Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures) Read Free

For the
most part, however, he drove the family car.
    When he had a day off, they would
go camping on the estate. It was very large, well over a thousand acres, much
of it densely forested hills. There were plenty of obscure places to set up a
lean-to and not be able to see or hear anything from the estate buildings. They
liked to pretend they were survivalists. They would bring no food with them,
and only minimal gear. Could they go two days eating only what they found in
the forest? It was all in fun, of course. Even if they found nothing, they
wouldn’t starve in two days.
    But it was a kind of mental
exercise for Emily. There was a thrill in solving the problems each day would
bring. Find water. Catch some game. Start a fire. Eat a bug? Build a trap.
Choose a campsite, set up a perimeter, arrange branches and twigs in the
underbrush to alert them to the approach of a stranger in the night. And above
all, avoid the cameras!
    Security cameras sprouted from odd
corners all over the estate. Mostly they watched the perimeter fences and
walls. But others aimed at the approaches to the buildings. A constant theme of
their survivalist games was to avoid letting the cameras see them. For as long
as Emily could remember, her father had insisted on including this game in
their outings. It was fun, like being a guerilla or a commando, stalking an
enemy compound. She got to be pretty good at spotting the cameras before they
saw her. But her father always seemed to know where one would be, even before
they came near it. She thought maybe he could hear some faint whirring sound,
or perhaps he just understood how the security team who installed them thought.
    Emily eventually developed her own
sense for the cameras, too. It wasn’t based on a whirring sound, or any deep
insight into the locations where they were placed. She simply began to see the
terrain the way the cameras did. She understood them, or the people looking at
the monitors at the other end of them. When the land looked a certain way, she
knew there would have to be a camera nearby. She became an invisible partner of
the cameras, shared their view of the estate, but denied them any view of her.
    Of course, the security guys knew
all about her. She was the chauffeur’s daughter. When she was little, if they
caught a glimpse of her on one of their monitors, she would run off with a
shriek and a giggle, maybe return a little while later wearing a funny hat, or
a new outfit. At least, that’s how it looked on the monitors. As she got older,
they saw less and less of her. Eventually she fell off their screens
altogether. Perhaps she was a bit of a mystery, some sort of recluse. They
didn’t think about her much anymore. She was harmless, and they had more
important things to worry about.
    Michael Cardano seemed to be an
important man. He once held some minor posts in the federal government. He had
been a deputy to the Ambassador to the Philippines in the eighties, later held
an obscure office in the Pentagon, and then worked briefly for a well known
conservative think-tank. Most recently, he was a consultant to the State
Department on Southeast Asian economies. But he also seemed to have an influence
and importance that could hardly be accounted for by a mere perusal of the
various official titles he had held. His professional acquaintances assumed he
really worked for the CIA, or perhaps the NSA. That would at least account for
the resources employed to secure an estate in the backwoods of Virginia someone
of his professional attainments could hardly be expected to be able to afford.
But in the end, no one inquired too closely into Michael Cardano’s finances, or
into his work. Emily never gave it much thought, and her father certainly never
discussed it with her, or anyone else for that matter.
    Emily slid into the front seat of
the family car. Her father grunted and she snorted. They both laughed. Thursday
was meditation day. Sensei had the whole dojo doing an “iron