With the teams back together, a quick search of the place was made.
The laptop in the office was no match for Gilbert, who hacked into it with ease. It proved to contain all the legitimate business contacts of Wong’s Fortune Cookie Works. There was nothing in it to lead to A.C. Morrison – although Gilbert did find an extensive collection of pornography stored on the hard drive and a wireless feed from the hidden camera located in the women’s restroom.
There really wasn’t anything incriminating here, except perhaps for the voyeuristic propensities of the owner.
As this went on, Samuel used his large crowbar to break into the locked operations room. Inside, were a few old desks and a row of filing cabinets that contained all the paperwork related to Wong’s legitimate business. There was nothing in them to connect Wong's with any sort of drug distribution operation.
Also in the room was a panel of camera feeds, showing all the areas under surveillance in the factory; including the view from the camera hidden in the women’s restroom. Each of the cameras in the facility was also wired for sound, which meant anyone avoiding the cameras might still give themselves away by being a little too loud.
From here, Samuel could see that the entire factory was currently empty.
The rest of the team confirmed, hitting all the rooms for a once-over.
The Receiving Room was a large open warehouse with a thirty-five foot high ceiling and watched over by a camera set high in the southeast corner. Large boxes and crates were stacked everywhere, moved into place with a small forklift, while a scrolling metal door allowed baking supplies and equipment to be brought in by the delivery trucks. A second scrolling metal door opened from the Receiving Room into the Packing Room and was currently open.
In the Shipping Annex, a camera was set twelve feet up the southwest corner of this room, which was used to stage the boxes and pallets of fortune cookies for delivery. A small forklift was also located here, used to load pallets onto trucks through its scrolling metal door. A number of empty pallets were currently stacked along the east wall.
The Mix Mixing Room was where the fortune cookie dough was prepared in a giant industrial mixer and pumped through tubes onto the conveyer belt that started in the adjacent Spraying Room. Huge sacks of flour and other ingredients sat on pallets that lined the edges of the room, leaving very little space to maneuver around the machinery.
Machinery in the Spraying Room would then roll out the fortune cookie dough on the conveyer belt and coat it with a sugary glaze, before it passed into the adjacent Cutting Room. Fifty-gallon drums of ‘Uncle Carl’s Ready-Mixed Fortune Cookie Glaze’ sat along the east wall, pumped through tubes and into the sprayer – no doubt Wong’s very own “secret” ingredient.
A catwalk, overlooking the conveyer belt and machinery as it heads along the process, was accessible from a fifteen foot high ladder in the room.
In the Cut Cutting Room, machinery would cut and shape the fortune cookie dough as it came in on the conveyer belt from the Spraying Room and then send the now individually folded cookies into the adjacent Baking Room for the remainder of the process.
The catwalk, overlooking the machinery and conveyer belt as it heads along the process, is set fifteen feet up the southern wall of the room, but is not accessible from here (except to the very determined).
In the Baking Room, hot oven coils hang from the ceiling and would bake the fortune cookies as they passed under on the conveyer belt. The hot cookies would then continue out of the room and into the Packing Room to the north.
The catwalk continued through this area as well.
And finally, the Packing Room. A camera watched over the area, set high on the northeast corner of the room. The conveyer belt that ran through the cookie making process ended here, dumping the folded and baked cookies into large cloth bins, where workers would then slip paper fortunes into them and pack them into bags and boxes for shipping.
Piles of empty pallets are stacked here, no doubt to be filled, wrapped, and transferred to the shipping annex when production was running.
The overhead catwalk ends in the back half of the room, but is not accessible from here. Under the catwalk are stacked hundreds of boxes of paper fortune strips for insertion into the cookies – literally millions of them.
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Topic: Fortune Cookie Fix (Read 226841 times)