Arranging a flight to America had been an easy task as Ryusuke's uncle held a plurality of equity in Japan's foremost airline company. Once Makoto showed her father what she recovered from the computer files of the underground Kageyama facility, the old man knew that he had to help, he ensured their safe travel and had Makoto send the Kageyama files to his friend at the Hiroshima Daily.
With tears abound, he drove the trio to the airport and gave them their tickets. Toshiro couldn't sleep on the plane as Makoto and Ryuske did, every time he closed his eyes, he saw them. Slick black bodies and bile-yellow eyes, the raving of the young doctor in the Kageyama facility, and Chihiro, strapped to a chair and injected with a monstrous concoction as she begged for her father while the chemicals wrapped and destroyed her tiny body.
Kill...them...all
It was Toshiro's new mantra, and the only thing that kept him from breaking down into a weeping mess, his raison d'être.
Kill...them..all
The phrase made the flight go by in seconds, the idea that allowed him to push through the jet lag and finally stand in front of the hideous building that reached into the sky, Rossi Tower. Makoto had found the schematics of the building and found that there was a security hub on the thirty-ninth floor, a room connected to all one-thousand and fifty surveillance cameras in the building, all forty elevators, and nine hundred electronic locks.
They got into the lobby easily enough and took the elevator up to the thirty-eighth floor, a keycard was needed to make the elevator stop on the thirty-ninth. The trio exited the elevator and walked with purpose, following the signs pointing them toward 'stairs'. Toshiro opened the heavy yellow door that blended into the wallpaper of the thirty-eighth floor and funneled his team through it into the cold, grey stairwell. Then it was a short trip up a flight of stairs to reach an even heavier metal door with a rather high-tech-looking keypad to the immediate left of it. Makoto went to link the PDA to the keypad, but Toshiro stopped her.
"One second." He said, closing his eyes and searching for the vibrations, the waves that came from the minds of men and women.
He felt Makoto, nearly impossible to enter, and Ryusuke, a mind he'd read before, but beyond the door, he felt nine people he could read and two more that he couldn't.
There are at least eleven, maybe more considering I can't even sense some people. We have no guns, going head-on with these guys would be a mistake, a deadly one, at that. We need a diversion, something to get them out of this room. Perhaps we could trigger the fire alarm and—
Then the lights went out, even the light-up display of the keypad, making the stairwell a chasm of darkness.
"What the hell?" Ryusuke spoke into the darkness.
"What happened to the lights?" Makoto agreed.
But Toshiro was still focused on the waves coming from beyond the door, the waves that were now moving away from him and fading. The lights went back on and the keypad lit up again, playing a happy tune as the display played a familiar logo sequence.
A burning phoenix swooped in from the top of the screen and exploded in a burst of flame that revealed in golden letters the name 'Qiánshuǐ Fènghuáng', the Chinese security firm that was used back home in Hiroshima at the police station.
"Makoto, open the door. Ryusuke, I think there's only one man left in the room, but I can't be sure, straighten your tie and if anyone asks, we are representatives for Qiánshuǐ Fènghuáng coming to do an inspection. Understand?" Toshiro ordered.
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