Oliver reaches out to an old "friend" to help him with his investigation.
Two more days passed, and the knot in Oliver's stomach which he had tried to convince himself would go away had not. In fact, the knot had tightened due to the state of affairs in the city having just worsened exponentially. Starling Bank had been robbed, cleaned out in minutes, while the ACU conducted a raid on a suspected warehouse where they believed Ricardo Diaz was hiding. Needless to say, the raid had gone horribly wrong. Diaz escaped and two ACU officers lost their lives. The only positive was that they had managed to find a few stashes of the new drug that the Scorpions, Diaz's old gang, were distributing in the streets.
While Star City was the closest metropolis to Slabside Penitentiary, there was little reason to believe that Ricardo Diaz himself had returned to Star City. Having just escaped from a Supermax Prison, why would he go back to the one place where he was most likely to get caught again? For Oliver, the fact that Diaz was in Star City and back to his old ways confirmed his initial thoughts on Diaz's escape. Slabside was practically impossible to break out of, so as soon as he had heard the news, Oliver had suspected that he didn't 'break out', but was rather 'broken' out.
By who seemed rather unimportant initially. By an old associate or by someone who owed him a debt were the most plausible explanations. Ricardo Diaz was a highly-skilled, dangerous man, but there was nothing he presented which could not be found in the underworld by hundreds of other mercenaries. Except for one thing…
Ricardo Diaz knew Star City like the back of his hand. He knew the legal structures inside out, and was familiar with every place in the city where he could hide. This meant that whoever had broken him out not only had a plan for him, but for the whole city itself. The rise of crime in The Glades coinciding with Diaz's escape and reaffiliation with his old gang? That was not something Oliver could just gloss over. Nor the fact that this too was taking place amongst several other things which only made the situation worse.
A bank robbery, an assassination, a mass shooting, theft of extremely valuable tech from Queen Industries, a likely soon-to-be drug epidemic, and gangs starting to get their hands on military-grade equipment – These events were all too uncanny, drastic and contemporary to be unconnected in Oliver's eyes. Most would say he was being paranoid, but he'd seen things far stranger than a simple plot to elevate crime in a city.
He'd forced himself to steer away from the laptop on his desk over the past few days, but right now he couldn't do that even if he wanted to. He went over to it and booted it up once again.
He searched the dark web for any recent black market sales of a DX-60 Augmentor, but there was nothing, which meant that whoever had stolen it was planning to use it for something. Regarding weapons, he checked to see if any nearby military bases had reported stolen weapon caches. Nothing. The new drug on the streets was called 'Burnout', having first appeared in Chile and now known as one of the most addictive substances on the planet.
After several hours of sifting through whatever data he could find, Oliver's lack of expertise in the cyber-field had caught up with him. He'd just fallen short at the most important part of his research, and it was partly his fault for equipping the SCPD with a cyber-security protocol that could stop its files from being accessed by most cyber-terrorists out there.
Whatever he had found so far had nothing to suggest that it was all linked, but Oliver simply knew that couldn't be true. If he wanted to confirm his suspicions, he had to gain access to the SCPD case files on everything that has occurred in the city over the past month. Such was impossible for Oliver to do without attracting attention to himself.
Firstly, he doubted he could get through the firewalls protecting the SCPD database, and even if he did, the system would likely pick up his intrusion and a SWAT Team would descend on his location before he could even reach his car. Secondly, he couldn't simply ask Quentin for the files without being questioned, nor could he expect Detective Mack Morgan to comply to his demands even if Oliver pulled an old trick out of his sleeve. Lastly, Oliver couldn't just break into SCPD and steal the paper files himself. If he tried, he'd be taking a massive risk where the odds of him getting caught would be exponentially higher than success.
There was only one way to get the files, and that was getting into the system without being noticed and by shutting down the security measures before it picked up on your intrusion. Something that only an expert hacker could do. He tried to think of anybody that could potentially help him. Someone not just good enough to do the job, but also someone who he could trust and would be crazy enough to trust him. The person sprung to mind after several minutes of intense thought but he immediately scolded himself and cast the thought of her aside. He couldn't involve her in this. Would she trust him? After all these years with everything that's happened in the meantime, would she still even believe him? Oliver closed his eyes and pinched his brow while straining his mind to think of an alternative. There were none. Right now, this was the only way.
He made his way to the closet in his room, and opened the secret latch at the bottom where he kept emergency supplies. A large bag full of cash, several encrypted burner phones, and a 9mm Beretta with 5 mags. He took out a burner phone from the stash, and after a quick search for her number, regrettably made the call.
Mia Dearden entered her small, but cozy apartment in downtown Seattle. She immediately switched on the kettle, before heading to her bathroom to take a shower. This time of year, the weather in Seattle started to warm up, but today had been a cold, rainy day, so Mia relished the hot shower. She had stayed overtime at work today, sorting through exabytes of metadata all with the purpose of making the world a better place. Or at least, she hoped it did.
Only three years into her work as an ARGUS agent, Mia had already gained enough respect and recognition from her superiors to be offered a promotion to ARGUS's main headquarters in Star City. She could not give an answer to the offer immediately, needing more time to reflect on such a decision. Normally, another agent would jump at the opportunity. In fact, the promotion wouldn't be an offer, it would be an order, but Director Michaels knew very well of Mia's troubled history with Star City, and assured her that she was not under any obligation to accept the offer.
After graduating from Caltech in 2021, Director Michaels herself approached Mia directly and offered recruitment into ARGUS. While Mia had never thought of working for an intelligence agency, a part of her always wanted to do something which she felt would help make the world a better place. With her technological gifts, she could have ventured into various other areas, but the once-in-a-lifetime offer from ARGUS coupled with an opportunity to make the world a better place proved too good to turn down.
After everything that had happened to her, it would have been too easy for her to become angry at the world and become selfish, but Mia had a hero to look up to who convinced her not to. The Hood had saved her life twice. One could even say thrice when he tasked Laurel Lance with providing her with a foster family who would eventually go on to adopt her. Despite relocating to Seattle, she stayed up-to-date with everything concerning him. Personally, she believed that The Hood, later The Arrow, and the Green Arrow were the same person, with Roy Harper being one of his partners who chose to take the fall for him. While some theorised that the Green Arrow had died following the riddance of Adrian Chase, she found that hard to believe.
Or perhaps, she didn't want to believe it. Perhaps she wanted to believe the man who gave up so much for Star City and that had saved her life had simply rode off into the sunset after taking down Adrian Chase, and that he and his team were now living normal lives. She knew such a theory was far too idealistic for the world that she lived in, but she still had an undeniable feeling that the man under the hood was still out there, somewhere…
After her quick shower, she returned to the kitchen and poured herself a large mug of tea. While she waited for the brew to strengthen, her phone started vibrating. The caller ID ominously displayed "BLOCKED", the caller obviously encrypting their details. Mia answered, expecting to hear the voice of an ARGUS superior, but was instead met with a low, distorted voice.
"Hello, Mia. Long time, no talk." Mia immediately picked up on the tone and depth of the voice, recognising that the caller was using a modulator to mask their identity.
"Who are you?" asked Mia.
"It's the Green Arrow. You knew me as The Hood when we first met."
Mia almost knocked her mug over when she heard the words. If the man under the hood really was calling her, then all of her suspicions about him were true. Despite the surprise, her training kicked in and she replied with the most sensible answer.
"Disregarding the fact that no one has seen the Green Arrow in seven years, I still have no way of verifying your identity. I'm going to need a little more than that to believe you." A short silence followed before he replied.
"The first night I rescued you, I told you to make me a promise. A promise to stay off the streets of The Glades at night. Do you remember?"
His reply all but confirmed it for Mia. She had told others about that night, but never the exact words that he had spoken to her. It was him, and after a decade, she was once again speaking to the man who had changed her life so profoundly.
"Yes… I remember," replied Mia, the short phrase being all she could muster to say.
"I need your help, Mia." Another bombshell dropped on her. What could the Green Arrow possibly need her help with?
"Me? What do you need?" she asked.
"I need you to hack into the Star City Police Database and find me the case files and reports of Emily Pollard's murder, the Nelson Plaza mass shooting, the Starling Bank robbery, and Ricardo Diaz's escape from Slabside Penitentiary. Also, I need you to find me anything related to the recent influx of weapons and a drug called 'Burnout' into The Glades. For that, start by looking into anything suspicious about Starling Port."
"That's it?" asked Mia, surprised at how relatively easy the task sounded. "Sounds like you could have done this yourself."
"I know my way around a computer, but the SCPD has one of the best cyber-security systems in the world, courtesy of Queen Industries."
"I'll be the judge of that," joked Mia.
"Once you have all of it, call me back on this number and I'll tell you how to send it to me. How soon can you get it?"
"I think I might be able to get into SCPD and find the files fairly quickly," replied Mia confidently, "But looking for anything suspicious about Starling Port might take a bit longer and my work might get in the way. So let's just say 24 hours."
"I understand. Thank you, Mia."
"No problem." Before he could cut the call, she quickly spoke up, "Hey… does this mean you're back?" A silence of several seconds followed as she waited eagerly for an answer.
"Depends on what I find in those case files... Have a good night, Mia."
"You too," replied Mia before the call ended.