Mina (who was still painting her nails). "Alright, I have you booked for a flight to LAX at 0045 on Cathay Pacific, then to Hartsfield–Jackson on Delta Airlines at 1645. From there, I think you can figure it out."

"Got it." Amy started packing up. "Thanks guys. Looks like we have a plan in motion."

"Good luck," Artemis said to them.

"Thanks. We'll need it." With that, she terminated the conversation.

"Sounds like we're going to America," Mina commented, finishing her nails.

"Yep, we're heading over there." Amy wondered what America was like; she had never been over unlike Mina.

"Eh," Mina replied when Amy asked her how America was like. "It's…hard to describe. I'll let you be the judge of that."

"You're real helpful," Amy complained, shoving some more clothes in her suitcase. "Can we purchase weapons over there?"

"Can you? More like, we are going to, if we even think about taking on some of those Nakanishi guys," Mina said, putting away the Glock 26 in a special container that allowed it to be bypassed by security. And if someone opened it, they would have to have a nice long talk with the Japanese Consulate in not to open secure diplomatic packages.

"Don't we have to pass a background check or something?"

"That's why we have aliases, Amy." Mina rolled her eyes at her. "Come on, I thought you were smarter than this."

"Jeez, sorry for not knowing every little fact ever," Amy replied.

"No worries…my lover." Mina puckered her cheeks up and pretended to give her a kiss again.

"Mina, cut that out," Amy groaned, backing away. That was still a very uncomfortable experience. "And don't ever pull that stunt again."

"Don't be such a killjoy," Mina replied, retreating from Amy. She was still smiling at Amy's discomfort. "It's all part of the mission." Mina knew better though. That kiss…

"Uh-huh. Right…" Amy walked away from her, continuing to pack up.

The two of them finished packing and checked out of the hotel, rushing to the airport because Luna had set up the flight only a couple of hours from now and they had to be in the terminal two hours beforehand. But they made it, and were sitting comfortably in first-class on Cathay (woohoo!) and had fallen asleep with a nice glass of champagne.

By the time the police had put the pieces together concerning the murders in the IFC towers, they had to worry about a much, much larger problem than a couple of random murders in a high-class bank.