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Fourteen-year-old Victoria Penn checked her watch and started home. The library was a good place to kill some time, but Dad must've finished preparing the apartment for her birthday by now. She was so excited she couldn't sit still. It was July 15th, her birthday, and Dad had promised something spectacular.
She left the library and immersed herself in the thousands of other pedestrians on the hot Boston sidewalks. Always find a crowd. That was one of the first lessons that Dad had taught her. Getting lost in a crowd was an easy way to lose a tail. All the habits that her father had ground into Victoria kicked in once she was out on the street. She scanned the windows around her to check her surroundings in the reflection. She "admired" the skyline to spot any flashes of binoculars. And she sometimes went the wrong way on purpose before doubling back to confuse any tails.
But Victoria had never found a tail. She had never had to face off anyone who wanted her life. She had stopped a bank robbery back in April, but only by luck of the draw. The girl had been depositing her weekly earnings from her bakery part-time job, just like any other day. When the robbers showed up, her training had kicked in and she incapacitated them. But other than that she had never done anything exceptional.
Victoria crossed a street and went down a side street before doubling back. That was the last double-back of her route, now she could make a beeline for her apartment. In truth, she should have been back at the apartment in five minutes. But it took a half hour because of circuitous route she had taken. Victoria and her father had planned out at least twenty routes and then memorized them, using a random one each day when they went out. The paths varied quite a bit, so getting home could take anywhere from ten minutes to two hours. Today was Route 13, which didn't take Victoria long at all.
Victoria took the stairs up; never the elevator. Stairs equaled free exercised, which suited father and daughter. It was obvious from the apartment building that affording a gym membership would have proven tough. In fact, their apartment was teetering on the line between barely-livable and dear-god-please-move-out-right-away. Luckily the apartment didn't cost much; and it came with free membership to a storage unit three blocks south. Dad stored his gun, lockpick kit, and a knife that Victoria wasn't to touch until age eighteen down there. Victoria knew that some of her mom's stuff was in there too, but not much.
Victoria breezily ascended three flights of stairs and came to a stop at her apartment; C16. She dug her key from her jeans pocket and unlocked the door. It didn't jam this time, which surprised Victoria; normally the door stuck and took ages to practically kick in. She shrugged it off and went inside.
It was a bit musty, but it was home. Two fans worked to pump out the hot air, and they did a surprisingly good job at it; they should have been only half as effective as they were. It was rather warm inside, but it wasn't broiling. Some of the light in the room came from a yellowed floor lamp, which her dad had rewired to keep bulbs burning brighter and longer. Most of the other lamps in the apartment did the same.
The couch was old and creaky, and the cushions had clearly been sewn up many times. A hammock was set up in a corner; that was where Victoria's dad slept. An old TV perched in the corner opposite the couch on a round table. Just next to the TV was a state-of-the-art router, one of the few electronics in the apartment that was younger than ten years. In fact, if Victoria recalled, her dad had only picked it up a month ago. He was the one that used the wifi at home with his sleek laptop, though Victoria wasn't sure why.
Victoria dropped her bag on the floor by the couch. "Hey dad, I'm home. What're we gonna do toda-"
She froze and took a closer look at the opposite wall. No, her eyes weren't deceiving her.
There, clear against the faded wallpaper, was an ugly bullet hole.
Victoria immediately raised her guard and began tying her hair back, like she did for sparring practice. She started taking a closer look at her surroundings. The door had opened so easily because it was already open; in fact, when she looked closely, one of the door's hinges was broken. According to the dusty floor, the couch had been moved about a foot to the left from where it usually was, probably when someone was shoved against it. There were several other signs of a struggle, but the apartment was totally silent, which was incredibly unnerving. Victoria forced her fear down and cautiously stepped further into the apartment.
The kitchen was tucked away in the back of the apartment. The gas stove was old and clunky, but it still worked. The fridge had been taken apart and rebuilt four times over, and it was possibly the best damn fridge in the world, probably better than all those other fridges. Victoria and her dad had found several fridges in an old junk yard and, using a few tools from Home Depot and her dad's mechanical expertise, together they had built a new fridge from spare parts and made them work good as new. There was a closet right next to it where father and daughter stored their coats and her father used half of it as a dresser. Victoria got the bedroom, which was at the end of a short hall that led just off the kitchen. The bathroom lay on the opposite side.
There was one other bedroom in the apartment, the room that her dad used as an office. The door was almost always locked, but it was open. That didn't bode well. The dread in Victoria's stomach grew as she slowly approached the door. She didn't hear anything inside, but she didn't drop her guard. She stepped closer until she was just outside the door, gathered her scraps of courage, and kicked the door in, already in a defensive stance, ready to take down whoever was inside-
She blinked. The office was empty.
No, it was more than empty. It was a disaster. The bookshelf had been mostly emptied of its contents, papers scattered the floor, and her father's precious bottle of ink, the ink that he had bought to remember his wife, had been upended and ink stained the carpet.
Clearly someone had been looking for something. And since they weren't here anymore, they must have found what they needed.
Now that she was mostly certain she was alone, Victoria dropped her guard. "Dad?" she called. When there was no answer, she called again. And then she began yelling it, running through the house four times over, opening every door, checking every exit. She yelled until her throat was hoarse, and then she kept yelling, fighting a battle against her panic and losing.
She yelled for her father until tears began streaming down her face. She barely noticed the broken window in the office until she cut her arm open on the glass while passing it, and even then it took her a few moments. She screamed so loud a few of the neighbors knocked on her door and shouted to quiet down, but she ignored them.
Finally, exhausted, throat sore, and face soaked, Victoria stumbled back to the office, now in shambles, and dropped to her knees.
"WHERE?" she yelled, even though she knew it was pointless. "WHERE ARE YOU!?"
She let herself stay like that for a while. She simply sat there and cried for a good long time. Most would probably wonder why Victoria was having such a violent reaction to her father disappearing, but Victoria knew her father had an ugly past and a dangerous job; he wouldn't tell her any details about the case he had been working on like he usually did. She was terrified for him, to be frank.
After a good long while, Victoria dried her tears and calmed herself down as best she could. She glanced around the office miserably, and then noticed something quite odd. The entire office was ransacked and looked like a tornado had gone through, true, but the chaos was somewhat organized. Entire sections of the bookshelf had been left alone, and a few paper stacks on the desk had gone untouched.
Victoria thought through it more rationally now. If her father had hidden something, he wouldn't hide it in his office; for him, it was more likely to plant something in the office and hide it in the most unlikely space the seeker would look.
Victoria got up, stretched her aching muscles, and left the room. As she suspected, her room appeared to have been left untouched. Victoria and her dad had set about making the outside as girly as possible on purpose, from painting the door purple with pink flowers to handmaking a cute sign and even going so far as to plaster posters from popular boy bands up, like One Direction. Victoria hated her door, but she loved her room. She grabbed the doorknob and pushed it open.
Inside, her room was only mildly messy because Dad hadn't pestered her to clean it recently. She slept in a bunk bed, with the top bunk for sleep and the bottom bunk for schoolwork; it saved space for a desk. She did have a desk, but it was mostly used for fiddling with mechanics that her dad brought in and cracking codes her dad was having trouble with, so her desk was always covered in gears, papers, and pencils. Her room did look a bit searched through to Victoria, but it wasn't nearly as thorough as the search through her dad's study had been. Maybe the culprits hadn't found what they needed, after all.
But then, this gave way to a far worse scenario; Victoria could picture it all. If the people who had been in the apartment earlier hadn't found their information, they may have taken her father who had the information. Was it because of the big break he'd recently gotten in his case? Either way, if they hadn't found the info, her father had most certainly hidden it somewhere in her room. So she set about finding it.
The two had created several hiding places in advance, of course; Victoria's dad always prepared for the worst possible scenario, and as far as Victoria was concerned, it couldn't get any worse now. So she checked them all; underneath the nearly-invisible carpet tear and behind the wallpaper, under the mattress, behind the false panel in the closet and even false panel under the desk. She came up empty.
She huffed in frustration. Where had her father hidden the stupid thing!? She nearly punched the wall, but calmed herself down. The last time she had done something that stupid she'd had to live with a hole in the thin wall until her dad had scraped together the money to make repairs. She decided to take a short break from hunting and unpack from the library; maybe if she calmed down some more she could find what she needed.
Victoria returned to the living room and ensured the door was locked before picking up her bag and settling on the couch. She hadn't actually taken out any books; instead, she'd brought a code she'd been working on for two months for her dad and had nearly cracked it. She pulled out her pen and her fingers brushed the folder that she kept her work in.
Victoria frowned. There was an extra paper in there. How'd that happen? She pulled it out and looked it over.
The first thing she noticed was the big red stamp in the bottom corner that read TOP SECRET. Her father's notes were scrawled in the margins. At the top of the paper, the title read "Ring Associates" followed by a list of twelve names. Victoria recognized a couple of them as well-known politicians and CEOs, but most of them were foreign to the fourteen-year-old. At the bottom was a strange insignia; a simplified picture of a rose viewed from the top, surrounded by a ring.
She definitely didn't remember packing this. Her mind immediately began to piece together the clues before coming to one conclusion: her father had slipped the paper into her bag before she left in anticipation of being attacked. But he wouldn't have known exactly when the attackers would show up, which meant that whatever else Victoria needed to find was not in her room; he wouldn't have had time to run for it.
No, it was in his office. And there was only one place in his office that he would ever hide anything of serious value. She set aside the code and sprinted to her dad's office.
Within minutes she'd located the correct book that had been strewn about on the floor. It felt a bit stiff, and for a reason; her father had turned it into a booksafe. He'd only made perhaps the last fifty pages part of the safe, though, and glued another page on top of it; it was a one-use-only, and perfect for hiding things. Her dad liked to have hidden meanings in his booksafes, and this was no exception; the book was titled Home Alone.
Victoria ripped the page open and pulled out several folded up papers, a torn piece of notebook paper, and a small velvet pouch. She checked the notebook paper first:
Hey, sport,
If you're reading this then that probably means I've disappeared. After you've gotten over your initial panic, read this carefully, since this has to do with the case I'm working on.
I feel like I'm getting close to what I need, but that means danger. I'll do my best to supply you with all the information I can at the present moment, but I don't know much and I'm concerned the rest of the file will 'mysteriously' vanish along with me. I've made copies of the information I understand so far.
Good luck, sport. I'm counting on you to bail me out if things get tough. If I have another message by the time I've been snatched, I'll do my best to get it out to you.
-- Dad
Victoria slowly put the paper down and started processing exactly what had just been told. Her dad knew he may get kidnapped and left her some clues. No doubt the file had been taken, but not burned; rather, it may have been dispensed. She needed to track down the rest of the file (no way would the agency give her another copy) and recreate the bits and pieces she would need again. Her mission now clear, she began to open up the other folded-up pieces of paper.
There were twelve total; each paper was folded around a high-quality picture of a person. The papers around the picture seemed to be profiles of each person. Victoria checked; the names on the profiles matched the names on the list, which meant all twelve of these people were connected somehow. She would have to go over them later, after sorting through everything else. She set them aside for the moment and picked up the velvet pouch.
Inside she found another piece of paper: Keep it safe. Victoria swallowed and tipped the pouch over. Something silvery and weighty dropped into her hand.
It was a silver locket. It was simple, with a smooth outside, and it hung on a silver chain. Victoria got the feeling the chain was enforced to hold the weight. She found the clasp and managed to open it up.
One of the compartments was taken up by a picture Victoria and her dad had taken two months ago, when her dad had taken the case. It was a picture of her dad grinning while Victoria winked and made a peace sign. It was so stupid, but seeing the picture again made her feel better. The other side was empty.
She didn't know why she had to keep it safe, but now that her dad gone his word was all she had. She fastened the locket around her neck. Another search of her dad's office revealed nothing, so she returned to her room and climbed up to her bed, fully intending to roll onto her bed and sleep for hours.
Instead, she rolled onto something cold and hard. Groaning and wondering what it could possibly be now, Victoria sat up and looked under her covers.
She blinked. There, wrapped up in a red ribbon, was one of the latest laptops on the market. It was sleek and smooth, and more importantly it was the exact model that Victoria had drooled over when she and her father had gone to pick up the new router. The charger was under her pillow when she checked.
Victoria, after hesitating for a moment, undid the ribbon and opened it up. There was a final note on the keyboard:
Happy birthday, sport! Can't wait to share it with you. Hope you like your present, you've been bugging me for ages about giving you your own laptop. Oh, and get excited - I worked in a deal with the sales guy, so you can trade in this laptop for a new model and get all your files transferred for about ten bucks for the next, oh, ten years. -- Dad
Victoria started it up. It was the precise model she wanted, the latest model, sure to work smoothly with their top-notch wifi.
The first thing she noticed on it was that someone had already turned it on for the first time, because other than Chrome and all the latest Microsoft programs, there was a single folder on the entire computer, called "Case #3189147". Curious, Victoria opened it up. It consisted of several other folders, labeled "Profiles", "Blueprints", and other things such as that. Victoria scanned the files and started to understand what she was looking at.
Oh, her father was good.
Once she closed out of the folder, Victoria noticed the small sticky note pegged on the home screen. It had the code to the storage unit, where Dad kept his weapons and useful tools.
Victoria took a deep breath. She knew what her father wanted her to do. She was going to do whatever she needed to get him back.
Or she was going to die trying.
 Jennalaia · Wed Dec 04, 2013 @ 06:44pm · 0 Comments |
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