CHAPTER TEN: MISSION DEVIATION
As the wheels of the C-130J touched down on Runway 15 of Robins Air Force Base, Georgia, Snake-Eyes glanced at Stalker.
Snake-Eyes signed to him, *I've been thinking. The last time we were at Ring-Halasp… remember that woman we walked by, the one who was working late? It looked like financial data. And I remember seeing some logos for multinational overseas companies. But when we researched Ring-Halasp Technologies, it seemed they weren't big enough to be international.*
Stalker scratched his chin, leaning backwards to resist the plane's forward momentum as the speed brakes deployed, bringing the Hercules to a halt. "That might be worth checking out. Tell you what, you think you can do some quick investigating when we get to Atlanta?"
Snake-Eyes nodded. *Give me three hours after we get there. I'll see what I can find.*
It was simple, ultimately: all he had to do was text Firewall over their secure line, and moments later, she'd sent him the address where the little girl and the mom lived in Atlanta, Georgia.
I never thought I'd be able to use a phone again after the explosion. How technology has changed things.
An address… and a name. O'Hara.
He'd never known the little girl's name. Of course, it was filed in the Pit's records, he had no doubt of that. While he'd been in the hospital, Uncle Sam had anonymously helped pay for just about all of the mother's funeral costs. Snake-Eyes didn't doubt that he could have found out who she was, what she was doing, if he'd so chosen. But he'd always known that their lives would lead down separate paths, and… it hadn't seemed right, to look her up, when he hadn't even been able to spare her the pain of losing her mother.
Finding the place was easy enough even at dusk. It was a big, rambling white house, but it was quiet. After scanning the heat signature of the place, it appeared that no one was home. He hid by a large oak tree when a black pick-up truck drove by on the old dirt road. At first, he thought it was the family coming home, but it drove on by.
Snake-Eyes crawled up the tree slowly: its main trunk was only about ten feet away from the house, and its long, slender branches brushed the eaves. He silently leaped to the roof, landing softly, easily, his feet barely tapping against the roofing tiles. Sliding open the window to the second floor with an easy flick of his wrist, the ninja slipped in completely undetected.
He practically had free run of the house but still, prudently, watched each step he took. Doing a room-to-room search revealed very little. He didn't feel like he had enough time to do a thorough search of the entire large house, so he'd look for the basic, simple clues.
Based on some of the older pictures that were hanging on the walls and displayed on the shelves, it looked like the young red-headed girl he remembered had an older sister. The older sister looked like she was old enough to have moved out of the house by now, so if the youngest was still here, she would most likely have the only "girl" room.
Surprisingly, he didn't notice any up-to-date pictures of the girl… or maybe not so surprising, considering that there were a number of empty picture frames sitting on the mantelpiece. One of them had a bright pink post-it note with "Dad! I TOLD you not to put these pictures up!" on it. He almost smiled.
It wasn't ideal, but he'd have to take the most recent picture of her he could find. He found one of her—maybe about fourteen, fifteen—dressed in a rumpled white pullover dobok and with a gold-striped black belt around her waist. She was smiling happily and hoisting up a trophy with "Taekwondo: Under-Sixteen Category: First Place" conspicuously scrawled on the plaque. He took the picture out of the frame, placing it inside one of his pockets. He left the frame—it wouldn't look out-of-place with the other empty ones around the room.
He went back upstairs, barely making a sound on the otherwise squeaky old wooden boards, and into her bedroom. Or at least, he assumed it was her bedroom: there was a small make-up kit sitting on the white oak dresser, and an old teddy bear reigning over the bed. But with all the martial arts trophies weighing down the shelves and Bruce Lee posters on the wall, it would have been easy to think the room belonged to one of her brothers. There certainly wasn't anything feminine about it.
There wasn't much for him to find. There were no financial records—or at least, anything other than her keeping track of her allowance and tournament winnings and part-time job pay slips. It was a weeknight—he couldn't figure out where she could be. As much as he didn't want to, his last option was to try her computer. Surprisingly, it was the only computer in the house, so he felt that checking this one was his last option. Truthfully, the odds were low that she would have anything, unless she'd done some research herself about the death of her mother… but he'd looked everywhere else.
The fact that he didn't want to get on her computer wasn't really a matter of respecting her property, though: it had more to do with the fact he really wasn't a huge fan of technology and gadgets. At least he had friends to help him crack into the girl's hard drive… fortunate, because he wouldn't have known the first thing about bypassing even a personal computer password. And she had one: immediately upon startup, the computer asked for a login name and password. Snake-Eyes shook his head, and sent another text to Firewall. The world had certainly changed since he'd started with the team.
He barely had to touch a button; Firewall brought up everything he needed on the computer screen in front of him -- all from her own faraway location. It was nice having an ex-hacker on the team.
"Thanks. Any kind of financial records?" he wrote.
Firewall responded, "Let me check."
After a few seconds, she wrote back to him, "No, sorry."
"Does she have any kind of day planner?" He hadn't seen a normal paper one anywhere, and it stood to reason that kids these days could keep track of their schedules on the computer.Snake-Eyes waited for her reply, but his phone remained still.
Instead, on the computer in front of him, a calendar of her schedule popped up—one neatly, completely, filled in: hours, days, months. The O'Hara child was, he thought, a very organized girl. Very convenient.
You're amazing, Firewall, Snake-Eyes thought to himself. I'd tell you that, but it takes me too long to text it.
Looking at the on-line calendar, six afternoons a week young miss O'Hara was simply at "Dojo." That explained the martial arts trophies (at least nine out of every ten were for first place, he'd noticed) all over her room. She must have been competing for awhile, and studying it for even longer. Taekwondo, kobujutsu, White Crane. Snake-Eyes couldn't help but wonder how exactly she'd grown up so… dedicated. Disciplined.
People reacted to trauma in different ways, he understood that. Some people hid in themselves—she could have just as easily turned into a meek, timid little thing, or the kind of troubled individual who turned to drugs to drown out the memories. She could have turned into the kind of terrified loner who hid in her house and couldn't sleep for the nightmares. But… looking around at the trophies, remembering the triumphant grin in her picture… none of those seemed to fit her.
Statistically, he didn't think that many people could rebound from such a major crisis at such a young age… at least, not the way she had. He'd always wondered what kind of girl she would grow into, after the explosion that had taken her mother, after violence had shredded her perception of a peaceful world. But if she'd taken up the martial arts for discipline and for control, well… he knew very well, from long first-hand experience, that they could heal the soul as well as harden the mind: that there was grace, and peace, and art to be found there, too. He hoped her dojo was as conscientious about meditation as his own teachers had been.
He'd worried about her over the last several years—thought of that small creature with the enormous, wet eyes and the red hair speckled dark by soot. And looking at those trophies, the filled calendar, he felt part of the burden of his concern being lifted off his shoulders.
What else... here's something. In the notes section of the calendar, the initials "C.H.: 7:00pm" were typed. Was she supposed to meet someone with the initials C.H.? Seven o' clock at night, but which day?
Firewall, I'm stuck. Do you have anything else on C.H.?
She wrote back, Give me a sec. I'll check.
A few seconds went by. Snake-Eyes saw the computer scanning various files. Popping up on the computer was a place -- not a name -- that started with C.H. Club Honey. It was an advertisement that, for whatever reason, the girl had scanned into her computer.
It appeared to be some kind of nightclub, from the picture on the screen. What was she getting into? Anyone could tell just by looking at the picture—a woman with her bare leg wrapped around a pole, her makeup thick, expression hungry—that the place was seedy. He couldn't help but wonder what -- or who -- she was looking for there.
Maybe she was more troubled than the trophies indicated. It happened. Girls did stupid things—people did stupid things—to forget. But there could be more to it than just that—he couldn't afford to just make that assumption. Not when there were terrorists involved. Whatever it is, I hope I'm not too late.
He quickly memorized the address to the club and wrote Firewall back: "Thanks, I'll check it out. The computer is all yours."
Firewall remotely deleted the search files, wiping away all traces that they had ever touched any part of the girl's current life, and turned the computer off. Well before shut-down, Snake-Eyes was already gone; only the faintest whispers of warmth, quickly dissipated, left any indication that he had ever been there at all.