Adult-FanFiction.org : Games

In the Name of Peace	By : ktatters Category: +M through R > Metal Gear Views: 2459 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Metal Gear, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 6
- 7
- 8
It was just past midnight when the lights in Julie Emmerich's house turned off. Snake wasn't satisfied with that though... he waited and watched as the lights throughout the neighborhood slowly went out, and at half past one, threw a stone at the street lamp in front of the house. He crept to the house and scaled the wall away from the streets, opening a window in the attic to get in.
What he saw when he got in was not really what he'd been expecting. Instead of the normal clutter that tended to fill attics throughout the world, this attic had everything neatly organized. Files cabinets, printouts, things in jars with neat little sticky labels attached... this wasn't an attic, it was a room of evidence.
Snake walked carefully to the jars, avoiding the loose floorboards and watching for rotten wood. The last thing he wanted to do was fall into Hal's step-mother's bed.
Hair samples? What kind of woman was this? Samples of hair from the jars coded as E1 and E2. Judging from the few grays splattered in the coloring of the hair, E1 was supposed to be Hal's father, and E2 was supposed to be Hal.
Half the jars seemed to be dated hair samples, while the other half had what could only be blood samples. The blood samples had other markings, instead of just E1 and E2. Some had B1, B3 and B4 written on them. The blood all seemed to have been carefully labeled with a date and location in coordinates.
What in the world had possessed her to keep vials of blood? Snake could think of a few answers, none of them good, especially if Hal's father had worked with Big Boss. Could Hal's father have been creating and testing biological agents on his own son? Could Big Boss have been involved with gene therapy back then?
Snake frowned. He would have to take some of these and have them tested. Hal would know of somewhere to do it safely.
Snake decided to leave the jars alone for the moment, and instead made his way to the filing cabinets.
*****
Hal stepped backwards as the technician walked past his the little pocket PC. He tried to keep his breathing quiet and even. After all, in the camo suit, even if they touched him, they might not realize he was around. As long as they didn't see the computer, he would be all right.
It might be a good time to check how it was doing at this point. He'd written several programs before-hand to try to automate as much of the crack as possible. Most hacking work was just exploiting known security flaws, after all. Well, that and coming up with new ones, but that tended to take a lot more time than he wanted to spend while on a mission.
The techie had moved on to a new location, and was typing into a console, so now was a perfect time to check on the progress. Hal walked back to his connection and touched the screen a few times. It was at 53%, which meant that it had already completed more than half of the attempted scripted hacks without success. Not great, but it didn't mean too much. Hal had over 10,000 scripts for it to go through to try to crack into a new system. The easiest, and least computationally complex scripts were at the beginning of the run. The later ones ranged from elegant though complex algorithms to brute force cracking methods, used as a last resort.
For comparison, when he'd hacked into the department of defense three years ago, he'd needed no more than 30% of the then 5000 scripts.
Hal bit his lip and watched the count as it slowly went up. Another five minutes passed and Hal frowned. 67%, and the techie activity around several of the consoles was increasing. They couldn't be tracing his hacking this quickly, could they?
He wasn't doing anything active yet. The system would have to have the most advanced anti-hacker protocols he'd ever seen... it couldn't be detecting what he was doing, could it?
There was nothing he could do about it right now except abort the mission, and he wasn't willing to do that yet. Hal glanced nervously between the small screen and the techies.
No, there was nothing to do but wait.
*****
The files weren't what he'd been expecting either. Paper upon paper of technical research into strange theoretical worlds of how nurture was the single most important part of a person's psyche.
Reports on the formative years of what had to be a thousand people, ranging from mother Teresa to Aldolf Hitler and everything in between. In fact, as he glanced through one of the studies, the reports actually went all the way until the end of the teenage years. Had this been the woman's main focus of study? If that were the case, what could have possessed her to take Hal as a lover at such a young age?
Of course, this was just in the first two cabinets. The cabinets lined the attic like insulation, and Snake intended to at least have a general idea of what was in each one.
The next three cabinets were filled with detailed reports on ten people, organized by number and identified by a small one-page summary at the front. These files were much more extensive, judging by the size of them. Each of the massive reports was subdivided, headed apparently by different stages of development, then further divided by age.
Snake took the summary pages of each. They each had a keyword attached with a little yellow sticky note that must have been at least ten years old. Snake absently took note of the names before relegating the sheets to a pocket for further study: Wizard, Warrior, Confederate, Politician, White Knight, Black Knight, Theurgist, High Priest, Economist, and Scientist.
Most of the rest of the cabinets were dedicated to minutiae of meetings Julie must have had with her clients. Snake decided to pass most of these up, and went instead to the file on Arthur Emmerich.
Pulling the heavy file out, Snake widened the beam of his flashlight so that there was a large though diffuse beam over the entire sheet.
Emmerich had come in following the Gulf War, that much had been true. He'd talked about "the Boss" frequently, but when Julie had pressed for a name, he'd insisted that he couldn't tell her for her own safety. He'd complained of nightmares and flashbacks, though in the first session he hadn't gone into any details. She had diagnosed him with PTSD, though hadn't eliminated the possibility of a general anxiety problem. Snake's eyes closed briefly. Post-traumatic stress disorder?
The next page had several cross listings. L134, FT1, L136-152, B1335-66458896042D2 ongoing... FT1... that was the "Wizard" file... Snake pursed his lips and kept reading.
The following six pages detailed a course of "treatment" that involved distancing the patient from his lover, who from her notes appeared to be the Boss himself, and at the same time creating a dependancy on his therapist. The next twenty were transcripts of sessions in which she apparently had done just that. She'd started some sort of hypnotherapy after that.
Snake read the file, enraptured as she carefully manipulated conversations and sessions. She started bringing up Hal, even though he had never been mentioned in any of the therapy sessions, implying that he needed a positive female influence and finally manipulating her patient into a strange relationship that involved no sex (Hal's father was apparently still devoted to his lover, despite her therapy) but had involved a marriage.
When he proposed marriage, the file suddenly stopped.
What the hell was going on here?
Snake put the file back. This was big, whatever it was... Snake suddenly wished that Otacon was around to watch his back, so to speak.
*****
At the same time, Otacon was wishing that Dave was around to watch his back.
At 95%, Hal knew that the last few tests might take days, and still might not work. He had become afraid of detection and was starting to seriously consider the intelligence of having come on this mission. The current test was to try every single one of the account identifications and passwords from the external system to gain access to the internal system. The simple version of the test tried them each one by one: this more brutish method tried every permutation of user id and password, then attempted to come up with different spellings or numbers that might be used in the passwords.
If this test didn't work, there were still almost 500 more... but each one could take up to an hour, and the final brute force method was a scary piece of work that, in isolation, had taken over 24 hours to find it's way into his own systems. Even at this point, given the size of the various files involved, it might take up to 20 minutes per test.
Oh yes. Hal had to wonder if he had any brains to begin with. This system was uncrackable.
Hal looked down at the little computer, still chugging along. Having nothing else to do, he decided that he might as well look over the shoulders of the techies. At least he might get some information out of it.
If he didn't, he was going to have to cover up the whole thing and somehow make Snake think he'd been working all day or deal with teasing and snide comments for the rest of his life when Dave found out.
Standing behind the techies, unfortunately, just wasn't very interesting. It seemed like all they did were system tests, checksumming files, looking at database logs and other bits of computer hocus-pocus that Hal would certainly have been able to recognize if he weren't so worried about getting into the system and getting out of the building without getting caught by the guards.
Hal went back to his computer interface and did a double take. It had gotten in! Somehow, someone must have used a password that was similar to one they'd used on the outside systems!
Hal clicked on the screen again and anxiously watched as it started to stream data. This just had to work!
Hal stood guard at his little pocket PC while the techies again started gathering at a console, pointing and talking quietly amongst themselves.
*****
Snake's bad feeling had gotten worse, but he wasn't ready to quit. There were still two filing cabinets left, and he wasn't about to leave and give Hal the information he'd just found without further proof.
The second last filing cabinet was filled with letters, or rather, correspondence between Julie and potential clients or sellers of medicines. The L annotation from the cross reference suddenly became clear: Julie, or perhaps a secretary, had labeled the letters carefully with an L and a following number, then arranged them numerically.
Most of the letters were uninteresting, though Snake read one or two at the beginning and glanced through the others that weren't related to anything. Basic letters about treatment options, queries and responses about Prozac, Cogentin, Amylobarbitone, Seranace...
L134 was the first referenced letter, and would probably have something interesting in it, so it was the first one he looked for. It was... strange, to say the least. It was a letter that was addressed from "the Boss." It basically said that if Julie did a good job with Mr. Emmerich, he would be willing to give her a recommendation to the men and women under his command if they or their families needed her services. It also had a slightly threatening tone to it, implying that if her services relating to the man were sold to anyone else, she could expect retribution.
It was exactly the sort of letter that Snake himself might have sent to some unknown person if Hal had, against his advice, decided to see a therapist.
Snake frowned, then continued on to the next set that had been cross-referenced. These were letters between Julie and a group calling themselves the "Patriotic Americans Association." They offered money to her for gaining access to Emmerich's son. Their stated goal was at first knowledge of the Boss, and this would be accomplished most easily through a young man who wouldn't have barriers to telling her the Boss's name.
At the third letter, the tone started changing. Apparently, Julie had been asking questions about the association, and was questioning their ultimate goals. The letter written back to her had been some sort of garbage about how there were certain people throughout time who could change the history of the world, and they thought Hal was one of those people. Apparently, they fed her something about nuclear disarmament.
Starting on L146, the letters were missing. Snake growled at this turn of events. The latter letters might have been the most interesting in the group. Whatever had happened, it had been on the orders of this association, and given recent events, it sounded as though the Patriots themselves were involved.
But why would they be involved with Big Boss and Arthur Emmerich? They had made Big Boss, surely they couldn't need to know his name... and sleeping with Hal, who didn't even know the men his father worked with, couldn't have made any difference!
One filing cabinet left.
*****
Histo Ririte.
Hal was breathing too shallowly and rapidly, he knew that intellectually. His breathing was loud in his ears, and he was going to get caught.
They'd found the link, and now they were searching for the pocket PC, and there were guards swarming the area. Hal was having enough trouble trying to stay out of the way of the armed men walking around. The techies had warned them not to fire their guns, but Hal had no doubt that these men would shoot him and then apologize to the technicians.
He'd looked away from the furious debate for only a moment to check on the data, and he'd seen something. The president of the company's name was now in his mind in indelible ink.
Histo Ririte.
The problem was, when he'd looked back up, there was a guard about to bump into him and he'd had to move fast to avoid the man.
They were going to find him, and then they were going to kill him. Where was Snake when he needed him?
*****
Snake was looking at the final filing cabinet. It didn't have much in it.
A chart that looked vaguely anthropological in nature, with the names of Wizard and company with lots of annotations, additional names scrawled around the others. Snake grabbed the chart and put it in his pocket.
A list of names, most crossed out, one underscored. Snake memorized the names and put the sheet back. Cross references that would take a year to decipher. Snake didn't even bother looking at that one.
Snake stopped suddenly, head rising as he went on alert. There was a light on in the house. He'd gone through as much as he could. It was time to leave.
He walked back to the jars and took a few of the blood samples. The lights were getting closer. Definitely time to leave.
Snake walked quietly to the window and got out, closing the window just as a light went on in the attic, then he scaled down the building. He pulled the evidence of his incursion off of the house and sprinted across the street to the rental car.
He drove away into the night.
*****
They'd found it, and they were locking the place down! There was no way to get the mini-computer now. Hal was going to be lucky to get out with his life. Damn the information, it was lost now.
Otacon carefully followed the technicians as the armed guards began escorting them out.
Whoever these people were, they were taking no chances. If these people caught him, he doubted even Snake would be able to save him. Even if he had been here.
Which he wasn't.
He followed the technicians as they walked in a tense line to the top floor. The elevator was down, and the guard did a face check of each one before they were allowed to get on. Hal backed himself up against a wall, hoping against hope that it wouldn't be crowded enough for someone to bump into him.
Hal thought he was going to die as the elevator slowly went up from the basement floor to the ground floor. Security had set up� a station that Hal didn't recognize. Each of the techies was walking past slowly to get outside. He couldn't go around it, so Hal waited for his chance. Some of the techies were a little slow to go through, and Hal darted, then heaved a sigh of relief, glad to be out of the building.
When he opened his eyes, there were three guns pointed at him. He looked down stupidly. His suit was off. He looked back up. The three guns were now seventeen. He let his hands slowly move away from his body to emphasize the fact that he was not about to take them on with an M9.
He never even felt the gun hit the back of his head.
- 6
- 7
- 8
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

In the Name of Peace