SEAL Team 666

39

On the way back to the Pit, Holmes let it be known that everyone was on one-hour recall. They had to find out where the cargo was for those ships. SPG was going to coordinate with FBI to see if they could get access to the enforcer captured in San Francisco. Meanwhile, Laws was going to sift through the data SPG provided. They offered to mirror the hard drive, but Laws was old-school. He preferred paper and pencil. So it was that they left the SPG with two boxes of paper, covering every piece of data they’d ripped from the hard drive.

When they hit the Pit, Yaya went off with Hoover for a little bonding. Ruiz and Walker went to strip and to prepare weapons. Holmes went to brief Ms. Billings. Which left Laws as the sole sentient individual to try and solve the mystery. Just the way he wanted. He scribbled a note on a piece of paper, taped it to the conference-room door, then set about unraveling the unravelable. It wasn’t half an hour before he exited the room, his gaze already screwed into a faraway place. He first went into his room and grabbed two Chinese-to-English dictionaries. Then he ordered a large anchovy and green chili pizza from Alexander’s Pizza, along with a carafe of Starbucks coffee. After going over the papers and categorizing them into different piles, he realized that he was going to need his references. Even though he had an audiographic memory and knew how to speak Chinese, the characters were a much harder thing to remember. Although there was a method to the Chinese madness, it was a three-step process to determine the number of strokes, look up the radical, then figure out what the character meant.

Bottom line, it was going to take some time.