9

 
Nakamura laid the evidence out on the table like he was dealing an oversized deck of cards. Well, he certainly had “twenty one” with this hand.

Glossy printouts of poor security camera footage, magnified to the point where they almost pixilated, in black and white that really looked more like silver-gray and black. People caught at odd angels, looking away, talking to one another … except for one. One shot, number eight in the sequence, showed one of the men looking straight at the concealed, distant camera, glaring at it in annoyance and defiance.  He had no idea why, but that instantly struck him as a warning sign.  It had to be mere coincidence, though - the man couldn’t have known the airport’s automated security cameras had picked them up.  They weren’t visible from anywhere on the tarmac.

“Just like we suspected, Tagawa came in tonight,” Nakamura said, as if that wasn’t all patently obvious. “By the time these photos were transmitted to us, they had left the a-”

“Who’s this?” He asked, pointing at the glaring man.  Something about him looked hard - craggy - but
it wasn’t so much physical, save for the darkness behind his eyes; he simply looked like trouble. ”The white?”

Nakamura - technically his cousin - grimaced, and the light caught his eyes in a way that made the thin plastic lenses of his contacts visible; they looked like ghostly corneas floating atop the real ones. “We assume he’s just hired muscle f-”

“He is not,” He corrected sharply. “The black is, clearly - I can see the bulges of the guns he wears beneath his coat, even from these poor photos.  This one is more than muscle.  He seems familiar to me, and not in a good way. Why is this?”

Nakamura gaped at him like a fish.  Idiot child.  If he was not family, he’d have had him shot and disposed of long ago. “Uh, I -”

“Find out.  Fax these photos back to Tokyo, have him compared to the lists of gaijins who owe us a debt of blood.”

Nakamura looked slightly goggle-eyed, his thin lips twisting into something far less attractive than usual. “But … sir, the gaijins who owe us blood have all …. paid…”

How he loved euphemisms. Why say “killed” when “paid” could carry the same connotations?  It honestly made him chuckle, but everyone else took him dead seriously.  He supposed he should pity the humorless clods, except he thought that was the most useless and wasted of emotions.  If someone actually merited pity, they were better off dead. “People slip through the cracks, Masao;  they are forgotten, or they disappear.  Not everyone is taken when they should be.”

The pathetic boy was almost shaking in his shoes.  Obviously he wasn’t convinced that he would not kill him someday. “I’ll get right on that.”

“You do that. Let me know the moment the ground team has a fix on Tagawa’s location.  I know that old man thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us, but there’s no fool like an old fool.”

“Y-yes sir,” Nakamura agreed, hastily gathering the photo prints off the long mahogany conference table. He simply sat back in his chair and watched as the nervous lackey seemed to increase his normal nervous tics tenfold under his gaze.  It amused him deeply to watch it, but he waited until he was gone before he smiled.

He turned his chair towards the window wall behind him, that overlooked the harbor, and revealed a good chunk of the Hong Kong skyline across the dark expanse of water.  Boats currently glided along its still surface like water bugs, and for awhile he watched them, finding it almost calming.

Tagawa was a very crafty fellow.  He knew who to hide behind.  The black hired muscle looked like he would be difficult, and surely he would be - Tagawa would only cower behind the finest, the most violent, possibly the craziest.  The white looked less impressive by comparison, as he had little over half the muscle mass of the other … so why did he get the feeling he was the truly dangerous one?  He got a sense that he should know him, and not just be bothered that Tagawa had chosen him, but even consider it an outright declaration of war.  Why was that?  Why did that gaijin make him so instantly angry?

Sanjiro Yashida watched the boats in the harbor, and wondered what he had to be afraid of.

10

Retreating was honestly a poor option, especially when you were stuck inside your own mind, and really had no place to go. While she still had no sense of herself, she did have a sense of growing, encroaching darkness, like a physical thing, somewhere beyond her.  It hadn’t quite come for her yet, but she knew it would be soon, once it got tired of playing with her.  This had set off Jean’s natural fury.  What right did this bastard have to play mind games with her?  Who was the telepath around here?

She found herself wandering the silver metal corridors of the headquarters beneath the school, and since this territory was hers, not its, she decided this was as good a place as any to try and make a stand.  She headed for the medical lab, her home away from home.

When she went inside, all was as she remembered it: surfaces spotlessly clean, lights harsh but revealing, glinting off some of the metal like sun off the water, but one of the tables was occupied by a supine figure, barefoot and shirtless, wearing only black cotton pants out of some semblance of modesty.  She didn’t need to see his face to know who it was - frankly, you didn’t forget a chest like that.  ”Hello, Logan,” she said wryly, wondering if the thing was enjoying this.  Probably; it seemed like a sadist. “So we’re back here, huh?  The fateful day you came into all our lives.” She went through the motions of preparing for an exam, going so far as to grab a folded white lab coat out of one of the cupboards.  She wondered how much the thing knew about medical instruments. “Scott first reported the physical oddities about you, you know.  He said you had some cuts and deep bruises on your chest - he speculated broken ribs - from
the beating Sabertooth gave you.  He didn’t believe Rogue’s report that he actually hit you with a tree, because if that were true, you’d likely be dead.  But then, after I talked him through getting the med-kit to sterilize the wounds, he muttered an obscenity - you know how rare that is for Scott - and said they were gone.  It was my turn not to believe him.”  She started putting together a tray of medical instruments, but it was heavy on scalpels and syringes. “It took him two minutes to get the kit and come back - three, tops. The bruises were gone; the cuts were gone.  The blood was still there, but nothing else.  I knew he was telling the truth simply because I could sense how deeply unnerved he was.  A healing factor as rapid and complete as yours can be a frightening thing when you first see it.” She started opening cupboards, looking for the saw used to remove plaster casts. “We didn’t know it was a healing factor then.  We didn’t know what to think.  The Professor hadn’t mentioned what your mutation was to anyone; presumably he didn’t know. So, once you were brought in here I cleaned off the blood, thinking I’d find something … but, of course, there was nothing.  Your skin was flawless.  Also, I couldn’t help but notice, it was unusually soft for a man’s.  I intended to ask you what kind of moisturizer you used, but if your body never ages, then your skin probably doesn't either, does it?  I also noticed you felt hot, and instruments confirmed your body temperature was above normal, along with your heart rate.  I thought perhaps you had a fever, and decided to give you something, see if I could temporarily bring your fever down until I determined why
you were sick.  I thought maybe you had some kind of infection, pre-dating the fight, or maybe the flu.
 The symptoms of your healing factor at work actually do correspond to a mild illness; fever is a body’s defense, after all.  It’s part of your healing factor too, but only as a brief side-effect.  Even you have noticed your healing comes with a sudden flush of heat.  The body doing its healing work; it’s truly a marvelous thing.”

She could not find the saw.  Maybe it had been moved and locked up, where no one could “accidentally” find it.  She couldn’t remember anymore, but it didn’t matter.  She had two trays of scalpels and syringes, and she turned to see “Logan” was still lying on the table, presumably unconscious. Going to act this out to the bitter end?  She remained where she was, back to the counter.  “When I went to take a blood sample that was when all hell broke loose. You really scared the shit out of me.  See, I had my mind “open” a bit; I was listening for you to start regaining consciousness.  But I didn’t get any thoughts from you until you already had me by the throat.  I’ve never known anyone who could fight by instinct, who could throw themselves into full consciousness by reflex, but you are a very unique man. Your first thought really made no sense to me: ”Not again.” Of course, if we'd known then what we know now, we’d never have put you down here. We’d have kept you upstairs in one of the empty rooms. You still wouldn’t have been Mister Congeniality, but maybe you wouldn’t have instantly thought the worst, waking up in a place that smelled medical.  It was like waking up a victim of shell-shock on a live firing range. We never did apologize for that, did we?  We should have.  So now that you know that much about it … whatever
the fuck your name is … you should know that I’m not going anywhere near the table. I know how this ends - I’m not going to make it easy for you.”

Logan sat up, and turned his empty eye sockets towards her. “Oh but come on - we’ve gone this far.   And I can tell you’ve enjoyed getting this off your chest.”

“Actually, that’s not the part I enjoyed,” she replied, and then, reaching out with familiar mental muscles, flung the entire contents of the trays at him.

It worked, like she'd convinced herself it would, and the dozen scalpels and syringes slammed into him like arrows. He jerked back, like he might fall off the table, but managed to remain sitting upright.  In fact, he looked down at the implements now riddling his chest and abdomen with something like curiosity, then looked up at her, with his unsettlingly empty smile. “Talking as distraction.  It’s kind of Freudian, though, inn’t?  It reveals your thoughts, your guilt … your blame.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Couldn’t he even pretend to be hurt?

“Sure you don’t.” The scalpels and syringes sticking out of him suddenly began pulling inside of him, being sucked through his skin like it was a porous and ravenously hungry substance.  But the truth was it was the thing inside the shell, his void, that made up his tenuous being.  There was no blood, and his (faux) skin sealed up as quickly and perfectly as Logan’s real skin. “You got bad luck with men, don’tcha?”

“That a corporeal thing.  Isn’t that beneath you?”

“Oh sure, but it’s fun to make you squirm.  So you get yourself a piece of young tail, but he’s so repressed and anal he might as well be a mannequin, and you get the hots for a guy who is obviously a lot more fun, but too damn wild and damaged for your tastes.”

“I don’t think of him as damaged.”

“Sure you don’t,” he repeated, cheerfully malevolent.  He hopped off the table, and started walking towards her.  He tried copying Logan’s strange stalking swagger, but couldn’t; instead, he looked like the grotesque parody he was.  She tried to telekinetically toss him across the room, but she was unable to get a sense of him as a physical presence, and therefore couldn’t wrap her power around him.  He was a void without presence; a thing that was but wasn’t, at the very same time. “Why are you holdin’ back on me, sweet buns?  You’re the avatar of Camaxtli, a god of war and bloodshed. You got oodles of ball shriveling power, babe. Why ain’tcha  throwin’ it at me?  Why are you holding back?”

There was something about him trying to provoke her into lashing out while wearing Logan’s skin that struck her as odd.  First his burnt, grilled arm, and now this.  Coincidence?  “Why do you want me to attack Logan?”

He stopped, arms held wide as if in welcome. “What d’ya mean Logan, sweetheart?  You know it’s me.”

“And I know you weren’t trying to provoke a fight while looking like Scott, either.” The answer seemed
so obvious she couldn’t believe it. “You want me to kill Logan.”

He scoffed. “I don’t even know who the fuck he is.”

“Yes, you do, because he’s Bob’s avatar.  And you already said you didn’t like Bob.  So this is a way of conditioning me to be violent against Logan, isn’t it?”

He gave her that empty grin of his, that wedge of space where his nothingness couldn’t have been more apparent. “So this is the analytical “Doctor Jean”, is it?  I hate to poke holes in your funny theory, but you have to be alive to kill anything.  And the future doesn’t look to rosy for ya right now.”

She shook her head, sure she was on to something here.  Conspiracies weren’t just for the corporeal.  “It’s revenge.  Bob is blackmailing Osiris - and by extension, you - into doing this.  And what better way to piss him off than take away his avatar?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” But his smile had taken on a edge that could only be called predatory.

“I bet you don’t.  No one said you had to be smart to be a god killer.”

If something without eyes could be said to glower, it did. “You’re trying to make me angry. You don’t want to do that.”

But maybe, if you were doomed, choosing your method of departure was the only choice you had.

11

They checked out the place before they let Tagawa in, but it was already clear.

It didn’t seem like a gangster’s hidey hole, but yet in several respects it did.  Hong Kong real estate was outrageously overpriced, precisely because there were so many people and so little usable space. So many of the skyscrapers that littered the city were actually apartment buildings, and Tagawa’s brother lived on the thirty fifth floor of one ... but not just any skyscraper, it seemed.  According to Tony, this building was full of politicians and others who were either in the Hong Kong government or worked with the Chinese government - a unique division that spoke volumes.  It also guaranteed that no one would hit this building, because the Chinese government was not one you wanted to piss off.  Fuck its “favored nation” status - China was a dictatorship.  They executed people, and then sent the family of the executed a bill for the bullets used to kill their loved one; they were stone cold hard.  You really didn’t want to fuck with them.

But, having said that, it was also clear that there must have been collusion - on some level - between the Triad and the Chinese government.  Because if the government really wanted to wipe them out, they would be gone, no muss, no fuss.  So somebody was letting it survive, whether through bribes or tradition or a combination of the two.  And just that fact alone made the Triads more potentially dangerous than the Yakuza, because they had political weapons in their arsenal.

It was a pretty roomy apartment for Hong Kong - three rooms (including a relatively large bathroom), including a spacious living room with a polarized window looking between neighboring towers to a thin slice of the harbor beyond.  The floor was polished hardwood covered with the occasional Turkish rugs, but it smelled dusty, like it hadn’t been inhabited for months, which was a good thing even though it made Logan sneeze.  It was very tastefully, if austerely, furnished, which is why it didn’t strike him as being a gangster hideout. But there were a few touches that gave clues about its previous inhabitant: a small baggie of cocaine in the well stocked bar, a dagger hidden beneath a couch cushion, a well oiled Magnum in a box beneath the bed, and a similarly maintained Glock in a case in the bathroom cupboard.  There were probably a couple of more hidden weapons, but Logan didn’t care to look for them.

Tagawa was tired, possibly from the long flight, so he went to sack out in the bedroom.  Once he was gone, Logan suggested to Marc, “Maybe you should get some sleep now, while you can.”

Marc was currently lounging casually on the smoky gray leather sofa, with a crystal glass of scotch in his hand.  He might have had an extremely well stocked bar, but Tetsuo curiously had no beer - Logan imagined he was one of those pretentious, snobby amoral gangster types.  “Naw man, it’s cool.  But if
you wanna -”

“I slept on the plane. I know you didn’t.”

“Yeah I did.  Told ya, I snoozed through the Matrix films.”

He scowled at him. “Will you get some sleep already?”

Marc shrugged, and gulped down the rest of his scotch, hiding a yawn.  He then thunked the heavy glass down on one of the glass and iron end tables, and stretched out fully on the couch. “Gonna give me a good night kiss?”

Logan flashed him a middle finger before turning back to Tetsuo’s laptop on the bar.  Marc chuckled, like he knew he would.

He felt odd sitting on a leather bar stool - a good, comfortable kind, a kind that didn’t seem to exist in
real bars anymore, just like a polished cherry wood bar top like this didn’t really exist anymore - going through the meager files on someone else’s computer, especially since Marc was the computer expert around here. But this was a Japanese laptop, which meant the keyboard wasn’t in English letters, but
kanji, the “symbol” language of Japanese text.  Marc couldn’t read it, but Logan could;  he could also
read any Japanese documents he found.  But as it turned out, Tetsuo had “scrubbed” his hard drive -
there was nothing on it of note.  He opened a browser, and found that he'd bookmarked a few porn sites, including some extremely unsavory ones that seemed to indicate they involved bestiality - what kind of
sick fuck was Tetsuo?  Logan was glad he was dead, or he’d have tossed him out his own fucking window.

He realized he had nothing better to do, so after finding a software program that displayed English language pages (well, if it wouldn’t display the characters, the pages wouldn’t load properly, if at all), he decided to check his e-mail.  He hadn’t done that since … had he ever done that?  He'd kind of forgotten he even had an e-mail address.

Well, the spammers hadn’t.  Amazing.  Some of them seemed to be from the same places that Tetsuo
had bookmarked.  He did have one legitimate e-mail, from Srina.  She was still in England, back from vacation, and while she enjoyed her time away, she was apparently having a minor crisis - she didn’t
want to leave her flat.  That tiny thing over the bookshop, where the street noise leaked in a bit too much at times.  She knew she could move to a better place, a roomier place, but she found to her own personal astonishment she didn’t want to, and suspected there was something wrong with her.  As if to emphasize that point, she added that she missed him.  It was easy to read, inbetween the lines of her letter (e-mail), how lonely she actually was.

And gods, he could sympathize.  He also knew why Srina had no desire to upgrade her digs - why bother?  It was her safe nest, her womb, her bolt hole against the rest of the world, and it had always served her well.  There was some irony in the woman who could convince everyone she was invisible wanting to desperately hide out from the world, and yet he knew, in a way, she couldn’t help it.  One of the reasons they'd probably ever connected in the first place - beyond some mutual loneliness - was the fact that they both dwelled on the fringes of even mutant society, because they felt they had no choice. Srina was simply used to being alone, being on the outside, going in only to steal something, while he … well, when they first met, he was a mindfucked tool for the Organization, their friendly neighborhood mutant killer, so he'd had to be on the outside: he was a creature that didn’t technically exist, working for an agency that didn’t technically exist.  How could he be “inside” anything? He liked to think that attracted them to each other, along with the possibility that maybe he was trying to reconnect with his lost humanity. Oh, and there was the sex too.  But he knew from being with her that they just seemed to fill the empty spaces within each other; it was a temporary feeling, but always better than nothing, better than living with the knowledge that you weren’t whole, and you didn’t know how to - or couldn't - fix yourself.

She sounded so lost he wished he could reach through the monitor and touch her; he could definitely relate to the feeling.  Logan figured e-mailing her back was the best he could do.  But what to say?  He decided then that, after this was all over, he’d go to London and he would see her - and tell her everything.  About Mariko, about Yasha (who may or may not have betrayed him), about everything that had happened these last few months.  Bob knew, perhaps, but he’d never told anyone about all of this; Marc came close, but he wasn’t prepared to share so much of Mariko with him.  It was probably sexist of him, but he felt more comfortable with the idea of telling a woman about her, and how he felt … his memories of her.  He knew he could trust Srina too.  Maybe there was “no honor among thieves”, but she always kept his secrets. 
In fact he knew, if he was objective, he and Srina were probably a match made in heaven (theoretically) - both were oddballs even among fellow mutants, they could only stand others for so long before they needed their privacy, and they both didn’t trust as a matter of course, but they trusted each other.  Just
a few more of those weird coincidences that made life so interesting sometimes.

He sat there for the longest time, not sure what to type, but eventually he thought of something - the bare facts.  He was in Hong Kong with a friend, but as soon as he was done here, he’d probably swing by London, if she was willing to put up with him for a little bit.  He told her to e-mail him back if she felt otherwise, as he’d actually bother to check it this time.

He had agonized over the content of the e-mail for so long, Marc was already asleep; he could hear his slow, rhythmic breathing from where he sat.  Bob knew he wasn't psychic, but he still got a sense that this was the rare calm before the storm.  He knew he should enjoy it while he could.

He wondered why that was so hard.

 
12

The drive to his lawyer in the morning was uneventful, but Tony had expected that.  They had to know
he was here, but they were probably still looking for him.  There was a good chance they’d strike on the
way back, but he assumed Marcus and Logan knew that.  They still kept an eye out for things as Yukio, dressed like a professional hired car driver, steered the sedan deftly through the crowded streets of Hong Kong.

He wondered if this would be a good place to die. If he had to, this would be a nice enough spot to do it in; Hong Kong was attractive in a chaotic, urban jungle sort of way.  He just hoped he hadn’t imperiled everyone else here.

By the time they reached his solicitor’s office, he asked Logan to stay with the car.  Logan looked perturbed, like Tony knew he would, but he whispered to him - low, so she didn’t hear it - that he didn’t want to leave Yukio alone out here, especially if the potential of a car bomber still existed.  Logan would know what to look for, and could deal with any threat; as well trained as Yukio was, he didn’t know if she would do as well.  Logan reluctantly agreed to stay.  Tony hoped he’d forgive him for the lie, if he ever found out about it.  But he knew he could count on Logan’s antiquated, intermittent chivalry to make the whole thing easier to swallow.

Marcus escorted him into the sterile lawyer’s office, where everything was in muted tones of beige and gold, potted rubber plants dotting the corners that weren’t taken up by filing cabinets or the occasional water cooler. The primly dressed, busy staff looked up in surprise, and tried to smooth their expressions into neutrality.  Hong Kong was a melting pot, all right, although mainly whites left when Britain ceded the territory back to China - so now it was mainly a melting pot of former expatriates and Asians from all over, but there were very few blacks.  And because there were some undertones of racism still existing - racism was everywhere, it just differed depending on the race doing the stereotyping and who was the target - most Asians around Hong Kong were genuinely startled by Marcus.  But Marcus knew and didn’t seem
to care, and Tony saw it as a bonus, as people would think twice about getting in a fight with him.

The black strong guy - the “muscle” - was a stereotype, and not a positive one, but Marcus hadn’t only embraced it, he reveled in it.  He had a very perverse sense of humor.  The truth was, if he was as much
of a stereotype as he often liked to appear, he’d be impossible to work with.  As it was, he was usually
the smartest man in the room - he usually knew this as well.  He was a dangerous combination of ability, perversity, non-conformity, and a restless intellect.  It would be a small miracle if he lived past forty.

The secretary turned her stunned gaze from Marcus to him, and blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear her vision. “Oh, um, Mr. Tagawa, I’ll let Mr. Lee know you’re here.”

“Thank you,” he said politely, as Marc threw himself in an empty waiting room chair.  He was checking it all out with his usual subtlety , but Tagawa remained standing.  Lee was not his usual lawyer, but Takashi Suzuki was affiliated with this solicitor’s office.

Because wealthy people were generally treated better than normal people (it was an awful thing, but true anyway), the secretary answered her internal line, and then told him, “You can go in now, Mr. Tagawa.”

He nodded, and then told Marcus, “If you don’t mind, I’ll go in alone.”

Marcus raised his eyebrows at that. “You sure?”

“Yes.  If there was trouble here, it would come in the front door.”

Marcus accepted that with a grunt, not exactly thrilled, but accepting. “Shout if you need me.  Good luck with the suits.”

“It’s always a party,” Tony agreed dryly, heading to the large oak door.  It was more than pleasant in the front office, but as soon as he entered Lee’s office, he was greeted by a blast of filtered, cold air.  What was with hermetically sealed buildings and heavy air conditioning?

Mr. Lee’s office was almost as big as the front room, with an ornately carved wooden desk taking up most of the central space, with a comfortable yet hardly warm loveseat pushed against the far wall, next to a realistic yet clearly fake ficus tree, and a small table containing a water pitcher and several glasses.  He had a large executive chair, currently turned away from him, presumably looking out his window, but the blinds were half shut against the rather harsh light of day.

Tony took a seat in one of the meagerly padded chairs before the ostentatious desk, and asked, “You haven’t killed him, have you?”

The chair slowly turned, and he found the somewhat bloated face of Shiro Morimoto giving him a phony, empty smile that looked sickly. “Of course not.  We told him to take a walk, and he did.  If he’s smart, he’ll walk until he hits the Pacific.”

Morimoto was an actual lawyer, and one firmly in the pocket of the Yakuza; he was their “go to” attorney, on the occasions where they needed one.  He was also an unofficial spokesman for the group, and pudgy in a way that suggested he was way too indulgent and comfortable with his life, which had ceased to be hard long ago - if indeed it ever had been.  He wore a sharply tailored black Prada suit with a white shirt and a blue tie, and all of it, combined with his thick, back swept mane of prematurely silver hair, made him look like an expensive undertaker gone to seed.  That description probably wasn’t far off from the truth. Tony simply folded his hands in his lap, and waited for Morimoto to get to the threats.

Finally, he obliged. “Are you slipping, old man, or do you just have balls bigger than glaciers?  Did you think we didn’t know you’d be coming sooner than not?” He chuckled darkly, without humor. “And then to spit in our face by bringing him. You live dangerously, old man.  Are you really that eager to die?”

“Him?  Him who?  Do you mean Marcus?  We’re all allowed a bodyguard.” He knew exactly who he meant, but he preferred to play dumb.  The most amazing thing was how many people actually bought it.

Shiro shook his head, dark eyes glittering like topaz. “Not “Shaft” out there, if that’s what his name is.
You know damn well who I mean.  That’s why you went and got him, right?  Don’t think we haven’t figured your intelligence network rivals ours.”

“Actually, it surpasses it. Can’t you tell?”

Shiro’s eyes narrowed, his expression becoming set like stone, hard and deadly. When he reached into
a desk drawer, he half expected him to pull out a gun and shoot him, but that seemed far too vulgar for Shiro, who was honestly quite prissy.  Others did the dirty work; he simply sued family estates afterward. “The fucking gaijin ronin, Tagawa.  The scourge, the Butcher of Tokyo.” Shiro pulled a large photograph out of the drawer, and threw it on the edge of the desk, so he could get a good look at it.  It was an old photo, obviously from a lower resolution security camera, and taken in a parking garage. There were a couple of men visible, but caught in profile was a man who was clearly Logan:  his scalp and facial hair were slightly different, but there was no way it could be anyone but him. “You brought him here, old man, and you made this battle personal.”

“My brother didn’t make it personal?”

Shiro ignored him. “Our people are in position, Tagawa - we’ve been waiting for you, and you’re surrounded.  Give us Logan Yashida, right this minute, or everyone in this building dies.”