Chapter Five: What's so special about Singapore?
R.J. peeled off her dress and threw it onto her bed. Anger flowed through her, how dare he! How dare he tell them all that she was fragile and weak! He didn't even know her!
After a few moments of angry thoughts and storming around her room, R.J. cooled down and made herself think properly. Yes it was embarrassing and insulting to be displayed as a weak, fragile doll that had to be kept in a glass case so she wouldn't break, but it also would work to her advantage.
With the world believing that she was small and weak, not many would ever suspect that she was Blue-Jay, Robyn Falcon was just a façade that hid the bird from the eyes of society.
Once that thought was set in her mind, R.J. got into her P.J.s and lay down in bed, switching on the T.V. and staring blankly at the screen. She would still be able to play Polo, one of the few things she enjoyed doing outside, but that was the only place where she could be a little more of herself, because, surprisingly enough, quite a few of the rich girls around the city played the game, Cathy Ducane for example, she had even seen Barbara Gordon on the field on occasion, it being a hobby of hers.
R.J. flopped back onto the pillows. Her parents would be going to Singapore in the morning, before the sun even came up. What was so special about Singapore anyway? They had been there more than anyplace else during their life of globetrotting, in fact, she quickly did the math in her head, they had spent a total of six of the past fifteen years there, and that was only for the trips R.J. knew about, there were probably more that she had never been told about.
Curiosity getting the better of her, R.J. sat up and pulled out her laptop. She hacked into her fathers' files easily and went through them until she found what she was looking for, the destinations and flight paths that the Eagle, her fathers' private jet, had taken since it had been made, the year before R.J. had been born.
Her eyes widened, according to the logs, her parents had spent not six, but eight of the past sixteen years in Singapore, making small, side trips to other countries, such as Japan, China, India, Russia, Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. But there was more.
While the side trips to those countries were not unusual in their own right, what the hell had they been doing in Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, the Congo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kaznia? There was no real explanation or reason for them to go to any of those places, let alone spend over two months at a time on average in them. Suddenly R.J. got the nasty feeling that her parents were not the adventurous globetrotters the world thought them to be.
Blue-Jay sat back in her seat, staring at the screen of the computer.
Once her parents had departed, R.J. had immediately gone down to the Roost to investigate their unorthodox vacation preferences. What she found blew her away.
Germaine and Carmine Falcon were at the helm of one of the biggest gunrunning and drug smuggling rings in the world. It seemed that Germaine ran everything from handguns to surface to air missile launchers to any country that had enough cash to pay, and Carmine was smuggling every drug on the list in and out of the U.S. and Gotham was one of the main ports for both of them.
They had been doing this for years, all under the guise of a tech. company. They were good, really good. Batman had no idea about them and the cops were just as clueless, only busting the decoy rings that the Falcons left for them to keep them off the real trail, not even the people who worked for them knew who their employers were. It was the perfect system; they had been getting away with flooding the world with guns and drugs for over two decades. Well, not anymore.
Blue-Jay wanted to go out right then and expose the whole lot, but she forced herself to think logically. She would eventually need to bring the Bat family in on this, but not now, not right away, this was her fight, and she would see this through, she would expose her parents and then rise above them, taking the Falcon Empire into clear skies, where it belonged.