The strike team sent a message to the Chen, then they went to the far corner of the roof, huddled in the dark corner, and waited.
Matt Chen-Jasic watched the dispatcher’s location panel. He saw the teams congregating in the police building, then watched their assault on the council building. He waited until they had all entered the council building. Some of them were moving up the stairs, but they were moving slowly, clearing each floor as they went.
When the police special teams were all in the council building, Matt used Kendall’s access to the building controls to turn the ventilation system up to full and sent the signal to the strike team.
When the driver received the signal, he activated the transmitter for the double-valve device on the plastic bottles. The binary nerve agent mixed in the manifold between the valves and dumped out into the metal cake pan, where it fumed prodigiously. The HVAC system sucked up all the gas into the building intake.
Nerve gas flooded the whole building.
One thing Kendall’s special teams did not have – at least yet – were gas masks.
It was a fatal omission.
When the contents of the two plastic bottles had completely drained out, the driver used the transmitter to close the valves. Whatever of the precursors remained were sealed up again. They waited there a half hour – the deployed nerve gas decomposed in fifteen minutes – then went over to the device and put it and the cake pan in a heavy plastic bag from the suitcase and sealed the bag. They put that into a second heavy plastic bag and sealed the bag. They put the bag in the case.
They waited another half hour, in case their disturbing the device had generated any small amounts of gas, then took the hazmat suits and gas masks off. They put them back in the suitcase and left the suitcase on the roof for now, before they ventured down into the building.
They also sent the all clear to the Chen.
The strike team got back down to the garage and one of the drivers watched out the small glass window of the man door. When three unmarked box trucks pulled up, he signaled the bodyguard over at the door controls, and the bodyguard opened the overhead vehicle door. The three box trucks pulled into the garage area.
As the overhead door of the garage came down, the rear overhead doors of the box trucks went up. Sixteen armed men got out of each box truck. They were all carrying Earth-manufactured semi-automatic rifles.
MingWei’s lieutenant, forty-year old Ken Bolton – Joseph Bolton and Amy Jasic’s youngest – got out of the passenger seat of one of the vans and came over to the strike team.
“We clear?” he asked.
“We think so. We can’t be sure.”
Ken nodded. He turned to his teams in the garage.
“All right. Clear the building. We should be good, but don’t take chances. At this point, he is Chen or he is gone. Go.”
Six eight-man teams moved out of the garage into the building. Two teams went out into the first floor, and four teams went up the stairs to the second and third floors. It would take them a while to clear the six-story building.
By dawn, the Chen-Jasic teams had gathered all the bodies from the council building in the garage using electric carts. The bodies had been stripped of body armor, helmets, weapons, magazines of ammo, and even grenades, both flash-bang and high explosive (H-E). Those had been loaded on one of the box trucks, and taken back to the Chen-Jasic compound. An empty box truck had taken its place so the teams retained their mobility.
The bodies, in their uniforms, were all laid out on the floor of the garage. Two hundred and forty-two in all.
Back in the Chen-Jasic compound, they matched the faces and badge numbers of the bodies against the police roster Matt found using Kendall’s access rights. Only ten of the police special teams members had slipped the net, and they knew who they were.
Assassination teams fanned out across Arcadia City.
Matt Chen-Jasic sent out a message under Kendall’s mail account to all employees who normally worked in the council building, telling them to stay home today.
Matt also sent a message from Kendall’s account to the one deputy police chief who was not on the take from Kendall. The police chief had been on the council, and died in one of the limousines the evening before. Matt made this one honest deputy the acting police chief, and gave him orders suspending the enforcement of any law for which there was no victim.
Address By The Chen
The next morning, Thursday, the citizens of Arcadia all received a message from Chairman Kendall’s account announcing a speech by the Chen, scheduled for eight o’clock in the morning.
The news wires on Arcadia that morning were also full of reports of the explosions on A street between Arcadia Boulevard and Market Street the previous evening. It was clear that the only two limousines on Arcadia, those belonging to Chairman Kendall, had been bombed. They had now been removed into the council building garage so recovery of the bodies could be done.
The people of Arcadia knew of the Chen, how his family ran the Uptown Market and the restaurant across the street, and how they made some of the more useful, decorative, or whimsical products for sale on Arcadia. The old-timers also knew of the Chen-Jasic family’s role in introducing lavalavas and flip-flops to the colony in the very early days.
And everyone knew that, in any dealing with the Chen or the Chen-Jasic family, one never needed to be concerned about being cheated. Their reputation for honest dealings was legendary and deserved.
