Sukie Red-Flower Kidnap

Ash is told by Mal that he has a blood infection similar to that of VITAS, but Mal thinks he is able to clear it out of his system. 20k lighter and 12 hours in a filtration tank later Ash is still not dead, but Mal isn’t convinced that the infection has passed. It seems that the strain of VITAS that Cross Applied Technologies had been playing with was a little stubborn.

A week passes.

Thursday 6th July 2070

Six, Ash, Glyph.

A man who calls himself Mitchell contacts Ash. He claims to represent an organisation keen to reduce childhood criminal uptake, and he believes that role models like the nova-star; Sukie Red-Flower should be making films other than Shadowrun flicks. He wanted the runners to kidnap her while she is in San Francisco so that he could then get in touch with her agent to suggest that she could do more savoury things. Ash negotiated a price, and despite Six’s bad gut feeling about the whole job, they went with it.

The runners set about doing some legwork from the table in the stuffer shack, they found out what flight that she was coming in on, and they got a rough itinerary for her visit. They realised that she would need a car and found out the agency that was leasing the armoured cars. Armoured Secure Services.

Heading down to the lease firm Six posed as a driver for Sukie, and dropped in the name of the bodyguard who was due to collect the car. The girl at the desk accepted Six’s fake I.D. but wouldn’t release the vehicle until she had verbal confirmation from the bodyguard. Six played it cool and blagged his way out of the office but didn’t get a sniff of the vehicles.

Not long later, the bodyguard turned up. And collected both vehicles, remote rigging one of them. The team followed from a discrete distance, and once they saw that he was heading into the Regal hotel they phoned ahead booked a room themselves. Heading into the car park the runners were able to get a close look at the armoured cars. Designed for body guarding work, big, armoured, and difficult to stop. The runners headed off to their room to plan the next move.

While they waited the cars moved on to the airfield. They came up with a bit of a plan. Wait at the airfield until the plane lands and find out who is in their entourage, and then try a snatch back here at the hotel.

They staked out the airport and watched Sukie get off the plane with her 3 other bodyguards, and to be joined on the landing pan by the 4th. The runners followed them back to the hotel and got a chance to eyeball their targets. An male Elf called Redial, a large troll called break, two humans, one called Deuter, and the other called Flattop, and of course, the simsense star, Sukie Red-Flower.

The runners planned on, snatch them in the morning, drop a couple of flashbangs into the lift in the carpark and snatch the girl. Six positioned his car outside the lift to deploy the grenades from the mounted launcher. Glyph sat in her car ready to pounce and Ash stood in the stairwell with a shotgun under hit coat ready to finish off any survivors.

Two of the bodyguards headed down in the lift first, and headed to the cars, unaware of the trap that had already been set for their charge. The other two, Redial and Deuter accompanied Sukie. The lift doors opened and Six had a grenade drop neatly into the small space. Redial was quick to react making a jump out of the lift, Deuter dropped and covered Sukie, and the flashbang went off.

Even flash bangs pack a concussive kick, and inside the lift the force was enough to instantly kill Deuter who took the full blast and Sukie suffered severe injuries. With the sound of the grenade still ringing Ash stepped out of the stairwell, ratcheted the shotgun and blew a hole in the back of the prone Elf.

Glyph came screeching round the underground carpark and she and Ash bundled Sukie into the car. Meanwhile Six deployed flashbangs and smoke grenades in an effort to distract the oncoming armoured SUV. Glyph was gone and the SUV couldn’t keep up with the sports car.

The runners drove a winding circuit through the city before heading down to the newly purchased yacht. They loaded Sukie’s unconscious form onto the craft and headed out to sea. Ash burned the RFID tags that were on Sukie, and then headed to a cove that he knew, where they could sit tight and wait. Six parked his car on a road about a mile from the cove working on the basis that he could get to them quickly enough if problems occurred. And then the runners waited.

Sukie’s Kidnap was all over the news, a readily prepared statement and a doctored photo which pictured Six and Ash grabbing Sukie had the runners concerned. This had become more than just a case of putting pressure on Sukie’s Agent.

TBC.