Chapter 4: Management

He didn't leave the office that night, not until long past the time he should have gone home to his brother. Knowing there would be no rest for him until he got answers he sent Mokuba a text that he would be late and not to wait up for him. Once he was sure everyone but the night shift janitors had gone home he started unraveling this mystery. He hadn't wanted to be interrupted with anything once he started, and had held both his temper and his impatience in check until he was sure there would be no disturbances.

Moving all his attention to his computer he turned off the television in his office, uninterest in the news that was replaying the same six stories it had since this evening. He had no interest in local festivals or petty thefts that had been perpetrated in Domino in the last few weeks. Silence settled around him and only the sound of the keys on his keyboard sounded as he went into his mainframe. As he bypassed his security with an encrypted code the second monitor on his desk came to life. An image of a boy with teal hair and blue eyes appeared looking bored. "Seto, fancy meeting you here, on the Kaiba Corp server."

"Noah." He replied dryly to the sarcastic greeting, not surprised this venture had alerted him. After the little fiasco he'd had with Noah years ago he hadn't been too upset when he thought his consciousness had been deleted in cyberspace. But a few months later he had gotten a shock when his technicians told him there was an odd program running rampant through the servers. Once he isolated it Noah had shown himself, clearly waiting to be caught by him before showing himself. After a rather tense hour or so they had come to an understanding. Whatever had happened in the virtual world had crippled him. There would be no escape for Noah, not anymore, but he wasn't interested in a meaningless existence as that had nearly driven him to insanity already. With few options available to him Noah had agreed to be his internal security in return for memory space to exist in. He might well have refused him if Mokuba hadn't been with him, insisting it was the right thing to do. He had to admit Noah was effective though. He had blocked multiple espionage attempts since he showed back up. "Bored?"

"Unbelievably so. Honestly, you can only surf the web for so long before losing interest."

He raised an eyebrow. "Aren't you supposed to be monitoring Kaiba Corp?"

The boy waved his hand. "It really doesn't take all that much of my attention. Especially when no one is trying to hack into the server and steal all your ideas. Please tell me you have something else for me to do."

He flipped a small hard drive out of his pocket, one human resources had sent up to him minutes after Kisara's double left his office per his demand, and inserted it into the computer. Noah made a slight motion with one of his hands and the file blinked to life. Sarah's picture flashed onto his monitor and the rest of her information appeared below the image of his stepbrother. His company required a great deal of background information and every legal item related to her was now on the screen. Noah processed all of it within moments. "She passed all the interviews. What's the problem?"

Where to even start? He kept it simple, not caring to have his sanity questioned by a virtual child, for all Noah was as old as he was. "She's hiding something."

Noah shrugged without much interest. "Everyone is." Noah's eyes flicked around as he looked at something he couldn't see. "If you don't trust her, fire her. There are more translators available." As he spoke two dozen pictures of various people appeared on the screen, several of which he had already been presented with. "Take your pick."

"I just want to do a little digging." He told him. He had determined there was very little he could do until he could analyze this situation fully, and clearly he couldn't trust himself to make a logical decision about what to do about her without all the information he could get.

Noah eyed him. "This isn't like you. No one is good enough for you to bother with once they blip unhappily on your radar. What's going on?" He flicked his fingers, saying nothing, which only increased Noah's suspicions. "It looks like she's not the only one hiding things."

"I don't actually need your help to do this." He pointed out. "So, would you like to alleviate your boredom or go elsewhere?"

Noah rolled his eyes. "So… You're not unhappy only curious?" He said in way of peacemaking, although Noah knew as well as he did it was only a way to appease him.

"Yes." He lied.

Noah clicked his tongue. "Let's see what I can find then."

The computers started blinking as Noah pulled up everything he could find on her. He started talking before he could read any of the windows that were opening. "You were right, she certainly is hiding something. Naughty thing did lie up and down to your recruiter." A file blinked to the front of the monitor. "Her real name is Sarah Blanche. Her place of birth is Lynden, Washington in the United States. That's very close to the Canadian border if you care to know. She actually does speak more languages than anyone should be able to. She has her age here listed at eighteen, but she's not that old. She'll be seventeen next month." He hummed. "It looks like her school records are as false as her work visa. She should be in her sophomore year, although her grades are consistently excellent and so are all her state and national test records. Five foot five, white hair, blue eyes. I'd say she needs to tan." Noah finished.

He thought he should be furious that she had lied to get a job at his company as he prided himself on his reputation of excellence in his workforce as much as his own inventions. Instead he was only intrigued as to what could have possibly motivated her to go to all the trouble of changing her identity, no doubt illegally, risking deportation and jail time, and moving to the other side of the world. It wasn't exactly something a person did on a whim. He waited, but Noah didn't say anything else as he looked off in the distance. "That's it? That's all there is?" There had to be something else, there had to be be a reason.

"Give me a second." Noah's eyes were flicking about as he no doubt read through lines of code. "I'm following a trail." He raised an eyebrow with interest. Leaning back in his chair he contented himself with looking at the pictures of the other translators that Noah had left up. He did manage to find the prettiest one in the bunch available. "My, my." His eyes went back to Noah. "This one is a clever little thing."

"What?"

Noah waved his hand. "This was professionally done I'm sure. Only a real cyberpunk could have nearly deleted her from existence this way." More pictures appeared. "According to state records her parents died in an automobile accident when she was seven. She lived with her uncle from then on…" Noah frowned as he trailed off.

"Well?"

"It looks like her uncle died four months ago."

"So?" He asked, wondering why that would cause Noah to be interested. People died all the time. She didn't have a monopoly on being an orphan.

"There were some odd circumstances." A police report came up and Noah summarized it. "He was found outside of his home with massive internal burns."

He had never heard of such a thing. "Internal burns?"

"It's often a result of electrocution, but he wasn't near any downed powerlines or energy grids. There were also no reports of storms that day. It looks like the police suspected foul play, but ruled Sarah out as she was unconscious in the house at the time they got there." He wasn't sure what to think about that yet and let him go on. "Or at least that's what they eventually decided since there was no murder weapon she could have used to do that with anywhere near her. Looking at some of the notes on the case at least one detective seems to think a lack of evidence wasn't enough to prove she didn't murder him."

"Why would he think that? Other than her being nearby?"

A faded ID card with an image of a man appeared on his screen. He appeared gaunt and unhealthy, but was otherwise average "I would say motive. Frank Tanner. Age fifty-two. Multiple complaints by neighbors about noise. He spent several nights in the local jail for drunken behavior. He has multiple files in child protective services."

His blood began to boil. He had no sympathy at all for child abusers. "For what?"

"Physical abuse. Doesn't look like they ever found much proof though." Noah was clearly angry as he kept sifting through information. "I doubt they were looking all that hard. Sarah has an extensive medical file. She was admitted to separate hospitals for broken bones and various minor injuries since almost as soon as she was placed in his custody." Anger curled up in him hotly. No child deserved such treatment and as far as he was concerned anyone who did that to them should be put down. "Regardless, any charges that were initially against her were dropped and she was placed in foster care. According to those files she ran from the home she was placed in within hours and hasn't been seen since." He moved his hand again, swiping away excess files, and then continued. "That's all I have on her until her application showed up here. It looks like she submitted it from somewhere in southern California according the IP address associated with it. I'm not sure why she was there though."

He had a good guess about that. "It must be where whoever wiped her record lives."

"That's certainly a possibility."

He mulled over the information for a few moments as he sat there. The girl had lied left and right on her application, not to mention to his government and hers, and it would be easy enough to get rid of her. He could do anything from firing her to getting her arrested with no more than a single phone call to the authorities. It would all be so incredibly easy. As he thought about that, his eyes sliding to the phone setting on the edge of his desk, his hand was shifting toward it when a vision blossomed in his head. He saw himself in strange garb, holding her lifeless body in front of a stone relief of a great dragon. He heard a roar, his favorite monster wailing in grief, and flinched back to reality.

Slowly, he turned his attention back to his monitor, his hand still pointed toward the receiver. Noah was watching him intently, clearly seeing that something was going on. Yes, she had lied, but as far as he could tell it was to escape a hellish life of pain and accusation. He knew what it was like to want a different life, to want more than the pitiful scraps that were thrown at you when one was alone. He knew what it was like to do whatever it took to claw your way out of poverty. So yes, she had lied. It was clear she had been lying for months, but as far as his moral compass went he couldn't fault her. She had found a way out, using the only skill she had, and done a rather admirable job of slipping past any obstacle in her way. The only thing he could actually fault her for was the rather shoddy hacking that lead to him finding any of this out.

Knowing very well that if Noah had found all this someone else would he turned fully back toward his computer. The sound of his blue eyes was still reverberating in his ears and he decided that perhaps if he took care of this properly he would alleviate any feelings of responsibility to her. Perhaps she only looked like Kisara, no matter what his instincts were telling him, but it was enough to make him unstable around her and he couldn't have that. He couldn't allow himself to be compromised and this would even the score surely.

Navigating onto the internet under his most private server, one only he had access to, he immediately started to build a security wall to hide behind before he started on his task. He was careful with it, far more than normal for even his most secretive project, and as he crafted it Noah's watched him with real confusion. "About to get into trouble are we?"

"I wouldn't say that." He disagreed. "I can hardly get into trouble if no one knows I'm doing anything."

Noah frowned at that and leaned back on whatever he was sitting on. "Are you going to hack into a competitor's system?" He queried. "That's rather a lot of coding going into hiding yourself."

"Decided to become a side seat hacker?" He jibed.

"By your own personal accounts you are the most interesting thing on this planet." Noah responded dryly. "I'm simply curious as to what the great Seto Kaiba has in mind."

He rolled his eyes as he finished his program. "Very funny."

That irritating smug grin filled Noah's face and he ignored him as he began his search. Noah watched, no doubt with more than his eyes, as he began to systematically rip through government databases. His stepbrother said nothing until he found what he wanted, having slid easily around security. Finding Sarah's legal documentation he copied it and began to clip loose ends and clean up all the inconsistencies he could find. He also tagged the coding that had generated the false documents and began to follow it out into cyberspace even as he erased all indication that he had been in the server.

"What are you doing?" Noah asked, although it was clear he understood.

"What do you mean?" He asked, brushing him off. "As you can see I've done nothing at all."

"You already knew these were forged. I told you that."

"Yes, you did." He agreed. "But I would prefer no one else notice that."

Noah frowned at that but held his peace for the next hour as he systematically found and replaced every scrap of evidence that the forged documents weren't fully legitimate. Whoever Sarah had employed to change her identity had been skilled, but he certainly wasn't as good as him. No one was. He was also fairly sure that whoever the hacker had been he hadn't been nearly as thorough as Sarah would have liked, but perhaps this was as far as her money got her. It has at least been enough to fool his basic background check and get her through customs. That didn't mean it would be enough to protect her forever and that was something that she sorely needed.

Once he was very sure he had gotten everything he backed out, destroying his own program and sending it to the edges of cyberspace where the bits would never be found. Sneaking back into his own server he smoothed over the data that could indicate he had done anything at all with it tonight and then shut the machine down after deleting the current usage log for the night. Beside him Noah spoke. "That was… very methodical."

"I know." He agreed, turning off the monitor in front of him, although he left Noah's alone. His stepbrother tended to stay in his personal server and could easily keep his monitor on if he wanted.

"Why would you bother with any of that?"

"She has skills I need. It was logical to take care of this before it became a problem."

Noah's eyes narrowed. "You've never had an employee that you didn't feel was replaceable."

"She's a unique circumstance." He replied, feigning disinterest. Although, it would be nearly impossible to find anyone else that could do what she could. His opinion of her as a person had no impact on that assessment. He needed her to help keep things in order here.

Noah wasn't at all convinced. "I'd say more unique than you would like considering you could have blackmailed her with that for the rest of her life. Why the sudden altruism?"

"Loyal employees are much more useful than cornered or scared ones." He reasoned, very sure that Noah remembered his own fiasco with the big five. "She'll work better and harder for me if she thinks she's secure."

"You realize I don't buy one word of that bullshit." Noah told him. Before he could say anything, or decide to say nothing, Noah sighed dramatically and went on. "But you are the boss." Yes, he was. "This has been fun, or at least somewhat interesting, but I think I'll go find something else to do, hopefully with someone with a better sense of humor." He rolled his eyes as Noah sent him another self-satisfied grin and vanished. Reaching over he turned off the monitor and got up. With most of his questions answered he could go home. Anything else he wanted to know could be dealt with after he slept, not that he wanted anything else to do with her. He resolved to keep all their interactions from here on out professional. With his level of focus it would not be a problem.