Hibo limped over to the SUV, sliding in with a grimace. He immediately set about opening the med kit and tending to his own chest wound, trying to wrap a bandage around himself as the vehicle lurched forward.
Once they had arrived at the conference room, he gingerly walked around, stopping to grab a bottle of water for himself.
Sitting in the car, Stringer had seemed fairly comfortable- being chauffered around in a black SUV seems perfectly natural to the young man. But once in the building, especially in the conference room, he realizes how grubby he is. His overalls are rumpled and singed, reeking of smoke and gunpowder, and while his scout armor is still pristine underneath it wearing combat gear into a business meeting is terribly gauche. Not to mention it sending the wrong message.
Then again, maybe it was the right message? Stringer shakes his head. "Still, I wish I could change before we meet these guys," he mutters to himself as he sits down and starts to grab food off the charcuterie plate.
While they wait, he fills in the group on what he knows about Oyama Corp and its dealings in the world of the weird.
Faith realizes how tense she has been ever since waking up and sighs, leaning back, eyes closed, until the car starts to move. Then she tries to keep track of the route being taken and where in the city they end up.
She too is pretty grubby, mostly from not having a decent shower and being in the same clothes for days. She keeps her guard up, for even if Stringer's information is correct, her survival instincts remind her there could be hidden dangers here. She helps herself to some food and drink, enjoying the fine surroundings.
"I could get used to this. I wonder if they are hiring."
Salvo quickly recovers the MG and the rest of his gear from the Jeep, when the man mentions ‘cleaning and flossing’ the area. Stowing the items in the transport vehicle.
”You guys might want to pay extra attention to the body just inside, It’s one of those shouldn’t exist things.”
Then he settles into the SUV for the trip.
Oyama ‘Special Projects’
Oyama ‘Special Projects’
”Okay to leave some of my gear in the car?” He asks when in the garage.
If the answer is yes. He leaves the MG, Shotgun, and Assault rifle along with his duffel bag. Otherwise he looks a little overloaded toting all the weapons. Either way he collapses the stock on the SMG and tucks it into his long coat.
Once in the conference room, he notes all exits including the window. Then he helps himself to a cup of coffee and liberal portion of the food. Finally taking a center seat at the table.
Nodding to Faith’s comment. ”Yeah, this place is nice. Bet they got great bennies,”
Salvo is fully aware of the rumors Stringer mentions, having heard similar things through his more analog connections.
The group finds themselves waiting for quite a while. The sword-bearing driver pops his head back in the room after maybe fifteen minutes to announce, "Tanomoshi-sama's flight was delayed leaving San Francisco, but he just landed and is on his way. Just bear with us a little longer, thank you."
Perhaps another ten minutes passes before the door opens again. The man who strides in isn't a Japanese man, but anglo. He is rather tall, just shy of two meters, but he is also skinny as a rail. Adding to his height is a gray Stetson with a silver band. A bolo tie with a piece of jade at the neck and well-worn cowboy boots add to the image, but are offset by a perfectly tailored Italian suit. He offs his hat to reveal thick, bushy brown hair. His mustache is the same color and bushy texture.
"Well, I had to just see it with my own baby blues, Tony! How the hell are ya, son? Ain't seen you since that thing that time. When we had to russle up a posse of locals for a coup? Damn, been so long, son, I just don't recall!"
"Now, how's about you introduce me to your friends?"
Salvo is constructing a prosciutto and cracker sandwich when the driver pops in. He gives the man a thumbs up.
When Tanomoshi arrives, Salvo's jaw actually drops. He smiles broadly and moves to shake the man’s hand.
”Yeah. And it turned out he was the wrong despot. But hell he needed to go anyway right?’
Stepping back he looks the man over.
”Damn Doug. You old jack rabbit. So this is what happened to you. The pool back at the Company was up to around 500. I was betting you went back for ‘That’ girl.”
Looking around the room.
”How in the hell did you wrangle all this? And don’t say you won it in a poker game. You ain’t that good.”
Looking back at the others.
”Right where are my manners?. Mom would smack me. This is Faith, Hibo, and Stringer. Good people to have in a bad situation. We could have used them that time in Brisbane.”
Suddenly snapping his fingers. ”Right, sorry. We agreed never to talk about that.”
Finally looking the man in the eyes.
”Man, just what is going on? This Klaus guy has major juice. He’s either got Folder tech or he is one uber Psych Sorcerer. And his minion was sporting some out of this world chrome. What is his deal?”
When the delay is announced, Faith realizes how hungry she really is and how long it has been since she had a decent meal. So she returns to the food spread and helps herself to a plateful of goodies and refreshes her drink, although she sticks with Maracujá juice.
She has just bitten off a too big bite of an empadinha when the big cheese arrives. She sits with her mouth full, watching the interchange with Salvo and Doug (?), barely holding in a full out belly laugh that would have caused an embarrassing spray of food. She was not expecting this Sam Elliot clone to be the much anticipated Tanomoshi-sama.
She covers her mouth with her hand when introduced and forces the food down mostly unchewed, then nods. She feels as if she has landed in a quirky action adventure flick. Her internal narrator points out, There's something you don't see everyday. And we see a lot of strange things in a typical day, do we not?
"Klaus? So that was you. Or y'all, I reckon. After the video surfaced, well, it was my assumption. Oh, the video?"
He clicks a button on a laptop and the screen in the conference room lights up with a shaky, grainy video. It looks like it was filmed with a cheap camera from a height equal to maybe a third or fourth floor of a building, and at least two blocks away. The videographer is struggling to control his breathing and swears quietly in Portuguese as the small individual pops are drowned out by the sharp staccato of machine gun fire.
It's the shootout with O Vampiros. Salvo can barely be made out opening fire on a ganger who drops amidst the hail of bullets.
”At the time of your raid on Horatio Bloodletter's hideout, yeah we were aware he was operating there but our resources been a bit stretched lately, andyway a group of teenagers were playing soccer in the courtyard of their tenement. Most of those boys want to be the next hero at the Copa. Great match by, the way, don't know if you caught it, Tony. Anyway, one of those kids doesn't want to be a futbol star. He wants to be Andre Camara. Unfortunately for him, he sold the video to a subsidiary of Oyama, and we are burying it. Oh, wait, I love this part.”
The video shows Hibo putting a round into one of the O Vampiros' abdomen before the ganger is lit up by Tank and Salvo. "Whew, boy, that'll buck your bronco!"
He fiddles with the laptop again, closing the video and opening an office slides application and scrolls through the different pages and selecting one that is an image of a photograph scanned from a hard-copy picture. The edges are worn and the photo itself is slightly faded. It shows an photo of Edmund Klaus, looking younger than you recall by a decade or so. He is wearing a parka and carrying ancient cross-country skies. A handwritten note in silver ink sits in the bottom-right corner that reads "Nepal, 1935".
"Yeah, Klaus is a real piece o' work, I tell you what. Here is what we know about his history, the short version: Edmund Klaus was born to a wealthy family and as a young man was quite the bon vivant. At some point in his mid-twenties, Klaus dropped out of the party scene entirely and began traveling the world as an amateur adventurer. We have records of him in Hong Kong, Iraq, Nepal, the west coast of Africa, even the American southwest. When the war broke out, Klaus joined the Third Reich and rose unusually quickly through the ranks. According to documents from Nuremberg and the Wiesel Foundation, he is directly implicated in the deaths and disappearances of scores of prisoners at Erichsburg."
He scratches his chin and moves to the coffee maker. "Weird thing? Klaus disappeared entirely in early 1944. We have a memo somewhere from Klaus' superiors discussing his desertion. He would later reappear in Rio in the 1950s. We believe at this time he had the Heart of Darkness." He clicks a key on his computer and the image shifts to a large, black opal with blood-red veins.
Having seen many strange and scary things over the past few days, Stringer doesn't scoff at the idea of Klaus having been alive in 1935. Rolling with it instead of trying to apply any sort of scientific thinking, he asks the obvious question. "So what's the Heart of Darkness? Other than a cool name, I mean."
"Yeah, I didn't grease that pig, wanted it to be easily caught." "Tanomoshi" chuckles and holds up his hand clenching his fingers. "On the surface, its an opal the size of a fist." He drops his demonstrating hand and clicks the laptop, which transitions to a slide that shows the gemstone sitting on a plain white surface with a scaling ruler beside it.
"Quite the paragon of opals, ain't it? As you can imagine it is rare, valuable, and cursed. All the biggest, rarest treasures always are."
He sips his coffee and leans back against the wall. "It's also a prison. Well, more accurately, it's the jail cell door. Now, I could give you more details on that, but policy prevents me unless you want to take the job."
He walks to where he set down the laptop case and pulls out a packet sealed in a classic interoffice envelope and tosses it down. "Inside are official badges, an HR packet, and contracts with standard NDAs. Also, a corporate platinum card and documents granting you use of a private jet. Avoids customs due corporate exclusion laws or some such."
"Like I said before, we are stretched a bit thin right now. Something big is about to go down, and we need some outside contractors to lend us a hand. That's why I was on a plane out of San-fran the moment Salvo showed up in the same place as Klaus just after the Heart was stolen from a museum in Australia. An operator like him? And currently running with a crew that consists of two investigaors and a tech expert? That's an opportunity I can't pass on, no sir."
"I want you four to head to Australia, investigate the heist. We assume Klaus was involved, and we want confirmation. If it wasn't, well, we still want a handle on who has it and where it is now."
Faith knows she should read all the documents closely before signing anything, but her heart is ready to accept the offer. Not only is it an opportunity to work with a corporation with deep pockets and seemingly good intentions, but there is payback to consider.
She says, "Sounds like fun! I'm in ... well once I read the fine print. Just happen to be in between assignments of my own choosing, now that my last investigation is closed courtesy of Mr. Klaus."
She does, as promised, read the documents very closely.
As near as Faith can tell, everything is standard boilerplate legal language. There are very strict conditions for the NDA, and the one thing she notices in that document is that the listed sanctions for violating the agreement include, "Corporate discretion in preventing further infractions." She is relatively sure that means someone running their mouth is going to be killed on corporate or neutral territory if they were to spill the beans.
Salvo begins nodding his head as Tanomoshi is talking. He also tries to remember if he has ever heard of the ‘Heart of Darkness’ item.
The credit card benefit makes him smile.At the mention of the private and bypass customs Salvo glances at his bag of weapons. Finally he skims the NDA. Then picking up a pen and quickly signing the document.
”Lifting language right from the ‘Company’s Hush documents I see. And I assume it we never met anyone from the Corp, we were never here, don’t know the name Tanomoshi, and were hired by anonymous email. Did I miss anything?”
Stringer is young but he has been through his parents' corpo-school's contracting class in preparation for entering the corp's executive university. He skims most of it quickly, looking in particular for any mention of ownership of items or cred acquired during the course of the contract or requirements for paying back items purchased with the corporate credit card. Becoming indebted to the company store is a classic hook to keep people working for the company, and nothing he wants any part of.
"Does this agreement include access to Oyama Corp tech?" The young man asks, head still down as he's reading the document. He only had access to corp-public and educational facilities with his parents' corp but was idly daydreaming about using Oyama's professional level facilities to upgrade his drones and gear.
Faith is not worried about the sanction possibilities for violation of the NDA. She knows this realm involves things few people would believe if told and that no law enforcement organization would act on any tip about such a group anyway. She signs and lets out a breath she did not realize she was holding, then returns to the food table for seconds.
Hibo slowly scrawled his signature on the NDA before asking "what about medical treatment?" his hand still holding his chest.
Doug swears and moves to examine Hibo. "Hell, son, fireplace poker? I hope you explained to whoever did that to you that ain't how you use a branding iron. So I'll have a doc waiting upstairs for you. And some food, too. One floor up are some executive suites. Small kitchen, common room, several decent-sized bedrooms with showers. The badges will get you there in the elevator."
"Well, there is a decent fabrication lab in our building in Sydney. I think we have to restrict some of our proprietary stuff, but I think you might be able to tweak things," he tells Stringer.
He walks back to the laptop and looks at Salvo. "Oh, no, you're official contractors. If you run into any legal issues, you just have the police reach out to old Mr. Tanomoshi. Try and avoid that, however." Scratching his chin he adds, "I hear-tell that I'm the fourth Tanomoshi. Anyway, let's start at the beginning."
Douglas Campbell proceeds to weave a tale of an ancient caliphate ruled by a widowed vizier. His only child was a girl named Fatima, and the vizier disguised her as a boy, grooming her to be his heir. But the girl chafed with the misogyny and masquerades, desiring to be her own woman with the ability to control men, rather than the other way around. "Now, y'all know this is all really apocryphal, but this girl found a secret mentor to teach her "dark magic". I don't buy into magic, but don't tell the Brothers I said that. Psychic powers, though? Yeah, I've seen an honest to God firestarter before. Didn't look a thing like Drew Barrymore, anyhow..."
His tale continues to the point where the young woman, now reaching an apex of immense power, has founded an entire cult dedicated to the worship of her. "And it was a cult, from the writings we have about a former member who was captured and interrogated. Sex, drugs, manipulation, and worse. Eventually, she got a little too big for her britches. She ends up attracting the attention of a political rival. At this point, they don't know she's a she. Anyway, this other old goat hires himself a wizard named Ahmed Mustafa. And Ahmed? He saw through her disguise and sensed her power immediately."
His story talks about how the wizard prepared some powerful magic to banish the young Fatima, known to the world as Faisal, to a void outside of time and space. The Heart of Darkness would serve a dual role for the wizard Ahmed Mustafa. First, it was a great treasure that would make perfect bait, but second, it was a conduit to the void he intended to imprison Fatima within.
"So Ahmed hands 'Faisal' this magnificent stone in front of the whole royal court or whatever. When she touches the stone, the wizard does his thing and begins to send her to his void. Fatima though? The girl had power, I tell you what. She somehow pulls her mind into a different place. Someplace closer to Earth where her powers still had some influence."
Over the next few years, her body lived despite her soul being...somewhere. Her cult acquired it and kept it hidden. Then they went for the wizard Ahmed. "And they got him, eventually. Thing is, old Ahmed knew what happened to Fatima, and he went and got himself prepared in case she came back. He reckoned she'd be even stronger than ever, having a thousand years to prepare."
"He founded a group of, well, guess you could call it a knighthood. They've been tracking the Cult of Fatima and the Heart of Darkness all this time, waiting for the moment she makes her move to come back to Earth somehow. They've tried, repeatedly, to take her body back from the Dark Lady's cult, and they got close last year. It was the first time they'd seen it in some six hundred years. And she'd aged. They think she looked like she was in her seventies. We think she's running out of time and were hoping to just run down the clock. Then the Heart was stolen. Then the bombing at the Bossa Nova Mall. I think Fatima knows her time is running out."
There was a time Faith would have assumed this Aussie bloke was yankin' her chain spinning out such a fairy tale. But since then, she'd seen things. Now she was ready to at least work on the assumption there was something to the tale.
Faith reviews in her memory the things Klaus said in the restaurant. Then she puts some things into place in Campbell's story. "So Fritz is with the group that has the princesses body and kidnapped this girl with psychic potential as the new vessel for her soul. And he needs this Heart of Darkness McGuffin to get her soul back. Is Klaus working for the cult of the princess or this Ahmed dude? Or is he Ahmed?"
Salvo listens to Tanomoshi’s exposition, alternating between nodding and shaking his head.
”Official Agents of the company. That will be a nice change for me. ”
Cult of the Dark Lady
”As if I didn’t already have enough reason to ‘Off’ Klaus, this cinches it. Suites you say. I could get used to being official. Yeah I suppose I could use a shower, shave and change of clothes” Looking down at his dirty and blood stained outfit.
”What is our timetable for wheels up to downunder?”
"Whoa, hold on, what is this about a kidnapped girl?" He pulls out his phone and quickly types. "We assumed it was a massive kidnapping for...well, y'know, a big sacrifice. This is troubling new information for us."
After he finishes typing he sets his phone down and returns to the important questions at hand.
"So you were asking about Klaus' involvement. It seems he and the Dark Lady both feel that mankind would function better under mass mind-control. We don't know exactly when he became involved with her cult, but we are sure he leads her forces here on Earth."
"The Brothers of Ahmed, as they call themselves, are the gentlemen who brought you here. They're the good guys. Kind of the Jedi mixed with the Shinobi. Their members all have some degree of natural psychic ability."
Doug "Tanomoshi" Campbell stifles a yawn. "Take a day or two to rest up. The jet will be ready when you are. Our original plan before the bombing was to interview a few people who became prominent in the media at the time of the heist."
He moves to the laptop again and calls up a news article on the heist which has some names highlighted. "First up is the curator of the museum where the Heart was stolen from, John Bellingham. Then we have Joey Miller, a local gem expert. Finally there is a Winston Smythe. Winston own a number of mineral exploration companies, including an opal mine in the Outback."
He begins packing up his computer. "I have to get more information on this kidnapping and talk with the Borther's and their chief 'magician' about what it could all mean. I will be in touch as needed. Good luck."
"The bombing was a cover, or a distraction. They wanted someone special, someone specific. Immediately following the explosion, men showed up with a talisman of some kind. They used it to test people, somehow. Those that passed were taken. Those that didn't were executed. All of us were taken to another location to be held, and they had a girl there. We assumed she was just another victim, like us, but when we finally met this Klause, he seemed to be focused on her. She was taken."
Stringer has been taking notes while trusting his specs to record the audio for him to reference later. "OK, so I've followed everything you said except I missed what the heist was. Do you mean the kidnappings?"
Stringer has been taking notes while trusting his specs to record the audio for him to reference later. "OK, so I've followed everything you said except I missed what the heist was. Do you mean the kidnappings?"