Prodigal Son

Chapter Three - Part 2

Felicity felt the weight of Oliver's stare but resisted its pull, picking at the toppings on her third slice rather than looking up. She didn't want to lie to Oliver, had never planned to, but still had hoped to save some of the more troubling revelations until after Oliver had spoken with his mother. Moira deserved at least a chance to reconcile with her son.

"It's complicated," she finally said. Boy, was that an understatement.

"You said that before."

Felicity pushed up her glasses to sit more firmly on her nose and finally looked at him. "Well, it's still complicated."

Oliver scrubbed his hands over his face, trying to hold onto his temper. "You said you used to have the book. Can you at least explain where you got it from?"

That she could answer.

"Walter Steele had a copy. It was a small, narrow journal about half the size of a paperback."

"Walter was involved in this? My dad's best friend?" Oliver frowned and then a grim line hardened his jaw. Felicity could see him leaping to conclusions. Shaking her head, she rose from her seat at the peninsula and went to where Oliver was brooding by the sink.

"It's not how you think. Walter didn't know anything about the book when he found it." When he found it in a special, wooden box hidden in the Grandfather clock in the bedroom he had shared with Moira.

"We were already working on another project." The fallout from what Moira bought with the 2.6 million dollars she had creatively acquired from Queen Consolidated.

"He thought the book might be related," Felicity added. It seemed certain it was after she found the same symbol in the book, seemingly random intersecting lines set in a circle, as she'd found left behind by a mysterious entity that had also been digitally tracking Moira's secret account. Much later, she'd found the symbol tied to a hush, hush project run through Queen Consolidated's applied science division. And much, much, later, Robert Queen's message for his son brought more confirmation that the list and the symbol were tied to the sinking of the Gambit. Yes. All very complicated.

"The only concrete connection at the time," she told Oliver, "was that looking into the book was dangerous. There was a related death that couldn't have been a coincidence and later, someone came after Walter."

"He told you that?" Oliver still looked skeptical.

"Heard it myself. I was on the phone with Mr. Steele when a man dropped down from the ceiling of the elevator and tried to kidnap him at gunpoint. Luckily, his new bodyguard was already on the job. He rescued Walter and stopped his kidnapper from escaping on a helicopter." Walter had been extremely fortunate John Diggle was so diligent about new clients. Felicity didn't want to think what would have happened if he hadn't come a day early to review the security measures. It was no surprise when John was hired full time by QC even after Walter's life was no longer in danger.

"When the police took the kidnapper into custody, he said he wanted to make a deal, but before that could happen, he, like others before him, met with an 'accident.'" At least this one hadn't involved a hit and run, tough to fit a car into the police lockup. Much easier for him to "slip" and hit his head.

"All because of the book my father described?"

"It has to be the one."

"Do you remember names?"

"Some." Walter had asked her not to make any copies so she'd only keep separate records on the ones she'd done further digging on. "Many belonged to the who's who of Starling City. I also researched a number of names I didn't recognize; a disturbing percentage of them were the kind of people no one wants to meet in a dark alley."