6. Life Saver
Blood SisterDouble update due to being featured. Go back a chapter if you haven't already read the previous one.
Kyungsoo’s weekend started off peacefully. When he woke up after a nice long lie-in, after making himself brunch, his initial plan had been to go walking in a park that afternoon, or maybe to meet up with some friends in the evening, and then to have a nice relaxing Sunday before getting back to developing the new computer software he was working on on Monday morning.
All that went to hell with Lay’s phone call mid-afternoon. It was always bad when Lay started a conversation with “are you free right now?”. It was always even worse when you replied yes. But at the weekend, there was no way Lay was going to believe that he wasn’t busy.
“And just how the am I supposed to find Lu Weiyi out of the millions of people in Seoul when she might not even be here?” he demanded. “Not to mention it’s the height of summer and there are thousands of tourists.”
“Don’t you have face detection software you can run?”
Kyungsoo snorted and gave his computer the final few orders it needed to remotely lock down Minseok’s and Semi’s files on the Seoul police department’s database. Since he’d left eight years ago, electronic security had taken a nosedive off a cliff. He’d barely even been challenged trying to get in. When he’d been in charge of IT security, there had been no fewer than eight firewalls, and that was before you even got near the sensitive data.
“It’ll take me well over a month to get everybody scanned just in Gangnam. It’ll probably be December next year before useable results are in from the entire city.” One of his computers beeped at him, a task complete message sitting happily on the screen. “Okay, nobody’s going to be able to get near Semi and Minseok’s files unless they torture me for the information. The security was worryingly lax, though. There wasn’t even any kind of imprint there to let me see whether or not the files have been accessed recently, and they must have been at least once if that’s how Luhan found out where they’re living. If anybody got into them before I did, they’re still in danger.”
“Great.” Lay sounded far too enthusiastic. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“Wait – quick question. Is there a photo of Lu Weiyi?”
“No, but apparently she looks pretty much identical to Luhan.”
Kyungsoo narrowed his eyes. “Are you sure?”
“No. Luhan hasn’t seen her since she was four, but apparently there were rumours before he escaped that he’d escaped and was running round in drag, so there must be reasonable similarity.”
Wearily, Kyungsoo closed his eyes and tilted his head back, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I am never doing a favour for you ever again.”
“You’re wonderful!” Lay sang before hanging up. Kyungsoo promptly face-planted on his desk. It was a hot summer, and it was going to be a very, very long weekend.
One of the first things he did was get back into the computer database to lift a clear photo of Luhan from it. Since there was incredibly little he could go on, hacking as many cameras as possible across the city and starting a face recognition search was at least a start, even if it was going to necessitate using a supercomputer to run a scan that gigantic, and even if Luhan’s face wasn’t identical to Weiyi’s, it was all he had to go on. Wandering around in the cyber department of the SPD, however, he quickly became side-tracked by a number of encrypted conversations. All were easy to hack without leaving any trace that he was also present, though most were fairly inane, just updates or instructions for particular cases being worked on or processed.
Inane, until he stumbled across one in which Lu Weiyi’s name cropped up. Multiple times. Temporarily forgetting about lifting a decent photo of Luhan from the records, Kyungsoo settled himself down with a soft drink and started following the conversation.
It took him all of about ten seconds to conclude that the police ought not yet to know that Luhan even had a sister, and all of about five seconds on top of that, aided by the appearance of a mention to Sangchu, to conclude that the police once again had a problem with moles. But that would also explain why IT security was virtually non-existent. One of them probably worked in the tech department. It was the only explanation for why it was so lax. It was doubly worrying, though, because the police were much more likely to find Weiyi before he was. They had many more resources, after all.
His lucky break came much, much earlier than expected while he was sitting in front of the TV with a yoghurt for brunch when the news came on the next day. Most of it was just stuff he nodded along to: celebrity gossip, a highly unpopular new bill that had been proposed to the government, international airstrikes in warring countries he’d never get the chance to go near – and then a segment on how they were going through a heatwave, accompanied by exhortations to keep bottles of water around at all times, since people were passing out in the streets and on the metro, and this was creating numerous medical emergencies that could be avoided. Various examples of this were caught on camera as busy medics rushed collapsed people back and forth, but the clips included one person in civilian dress removing a limp form from a doorway, and Kyungsoo nearly inhaled yoghurt in surprise when the head of the person dropped back, in full view of the passer-by’s camera, to reveal a startlingly familiar face. Weiyi really did look like Luhan.
Spluttering, he all but flung the yoghurt aside and dash back to his supercomputer, unable to believe his luck but aware that time was incredibly short: if he’d seen and recognised Weiyi, then so had everybody else in Seoul. He needed to find her before they did.
Frantically halting the face recognition search, Kyungsoo began instead looking up all the hospitals in the city. It was impossible to tell which one she would have been taken to, but also exactly when she would have been admitted. Warnings about the heatwave had kicked in a couple of days ago, so it was possible that footage could have been from as far back as Thursday, which meant that she could already have been treated and out of hospital. It also meant a ridiculously higher number of medical records to look through, even if he was only sifting through everybody brought in for dehydration and heatstroke.
It also didn’t help that the hospitals, unlike the police station, actually had proper security
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