Author's note: Hey there. Here's the next chapter. Sorry for the delay. I know there was a little strife in the comments, but I appreciate the criticisms (because that helps me learn. This is the first time I'm writing a thriller/action, so hope you could cut me a little slack. But point taken, I'm learning to refine my plot :D) as well as the commendations (really, really appreciate your support and speaking up for me. I'll always be grateful for that :D). So, anyways, hope you enjoy this chapter. It's a little long-winded, I know. But I hope it doesn't confuse you (although it did confuse me when I was writing it. Oops. O.o)
Chapter 25:
"No one heard the gunshots," Lunamaria said, "so obviously, the guy used a silencer."
"Guys," Nicol said.
Luna turned to glance at him, "What?"
"Guys," he repeated. "There was more than one." He picked up a small tape lying in front of him and waved it so that everyone could see it. He gestured at Athrun with the tape. "It's from the video camera that Athrun had Officers Hutson and Samson install in the dashboard of the truck."
He slapped it back onto the conference table and picked up a remote control. Pointing it at the projector situated in the middle of the table, he said, "I watched it with the crime scene techs. We've cut it down to the essential portions. It's not pretty, so..." He left the sentence hanging as he pressed a button on the remote and the screen came to life. Chairs swivelled around as their occupants turned their attention to the screen.
The picture was grainy, as expected from a low-quality camcorder, but clear enough for them to make out the shapes in the footage. It showed the car park from an angle, the focus was on the entrance of the car park.
Nicol pressed the 'play' button and for several seconds, the image on the screen stayed the same and only the soft breathing of the officers could be heard. "Wait for it," Nicol whispered. Then Athrun saw what Nicol was referring to – the dark shape of a van steering through the entrance of the car park. It loomed into the view of the camera and Athrun watched it reverse and park, diagonally across the car park.
The tension in the conference room elevated. No one made a sound. Athrun knew he was looking at the murderers who had shot his colleagues in cold blood.
"Keep your eyes peeled," Officer Samson's voice came through the speakers and reverberated around the conference room. It sounded scratchy and high-pitched, marred by background noise.
There was no change in the video footage for a minute. Then a person appeared from the side of the van. Was it a man or a woman? Athrun found himself squinting at the screen. The person was running in the direction of the camera, towards the truck. Passing under a nearby streetlamp, Athrun saw that it was a woman. But wait, no, it wasn't one person. It was two. A man was chasing her. The woman was screaming but the background noise had distorted what she was saying.
"What the hell?" It was Officer Hutson who spoke first. "Should we go out and take a look?"
"No..." Officer Samson sounded hesitant. "No, stay put first. Let's wait and see."
The woman reached for the hood of the truck but was yanked around by the man. They wrestled for a second or two before the man hit her and she collapsed against the truck's hood.
"He just hit her!"
"Wait, it could be a trick."
"What sort of trick is that?"
"I-I don't know. Just hold on, Brian."
The woman was now very close to the hidden camera but the dark night and the lack of light obscured her face. All Athrun could see was her silhouette, which scrambled around the hood and disappeared from the view of the camera. But he could hear her screams now and the sound of her fists pounding against the passenger door of the truck.
"Hold on-"
"I'm trying to wind down the window."
"Hurry up! The guy's getting to her."
The camera remained stationary, aimed at the van across the car park. Both the woman and the man were out of the camera. From the sounds of urgent fumbling and the sudden increase in background noise, Athrun guessed that the officers must have wound down the window and he knew what was coming next.
"Help me, please! He's trying to kill me!"
"You! Back off. Don't say we didn't warn you. Leave the lady alone. I'm only going to say it one more time: back-"
Officer Hutson was cut off by a double bang emitted from the speakers and ricocheted off the walls of the conference room. It wasn't very loud, which confirmed Luna's point that a silencer had been used. Nevertheless, it was loud enough to shock the entire conference room into stunned silence.
The video continued to play, showing the backs of the man and woman who returned to the van and the vehicle pulling out of the parking lot out of the view of the camera. But Athrun was barely registering it.
When the screen went black, there was no movement in the conference room. Athrun sat where he was, frozen by the brutality of what he had just watched. It took a minute or two for the shock to subside and eventually he realised that he was holding his breath. He released it and turned slowly to take in the disbelieving faces of his team.
"Is that the end of the video?" He asked Nicol. He realised his voice was a little shaky and he cleared his throat. "What happens after that?"
"Exactly ten minutes and twenty-two seconds after the end of this footage, the same van was recorded again. It was shown to be leaving the carpark. After that, it's just another fifty minutes of nothing. No vehicles recorded entering or leaving up till the end of the tape." Nicol replied. "There were three other tapes found in the truck, showing footage before the incident. But there's nothing suspicious on those tapes. Officers Hutson and Samson were changing the tapes regularly, so they've captured pretty much everything that happened until they were..." Nicol took a deep breath, then said simply, "...killed."
"Okay."
"So these guys were the ones who killed the woman too?" Meyrin asked quietly.
"Most likely," Nicol nodded, "given that they left the scene only ten minutes later, instead of right away."
"Do we have any witnesses to confirm that?"
"Unfortunately not," Luna shrugged her shoulders, "we've knocked on every door in the vicinity. No one heard or saw anything suspicious."
"What about the van they were using?" Athrun took over the remote control and rewound the tape. He paused it when the van was in view, parked in its lot. "Do we have any leads on it? Can the crime scene techs zoom in and identify the licence plate number? Anyone reported a stolen van?"
"No," Nicol said, "and no. To both your questions. Firstly, it's too dark and the image quality is bad. We've tried but all we got was a jumble of blurred symbols. Secondly, we've cross-referenced all reports of stolen vehicles over the past week. There's been no match."
There was silence again. It was obvious that everyone was attempting to process the information they were receiving and fit the facts they had into a logical account. Eventually Meyrin sighed and said, "Well, at least we gathered from the video that it's not the act of one person, but two."
"Maybe three, or four," Athrun corrected, glancing at her, "we can't be sure of that. I'm guessing that there's at least one person in the van to serve as backup in case things didn't go as they planned."
"Okay," Dearka said, "so let's look at the Big Three." He counted them off his fingers. "Opportunity, means, motive."
" 'Means' is easy," Nicol pointed out, "One single gunshot for all three victims. In the head or in the heart."
Shinn stood up and went over to a whiteboard covered in Polaroid photos and scribbles. With a marker, he scrawled a large 'Means = gunshot to head / heart'.
"Good," Dearka nodded, "so 'opportunity'. We just saw how they set up Officers Hutson and Samson – by pretending to be in distress. What we don't know is how they got through the door of the woman." Shinn wrote down 'Opportunity = in distress + ?' on the whiteboard.
"Maybe they set her up too," Luna pointed out. "Maybe they pretended to be someone she knew. Like one of her clients or a neighbour or something." Rubbing out the question mark with his palm, Shinn replaced it with the words 'someone she knew?'
"Right, so let's look at the last and most important one: motive."
"Here's the thing," Nicol frowned, "the motives are unclear. Obviously, they killed Officers Hutson and Samson to get to the woman. So, motive for killing them is clear. But the big question is why kill the woman? Because she knew the identity of the infiltrators of the Clyne Mansion? How? Her son was the infiltrator? If so, the son killed his own mother?"
"Maybe these the infiltration at the party and the woman's murder aren't related."
Athrun turned to look at Meyrin who was frowning, toying with a pen with her fingers.
"So," Shinn drawled out. "We find a blood sample containing chemicals allowing us to believe our criminal is a 'superhuman', trace it to a woman who claims that she sold her son, and turns up later murdered by what appears to be a 'superhuman'. And you think these two crimes are unrelated?" He raised a sceptical eyebrow at his teammate, "I don't think so."
Meyrin shrugged, "I don't know. This is just too-" She waved her pen around in the air, searching for a correct word to describe the situation. "-too overwhelming. It's stretching my imagination way too far," she concluded, with another shrug and a frown.
"Maybe it's a coincidence," Luna winced. She didn't look like she believed in what she was saying. "Maybe the woman was killed for another reason. Say, the wife of one of her clients finds out that her husband is cheating on her. So she hires someone to kill the third party."
"Maybe a professional fixer," Dearka offered, "a killer for hire. That would explain the perfection in which the murder is executed."
Athrun thought about it. It wasn't impossible, but he had seen and done enough in his law enforcement career to know that coincidences didn't occur as frequently as people thought they did. As he stared at the whiteboard across the conference room, he knew that this was no coincidence and he said so to his subordinates who were clustered around the conference table.
"Okay," Shinn said, "so let's assume it's not a coincidence. From what we gathered from the victim's statement, she sold her son to a man who turned up on her doorstep twenty years ago and offered her an irresistible sum of money. So, maybe this mysterious stranger is the mastermind behind the infiltration. He's using the woman's son and he's afraid she would be able to identify him."
"Possible." Athrun pointed his pen in Shinn's direction and nodded. "Think about what spawned this whole investigation."
"The drug that Siegel Clyne's company created."
"Exactly," Athrun nodded again, "let's not get distracted by recent happenings. All these incidents-" He sketched a circle in the air with his pen to encompass the entire whiteboard. "- the infiltration at the corporation, the break-in at Lacus' homecoming party, the blood sample we found, the woman we traced it to and her 'superhuman' murderer. It all stems from science, from chemicals, from the pharmaceutical industry."
"So you're saying that we're dealing with illegal human experimentation?"
"Possible," Athrun said again.
Shinn scribbled a large 'Illegal human experimentation' with the marker and added a question mark.
Athrun glanced at Meyrin pointedly. "What about that name Lacus mentioned in her statement? Any leads?"
"No," she shook her head. "The name Kira Hibiki doesn't appear anywhere in the invitation list."
"So that's our guy," Dearka said, leaning back into his chair, "let's bring him in for questioning."
Meyrin turned to look at Dearka and shook her head again. "Here's the problem," she said, "I've run the name through the national database and there are no records of him. No address, no telephone number, no bank loans, no licensed vehicle. Nothing. He's either not a citizen here or that's just an alias."
"I glanced through Lacus' statement," she added, "and Lacus mentioned that he was from DEX enterprises. Yes, there were guests from DEX enterprises that night but none of them were called Kira Hibiki."
"Do we have their photographs?" Athrun questioned.
"From the party? No, unless Nicol is able to pull up footages from the security cameras-"
"Only footage from the beginning of the party," Nicol interrupted. "The cameras were 'fried' during the infiltration. They screwed up the whole system so all I've managed to save are some random footages of the party at the start."
"Okay," Meyrin said, "and I can pull up some photos from the corporate website of DEX enterprises. See if any of the faces look familiar to Lacus."
"Do that," Athrun ordered, "and show her the two people in the carpark footage too. Let's see if she recognises them."
With a casual flick of his wrist, Rau sent the glass vial shattering into the opposite wall. Tiny shards of glass fell tinkling to the floor. Kira heard the sharp intake of breath from his companions but he remained impassive as Rau turned to him.
"Do you know what that is?" Rau's voice was dripping with sarcasm.
Kira didn't reply and Rau didn't ask again. They stared at each other across the desk, Kira's eyes emotionless and Rau's cold and impersonal.
Finally, Stellar spoke up and broke the awkward silence. "It's the drug we retrieved from the Clyne Mansion, sir," she muttered.
Kira bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from asking her to shut up. He knew they were treading on dangerous grounds. One wrong word and they could end up in deep shit. He had been there, done that.
His dark amethyst eyes caught sight of the shattered glass vial in the corner. Something wasn't right. Whatever the glass vial contained was precious to Rau. That was the only reason why he would send them for it and his careless treatment towards it could only mean one thing – it wasn't real.
They had been tricked.
As soon as the realisation dawned on Kira, he knew they had failed their mission and Rau didn't take failures lightly.
"Where is the real drug?" He asked quietly, eyes betraying no emotion. He was aware of the perplexed glances that his teammates were casting him but he kept his eyes fixed on Rau. Never take your eyes off the threat. His first lesson back in the facility.
Rau's lips stretched into a wide grin. "I always knew you were sharp," he smiled, "quick as whip. My best assassin so far."
Kira ignored the compliment.
"I don't know where the real thing is," Rau continued. The smile had faded and was now replaced with an annoyed frown. "And even if I sent an undercover team, my guess is that the outcome will be unsuccessful." His fingers drummed an impatient rhythm on the edge of his desk. "I don't have time to entertain another failure."
"So we're going to do this differently," He settled back into his leather chair and interlaced his long fingers, "I'm proposing an exchange, a trade. I want to swap someone for the drug. The real drug."
"And who are you referring to?"
Rau opened his desk drawer with a hand and drew out a white card, tossing it across his desk. It landed inches away from Kira, who broke the eye contact between them to glance down at it. It was a Polaroid photo showing a black convertible. There were two people in the picture. The first was a man standing on the driver's side of the vehicle. He had one hand on the door handle and the other was removing magenta wraparound shades to expose emerald eyes. Navy blue hair was his other distinguishing feature.
He was looking over the top of the convertible at the second person in the photo - a woman, with waist-length pink hair, but unlike her male companion, her back was to the camera.
From the angle of the shot and the grainy texture of the photograph, the photograph had probably been taken from a distance away. Probably by one of the teams Rau had sent out to gather intel.
Kira stared at the photograph, unable to tear his eyes away. He recognised the man. He had been leaning against the door of the Clyne Mansion the night they had broke into it. And as for the woman, Kira had a pretty good idea who she was, and he didn't like where the conversation was going.
"Who is he?" Auel's voice broke through his reverie and he glanced up again to look at Rau.
"His name is Athrun Zala. He is the chief of the Special Unit and Siegel Clyne's adopted son. He's not one to be trifled with, so don't let your guard down around him."
Kira remembered those sharp green eyes scanning the area, wary and alert. This guy was trouble.
"So, we're capturing the man?" Sting asked.
"No, I don't want him," Rau shook his head. He tossed another photograph onto the desk. This time, the camera was pointing straight at the woman. Her head was half-turned towards the camera, as though someone had just called out to her and she was turning around. Kira recognised her immediately. The same flowing pink hair, soft blue-grey eyes and that familiar smile.
"I want her."
Author's note: There you go. If you're confused by anything, especially in that extremely long convo in the conference room, just drop me a comment, and I'll do my bets to clear it up in the next chapter! So, review, review, review!