Other people failed him. That’s why the slitch survived, why she lived to
pursue him out of Seattle. She was supposed to have been killed. She was hired 
to kill the man whom he’d set up as a thief, the thief of a very valuable
datafile. Naturally, Ohara himself had the file. The phony theft was staged 
merely to deflect suspicion. The death of the man was necessary to keep him from 
revealing the truth. Striper’s own death, had she died, would simply have helped
account for the disappearance of the datafile.